Condemned: Criminal Origins Review

 (Originally published to Glitchwave on 10/19/2024)

[Image from glitchwave.com]

Condemned: Criminal Origins

Developer: Monolith Productions

Publisher: Sega

Genre(s): Action Horror

Platforms: Xbox 360

Release Date: November 16, 2005

Microsoft had some serious stugots releasing Condemned: Criminal Origins as a launch title for the Xbox 360. Whenever a new console first hits the shelves and there is only a select few titles available in its infancy, it's important to pair the system with games that are accessible, recognizable from an already celebrated IP, or at least demonstrate the intricacies of the hardware. This should be a rule of thumb so all gamers don’t feel cheated having nothing to play after paying an exorbitant price for the console. Releasing a freshly original horror game as the system is born isn’t exactly a wise decision from a marketing standpoint, as the horror genre will inherently feature mature content and only appeal to a niche percentage of that adult audience anyway. Sure, I’d be thrilled to unwrap something like Condemned along with my bouncing baby Xbox 360. However, if any media industry focused on putting all of their budgetary eggs in my specialized basket, they would all crash and burn and we’d all have to revert back to stickball and shadow puppets for entertainment. Plus, if I owned the Xbox 360 at its launch when I was only nine and my mom found the box of Condemned with its ghastly cover art lying around, she would’ve shipped the console back to the store in a metal crate and performed an exorcism to cleanse the evil permeating in the air that Condemned left in its wake. Given that the other titles released on the Xbox 360’s day of birth were Kameo, Perfect Dark Zero, and a litany of sports games, Condemned actually seemed like the most savory option for the vast majority of gamers anyway. Microsoft seriously sat Little Timmy down and expected him to piss his pants in fear playing Condemned out of a lack of alternatives, for the idea of going outside was probably even more terrifying. I’d be worried if I were a small child with no experience with this kind of game, for Condemned does something masterful in the horror department outside of outright scares that other games in the genre can’t quite pinpoint.

Many horror video games have a tendency to wear their influences from horror media outside of their medium on their sleeves, and Condemned is just as transparent with its inspiration. Whereas Silent Hill is greatly influenced by Jacob’s Ladder and Twin Peaks and Deadly Premonition is influenced by…also Twin Peaks, Condemned takes a whopping amount of its conceptual identity from David Fincher’s acclaimed neo-noir mystery thriller Se7en. This comparison becomes readily apparent by the introduction which details a squad of police officers tailing a particularly crafty and elusive serial killer suspect. Ethan Thomas, the protagonist, chases the suspect through the hallways of an abandoned business building with his fellow lawmen to catch the psychopathic menace. Alas, even when they’ve cornered him up against a wall, the perp still gets the better of them when he snatches Thomas’ gun and shoots the protagonist’s partners dead on sight. When Thomas hazily awakens from this failed ordeal, he’s shocked and offended that he’s now a wanted man himself. Because the fired gun that killed the two other officers was his, Thomas’ precinct believes that he’s the one committing all of the heinous homicides, disgracing him from his law enforcing position. Even though he’s been disbarred, Thomas proactively still searches for the cunning killer who framed him not only to detain a wild homicidal maniac but to prove his innocence. Even from a distant, vicarious point-of-view as the player, I was as equally appalled by this unfortunate set of circumstances that Thomas found himself in. How did Thomas’ superiors come to this conclusion? Weren’t they the ones who dispatched the three men to the scene after intercepting suspicious activity from their suspect? Is it entirely out of the realm of possibility that the killer on the scene overwhelmed their unit considering they’ve had such a struggle to apprehend him? Are they that desperate to pin the murders on anyone at this point? Sure, letting the perp steal your weapon isn’t medal-winning police work, but they sincerely believe that Thomas has revealed himself as the serial killer through this event. Unless a conspiracy is involved, this precinct is downright incompetent. No wonder their city is in shambles. I never thought the initial resonating emotions in a horror game would be confusion and outrage, and those feelings still persisted as Condemned progressed.

One silver lining regarding Condemned’s haphazardly convenient conflict devices is that Thomas’ pursuit of the true culprit by himself situates him in a place of isolation. Solitude intertwined with the horror genre is an especially effective pairing, and the atmosphere of acting alone is where Condemned thrives. Judging by the ever-present dilapidation of Metro City’s streets and architecture, the area has fallen victim to a litany of unresolved strife and societal malignancies of both the domestic and governmental persuasion. Condemned’s environment is so battered and torn that it’s borderline apocalyptic, even though the existence of an active police department connotes that the establishments of democracy are still active forces in this society. Still, every single sight seen around the city is idly festering in filth like a rotting corpse, an extremely effective depiction of urban decay at its zenith point of destitution. Wherever Thomas finds himself en route to the killer’s location, only the minor setpieces of the specific setting will give them their discernibility, such as the terminals of the metro station or the bookshelves in the public library. Otherwise, the total flatlining of morale or functionality essentially places all of the game’s locations on an equal scale of death-like sterility. Oftentimes, the floors of these once-active communal areas will simply cave in at what seems like random occurrences. Truthfully, it's a sequenced way for the game to provide progress, but the player can rationalize these shortcuts because the foundations of each building are so frail and damaged that it's a wonder how the roofs don’t collapse on Thomas. Traversing through the widespread decrepitude of Condemned’s city with its soiled setpieces is effectively stifling. Parallels to the grimy aesthetic of Se7en are a given, but Condemned’s atmosphere is also reminiscent of Half-Life 2’s environmental debility and Silent Hill’s brooding loneliness.

While I’m on the subject, Condemned’s primary influence in terms of its fellow titles in its medium is transparently Half-Life 2. The journey through a miserably broken urban landscape is one apparent facet from the then-newest contender for all-time gaming greatness, and the linear level designs per setting around this city is yet another aspect that Condemned borrows from Valve’s magnum opus. One might also note that the shared first-person perspective is a commonality between the two games, and the intimate view certainly allows the player to clearly see all of the filth in its feculent glory. However, one’s assumption that Condemned’s choice of viewpoint is fitting for a first-person shooter similar to Half-Life would be sadly mistaken. Instead of abiding by the usual conventions of sticking a gun in the player’s limited line of sight, Condemned emphasizes melee combat. Strewn around the urban wasteland are a number of discarded tools that can now be used as blunt objects for Thomas to defend himself from the terrors that crawl out of the advanced darkness. Several of these melee weapons are classic offensive items such as the fire ax and shovel, while others see Thomas utilizing common, typically innocuous objects like a locker door or a plank of wood in a makeshift fashion. The more pronounced items listed in the former section also have a secondary, situational purpose whenever Thomas finds a specific obstacle. The crowbar will pry open safes, the shovel will skewer gates locked by unknown passcodes, and the trusty fire ax will pierce through the wood of a doorway with little strain. How the player couldn’t easily decimate the door with the sledgehammer doesn’t seem logical to me but alas, the developers will always have Thomas channel his inner Jack Torrance in these instances. Sure, an assortment of guns are also scattered about on the ground such as revolvers and shotguns. However, anyone expecting them to support their playthrough as a crutch will be disappointed, for the amount of ammo in these firearms never exceeds the number of fingers on one hand. It’ll be too soon before Thomas will have to resort to pathetically pistol-whipping enemies with the blunt impact of a rolled-up newspaper. I admire Condemned’s unconventional choice of combat while using a first-person perspective, and the stats between the wide range of melee weapons at the player’s disposal showcase a genuine depth relating to the gameplay.

However, simply because I’m commending Condemned’s combat for its subversiveness doesn’t mean that it’s a standing ovation. The enemies that Thomas will be inflicting fatal blunt force trauma to are the city’s forsaken citizens. Whether they are the victims of a total lack of economic prosperity or are the products of an extreme crack cocaine epidemic, the damned denizens of Metro City are a feral, hostile bunch fitting for their destitute surroundings. The hobo variants located around each corner of the city’s blackened back alleys remind me of the splicers from BioShock, mentally maliferous malcontents with only a handful of brain cells, and at least two of those precious cognitive units are focused on both maintaining their ruptured speech and their desire to kill Thomas. Their methods of bushwhacking the protagonist are an identical match to the player’s mode of combat, grabbing a pipe or a conduit off the wall and swinging it vigorously at Thomas’ head. Whenever these enemies enact the same sort of combat, the duel introduces the defensive side of Condemned’s gameplay. Thomas can block the concussive blows from the Metro City vagrants, provided he can execute the timing needed to perform this defensive maneuver. When performed correctly, the interception will put the crazed ghoul in a daze for a brief period, leaving Thomas with a golden opportunity to whack their brains out. This defensive element to Condemned’s combat greatly raises the skill ceiling, incentivizing the player to practice the exact timing needed to reject damage. A precision-based mechanic is all fine and dandy, and there is a real visceral oomph to every pummel that Thomas delivers, especially in the execution finishers he performs when an enemy is on its knees groveling at his feet. However, I still have some qualms pertaining to a few factors of Condemned’s combat all the same. I would argue that the timing on the blocks is a tad imprecise, but the player soon acclimates to the game’s rushed tempo through frequent encounters. However, it’s whenever the enemies mislead Thomas pretending to reel back a hit just to cancel and dupe him, leaving Thomas vulnerable because of his miscalculation. Sure, this is a tactic that a combatant would realistically employ, but answer this question: would a rhythm game ever think to obscure notes/tabs from the player because they wouldn’t realistically know how to play the song? I hope not. The player will always suffer whenever the enemies outsmart them, which I believe is an unjust way to punish the player for learning and adapting to this mechanic. Fortunately, Condemned provides plenty of aid if the player is cheated one too many times. Health kits that replenish two-thirds of Thomas’ maximum health are commonplace, and Thomas’ taser is the consistent trump card the player can utilize if they struggle with the tense tango of fighting.

The third type of gameplay that Condemned bestows is arguably the most narratively relevant, yet the least stimulating. Lest we forget in the wake of hundreds of subdued crackheads that Thomas is (or was) a professional detective, and he plans to track the whereabouts of this serial killer as he would if he weren’t a fugitive even if this act of subordination is digging the hole he’s already in even deeper. Every few yards on the field, Thomas will encounter a piece of evidence that could be vital to tracking down the murderous maniac. Being in the immediate presence of a clue will be signaled when an indicator appears on the screen, and then Thomas swaps his current weapon to whip out the appropriate gadget. A camera exposes the prints of both footsteps and finger touches, while a UV light machine gathers DNA from bloodstains. Traces of both types of evidence samples are then extracted at their source through the zooming of a digital camera or an infrared gun. Thomas also carries a device that locates the source of particularly odious stenches, but this seems to only take him towards a nearby dead crow collectible which has zero impact on the case at hand. After examining the evidence, the context is relayed through Rosa, the bureau official sticking her neck out for Thomas by collaborating with him on this vigilante mission. As refreshing as this contextually sensible mechanic is in this game, it isn’t all that engaging from a gameplay standpoint. Aiming the devices at the target every so often isn’t exactly on par with the excitement of smacking lunatics across the skull with the top of a school desk. Really, the true reason why Thomas signals Rosa on his cellphone is so she can explain the context behind what was gathered up for the player. The only instance where the detective gadgets are utilized for something invigorating is following the trail of cryptic messages the killer lays out for Thomas at the country home, and getting closer to what they want Thomas to find instills an uncomforting feeling of suspense. Still, noting this section as a highlight is probably an indictment of the game’s pension for linear levels more than anything else.

No matter how many vials of blood or fingerprints Thomas collects and analyzes, none of his findings will result in the unfolded story making a lick of fucking sense. That plot catalyst that drove me up a wall in the beginning only doubles down on its nonsense as the story progresses. Thomas soon finds that the man he’s attempting to track down is no ordinary serial killer: he’s a righteous Robin Hood serial killer whose modus operandi is killing other serial killers, and he’s been cleansing the streets of Metro City’s most dangerous residents for quite some time. Yes, this aired a year before the popular television series with the same premise, so Condemned was evidently an interactive trendsetter that doesn’t receive its due credit. The clues lead Thomas to find that his target’s next victim will be Carl Anderson, also known as “The Torturer,” who inflicts so much physical and psychological torment on his prey that it drives them to commit suicide. Thomas feels a ridiculous conflict of ethics having to save this sadistic psychopath from his person of interest, but his efforts are ultimately futile when he finds Anderson dead in the country house propped up like one of his victims. Thomas is knocked unconscious by the perpetrator and dragged further into the countryside to a farm. Thomas evades his fate when his new friend Malcolm Van Horn interferes. He commits the act of deus ex machina not only to save Thomas but to prevent his nephew Leland Van Horn, the legal name of Serial Killer X, from performing another gruesome act in the name of his own morbid sense of “justice.” At the game’s climax, Malcolm successfully captures his nephew and begs Thomas to show mercy towards him despite his horrific crimes. Oops, I shot that sick fucker between the eyes without a second thought. Whether or not the player decides to pull the trigger, Leland dies anyway from blowing his own brains out. Besides, it will result in the same ending where Thomas meets Rosa for coffee only to find out that she’s wearing a wire working for the bureau to arrest Thomas. Their persistence in capturing Thomas after all these events borders on a Kafkaesque level of absurdity.

There is another thematic element to Condemned’s story implemented to make the developer’s intentions with this plot easier to swallow. However, all it does is turn the patchy story into a downright brain-dead clusterfuck. By the fourth or fifth chapter, Thomas will start experiencing hallucinations where the screen turns a staticky gray, and monstrous apparitions will bombard Thomas momentarily. These hallucinations will eventually manifest as the game’s final boss, who looks like if a cenobite trained in the martial art of kendo. The game closes on a shot where Ethan is writhing over a public bathroom sink as the spirit of the final boss apparently seeps into his essence from behind and transforms him into a beastly terror as the game’s closing shot. The “Oro Dark Primary” is the spiritual embodiment of the evil that dwells in all mankind, and it apparently has prime real estate here in Metro City considering the area is rife with serial killers. Displaying Thomas’ inner demons with these sequences gives the player an impression that this lawman is deservingly disgraced, for he’s as wicked as the suspects that he hunts down. Serial Killer X does state that he’s been “following Thomas’ work” for many years, which is another hint that he’s a twisted bastard behind the badge. I’d like to think that anyone with the cognitive capacity to count to ten would reject this revelation. We know firsthand that Thomas is a victim of mistaken identity upon witnessing Leland shoot his cop buddies, so he’s totally clean of that sin. The game gives no indication that Thomas has ever killed for pleasure, so what other murders would he be talking about? Is he suggesting that Thomas has murdered more people throughout the game in self-defense and this is an instance of the hypocritical pot calling the kettle black? Is it a comment on the justification of police brutality? No, it’s a stupid, failed attempt at a twist with a story that already went sour at the start, and this contrived, metaphysical dogshit only makes the stink of a bad plot reek like an open sewage vent.

Condemned: Criminal Origins is a flawed game in a myriad of aspects. The enemy AI’s cleverness is laudable in theory, but I still believe that it’s fundamentally unfair to catch the player off guard during combat and swiftly reprimand them for having a lack of psychic premonition. If I even humor thinking about its dumb, crackbrained plot again, it’s going to give me a migraine. Still, despite the fact that its flaw spurt out of its pores like a pus-filled zit, it displays an impeccably grim and claustrophobic atmosphere that will strike dread in the player incomparable to most of its peers. Given that Condemned was released right before every game was depicted in this viewpoint, the gameplay and plot could’ve been put under the knife by another IP and awakened anew as a prominent trend in first-person video games. Sadly, it was too daring to take on as a lark, so Condemned unconventional nature remains as unique as it once was. It’s not too late to experience bashing in the heads of drug-addled goons with plywood, even if the one game that revels in this prospect is faulty at best.

Deadly Premonition Review

 (Originally published to Glitchwave on 10/13/2024)

[Image from igdb.com]

Deadly Premonition

Developer: Marvelous Entertainment

Publisher: UTV Ignition

Genre(s): Horror, Open-World

Platforms: Xbox 360, PS3

Release Date: February 23, 2010

Deadly Premonition is Twin Peaks if David Lynch and the rest of the cast and crew did whippets in between takes. Baddabing, baddaboom–I’m done with this review. Good night, everyone!
…
Anyway, I could summarize the third-person shooter horror game Deadly Premonition with the jokey blurb because it perfectly encapsulates everything that it offers in a succinct little nutshell. However, the short sentence doesn’t detail Deadly Premonition’s strange legacy, namely how it gained its cult status. In the film world, there’s a myriad of shoddy movies whose relevance is preserved under an ironic phenomenon referred to as “so bad it's good.” Films with nonsensical stories, hammy actors, “endearing” special effects, and other immersion-killing mistakes that would’ve been left in the blooper reel by a more competent filmmaker are obviously not worthy of Oscar contention. Furthermore, they’re also certainly prime for critical scorn from an objective standpoint. Still, the appreciation of any piece of art or entertainment is entirely subjective, and viewers will still actively watch these types of films while fully understanding that they are absolute disasters. Whether it be laughing at the film for its unintentional hilarity or admiration for how it breaks the standards and practices of the filmmaking status quo, all of the flawed elements can still amount to a genuinely enjoyable experience. Take the astounding reputation of The Room as the perfect example of this sensation, still screening at theaters around the world so audiences can lovingly mock it. Can the same sensation be achieved in the medium of video games? Frankly, I’m a bit skeptical. It’s easy to appreciate nonsensical shlock from a viewer's removed perspective because the experience with any film involves the same inert process. With an interactive medium, the clumsy attributes will be actively defying the player throughout their playtime if they choose to persist with it. Given the intriguing reputation of Deadly Premonition, whose fan base adores its messiness, I thought I’d be a new member of the club. However, my skepticism has not dissipated entirely.

Deadly Premonition couldn't have possibly ripped off Twin Peaks more if it wanted to. Sure, not everything is a shot-for-shot recreation, but the line between the parallels that Deadly Premonition is trying to mask to discern itself is so thinly veiled that it's like wearing a mesh outfit to cover one’s naked body. For instance, the popular, beautiful prom queen whose murder serves as the plot catalyst and focal point of the entire plot is not found “dead…wrapped in plastic” over by the shore. Instead, she’s been hung up on a towering tree in a crucifixion position, totally topless with her long blonde hair tastefully covering her breasts and a grievous gash exposed on her torso. The discovery of her freshly deceased corpse devastates the town, which inspires the call for action to prevent future killings in what seems to be a string of similar murders. The severity of the situation invites out-of-towner FBI agent Dale Coo–I mean, Francis “York” Morgan, whose detective expertise is vital to solving the mystery of the case. After a detour through the town’s lakefront, York (his preferred title) meets his subsidiary crew of local sheriff George Woodman and junior deputy Emily Wyatt once dawn arrives. With this gang of law enforcers on the scene, cracking the case of whoever is behind all of the spree killings should be done by breakfast time. Good lord: where do I start with the comparisons? I’ve already covered the similarities with what event begins Deadly Premonition, but the uncanny instances just keep piling on afterward like a Chinese buffet. Is it a coincidence that the first glimpse of our suited protagonist is while he’s driving and mumbling a soliloquy on the situation at hand? Why do I even bother asking this question when I realize it’s entirely rhetorical? Did I mention that York here has access to his own Black Lodge, the otherworldly lounge pad whose iconography is arguably the most indelible image of Twin Peaks? York’s special space suspended between the realm of dreams and reality isn’t decked out with crimson red curtains and a black and white wave pattern as its flooring. Still, a bed of fallen, luridly orange leaves supporting the foundation of a circular living area that only the protagonist is privy to functions the same as Agent Cooper’s swanky and sophisticated waiting room. If the angelic versions of the twin boys Isaach and Isaiah that reside here spoke backward, I would’ve rolled my eyes back so far into my head that it would have rendered me blind. My only hope for Deadly Premonition’s sake is that David Lynch is so old and out of touch that he isn’t aware of the existence of video games. Otherwise, the passionate director will rain fury upon the developers for unabashedly stealing his material. One thing to take note of in comparing Deadly Premonition to its obvious source is that the macabre subject matter is presented much more graphically if the partial nudity and blood spilling out of victim Anna Graham is any indication. By the seventh console generation, censorship in gaming had evidently become less restrained than what was allowed on television in the early 1990s.

If you’re not familiar with the drug I referenced in my opening blurb, and bless you sweet, innocent angel if you’re not, what I was ultimately alluding to is that Deadly Premonition’s attributes resemble those of Twin Peaks in a warped and disoriented fashion. What better way to illustrate the game’s mirrored, bizarro realm relationship with Twin Peaks than by comparing the protagonists? Besides their vocation and exact purpose for driving out to the boonies, Agent Francis “York” Morgan shares several of the same eccentricities as Kyle Maclaughlan’s character from the show. However, York sheds much of Dale Cooper’s personability and charm in favor of cranking up his apparent autism to eleven. York is endlessly fascinated by everything, and he’ll monologue to himself about that particular point of interest tangent after tangent until someone snaps him back to reality. The player will grow weary of York rambling on and on about horror movies, punk rock music (uh oh. Are those two things a tell-tale sign of autism?), and the nostalgia of girls from a bygone era of his life, especially when he’s driving alone in a police vehicle. Actually, York’s enthusiastic words will always be shared with “Zach,” a “character” constantly addressed by York but never seen or heard by anyone. The inclusion of this illusory character would veer the game into the realm of the absurd if the other characters didn’t acknowledge that York seems to have an imaginary friend based on how many times he openly converses with the invisible figure. York believes that the shape of the swirl of milk inside his morning coffee gives him vital intimations on the case at hand, and the grizzliness revolving around the spree killings never wavers his smirk of confidence. In fact, each subsequent tragedy that occurs around town after Anna is treated as a new source of stimuli for York to mull over. Many of the townspeople express an open dislike for York because his social skills are downright abysmal. He’s so aloof that it's as if an alien has invaded the grounds of Greenvale, which is certainly not a source of relief for a town already on edge from the recent murders. George and Emily often admonish York for his unorthodox, borderline nonsensical detective tactics, and their chiding stems from both a disagreement in planning as well as a genuine concern for the man’s mental health. Still, by York’s own admission, one needs an abstract mind to understand the motivations of a psychopathic killer and calculate their next moves. If no one else in Greenvale is equipped to handle a case of such drastic proportions, they shouldn’t be questioning York’s methods. As for his merits as a protagonist, there’s something oddly endearing about York’s quirks that make him more tolerable for the player rather than the characters who interact with him. Dollar store Dale Cooper has a hilarious stoicism streak that combats wonderfully with the terrors the case presents, signifying that he’s the only man suited for this job and is exquisitely insane.

As amusing as York’s neurodivergence is, he also acts as a vehicle for the player to get acquainted with Greenvale’s fine folk. Similarly to the close-knit atmosphere of Twin Peaks, the cast of secondary characters in Deadly Premonition is a diverse community of eclectic characters. Firstly, there’s York’s ragtag partners of George and Emily. The sheriff 'round these parts is exactly what one would expect from a chief officer in a rural, woodland area. He’s a gruff, no-nonsense, broad-shouldered man who likes his beer cold and his football games loud. It’s fitting that his last name is Woodman, for he could easily become a lumberjack if leaving this case unsolved tanks his current career. By his side on duty is Ms. Emily Wyatt, the sweet and devoted policewoman who York soon develops a boyish crush on as they spend more time together. She’s also gorgeous, which is a commentary on how ironic it was that the podunk town of Twin Peaks had dozens of beautiful women as its residents. Rounding out the ensemble of dime pieces to affirm this as a spoof is the loose art museum curator Diane Ames and her sister Becky, gas station co-owner Gina, and cabaret nightclub singer Carol. There are also some older ladies who were allegedly just as radiant in their younger years such as the hotel manager Polly and “Roaming Sigourney,” whose defining characteristic is that she’s so attached to a pot that it’s as if it's superglued to her. See the reference, Twin Peaks fans? Plenty of male characters also live amongst these smoke shows, such as Wesley the gunsmith, rockabilly Keith Ingram, the belligerent Jack whose nickname is “The Raging Bull,” etc. Thomas is also a less integral officer in Greenvale’s police squad who can cook a biscuit that will blow your balls off. One must feel especially concerned for the two towheaded twin boys, Isaach and Isaiah, who are far too young to understand the epidemic plaguing their town. One would think witnessing the crime scene of a gruesome murder would traumatize them, but they naively perceive Anna as a “forest goddess” who has returned to her rightful throne in the arboreal realm. York will have a chance to formally meet with many of Greenvale’s finest at a community center gathering, but the players can choose to ingratiate themselves even further with each of them by engaging with their individual sidequests scattered around the map. Sure, several of these adjunct objectives amount to trivial tasks involving moving some supply boxes in the Ingram’s market and digging through the junkyard owned by the war veteran Lysander for a car part. Still, completing these minuscule missions allows the player to soak in the ongoings of the town whereas York hardly interacts with anyone outside of the police department while on the case. Making the extra effort to visit Greenvale’s civilians will sometimes even reward York with valuable goodies like enhanced firearms. However, the sidequests that lock these coveted items are often the excruciatingly tedious ones, like finding an entire human skeleton for Willie the Dog piece by piece. Doing these tasks is entirely of the player’s own volition for a reason.

Quirky characters withstanding, what particularly makes Deadly Premonition fried and discombobulated is its presentation. The voices are out of sync with each character’s mouth movements, the voice lines often don’t match what is written in the subtitles, character expressions are inappropriately exaggerated, and every character, especially Yorkie Boy, utter lines of dialogue that smack of an amateur (stoned) film school screenwriter that was committed to a psych ward after ingesting too much LSD. Deadly Premonition meets the criteria of a laughably bad movie, but the medium of gaming allows the wonky elements of its presentation to bleed into its gameplay. Glitches run rampant through Deadly Premonition like a multiplying virus. NPCs will drive through solid walls and phase out of them without a scratch like the T-1000, York’s tie will stop hanging off his neck and instead impale him right through his sternum, and the various police vehicles that York has access to will sometimes become as imperceptible as his compadre. York’s controls are also so robotic and stiff that he makes every Silent Hill protagonist look like a spry college athlete by comparison. One could argue that all the game needs is a can of coding duster to clean the clunky cobwebs, but the facets of Deadly Premonition’s gameplay that couldn't have been unintentional are equally as questionable. What is “agent honor,” and why should I concern myself with gathering the assorted medals that increase my “honor points?” What relevance does the sour smell of York’s worn suits have on the character or the case, and why did they feel the need to include a feature where York can grow a scraggly beard if he doesn’t shave while we’re on the subject of his personal hygiene? Why is driving confined to a first-person perspective? Why are the sound bites so dramatic? Why can he become hungry, or tired while we’re at it? I don’t want to dwell too long on every odd attribute the game presents because the list would span the length of an entire page but leave these few examples with the impression that Deadly Premonition is baffling, to say the least.

All of these moments had me grinning like the Cheshire Cat, and even instances where I had a befuddled look on my face still didn’t waver my general sense of joy. However, one aspect of Deadly Premonition did legitimately cause my smile to angle downwards to furious rage and discontent, and that’s the open-world format of the game’s map. One would need to have seen Twin Peaks to understand this statement, but the show was sort of an “open-world” series. Maybe it’s the third-person omniscient perspective in which its events unfold, but the way the show contains every minutia of the plot to the town and its denizen’s individual story arcs shares a commonality with how an open-world video game functions narratively. A game that essentially acts as an interactive version of the show would be remiss if it didn’t capitalize on this prospect that is already organically laid out for them. However, the way in which Deadly Premonition orchestrates its open-world format is yet another of its awkward attributes. Given the examples of York’s cleanliness deteriorating and his need for food, Deadly Premonition focuses on a realism imperative. How this initiative factors into its non-linear open world is that many of the sidequests and persons of interest aren’t available at all times of the day, most notably whenever the sun isn’t shining either due to rainfall or the nightly moonrise. Progressing the story might also be locked by a time constraint, which is a mechanic borrowed from open-world grandaddy Grand Theft Auto. It’s understandable from a realistic perspective why the townsfolk have hung their hats during these hours because that’s how a town in real life operates. However, from a gameplay perspective, roaming around with zilch to do while the clock ticks at a snail’s pace puts the player in a deep slump of profound boredom. Finding a place to rest or smoking a hearty cigar will allow time to pass automatically, but the time expended by lighting up is only a few hours and York’s metabolism is liable to cave if he slumbers for too long. Not to mention, traversing through Greenvale in general is a total slog. A marker will show the location of the current objective, but good luck finding your way anywhere else because the map is zoomed in like the interface of an elderly person’s smartphone. Also, expending a vehicle’s gas is a constant source of stress, for every police vehicle has the gas mileage of a fat guy giving someone a piggyback ride. This issue is compounded by the fact that there is only one gas station in town monopolizing what should be a common convenience. Why? Just…why?

Most of Deadly Premonition’s essential gameplay is spent indoors, and the various architectures of Greenvale are where the game’s horror factor is kicked into high gear. York insists on investigating each building alone while George and Emily stand guard outside, for he requires this solitude (minus Zach) for the place to transform into a terrifying otherworld of sorts similar to the “dungeons” in Silent Hill. In this schizophrenic nightmare realm, the interior will melt like it’s being digested, and red vines will sprout from several corners to block York from entering certain routes. The main objective here is to collect clues so York can undergo a process called “profiling” where he pieces together the evidence in order to formulate a relatively cohesive theory on what occurred and how it pertains to the case. Other obstructions in these areas besides the crimson walls of thorny vegetation are the occasional puzzles and the more frequent enemy placements. For some unexplained reason, the enemies in Deadly Premonition are pale, zombified ghouls with visages splattered by what looks like black ink. They are consistently sluggish no matter if they’re male or female, and their strange habit of doing the Exorcist spider walk leaves them vulnerable to York aiming his sights at them with deadly accuracy. Unless they are in packs and are also carrying firearms of their own, these groaning phantoms are hardly ever an issue. The Ringu girls that crawl along the walls don’t add a challenge but rather lather the combat in an extra layer of tedium. York’s primary pistol also has infinite ammunition, so combat in Deadly Premonition seems superfluous. Actually, enemies were added in the game as an afterthought to “spice up the gameplay for Westerners,” so it’s no wonder that it seems tacked on. The puzzles are also as equally incidental, as they’re so straightforward that a neanderthal could ace them. I enjoy the tense, spooky atmosphere of these sections and the well-illustrated reference to how Agent Cooper tended to piece together clues through extremely surreal tactics. However, they exhibit all of the game’s properties that were obviously close contenders for the cutting room floor.

Near the end of the investigation sections, the game likes to add a third element for York to contend with to disrupt his train of thought. Sometimes, the game will signal the presence of a shrouded figure who resembles the outfit and aura of the “Raincoat Killer” folklore legend that has been told around the town for generations. This ax-wielding maniac is a classic pursuer of the Nemesis variety in which all the player can possibly do in his presence is run like hell and hope they escape his sights. Again, I have to disclaim that Deadly Premonition’s tackling of this horror game trope is riddled with more holes than clothing eaten by moths. Whenever York is scurrying away from this hostile figure, the game doesn’t allow him to manually run and potentially exhaust York’s heart rate meter. No, the game catapults the player into a sequence where the player must violently swing the analog stick back and forth like they’re flicking the bean, which is often interrupted by having to open a door or push a wooden crate obstructing the path to survival. The alternate aspect of gameplay involving the Raincoat Killer is hiding from him in a locker or closet while he menacingly scours the room trying to find York while he does nothing but sit idly and hold his breath. He will never suss out York’s location if the player does this simple task. The hectic dilemma of these scenes with the Raincoat Killer is not the jarring dual screens of both York and the POV of the killer that slows the framerate to a glacial pace, but the absolutely swift reaction time required from the quicktime events to dodge his ax swings. While I mostly find this juggernaut of a character to be more annoying than frightening, he’s quite captivating from a villain design standpoint. That, and I greatly admire his craftsmanship, for lack of a better term. It sounds rather callous, but the elaborate death vices he puts his victims through are incredibly striking, albeit shocking and morbid. He’s truly living up to his Giallo-esque killer persona with these circuitous feats of sadism, and Dario Argento would be proud.

But the mystery that drives Deadly Premonition’s plot is not figuring out that the Raincoat Killer is the perpetrator, but WHO is behind the hooded garb and high beam eyes. For the chunkier early half of the game, York and company cycle through many red herrings. The hapless diner owner, Nick Cormack, is the first suspect detained for questioning, but his crime is merely sleeping around on his wife, Olivia. Thomas is then the first suspect with a credible lead, but he’s only an accessory to the true culprit. He’s also revealed to be a lunatic who fancies crossdressing as a form of self-expression (he’s not a lunatic BECAUSE he crossdresses, it’s just something that accentuates his flamboyant craziness). Once Thomas is subdued by Emily, she believes that the killer has been brought to justice. However, York knows that he’s just the crucial connection that leads them to the true culprit: George Woodman. If you’ve been paying attention up to this point, figuring out that the mustachioed man of rural masculinity hiding out right under our noses is the murderer should come as no surprise. His backstory he tells York over drinks about when his mother used to whip him like his name was Toby as a child matches a logical modus operandi for a killer that only targets women. His unrequited love for Emily, his access to the police files when Thomas is eliminated as a suspect, and his defensiveness whenever York suggests that the Raincoat Killer might not be a fabricated myth all point directly to George. When York confronts his former partner, he reveals his insidious true nature in a boss fight that is epically dripping with anime cheese. Even though his actions are reprehensible, how could George not be placed in the category of sympathetic antagonists with what we know about him? This is an attitude that York approaches George with, something that is equally felt by the player.

Homicidal misogyny is not the only oil that fuels George’s murderous fire. How he transformed into the hulking Akuma beast in his second phase as a boss was due to the power of the seeds. George subscribed to the rumors that killing those women in the ritualistic fashion of cutting out their tongues and feeding them seeds from a breed of tree that grows in town would grant him the gift of immortality. While George is still the man behind the raincoat, the conspiracy unravels even further. It’s here in its final act where Deadly Premonition adopts a JRPG arc like something from Persona, where there is something far bigger beyond the focal point that initially drove the narrative. Greenvale’s elderly, gas-mask-wearing aristocrat, Harry Stewart, tells York a tale from long ago when the town was victim to a military experiment where they released a gas that turned the townsfolk into feral savages that killed each other in the streets. The MVP of this chaotic scene was a man who racked up the most bodies was a man carrying an ax and wearing a red raincoat, and the original raincoat killer was born. In this scene, the camera pans over to a rotund military man who shares a striking resemblance to of Forrest Kaysen, the jolly, dopey man with the dog who always seems to be present during pressing moments of the case. He is actually an eldritch demon who spreads the noxious properties of the red trees, so his job title of “traveling sapling salesman” has tons of sinister connotations. Not only does he implore spiritually broken humans like George to consume the red seeds, but another aspect of spreading his seed, or so to speak, is implanting women with the seedling of a red tree that bursts from their bodies like a baby Xenomorph. Kaysen’s next victim of this visceral fate is Emily, so York’s confrontation with Kaysen at the community center becomes personal. In a three-act boss fight that becomes a chore as it progresses, York finally does away with the looming, hidden threat that has plagued Greenvale for decades. Kaysen’s role taps into the BOB parallel with Twin Peaks, a supernatural force pulling the strings behind the proverbial curtain. However, whereas BOB’s malevolence is never hidden from the audience, it’s almost insulting how the developers want us to be duped by this obvious agent of chaos. There’s no way that this stammering, sweaty fat man with this much main quest screen time isn’t involved with the dark ongoings of this town in some capacity. Never doubt the morning coffee!

…Oh, and the final portion of the game reveals that “Zach” is not a figment of York’s imagination. He’s the FBI agent’s true personality that was hidden from reality as a coping mechanism after the traumatic event of witnessing his father kill his mother and then blow his brains out as a child. More context behind the tragedy is unveiled when the full scene sees his mother with a tree growth protruding from her abdomen with Kaysen laughing maniacally from the side. Sorry, the final act of the game is kind of a clusterfuck and it’s difficult to talk about this twist with everything else happening concisely.

I’m at a loss for words with Deadly Premonition. This uncanny Twin Peaks homage with all of the television series' glorious garmonbozia on display is a frazzled, mind-boggling mess in regard to every aspect of the game. The plot is fucking bonkers, the presentation is incompetent, and the gameplay is often a dreadful slog both in its open world and enclosed areas. Yet, it showcases so many instances of genuine brilliance that I’m facing a crisis on how to judge this game. To what extent is Deadly Premonition taking the piss, and what is it taking the piss out of exactly? Is it taking the piss out of Twin Peaks, and why? Is it taking the piss out of Resident Evil 4 and other popular third-person shooter games with its irreverent use of enemies and quick-time events? Is its target of tongue-in-cheek scrutiny open-world games? I don’t fucking know! In the immortal words of Rich Evans of Red Letter Media fame, bad movies aren’t fun unless the person that made them tried, and one can scratch out the word movies and apply it to video games. Given the positives of Deadly Premonition, it’s clear that core developer Swery65 did not set out to create an interactive dumpster fire despite all of the game’s glaring flaws. Whether or not his intentions were to craft a parody game, the final product encapsulates that phenomenon of a “so bad, it’s good” film in an interactive medium to a masterful degree. Deadly Premonition exudes a creative flair and winsome nature that all other game developers don’t have the chutzpah to put into their creations. Deadly Premonition is not a good game by any stretch of the imagination. Still, I highly recommend it to anyone who plays video games.

Manhunt Review

 (Originally published to Glitchwave on 10/7/2024)

[Image from glitchwave.com]

Manhunt

Developer: Rockstar

Publisher: Rockstar

Genre(s): Stealth, Horror

Platforms: PS2, Xbox

Release Date: November 18, 2003

The guys over at Rockstar are going to Hell. Pushing the buttons of middle-aged parents with Grand Theft Auto's sleazy and unfettered violence evidently didn't garner enough ethical controversy for their liking. With a game like Manhunt, I feel the studio has promptly stamped their one-way ticket to eternal damnation. Rockstar has always embraced the hysterical outcries their games have received and effectively shielded all accusations of corrupting the youth with a sense of indomitable pride in their work. In the case of Manhunt, however, even they feel as if their libertarian ethos in game development crossed a solid line. Manhunt was a veritable Pandora’s box of controversy when it hit store shelves shortly after GTA was making waves on the PS2, and the brutal nature of Manhunt was shocking enough to momentarily transfuse the public contention away from their best-known series. A nightmare of a court case involved blaming Manhunt for a fourteen-year-old’s death held a strain on Rockstar for years. While the studio stood its ground and ultimately won the legal battle, a part of the team still felt pangs of guilt for the tragedy they got roped up in. Deep down, they still somewhat felt that they had unleashed something unholy into this world. Rockstar may be content with their acclaimed association in broadening the parameters of gaming environments despite the backlash they’ve faced, but Manhunt still makes them take Ambien at times to help them sleep at night. Given that the era in which Manhunt was released was my gaming prime, I’m all too familiar with its storied notoriety. Still, what I don’t know from decades of third-person gossip is if Manhunt is worthy of joining the ranks of its fellow exceptional, yet problematic Rockstar brethren.

So what exactly makes Manhunt extreme enough to give GTA a break? Well, I can’t think of anything more taboo-breaking in an interactive medium than having the player pilot the actions of a serial killer. Before you conclude that the player will be breaking into people’s homes and unceremoniously butchering them like farm animals, there is at least context to the amoral deeds taking place. The playable psychopath is named James Earl Cash, and the state has just failed to euthanize him via lethal injection after he’s been sentenced to death. Soon after he re-emerges from his temporary slumber in the dark and desolate death row, an untraceable voice starts speaking to him. The detached presence manages to release Cash from his cell, but there is a price for his freedom. The caveat to setting Cash loose is that now he must embrace his violent criminal persona set by his conviction and create a snuff film. Considering how the game sprinkles in the footage reel frame, some editor is probably going to stitch each of Cash’s kills into an extensive compilation. Yeah, I’m sure whoever at Rockstar conjured up this premise has a lot of explaining to do, mostly to a certified therapist.

The streets that Cash is now running around as a fugitive are the ones of Carcer City, a fictional American metropolis that may only marginally bear a resemblance to at least one of the USA’s urban zones by circumstance. Carcer City is a vacant, bombed-out wasteland, with architecture so grimy and depleted that one might think it was torn and shredded by the horrors of some unspecified war. The desolate urban decay is a perfect breeding ground for gangs to run amok and conduct shady, illicit business practices. Cash’s victims sacrificed for snuff art are the various members of these criminal factions. He’s eradicating their strongholds block by block, but I’m not sure cleansing the city of these scummy wastrels constitutes a crude gentrification measure. This is especially the case considering his methods of dispatching them. To make a dirtbag descend beyond the pale into the gates of the underworld where he belongs, Cash must find an object on the field because his hands are apparently too tiny and delicate to oust them with pure strangulation. Once he finds his golden opportunity upon getting close to them, an automated sequence commences where he executes the poor sap, with a staticky VHS tape filter over it to signify it’s being filmed. Pouncing on an enemy immediately once in range already delivers a gruesome kill, but holding down the attack button until the target marker glows either yellow or red will initiate an execution of unspeakable brutality. Don’t play Manhunt on a full stomach.

While the centerpiece of the action in Manhunt is obviously horrific, a million-dollar question lingers in my mind: should the player feel remorseful for their deeds if these pieces of human excrement are the ones taking the brunt of it? The various gangs encompass the absolute dregs of society, the kinds of dudes that would make anyone lock their cars or clutch their belongings while walking down the street at even a fleeting glance. Besides the “Hoods” and “Wardogs” who greatly intimidate just on their outfits and statures alone, other gangs exhibit plenty of unsavory traits than just the physical ones. The “Skinz” are a bunch of neo-Nazi rednecks that refer to Cash as a “half-breed.” Cash must only be an eighth African then, which is considered “impure” enough to evoke their wrath. The fatter, balder members of the predominantly Mexican gang of “The Innocentz” exude the stereotypical look of a sex offender, and their perverted dialogue is guaranteed to give anyone the creeps. Sure, two wrongs don’t make a right but in Cash’s dire situation, I’m glad that Rockstar took a firm “no women or children” approach and decided to zone their carnage on the least sympathetic people possible. All the while, the scope of the action combined with the merciless bludgeoning that Cash inflicts on his foes always places him as “the danger,” almost a role reversal that muddles the horror factor.

Even though Cash is ultimately “the one who knocks,” the conditions of his videotaping contract still involve him skulking around to avoid enemy detection. I neglected to mention that while Cash is winding up a swift murdering maneuver on an enemy, he can only perform his specialty when the enemy is unaware of his presence. This statement should connote that Manhunt is a stealth title, a genre of video game that emphasizes a patient, methodical approach to combat rather than storming into the line of fire guns blazing like in its more accessible action counterpart. Gangs tend to work in packs and they outnumber Cash per square inch by six to one, so it’s wise to adopt a stealthy initiative to smoothly bump off their numbers. The outlined prominence of stealth in a horror game such as Manhunt is quite harmonious since one could assume that they’d rather hide from the terrors that be than face them with fierce confidence. If Cash’s cover is blown, several corners and alcoves are available around any area, and their blanketed shadowy dimness practically makes Cash invisible to the naked eye. Still, this form of covert camouflage will only protect Cash from harm if he distances himself from the enemy that has caught him, but the endurance meter is likely not to exhaust if Cash needs to evade any hostilities. If one of the aggressors knicks Cash with a blade or a bullet, a plentiful amount of painkillers will be strewn across the field to heal his wounds, provided the player can locate them in the dimly lit corridors where they are usually found.

Manhunt is relatively lenient with player error, but I bet the developers never predicted that the player could use their leniencies as a tactical strategy. Exposing one’s presence to the enemies just to bolt away to a shadowed corner is the perfect method of laying waste to the city’s various savages. The alcoves and alleyways around the city are deeply darkened enough to completely shroud Cash’s body, leaving any pursuer to tilt their heads in confusion like a dog while pacing around the vicinity doing a triple check of their surroundings. Once they’ve given up or turned their backs on Cash long enough, the player is free to swoop in and whack the stupid fuck. Is this tactic an infraction on the core principle of a stealth game to remain unseen? Of course it is. In my defense, if Manhunt was actually concerned with the player’s elusiveness like any other stealth game would be, its accommodations would lean more towards preventing getting caught and less in the evasion process. I understand that Cash’s line of sight is realistically limited, but the radar that is intended as a reference to the enemy’s positions needs to be smacked for it to fully function like an old television. Whenever an enemy is blissfully unaware and whistling a jaunty tune to themselves out of boredom (that I swear sounds like the Sesame Street theme at times), the yellow arrow marker that signifies their lack of alertness only emerges on the radar whenever Cash is close to them. Even up close, its appearance on the radar is shaky at best, so it's difficult to discern their line of sight. Whenever they’re a suspicious orange or a chasing red, the radar never abandons them. This is why compromising one’s location in Manhunt seems to be the most logical means of eradication. It seems counterintuitive to the definition of stealth, but whatever floats this game’s boat.

Presenting a few clueless enemies every few yards in a level is essentially the recurring objective in Manhunt. Even with the unflinching, stomach-churning violence on display, many players still eventually become jaded by the frequent massacres and chide the game for being repetitive. While there is some validity to this criticism, the game at least makes an effort to alter the scope of the same task every so often. However, I’m not sure they’re welcome adjustments in the long run. Everyone knows that escort missions are the bane of every gamer’s existence, so randomly having to keep track of some drunken bum with no relevance to the plot is an unsolicited ball and chain strapped to the player’s ankles. Commandeering a magnetic crane and flattening guys with a fridge sounds hilariously enthralling in theory, but the loudness of the industrial contraption is an invitation for everyone in the area to run to Cash’s location and ambush him. Saving Cash’s four family members who are bound and gagged puts our psychopathic protagonist in an unusual heroic role, and the guards targeting the hostages instead of Cash if they spot him actually gives the player incentive to stay in the shadows and plan their moves tactfully. Still, the radar screws the player over as some guards emerging at inconvenient moments is almost RNG conditional. Manhunt only offers one boss battle, and it’s certainly a highlight that incorporates all of the best implementations of the game’s stealth mechanics. Cash will start the duel without any tools, as he must scour the dilapidated hallways of the arena for glass shards and wooden picks while finding that golden moment to leap out of the shade and skewer the target. Not to mention, the target in question is an obese, chainsaw-wielding cannibal serial killer named “Piggsy” who veils his identity behind the severed head of a swine and whose mental faculties have all deteriorated from being kept as a prisoner for so long. Piggsy alone is the most vomit-inducing sight in a game filled to the brim with scenes liable to make the player nauseous.

Even though I think the occasional alterations to the stealth gameplay are ultimately unnecessary, I will gladly guide a thousand shiftless hobos through the roughest of ghettos before the game diverts into third-person shooter territory. Once the player advances to the eighth scene of the game, the voice finds it time to grant Cash the usage of firearms. From then on, pistols, shotguns, machine guns, and the rare sniper rifle are integral assets to Manhunt’s gameplay. Must I detail why the deafening bangs of guns are counterintuitive in a stealth game? One may use Solid Snake’s lengthy arsenal as a rebuttal to my rhetorical question, but the series synonymous with the stealth genre utilizes guns in a completely different manner than Manhunt. In Metal Gear Solid, disposing of the common enemies scattered around is discouraged entirely. Alerting the guards carries a bevy of consequences that range from tedious to overwhelming, which incentivizes the player to stay sneaky at all costs. A gun should only be fired either at a safe distance or as a last resort when caught in close quarters. Plus, it helps to conserve ammunition for the various boss fights. When a stealth game is centered around directly interacting with enemies like in Manhunt, compromising one’s presence with unsilenced firearms is a recipe for disaster. Surprisingly with all I’ve stated, Manhunt tends to forgo the stealth gameplay almost entirely whenever Cash finds himself in an area with firearms scattered about. This may initially seem like a relief, but this shift in gameplay is the primary source of suffering while playing Manhunt. Unlike Solid Snake who is an adroit super soldier capable of incapacitating enemies head-on when he needs to, James Earl Cash is an untrained schmuck who moves like he has an acute calcium deficiency. Anyone who attempts to confront enemies face to face will immediately learn that Cash is not equipped to deal with hand-to-hand combat, hence why the developers designed his stilted movement to fit a stealth game. When the game suddenly expects the player to rush all enemies like a one-man army, Manhunt becomes like a severely handicapped version of Max Payne. Cash cannot crouch behind cover, he can’t shift through his weapons swiftly, and the only way to inflict fatal damage to enemies by shooting them in the head is to sprint right up to them almost like Cash is ready to give them a warm embrace instead of a steamy bullet to the brain. The scene called “Border Patrol” is the notoriously difficult mission involving shooting-intensive gameplay, but the level that is most indicative of the fallacies of Manhunt’s gunplay in my perspective is the second half of “Doing Time.” The amount of armed lunatics in close quarters ready to obliterate Cash without any sort of stealth to aid the player made me wish that Cash could instead turn the gun towards his own head and pull the trigger. What a god-awful, inappropriate way to diversify Manhunt’s gameplay.

Ultimately, who the players should focus their frustrations on for all of this broken bullshit is Lionel Starkweather, also known as the identity behind the disembodied voice commanding Cash to commit heinous, amoral acts on camera. Apparently, this man is a successful filmmaker in the canon of Manhunt who also dabbles in creating movies that one can only see in the forbidden sections of the internet. I’d say that his little project with Cash is his side hustle tapping into a lucrative market of depraved people, but he cannot seem to refrain from commenting on his arousal when Cash murders someone in cold blood. Not only is his bloodlust unnerving, to say the least, but his Hollywood sleazeball demeanor makes this man arguably more disgusting than the pig man who feasts on gory human remains and feces chained up in his attic. From his loathsome commentary to all of the sadistic stipulations he instills onto the player, Starkweather becomes the most detestable character in the game and he’s not even the one directly committing all of the murders. I couldn't abandon Manhunt despite how many times the thought had crossed my mind, for I started to despise Starkweather on a personal level and desperately wanted to tear him limb from limb. Once Starkweather decides to sever ties with Cash and leaves him to die after a cheeky white rabbit scenario gimmick for unclear reasons, Cash’s freedom from his all-seeing eye leads him on a warpath to get revenge on his former associate with the aid of a news reporter who is already wise to Starkweather’s shenanigans. The road to payback is not a smooth one, especially since the revenge arc is littered with late-game shooting levels that aggravate me to no end. Still, once Cash climbs Starkweather’s mansion and finishes off his bottom bitch Piggsy in the aforementioned duel, cornering Starkweather in the first and only in-person interaction with the absolute slimebag and eviscerating him to a pulp with a chainsaw is so cathartic that it almost made me pop a chub. Starkweather is one of the most effective villains in video game history, for I’ve never hated an antagonist to this degree where finally bringing him to justice in the grizzly way the player does fills me with profound joy. Does that make me a sick fuck? No, because everyone who has played Manhunt is in the same boat (or at least they should be).

What I’ve learned is that Manhunt is like the Splatterhouse of the 21st-century 3D era of gaming. The 1980s side scroller became a staple in arcades because its horror factor was unprecedented in the medium. Still, it faltered in all gameplay aspects because the mechanics were clunky and presented a main character unfit for the style of video game at hand. Its popularity was truly due to its gory spectacle, a treat to witness but not so much to experience firsthand. The same indictments given to Splatterhouse can be easily attributed to Manhunt, elevating the threshold of permissible content in gaming and provoking the ire of parents everywhere in a vexing package. Manhunt’s stealth gameplay, while competent enough, isn’t exactly intuitive and does not foster the same skill ceiling as something like Metal Gear Solid. When it poses as a third-person shooter for a large chunk of the playtime, the game is fucking atrocious. Rockstar’s presentational strides elevate the game, but not enough that I can forgive all of its flaws so glaring that it angers me that the developers could not see it. Still, no gaming experience matches the same level of visceral and cold, nihilistic violence that Manhunt bestows. For the sake of taste, I hope no other game dares to come to the challenge of topping it.

The House of the Dead: Overkill

 (Originally published to Glitchwave on 10/4/2024)

[Image from igdb.com]

The House of the Dead: Overkill

Developer: Headstrong Games

Publisher: Sega

Genre(s): Rail Shooter

Platforms: Wii

Release Date: February 10, 2009

Unfortunately, Sega’s House of the Dead franchise had to exist before zombies were a roaring hot commodity. Sure, it capitalized on the rail shooter trend with the light gun peripheral at the optimal time when such a marvel of gaming innovation was consuming quarters at all the hot arcade cabinets. It’s practically what the series’ legacy is associated with. Still, it’s a damn shame that Sega jumped on the thematic construct of shooting the living dead before everyone wasn’t doing it, and it hardly ever receives the rightful acknowledgment as one of the first video game franchises to do so. A franchise is only as dormant as a developer ultimately wishes it to be and when Sega became aware of how prevalent zombies were in the greater media landscape in the late 2000s/early 2010s, it would’ve been foolish of them not to resurrect their undead-oriented rail shooter series from the grave and reap the financial spoils of its ubiquity. But do you think the team that turned their zombie bonanza into a fucking typing tutor was content to just skate by on the bare minimum and let the trend take the wheel and steer them toward financial success? The House of the Dead always had more integrity to stoop to that, so Sega and Headstrong Games molded the franchise’s comeback into an untapped artistic style for the medium with The House of the Dead: Overkill.

That is to say, Overkill’s presentation and direction are unique in the realm of video games. For the medium of film, too many movies exhibit the tropes that Overkill is paying tribute to count. Many others comment that Overkill is reminiscent of Quentin Tarantino’s works, but the famous director would be paradoxically flattered and offended at the notion that the iconography on display here is definitively his own. The popularity of his film Death Proof along with its double feature slot of Robert Rodriguez’s Planet Terror likely only served as the impetus for creating this game. For those of you who are teenagers who just discovered Tarantino's films after only watching Marvel movies and Madagascar sequels, Overkill’s aura and inspiration are deeply rooted in that of a grindhouse film, an orient of exploitation cinema that stretches back to the days of the medium’s history when Tarantino still had his baby teeth. Exploitation films are inherently centered around the cheap selling points of violence, casual sex, and other forms of depravity, but grindhouse films explicitly revel in these content taboos to the point where they’re all defining characteristics. Overkill understood exactly what buttons it needed to press to evoke the idiosyncratic essentials of a grindhouse film, and they hit every nail on the head.

For starters, the overhead narration that sets the scene of the game is perfect. Our enthusiastic host of the feature presentation introduces our cast of eclectic characters. Overkill’s world has been afflicted with a biological infection called “Formula X” that has transformed the good American people of Louisiana into rabid mutants with a hunger for flesh. Notice how the game never refers to the infected as zombies, which is an admirable choice to distance itself from the obvious hype machine it's attempting to cash on. A suave, stoic man dressed in a dapper suit enigmatically referred to as Agent G has been tasked with hunting down a powerful crime boss named Papa Caesar who might be responsible for the outbreak. At his assistance is the police detective Isaac Washington, whose character delves into the blaxploitation branch of the B-movie family tree. No, I’m not stating this simply because he’s black. The man wears a t-shirt on duty and exclaims the word “motherfucker” more than Samuel Jackson after stubbing his toe. A third member of this squad team is stripper Varla Guns, who has a personal vendetta against Papa Caesar for conducting an experiment on her brother Jasper that transformed him into a hideous monster that ultimately led to his untimely death. The names of these characters alone scream the sleazy nonsense of grindhouse movies if their occupations and designs don’t do enough to hone in on the desired homage. Above all of the shots taken of Agent G and Isaac dueling their weapons akimbo style, an unprofessional way to handle a firearm as a police officer I might add, the indelible proof that the developers did their homework is a shot with the well-endowed Varla driving our two protagonists through the Louisiana countryside at night on her bitchin’ Harley. I’m not sure if it’s the vehicle of choice or if it's the group shot overload of exploitation caricatures all at once, but I have a feeling that I’d suspect that this image alone would ring a grindhouse vibe in my mind without knowing the context. It’s difficult to declare this definitively, for Overkill seems to portray the elements of exploitation film so well that it might trump Tarantino’s understanding of them.

Rail shooters and the Wii’s motion controls are a match made in heaven, even if the inherently violent content of such a genre conflicts with Nintendo’s reputation as a family-friendly brand–especially with the widespread accessibility marketing of this particular system. I’ve already noted how surprising it is that No More Heroes and MadWorld were greenlit to appear on Nintendo’s bundle of multi-million dollar joy, so I’m going to declare that Overkill is part of the gilded club of M-rated Wii titles instead of expressing shock and awe of its exclusivity to the console. If they didn’t want vulgar and graphic content polluting their otherwise pristine system, they shouldn’t have modeled their controller to aim like a gun! But the kinetic relationship between the player’s tangible controller and aiming the deadly virtual weapon in the video game is precisely what makes Overkill especially enjoyable. As par for the course in a rail shooter game, the player’s trajectory through each level is fixed to an automated track set by the developers, and they must splatter the walls with the brains of the “infected” before they get the chance to claw their eyes out or sink their gnarly teeth into the protagonist’s warm human skin. The backdrops of the levels are typical settings for horror films, such as an abandoned plantation home, a carnival, a swamp, a prison, etc. Each location is also framed as a new chapter in the game with electrifying grindhouse titles like “Papa’s Palace of Pain” and “Jailhouse Judgment.” While I understand that the camera controls of a rail shooter are similar to a theme park ride, Overkill’s treatment of the genre’s predestined track sequences is bound to give the player whiplash. The screen shucks and jives to and fro from angle to angle even before the player is finished wiping away the enemies from the previous screen. Still, the erratic tendencies of the generated rail shooter courses are but a minor nitpick to prod at. If it was jarring enough to ruin swiftly turning “infected” into bloody Swiss cheese with five different weapons, something would be seriously wrong.

I think that if the player’s attention starts to wane with Overkill, it’ll be due to the ease of difficulty. Sure, the hordes of enemies ambushing them from every corner of the screen are bound to overwhelm and subdue the player from time to time. However, it’s the fact that succumbing to the onslaught of the undead is a trivial hiccup. The penalty for dying in Overkill is that the player’s score is reduced by half of its total amount, and it’s not as if they’ll receive an irreparable “game over” if their total plummets down to zero. I gather that the developers wanted to maintain the relationship between the rail shooter game and its arcade roots where high scores are what the player strives for. Still, the developers failed to realize that the only person marveling at the player’s accomplishments on a home console is themselves. Overtly drawing conspicuous circles around the weak points of every boss certainly doesn’t inspire dread or panic in the player either. Was there still a strict mandate to dumb down the difficulty to maintain the Wii’s accessibility, even though the game is as profane as an orgy in church?

Speaking of the game’s bosses, I briefly thought Overkill allowed the player to dig out of the facile difficulty rut with its final battle. In a nutshell, Papa Caesar, the villain we’ve been pursuing, has been nothing but a red herring for the prison warden Clement Darling–the true mastermind behind the events of the game. This creepy and sadistic madman reveals that the outbreak was a casualty of his scientific experiments conducted to give his decrepit mother a few additional years on this earth. Before you conclude that his motives are sweet but irrationally conceived, the man had an Oedipus complex a mile wide. You can plainly see with this piece of context why Varla is the ideal specimen to use in a brain swap experiment, and our heroes are too late to prevent this unholy crossover from occurring. The experiment results in Varla’s body mutating to beastly proportions in more ways than I can detail. Before Agent G and Isaac can put this horrific abomination out of its misery, the game pulls a “scene missing” reel cut and then leaps to what seems like their triumphant victory. For a second, I thought the game had locked me out of some vital content due to not meeting some hidden conditions, a sign that the game actually expected more from the player. Alas, this was instead a fakeout as the player fights the beast anyway, with Agent G and Isaac blowing the facility to smithereens with a detonator and transporting Varla’s brain around in a jar in what is definitively a happy ending. Phooey.

Upon putting Overkill’s lack of player determination into perspective, I’m not sure exactly what I expected from it. The game’s entire identity is parodying a sector of films where the style is the substance, and that style in question is nothing but tawdry trash meant to cater to the audience’s most primal and shameful sources of titillation. I fall in the middle of the often non-converging Venn diagram of gamers who are aware of and appreciate the grindhouse films that the game knocks right out of the park in terms of portrayal. For those alien to the game’s stylistic inspirations, I don’t blame them for seeing Overkill as an average rail shooter slightly elevated by the system’s more kinetically involved hardware. Given that the game is at least competent, I still thoroughly enjoyed every moment of The House of the Dead: Overkill in its schlocky glory. Its presentation is just too unique to the gaming medium to pass up.

Demon's Souls Review

 (Originally published to Glitchwave on 9/29/2024)

[Image from glitchwave.com]

Demon's Souls

Developer: FromSoftware

Publisher: SCEI

Genre(s): Action RPG, Soulslike

Platforms: PS3

Release Date: February 5, 2009

Every bit of praise I’ve bestowed on Dark Souls has been a lie. Okay, maybe the whole truth behind the misappropriated adulation is that they are half-truths. The first Dark Souls did in fact popularize the idiosyncratic combat, rich lore, and world-building that hundreds of future titles would emulate. However, I’ve been attributing it as a visionary pioneer of its attributes and gameplay mechanics, and that’s not entirely an honest statement. The true innovator, the Nikola Tesla to Dark Souls’ Thomas Edison, is Demon’s Souls, FromSoft’s 2009 title that debuted all of the Dark Souls ingredients that captivated gamers everywhere. Demon’s Souls was critically acclaimed and it gave gamers of the era a stark alternative to the cinematically-inclined titles that ran amok on the PS3. So why is it that Demon’s Souls is relegated to partial obscurity while Dark Souls is the one reaping the spoils of its legacy? The way I see things, Demon's Souls' placement in the Souls family is comparable to how Vladamir Lenin fits in the Soviet Union's timeline. The Russian revolutionary was the governing debutant of the communist empire but was cut down in his prime just as the movement was in its infancy. The immediate successor to the throne (Stalin) reigned the ideals of Lenin’s new world order for decades onward, so it's no wonder that that figure has a clearer association with that particular dogma and political period. In a non-analogous fashion, Demon’s Souls is positioned as a “proto-Souls” game instead of the series’ glorious emergence because its licensing confines it not only to Sony’s grasp but to the now-defunct PS3 system. In order to play it myself, I had to make an extraneous purchase for a used PS3 console. This was an endeavor I never would’ve been forced to do for any future Souls title due to their widespread accessibility as far as their availability is concerned. Given that I’m a staunch veteran who has played through its successors countless times (except for Dark Souls II), I figured that I’d face less adversity in Demon’s Souls. The reality behind my assumption was that the progenitor of Dark Souls threw me around just as violently specifically due to its primitive elements.

To my surprise, Demon’s Souls doesn’t hide narrative context from the player. Every subsequent Souls game makes a deliberate effort to implore the player to seek out the lore and obscured rationale for embarking on this quest through character interactions and organic clues implied by the world’s conditions and general atmosphere. Demon’s Souls blinds the player at first when they are catapulted into the “tutorial” area and a portly beast with a seemingly impenetrable health bar trounces the player with a single swipe of his hulking battle ax. After conquering the feasibly vanquishable first boss, an eyeless woman wearing a black cloak carrying a staff decides that the player has earned the privilege of being informed on what they are experiencing. The kingdom of Boletaria has been poisoned with a noxious fog that carries the presence of soul-sucking demons who have made quick work devouring the inner essences of the kingdom’s denizens. The fog in question is not a thick, blinding wall of aerosol like in Silent Hill, rather, it's a metaphorical malaise that refers to the overwhelming danger that exists throughout. The player’s primary target is Boletaria’s ruler King Allant, who resurrected “The Old One” and his legion of demons to render his world barren out of contempt for it. Naturally, the road up to knocking this tyrant off his prodigious pedestal is filled with gobs of formidable monsters, so this adventure will be an extensive one, to say the least. The mission of quelling the immediate threat that plagues Boletaria positions the player’s warrior avatar into a heroic role, and acting as the kingdom’s savior recalls a more heightened, traditional hero’s journey arc than the mopping up of Lordran the player embarks on in Dark Souls.

At the center of Boletaria from both a gameplay and geographical (in a manner of speaking) sense in The Nexus. The player, on the high likelihood that the “Vanguard” demon pulverized them, would’ve shed their mortal coil at the start if this detached nether realm wasn’t present as a safety net of sorts. The player will only be teleported to The Nexus once upon dying, but they will always be invited to return on their volition because it's the hub of Demons Souls. At the base of the towering temple lies various NPCs that cater to many of the player’s necessities. The aforementioned eyeless figure known as the “Maiden in Black” serves the player in upgrading their stats if their soul count is equal to or more than the amount that she requests. Blacksmith Boldwin will upgrade the player’s weapons and armor given the appropriate smithing materials, and Stockpile Thomas sitting next to him will keep an eye on your overflow of items like a bank. Encumbering the player when they pile on too much bulky equipment persists onward to subsequent Souls games, but Demon’s Souls putting a finite limit on their entire inventory is the first mark of primitiveness the game bestows. The player will “collect” many other NPCs, mostly magicians and sages, after encountering them in the “fog.” The last initial person held up here is the “Crestfallen Warrior,” who does nothing but bitch and complain about how he doesn’t know the whereabouts of his body. Should I inform him that it’s one kingdom over in Lordran, or is my future insight considered a paradox? I not only appreciate the one-stop-shop convenience of The Nexus after the first Dark Souls scattered all of Lordran’s blacksmiths and sages across the map, but it's possibly my favorite hub that FromSoft has ever devised because it's downright sublime. The otherworldly etherealness of this monumental area exudes something of a pleasant dream, making it seem like any harm that might come to the player is ultimately inconsequential. Considering a hub’s utility is to emulate a sanctuary, The Nexus does its job perfectly.

But like all proactive people, they must leave the comfort of their homes and expose themselves to the drudgery of the outside world to work and earn a living. For the player, leaving The Nexus especially exposes them to a world most foul and hostile. I’ve been known to marvel at Dark Souls’ 3D interpretation of a quasi-Metroidvania game displayed as the interconnected world of Lordran. Considering that Demon’s Souls is the primitive predecessor to Dark Souls, one can already assume that its kingdom isn’t designed with the same rich and ambitious world template. Boletaria is divided into five different areas, all accessed through teleporting via the archstones located alongside the arched staircase at the base of The Nexus. Traversing through each area is a linear trek, and each boss conquered is a stamp that marks a significant progression milestone. This is why sections between bosses across all of the areas of Demon’s Souls are conventionally referred to by decimal integers (I.e. the area outside of the castle door in Boletarian Palace is “1-1” and anywhere past the Phalanx boss arena is “1-2”). While the linearity displayed in Demon’s Souls level design doesn’t floor me like Dark Souls’ impeccable world cohesion, I’d equate each area in the game to a rope with tons of knots that interrupt the straightforward pathway. Arriving at the domain of another demon admiral will still involve navigating through several twisted, labyrinthian roadblocks, which still constitutes a deeply engaging design philosophy in my book. Unfortunately, shortcuts and other forms of moderate respite are not prominent tenets of Demon’s Souls’ philosophy. In Dark Souls, surviving past a certain point in an area will often reward the player with a bonfire as another spawn point, or at least they’ll find themselves circling around to an unlocked door or transportation contraption as a more organic form of shortcut. Demon’s Souls, on the other hand, evidently does not subscribe to the belief that the tedium of backtracking upon dying should be mitigated as a reward for incremental progress or astute discovery. If the player is slain in Demon’s Souls, returning to the point of demise, much less the nearest boss arena, usually involves an exhaustive retread. Organic shortcuts are seldom provided at certain extents of progress, but they are definitely exceptions to the general rule and tend to be rather oblique. The pulley intended to transport coal and other materials down to Blacksmith Ed’s workshop in Stonefang Tunnel feels so makeshift that it's as if the developers implemented it as a shortcut unintentionally. For the most part, Demon’s Souls forces the player to hike all over creation without stopping to rest their feet, and conquering a boss to earn that intermission after tiring themselves arriving there is an insult to injury. The “runbacks” to boss arenas are an infamous consistency across all of FromSoft’s output. Still, the lack of any kind of intervals to breathe marks this cumbrous idiosyncrasy at its most austere and unforgiving.

The extent of what Demon’s Souls expects the player to endure for such a lengthy swathe of progress stunned me with incredulity as soon as the “second” level. The area past the armored slug Phalanx and his identical bodyguard underlings in Boletarian Palace is set on top of a narrow stone bridge that directly connects to the next boss arena. Sounds (literally) straightforward, right? Well, confidently stepping into the sunlight after leaving the field archstone will likely incinerate the player to a smoldering crisp. An orange dragon will belch an inferno of flames that engulfs the entire section of the bridge the player is standing on every five seconds, and it’ll switch its flight path to the following portion if the player survives the first fiery onslaught as if it harbors a vindictive grudge against their wellbeing. An underground passage is available to elude the scaly beast, but the ground-level enemies in this musty, dark tunnel will likely eviscerate the player due to their pack-like attack strategy. Once the player reemerges and manages to dodge yet another fire blast from the dragon, an army of soulless soldiers of differing ranks will stand guard to hack the player to bits with a vengeance. Miraculously withstanding all of this strife just to be immediately smote by the gargantuan blade of the stainless-steel sentinel Tower Knight will leave the player quite disillusioned. Before I raised my white flag and wrote Demon’s Souls off as too stringent to even humor, a moment of clarity struck me like a falling apple. I didn’t have to be trapped in this vicious cycle of defeat attempting to conquer Tower Knight, for the other archstones in The Nexus were open and I was free to travel elsewhere. While the individual areas of Demon’s Souls are relatively ironed out to a point of compression, the optional method of tackling them in whichever order the player chooses is the juicy component of nonlinearity that I initially thought hadn’t crossed the developers’ mind yet. It smacks of Mega Man instead of Metroid, but even a less sophisticated depiction of freeform world design is still stimulating nonetheless.

While it's relieving to vacate from Tower Knight’s domain if the player feels like the obstacles are too overwhelming to overcome, I must issue a warning that the player’s ticket out of torture isn’t as golden as one might think. Assuming that the difficulty curve of Demon’s Souls still abides by the order of the numerical integers, shifting from Boletarian Palace to another area presents an entirely different slew of challenges. The leathery, lizard-esque miners in Stonefang Tunnel will be upset if the player interrupts their perpetual labor, and the exoskeletons of both the native rock worms and bearbugs are as impenetrable as a laminated windshield. The eerie Tower of Latria sees illithid guards patrolling the dank prison halls, and they’ll paralyze anyone in their sight to suck their gray matter dry far before the player encounters the mechanized tower that spits rows of arrows. As a melee player, all I could do was evade the torrent of javelin icicles constantly spurting out of the flying stingrays that soar in the skies over the Shrine of Storms. God help you if the Old Hero strikes you down, for the trek back to him with the rolling skeletons and reaper ghouls alongside the swarm of aerial projectiles is possibly the most strenuous journey back to a boss fight across the entire Souls series. If you couldn’t tell, choosing an alternative to Tower Knight is a “pick your poison” scenario and the route is determined by which of these areas presents the path of least resistance. All of these districts of Boletaria are equally arduous in their unique ways but for the love of all that is holy, do not pick the literal poison that is the Valley of Defilement. Take the name of this area as a cautionary warning, for the fifth area that proves Miyazaki had no latency period for his favorite level trope will defile the player at every corner of the sludgy and dismal bog. Still, I think I’d rather invest in a timeshare here rather than excavate through Blighttown again.

The bouts of endurance that the player is forced to undergo to succeed in Demon’s Souls don’t entirely connote that the game is bereft of any accommodations. For instance, the unhinged healing system in this game will stave off any fatal occurrences for a long while. Instead of using the sparkling, possibly tangerine-flavored Estus Flasks, the restorative grass is an item meshed in with the rest of the player’s inventory. Boletaria has a thumb as green as the state of Colorado, for grass is commonly dropped from enemies upon defeat for the player’s taking. The different strands of grass are differentiated by the phases of the moon, ranging from the sliver of crescent grass to the curvaceousness of the full moon grass which signifies the effectiveness of its restoration. Once the player can afford to spend their surplus of souls on other services besides leveling up, grasses are available to be bought in bulk like a Costco member before a hurricane hits. I can definitely see why this method of healing was scrapped in favor of the Estus System with a fixed and reasonably finite amount of uses. The unabated mass of grass I accumulated after a certain point in the game became relied on like a crutch, replenishing any fraction of damage received provided I found an opportunity to distance myself from enemies. My mistakes during combat that resulted in a grave depletion of my health bar became trivialized by the limitlessness at which I could remedy them. In the defense of the grass, perhaps I wouldn’t be desperately chowing down on the plant like livestock if the game didn’t fracture my health bar in half per death. It’s an absurdly uncharitable penalty for failure and I’d chalk it up as another example of the game’s primitive mold if one Dark Souls game didn’t adopt it (it was equally bullshit in that game too). Only conquering a boss or imbibing a Stone of Ephemeral Eyes will mend this unfair affliction, and that particular item isn’t nearly as plentiful as the grass (surprise, surprise). While I was initially appalled by the game’s demerit of death, I eventually discovered that there were benefits to playing with a crappy hand. Another feature totally unique to Demon’s Souls is “world tendency,” which affects certain aspects of the gameplay. If the player is in “soul mode” with half of their total health, the enemies do not brutalize the player quite as relentlessly. On the other hand, having full health comes with the perk of looting rarer items and obtaining more souls per kill with the caveat of tougher foes and frequent black phantom invasions. It’s nice to know that the developers can express kernels of sympathy for the player, but I find the world tendency mechanic to be somewhat condescending. FromSoft can fuck off if they’re insinuating that one death is enough evidence of the player’s skill, or lack thereof, to lower the difficulty.

The bosses will not be affected by the player’s status, even if a good handful of them will have the player questioning if the stipulations of their “soul form” are still seeping into the experience. Surprisingly, the mightiest foes of Demon’s Souls with screen-spanning health bars are the easiest crop of bosses across all of FromSoft’s titles. Instead of seeking out a chance to stab at a boss at a moment most opportune that will ideally leave the player unscathed like the Souls duels we’re accustomed to, several of the bosses in Demon’s Souls are dispatched via methods so unorthodox that they can be interpreted as gimmicks. For example, fighting Tower Knight organically will result in shaving unsatisfactory chips off his health bar. Targeting his ankles and nipping at them like a mangy chihuahua will cause him to lose his balance and fall on his back, giving the player free rein to strike at his exposed head for potent damage. The grotesquely obese cleaver-wielder called The Adjudicator will absorb any and all harm that touches the impenetrable rolls of fat on his body. That is until his bloody fissures are prodded enough times that he’ll similarly fall over and expose the weak spot of the bird piloting this abomination. This puzzle-oriented pattern of boss fights is incredibly prevalent for the so-called “archdemons,” the penultimate boss of an area that concludes the overarching level. The foreboding Dragon God will crumble into the pool of lava below him after impaling him with two giant arrow contraptions found in the arena, shooting the Storm King out of the sky requires unsheathing a special sword with forceful wind properties. The fight against Maiden Astraea is actually with her bodyguard, as she’ll oblige her own demise once the player defeats her means of protection. The aggressive major adversaries that mirror the typical Souls bosses like Flamelurker and Penetrator are few and far between here, and their predictability still makes them pale in comparison. The Old Hero would fit in this category if his blindness wasn’t burdening him, a quirk that situates this boss with the rest of the unconventional pack. At times, it seems like finally arriving at a boss is a relief from the hellish expedition that preceded it, which is yet another amusing instance of Demon’s Souls dipping its toes in the quaint characteristics of retro gaming.

After defeating every demon boss whether they be breezy or a grueling test of one’s Souls prowess, a complete checklist will eventually circle around to continue ascending Boletarian Palace and quashing the king who doomed the kingdom with his hubris: King Allant. The pathway up to Boletaria’s decorated ruler is appropriately one of the most excruciating, with roided-up knights and agile ninjas bombarding the player at all angles and another dragon’s fire to swiftly evade with great precision. Once the player faces Allant, no gimmicks will save the player any strain. King Allant verges heavily towards the belligerent side of the boss spectrum, and his array of sword tactics along with his AOE magic explosion will have the player devouring so much grass that they’d make for a healthy cut of hamburger meat. As epic as this duel is, the formidable King Allant is not the final battle. In fact, this is but a mirage of the king’s glory days. The true King Allant is located in a realm under the base of The Nexus, and he’s pathetically been reduced to what is best described as a sentient turd. Refusing to commit regicide will result in the player taking his position as the ultimate demon lord that will reign in a new era of prosperity for the scourge. On the other hand, returning to The Nexus and letting the Maiden in Black close the portal to the demon world will put Boletaria at peace. It should be pretty clear which decision to make in these final moments considering one ending is concretely labeled as “bad” and the other as “good,” I much appreciate the ambiguous conundrum of ethics that the player is presented with at the end of Dark Souls. Besides, the miserable state of King Allant is an effective forewarning of what is to come if the player takes control, and it’s an existence I can’t imagine anyone would idealize for themselves.

A lesser Dark Souls, Demon’s Souls certainly isn’t. Sure, it’s comparatively rudimentary in plenty of aspects as to be expected from a first crack at an unprecedented type of action-adventure video game. I prefer the seamless world, the frequency of bonfires, the obscured narrative, and the boss fights that require pure skill to defeat rather than the prevalence of puzzle-oriented headscratchers that all became idiosyncrasies of every game in the Dark Souls trilogy. Yet, this is all based on personal preference. None of Demon’s Souls' more “video gamey” attributes inherently make it obsolete, even if working with them made the game infuriating at times. At the end of the day, Demon’s Souls resonated with me on the same scale as any of its spiritual successors because triumphing over all of its challenges gave me the same invigorating sense of personal satisfaction that no other series exudes.