At the onset of the month, I found some gameplay footage of the eponymous video game. Intrigued I did a little digging and eventually decided to play. About 10 in-game hours later I was done, and I have thoughts.
There’s great effort put into setting up the mystery of what’s going on and it is alluring but there’s never a satisfying answer, only supposition. A great tower appears in the jungle and you, a “modern” military man, find it with a guide’s help. The tower holds a spear believed to grant wishes and immeasurable power. Venturing inside the stone shrine otherworldly creatures and sights lay before you. With your torch sputtering, little ammo, and the way out sealed behind, you must go forward. Using conversations with other characters, the game builds this meta-narrative that by choosing to play the game you are just like the soldier who has chosen to find the spear. Despite whatever difficulties you face your willingness to struggle and beat the game is the same as the soldier’s search for the spear. In essence to stop playing before finishing would be dooming your player character to the fate of the many other human adventurers you pass.
Building from the idea that the player’s intentions mirror their characters, the idea that guns are present takes even greater effect. Sure, shooting spectral monsters, knights in armor, and giant bugs with guns is fun but narratively you are the invading force. All the places you visit are living biomes with their own lifecycles and inhabitants and by playing you are choosing to murder your way through them. It’s mentioned that you don’t have to struggle so much to achieve your desire, the spear, but for the player with the freely available guns and ammunition the difficulty is not so severe. Intentional or not this makes me feel like there’s even more meta-narrative implying that advanced enough technology can trivialize certain obstacles so much we don’t recognize the damage caused. There’s even magic in this game but guns are so effective there’s no need to even use it. However, that’s the extent of the narrative from what I can tell. There wasn’t enough information to make any other interesting connections. Edit: Upon reflection, when you “finish” the game you don’t get the spear and you just start over from the beginning, I can only interpret this to mean you never had any real agency and the spear/game is the one in control all the while.
As a game it echoes that time when games held so much mystery by including hidden passageways and secrets and there not being much information available even online. It rewards exploration and risk-taking while also punishing it when not done carefully. In one of the later areas, I had to draw a physical map to keep track of everything and I enjoyed it more so.
Honestly you could even forgo using guns and rely on magic, clubs, katanas, bows, and more. There’s much to do and much to do it with. Combat is slow but deliberate. Swinging a melee weapon requires energy which will be depending on the weapon’s weight. For example, a knife might be swung 3-4 times before you must wait, while a big club only gets one. Missing a swing exposes you and turning to face your foes takes time. This isn’t a game where you can whip the camera around freely, in fact having a gun out renders you slower overall. Understanding your space, time to swing, time to recover, etc is how you “git gud”. Or just use the AR-15.
Visually, I have no problem saying this is one of the best looking PS2 games. The art direction goes a long way into selling you the world of the game. Enemies have cohesive visual schemes in their visually distinct worlds, with each world encompassing a, usually, familiar theme. Armor, weapons, and other character gear have unique in-world renders that dynamically affect your character’s “paper doll”. Also there is the technical point that the game allows for 16:9 rendering which is great on modern displays.
Instead of music the soundscape is almost entirely diegetic. You’ll hear wind blowing through canyons, plants gurgling, enemies shrieking, splashes of water, earth crushing under-foot. All kinds of noises but no music aside from music cues when segueing between areas.
As a fan of the Souls games, playing through this was like walking through the connective tissue from King’s Field to Demon Souls and eventually Dark Souls. The sound effects, weapon variety, damage types, statistics, character-based sub-plots and more all strongly resonate within the later titles. It really feels like playing a first-person prototype for Dark Souls 1 on the PS2 that they added guns to. I hope that’s not taking too much away from the game’s own identity which is distinct enough with its alien geometry and coloring.
ooglykraken 