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This is a prequel, the backstory to a series that I hope is going to have a very different focus to this book. As such, it spends a lot of words on not a huge amount of story. This would be the first act of a more competently-written sci-fi thriller. As it is, this book bogged down with tedious details and depictions of torture that go from hideous, to gratuitous, to banal. It's a torture machine, our hero gets psychic powers from it in Superhero Origin Story #3. We get it. Can something happen now? No, just more ridiculous detail of dental procedures? Eh fine whatever, but it's all just grist for the word-mills.

I think that's the biggest problem with this book. It drags on long past its welcome, but in doing so it repeats so much that what should be horrifying is as much fun as the instructions to a washing machine. No, repeating torture scenes — which read like the writer is only using one hand to type them — doesn't make each one new, it makes them both boring because they have the same effect on someone that we're supposed to care about? But the protagonist's entire personality is "I'm not a rapist", so who gives a toss anyway? There's nothing to care about. He's just a great victim.

This excited me to begin with, but Essence takes entirely the wrong method to streamline Exalted.

Because the book covers playing every single kind of Exalted, it doesn't give anywhere near enough information on the world to actually run a game without further information — there's not enough setting information to play several types of Exalted (such as the Liminals and Getimian) because everything's given in broad strokes that work for many but don't have the room for exceptions.

Rules-wise, while traits are a little simplified — fewer Attributes and Abilities, fewer and more expansive Charms — the systems themselves are mostly the same baroque nonsense that breaks everything down into checklists and flow-charts, meaning that the "simplified" version is anything but. Making a combat system that didn't require a flow-chart, for example, would have actually simplified things. So would having even fewer Charms but a real system for making them, rather than several pages of "eyeball it". Instead, Essence tries so very hard to remain compatible with Exalted 3rd edition and so can't simplify things anywhere as much as the book promises.