Sony has been delivering hit after hit with a steady stream of quality first-party releases, and while some continue to bash the homogenization of these cinematic action adventure games – fans have been lapping them up without pause. The Japanese gaming giant has built its reputation on this very format of games, and this is a big reason behind Sony securing a win over Microsoft during the PS4 generation.
So if fans absolutely adore such kinds of games, how is it then that a game that represents the pinnacle of cinematic flair infused with linear gameplay is remembered as one of Sony’s biggest flops of the last generation? We are, of course, talking about developer Ready at Dawn’s 2015 release The Order 1886.
With a Metacritic score of just 63 and underwhelming sales figures, it’s no surprise that The Order 1886 didn’t exactly resonate with fans when it was first released in 2015. But was it a game that was ahead of its time? Was it actually deserving of the criticism that players bestowed upon it back then? And most importantly, how does it hold up against the pool of current AAA releases and trends? With this feature, we try to find out exactly that as we revisit The Order 1886 more than 10 years later.
Undoubtedly, The Order 1886’s biggest drawing factor is the visuals. The technical wizards over at Ready at Dawn have brought their A-game to the field, and the results remain astonishing. The Order 1886 looked better than almost any game on the market upon its release, and it surprisingly holds up to this date. It offers a unique mix of technical tapestry intertwined with great art direction, resulting in a crisp image with a lot of personality.
The Order 1886 can really seat you in its world, all thanks to a thick layer of atmosphere that can confidently stand toe to toe against the best games of this generation. Thick volumetric smoke trailing from chimneys, impressive clouds, large draw distances, and highly detailed textures all come together to create a very convincing look of Victorian London that you can gawk at for hours upon hours on end. In a similar vein, The Order 1886 also impresses with its character designs.
Every character model has been created with painstaking attention to detail, right from the dense skin meshes to physically based materials for rendering and realistic animations to go along with it. Nailing that element of the presentation was also quite important because The Order 1886 has a lot of slow sections where you have to just leisurely stroll across cobbled streets and alleyways or sit through minutes of conversations in cutscenes.
On the gameplay side, The Order 1886 presents a rather simple suite of mechanics. In between exploration and exposition, you have to fight groups of enemies using your long-range weapons. Each firefight is a rapid exchange of hiding behind pieces of cover, shooting in short windows, and then waltzing back to cover to heal up your wounds. It works on a functional level, but there isn’t much depth to these mechanics which becomes a major point of frustration as you progress further and further into the story.
The Order 1886 doesn’t pull many tricks out of its sleeve to make the combat interesting, which is sad because there is definitely some potential that could have been squeezed out of this set of mechanics through elements like varied enemy designs. You can see such glimpses of hope during one-off fights with aggressive monsters that force you to play differently, but such cases are too far spread out to really make any difference in the grand scheme of things.
Apart from getting new weapons, The Order 1886 doesn’t feature any character progression systems where you could use skill points to unlock any new abilities. The monotonous loop of dancing between cutscenes, exploration, and firefights can start to grow old quickly, making it all a rather underwhelming experience as you crawl through to the end credits.
And what makes this whole ordeal more baffling is the fact that The Order 1886 takes only six to eight hours to roll the credits. Again, we are not going to have a long argument about the game length and the economics of the experience – but just the feeling of being exhausted by the mechanics in such a short-lived game is not something that’s positive in my book.
But the silver lining to it all is that the story is worth seeing through to the end credits. In addition to just looking great, the characters are also well-written which makes them interesting to notice as new conspiracies and plotlines start to come into the picture. The narrative pacing is on point, but the aforementioned monotony of gameplay does mar those strengths down by a significant margin.
In all of totality, The Order 1886 presents a rather curious case. It definitely had a lot of potential to be something different yet worthwhile, but most of that potential was turned to waste by account of the developer leaning too much into the cinematic aspect of the presentation; perhaps to its own fault.
You see, The Order 1886 was released at a time when open-world games and multiplayer-centric titles were all the rage, and the market wasn’t really generous to such smaller-scale experiences that only lasted for a handful of hours in exchange for a full retail price. But jump to the current gaming landscape, the recent revival of the AA market and subscription services like Game Pass or PS Plus have allowed developers to create such smaller-scale experiences to better degrees of success.
We have seen plenty of games with similar runtimes and simple mechanics garner mainstream success in the market lately, and Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice comes to mind as an example. We have even seen games that have entire mechanics built around monotonous tasks such as Death Stranding, which also has plenty of awards to its name. So why does The Order 1886 fail when other titles that have similar traits tend to succeed?
A big reason why that is the case is the developer’s insistence on adapting flaws from a different medium of entertainment, and not taking full advantage of what video games have to offer. The Order 1886 tries so hard to create a cinematic experience, right from capping its frame rate to 30fps to adapting a different aspect ratio to crafting linear ghost train rides and much more. But what makes video games so special and different from other forms of entertainment is the interactivity it has to offer.
Player agency is thrown out the window, and the only semblance of freedom you have in The Order 1866 is to choose which enemy to down first, and what weapon to use for the deed. Environments aren’t reactive, level design is extremely linear, the mechanics don’t have much depth – and all of that leaves player interactions feeling half-baked as a result. As it stands, The Order 1886 remains a cautionary tale for developers to not blindly fall into tropes and imitate others to a point where you take their flaws as strengths.
Of course, Ready at Dawn can’t be completely held at fault either. As per a recent interview with MinnMax, the developer had to deliver the game within strict deadlines which resulted in cut corners and unfulfilled ambitions. The same interview also revealed plans about a more ambitious sequel that was pitched to Sony, which makes sense considering the many loose narrative threads left by the original – but it was allegedly passed on due to the commercial failure of the first game.
“It would have been an incredible sequel, I can tell you that for a fact,” studio co-founder and developer Andrea Pessino. “We pitched the sequel to Sony regardless of [the critical reception] and, in a way, it’s better that they passed because if we thought we were going to be screwed before, man, with the sequel, we would have signed our life away.”
According to Pessino, dealing with Sony’s exorbitant demands and strict deadlines would have made lives difficult for anyone on the project but they wanted to do it regardless. It’s an interesting prospect, though not one that will come to fruition anytime soon.
“We were not in a position to negotiate a reasonable contract; they could have done whatever. But we would’ve taken it because we wanted a chance to redeem the franchise. All of the groundwork was really, really good, I can tell you that for a fact. There was so much there that just needed to be built on,” he said.
To conclude however, The Order 1886 is a game that has a few strengths but they end up being outnumbered by the design flaws – making it an experience that doesn’t have much to show for it except the pretty visuals. Even considering how smaller-scale games have come to be successful in the modern AA market, The Order 1886 doesn’t really stack up against contemporaries making it an ultimately disappointing experience. It’s definitely worth a shot just to see the concepts and ambitions of the developer, but don’t expect to be blown away by the whole ordeal. In terms of rating, I would like to rate it a 6/10 in 2025; a fairly enjoyable but a flawed game.
Note: The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, GamingBolt as an organization.
