Everything you need to know about Disaster Report 4: Summer Memories is conveyed through the action-adventure survival game’s opening dialogue options.

After deciding your character’s gender and appearance, you’re plopped down in the seat of a slow-moving bus in the fictional Japanese metropolis of Hisui City. The cabin is full of passengers, so much so that an old woman, bent over and frail, has no choice but to stand in the aisle as she awaits her stop. It’s here that Disaster Report 4 offers you four distinct options:

• I offer my seat to the elderly lady.

• I realize I’m getting off soon and offer my seat.

• I look at the surroundings and offer my seat.

• I curse at the elderly lady before offering my seat.

While you give up your seat no matter what, your motivation and attitude differs. Furthermore, only the first option—an act of generosity with no caveats—gives you a positive boost to the Morality Points tracked by Disaster Report 4. Nothing much happens if you find yourself swaying toward either extreme of the tacit saint-or-jerk spectrum, but that’s not the lesson the game is trying to teach you through this common scenario anyway.

Disaster Report 4 conversations aren’t treated like transactional conflicts to be dominated, as they are in most video games, but rather opportunities to navigate its world through guided roleplay. The interaction with the old woman on the bus sets the tone for the rest of the adventure: You may not have a hand in deciding the outcome of every situation Disaster Report 4 throws your way, but you can almost always affect conversations subtly with the mood and tenor of your responses.

And that all happens before disaster strikes.

The meat of Disaster Report 4 involves navigating the impact of a massive earthquake. The initial shaking crashes your bus, and you crawl from the wreckage to find Hisui City transformed from a bustling urban center to a modern-day ruin beset by frequent, massive aftershocks. Over the course of the game, you navigate city streets and buildings in various states of collapse, conflagration, or flooding, a normal person simply trying to weather the chaos surrounding you.

Disaster Report 4 doesn’t cast you as the hero, though you can be heroic via small gestures like bringing toilet paper to someone in a state of gastric distress or life-saving feats like prying a buried woman loose from the rubble of a collapsed subway platform. And just like with good behavior, the story doesn’t radically change if you decide to be more self-centered by starting a bidding war between survivors for a box of bandages or ignoring an obvious murder in the back offices of a jewelry shop.

With consequences for your actions a rarity, Disaster Report 4 can make you feel powerless in the face of its linear storylines. At the same time, however, I still found myself compelled to speak with everyone I saw despite most NPCs providing only a single line of dialogue. I learned next to nothing about the situation at hand or even the person I was talking to, but the vast tapestry of background characters, one-note as they are on their own, provides an arguably believable approximation of the various people one would imaginably meet during such a disaster in real life.

Although hardly “good” by mainstream standards, Disaster Report 4 still manages to hold a special place in my heart thanks to its environmental storytelling and dramatic set pieces. Watching office buildings collapse mere meters from where you’re standing is a breathtaking sight no matter how many times it happens (and it happens a lot). If there’s one thing Disaster Report 4 does well, it’s providing the player with grandiose scenes of destruction that, from the game’s street-level view, make it feel as if the whole world is falling apart, largely without relying on so much as a non-diegetic orchestra crescendo to mark the occasion as super dramatic.

I’m sure longtime Disaster Report fans hope the next installment returns to the more open-world, player-driven narratives of earlier games in the series, and I don’t necessarily disagree. That said, I still appreciate what Disaster Report 4 sets out to do, especially when taking its rollercoaster of a development cycle into account. The result is equal parts tense, cozy, and silly, elements that come together to create a decidedly B game that’s well worth the time of anyone interested in experiencing an offbeat adventure unlike anything else in gaming. You can purchase Disaster Report 4: Summer Memories on Epic Games Store.