On August 7, it was announced that Ready at Dawn, the studio behind Facebook’s Oculus VR series Lone Echo, was shut down. It was a tragic, senseless end to a studio with an over 20-year history. Before it was bought by Facebook in 2020, Ready at Dawn primarily worked with PlayStation. It started out creating PSP spin-offs of beloved franchises like Daxter and God of War. Those works eventually made their way to consoles, but it wasn’t until 2015 that the studio got to make its own original IP in the PlayStation 4 exclusive The Order: 1886. While the steampunk, cinematic action game was divisive when it launched, even to Kotaku, time has been kinder to The Order: 1886 than it has been to its developer. If you’ve never played the game before, it’s on sale for $US10 as part of the PlayStation Summer Sale.
The Order: 1886 is the kind of AAA game we need right now. It was derided in 2015 for its short length, with How Long To Beat clocking the average playthrough at about seven hours. Admittedly, that is a tough pill to swallow when you paid $US60 for it, but $US10 for a pretty solid, highly polished action game is a steal. The Order stars Sir Galahad, a member of an alternate history Knights of the Round Table in which the titles of Galahad, Perceval, and the like are passed down to different members of the order. In this world, the Knights of the Round Table persist into the 1880s and face a growing infestation of monstrous half-breeds that resemble werewolves, vampires, and other monsters.
Galahad starts out as a loyal member of the order, but it’s clear from the outset he won’t stay that way. The Order: 1886 opens with Galahad being violently interrogated by his own comrades. As the game recounts how we got here, The Order: 1886 unravels a centuries-long conspiracy in a steampunk Victorian-era London, full of twists, turns, and betrayal.
Gameplay-wise, The Order: 1886 is a mostly fine cover shooter with flashes of potential brilliance. Taking advantage of the steampunk setting, The Order: 1886’s arsenal of guns range from period-appropriate firearms to some really cool toys like the electricity-firing Arc Induction Lance courtesy of this universe’s version of scientist Nikola Tesla. The Order: 1886 packs a lot of worldbuilding into its brief runtime, which extends to Galahad’s collection of pseudo-futuristic armaments. The time between fights is often filled with QTEs that range from clever moments like having Galahad counting down with individual button presses to initiate a combat encounter, to some of the more standard “mash a button until you push someone off of you,” but it’s got a level of polish only attainable when a game scales down to this size.
Skimming through the lore as I write this, I’m immediately taken back to 2015 when I saw the potential for something spectacular to come from The Order. A sequel that learned lessons from the criticisms of the first could have been truly special and established itself as a long-running franchise from the PS4 era alongside games like Horizon Zero Dawn and Spider-Man. I think many fans held out hope that one would happen. Knack got a sequel despite a middling reception, so why not The Order? Unfortunately, one never came, and then Ready At Dawn was acquired by Meta.
It’s bittersweet to look back on because I feel like we as an industry are better equipped to appreciate The Order: 1886 for what it did so well. It didn’t feel like it was looking to waste your time, it presented a world that could have easily have built a long-running franchise, and it had glimpses of what could have been a really exciting shooter with some tweaks and a harder focus on the ways of play that set it apart from other games of the time. The Order: 1886 deserved better, but so did Ready at Dawn. So if you only ever heard bad things and never picked it up, or you maybe were jaded towards it the first time and haven’t touched it in years, give The Order: 1886 a second chance.
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