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Are you someone who spends almost as much time creating your characters as you do playing them in an RPG? Love obsessing over the details of your avatar’s facial features, browsing the menu of noses, eyes, ears, and facial hair for ages? Think you’re good enough that you could make your character look so much like someone else that you could fool people?
Good, because Legion Was Here is a game that spends more time in the character creator than it does anywhere else, and if you can’t create a convincing character, you die.
In Legion Was Here you’re a spy. Scratch that: you’re the spy. This game is the opposite of James Bond walking into every undercover situation and saying “Hi, I’m James Bond.” You’re gifted at stealing someone’s identity and impersonating them down to the very finest detail, mimicking them so expertly that their friends, family, and associates will have no idea they’re talking to an imposter. At least, that’s the idea.
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Your mission begins on the operating table, where you page through a dossier of information about the person you’re going to be replacing. What color and shape are their eyes? What hairstyle do they have? Is their nose big or small, wide or narrow? Try to match their looks precisely enough that you’ll be able to fool the people that know them well.
But it’s not as simple as just looking at a photo and picking the parts that match. In the demo I played—the full game is due later this year—I’ve only got a partial photo of someone I’m trying to duplicate, which shows their mouth, ear, chin, and nothing else. For the rest, I’ve only got a drawing to go off, and it’s not super helpful because it looks like it was drawn by a child. I’m pretty sure my target doesn’t really look like this:
Did I mention Legion Was Here can be a bit silly? It can. At least I can gather that my target has curly hair, green eyes, and a narrow nose, so I add those features to my own face, and hope like hell the blue crayon that was used means his hair is actually blue.
But it’s no use being someone’s doppelganger if your disguise can’t stand up to scrutiny, so the dossier is also filled with details about that person: where they’re from, what they do for a living, their favorite foods, their hobbies, and more. Before the mission you don’t know what questions you might be asked, so you have to learn as much as possible.
That’s a lot of information to absorb: after the tutorial, the first real mission of the demo is filled with pictures, newspaper clippings, and lots of other notes and files, and that takes ages to pore over. On the plus side, you don’t need to memorize everything: you can create a crib sheet by writing notes on your hand like you’re in middle school trying to pass a geography test.
Once you’re ready, or think you’re ready, you set off on your mission. If you didn’t get the looks precisely right, the people you’re talking to will be suspicious, and as they ask you question after question, even a few small slip-ups can blow your cover. There’s nothing worse than looking at your hand covered in notes and discovering you didn’t write down the one piece of information that could help you during interrogation.
Did I say it was a bit silly? It’s extremely silly: the demo mission has me impersonate a guy who is actually an alien from Neptune in a human disguise, who also likes dressing like a clown. The aliens’ dastardly plot is to blow up Mount Rushmore, and you have to endure lots of questions and suspicions from the Neptunians before you get the chance to thwart their evil plan.
The Legion Was Here demo is a lot of fun and surprisingly tricky: the dossier is really packed with information and it’s hard to tell what’ll be useful on your mission and what won’t. On my first try, my disguise as an alien disguised as a human disguised as a clown was convincing enough, but I fell apart under questioning and the Neptunians killed me.
On my second try I succeeded, however, even after a human sheriff showed up and I had to convince him I was a human and not an alien disguised as one. Funny stuff! I’m looking forward to playing more when Legion Was Here releases later this year. You can play the demo on Steam.
