Miasma Chronicles Hits Mechanically, But the Theming Misteps Can't be Excused

Miasma Chronicles is a good time mechanically, however it never earns the intrigue it so desperately wants you to feel. Right up through the final fight, the exploration / stealth take-downs / tactical battle loop was fun to engage with, and the twists and turns the story takes are fun in isolation, yet thanks to a lot of mishandled takes on a vast array of themes worthy of exploring I just wanted to stop reading all text and mute the TV altogether.

This world could have so much going for it, with a rich and detailed lore bible and a lot of potential themes it could explore, but it never lands in the way you hope it might.

For example, Miasma Chronicles has a large section focused squarely at oppression. The human population of a town, which worked the local factory for our resident asshole billionaire overlords, decided to unionize. Said overlords swoop in, fire all the humans and replace them with the robot population - a population that had already been treated as second class citizens by its human counterparts. The roles reversed, the robots take pleasure in treating their human comrades how they treated them.

Now, one of your main companions is Diggs, Elvis’ “brother” and token robot of the crew. He is also extremely stereotypical Mr T level comedic relief black man. You know the racist take - too dumb to understand what’s going on, but a real strong tank type dude who would do anything to protect his younger, “smarter” brother. In addition, the robot leader of the town and main antagonist of this section of the game, “Diesel D”, is a straight up gangster thug type, who is - ding ding ding - black coded, all the way down to the lavish chains around his neck. Robots = Black = Slaves. Got it.

It feels like the game wants to lean into class divides here, and how the rich ruling class happily pits the poor against one another to get what they want from them and distract them from the true enemy. But it gets so lost in racial stereotyping and extremely poor taste one liners that any impact or provoking thought it might conjure just gets lost. The game wraps up with this town’s people striking a truce and working together “against their mutual oppressors”, realizing that the real problem are the assholes in their ivory towers. That’s great and all, but it’s just a line in the post game cutscene to tie it up neatly. The game wraps up without putting in the hard work to justify its exploration of any of it.

It’s like this across a vast array of themes the story of this game touches upon. Humanity willingly destroys the planet in search of wasteful comfort. Rich people come in with a “solution” to the world’s issues, but only because they will gain vast wealth and power as a result. What the differences are between a hero and a survivor in war. The cruelty of manipulation of others for your own purposes, particularly from parental figures. 

All of these could be great topics to explore in depth and discuss. Instead, the game uses them as set dressing in service of a chosen one story about a white boy who will Save America. There’s plenty of intriguing enough twists and turns through this tale - particularly around who each of these characters truly are and what their motivations say about them - but they feel unearned and lose all impact thanks to the clear misses the rest of the world swings at.

I wouldn’t call it redeeming as such, but there’s something about approaching a squad of enemies, finding the weak links and slimming them down to an easily won battle that kept its hooks in me enough to play all the way through. There’s enough meat here with cool abilities and choice of approach that the RPG progression felt mechanically satisfying across the 20 or so hours of exploration and combat on offer.

This isn’t really a tactics game where you walk up to a group of enemies and just engage them head on. As soon as Jade - your first of a handful of companions who will be your only extra through most of the game - joins up, her silenced sniper rifle becomes clutch in picking off low level enemies before an encounter actually starts. A few other tools in your toolbox - a silent melee shock ability for robot enemies, glass bottles for distractions and a second silent weapon unlocked through the story - make whittling down the overwhelming enemy force a fun puzzle to tackle every encounter.

When you do get into combat, being smart with positioning your various party members for optimal ability use is key. You don’t really want fights to drag out for more than a handful of turns, and you always want encounters to start on your terms. I found setting Diggs up to leap in and knock over enemies then blasting with a shotgun heavily effective, with Jade perched up on high ground dealing significant crit damage while main character Elvis manipulates the field with a handful of essentially magic abilities a good way to take out swaths of enemies unscathed.

The world itself is quite beautiful, with a whole range of post apocalyptic landscapes scarred by the mysterious miasma. It’s heavily evocative and alluring, and probably the one main driver for my curiosity around the history and lore of this depiction of the US south.

Mutant Year Zero: Road To Eden was a genuine surprise hit for me several years back, and despite the bland take Corruption 2029 landed on, I had high hopes for Miasma Chronicles. I suppose the IP of MYZ kept the storytelling of that game along more interesting lines, with MC showing that world building isn’t such a simple task. For all the fun squeezed out of this experience, I’ll keep my fingers crossed for a second Road To Eden.