I’ve been trying to play Geas for four years now. I say trying because in all honesty this game is impossible to get into if you don’t already have a friend who is a longtime player on some kind of IM service, if not in real life.

Before I delve into the many reasons why this game is bad, let me offer a few reasons why it is not. The system is easy enough to figure out, and the newbie intro is extremely helpful in explaining the basics. The world is both original and large, and can be quite fun to explore for the first thirty minutes or so.

Unfortunately, this is almost immediately countered by the torrent of bad things I have to talk about. Geas advertises itself as a roleplaying game, specifically with roleplaying enforced, but at some point, the admins seem to have forgotten that roleplaying, in the context of a MUD, does not mean ‘wandering around in the middle of nowhere playing with myself’ or ‘trying to figure out which keyword makes the NPC tell me what I want to know’, nor is it meant to be a solitary activity. It is meant to involve multiple people, each playing at least one character, and that’s one of this game’s biggest flaws. There are other players, supposedly, but good luck meeting any of them without the use of an IM client of some sort or other methods of contact outside the game.

To make matters worse, access to virtually any kind of skill beyond basic combat requires that you track down a member of one of the ‘guilds’ and talk to them. While I for one have no problems with the second one – after all, if I want to play an evil cleric of the god of Death, I’d better have a good idea what said god’s teachings are – the fact that players are spread so thinly over so large an area means, once more, unless you know someone IRL or are extremely lucky, be prepared to do a lot of work to get beginner-level skills.

In conclusion, then: this game has a few good ideas. But it’s simply too big for the playerbase it currently has.