Rock Lord: Dragon Age’s Number One Guy

The guys over at Rock, Paper, Shotgun appear to be enjoying their time with Shale, as they’ve kicked up an enthusiastic editorial about DA:O’s bird-hating golem companion.

Shale is HK-47 through-and-through, and, I suspect, very self-consciously so on Bioware’s part. As KOTOR’s psycho-C3PO was, Shale is the guy who doesn’t quite fit the tone of the game, because he doesn’t take anything seriously. He’s its Rosencratz & Guildenstein, its Deadpool creeping as close as the broadly po-faced dark fantasy comes to breaking the fourth wall. Which is why he’s the most welcome presence in the game. He’s also cheerfully homicidal, as was HK-47, and killed his master, as did HK-47. Maybe it’s lazy, but it’s hard to disagree with someone who ritually suggests solving moral dilemmas by stomping everyone involved into paste. Plus, he’s pathologically afraid of birds.

When Shale first spoke, after I’d completed a quest to earn the magic rod and codeword necessary to wake him from a long, petrified slumber in the centre of a human village, I sighed before he even finished his sentence. Another clipped English voice, reedy and weak, not the big, booming, stony golem-voice I’d expected. What is it with this game and its thin voices? Oh, wait. Wait wait wait. A few words in, the shock of his non-golemnity overcome, I listened to what he said and how he said it, and I realised what he was. He was, well, camp.