I’ve heard lots of people insist this is the bestest game ever. I was dubious since I’ve never been able to get into FPSs, but a while back Epic Games gave it away as a freebie, so I picked it up on a whim. While going through my Christmas games I remembered it, and decided to give it a try.
File this away next to Fallout: New Vegas in excellent stories that were tragically packaged with terrible gameplay. Because by god the gameplay is terrible. I can tolerate simple FPSs, but ones that try to get fancy with verticality and exploration and platforming are just painful.
I genuinely can’t understand what people mean when they say this genre is “immersive”. First-person control schemes have always been by far the clunkiest and least immersive video game interfaces I’ve experienced. I always feel like I’m moving through molasses while wearing blinders, and I’m constantly missing jumps that would give me no trouble in real life because I can’t freaking see anything.
Thinking on it now that I’ve played several such games, I think I can nail this down to the lack of prioperception. Video games can simulate vision and hearing, but without prioperception a first-person perspective only draws attention to the dissonance between you and the game. During any physical activity, we rely on so much more than just our vision. We know where our legs are and where our body is in space when we jump or slide or crawl. We don’t move in perfectly straight lines and we don’t have to rotate our entire bodies whenever we want to look around. But the reason we can so easily perform such complex physical motion is because of prioperception, which can’t be simulated by a video game interface. (Perhaps VR solves this problem? I wouldn’t know, I’ve never been not-poor enough to try one.) Without that, a first-person camera is simply incapable of feeling like anything close to real movement. (It’s better with a mouse and keyboard, but in this case there were way too many functions for me to even think about playing without a controller; I just couldn’t build up muscle memory for the bajillion different buttons my pinky had to reach on split-second notice.)
But even without the interface problems, the gameplay is terribly dull and frustrating. The game advertises that it lets you choose how to progress based on your preferred playstyle, but this basically just translates to letting you skip content if you’ve invested enough XP, which is baffling game design and I hate it. Sure, I could actually engage with the environment and/or solve some puzzles to track down this computer password, or I could just use the hacking skill. Constantly running into dead ends and locked doors when trying to get through an area was endlessly frustrating.
The RPG elements are a major culprit here. Unless you’ve maxed out everything, you never actually get to choose how to approach a level; you are instead presented with several locked doors, of which you only have the keys to one or two. But of course they also have to let you progress without any level requirements because otherwise the player could lock themselves into an unwinnable situation, so using your hard-earned skills has to actually be completely optional, so what’s even the point? That’s not “playing my own way”, that’s stumbling around looking for anything I can interact with and getting stonewalled by what I can’t. If they had restricted the RPG elements to purely quantitative improvements instead of making them gate progress, they would have given players more genuine freedom.
I believe the open world also hurts this design approach. If you present multiple routes forward, but also you can double back and in fact are encouraged to explore as much as possible to get all the goodies, then the most optimal playstyle becomes to simply explore every route, completely bypassing the choice. And of course you’d want to do that in a game that bills itself on immersive storytelling and optional secrets! What if there’s lore hidden in one of the paths I didn’t pick, I don’t want to miss that! But because everything has to be explorable and connect to everywhere else, this is often frustrating and underwhelming; I repeatedly came back with stronger skills to open a locked door, only to discover it led to the same place I had found through another means. You can’t say “play your own way” with game design that incentivizes “playing every way”; the game’s stated goal and its mechanics are pulling in opposite directions.
I also never got the hang of the combat, which appears to be balanced assuming you have the agility of mouse controls; with a controller, trying to hunt down the absurdly agile (and teleporting!) enemies always felt like trying to aim a tank at a fly.
This is all a shame, because the story is actually quite good and uses the medium in a genuinely clever way.
You play as Morgan Yu, a scientist who has recently agreed to join a tech startup headed by your brother Alex. The prologue is your first-day orientation where you’re told to run through a series of simple tests that also tutorialize basic gameplay mechanics in a cheeky leaning-on-the-fourth-wall way. Except that there’s something off about them. While the tests seem like normal and straightforward fitness checks, the researchers all act really weird: They prompt you to perform these simple tasks in “whatever way feels most natural to you”, then act visibly disappointed when you complete the tests in totally normal ways. In the middle you’re suddenly given a personality test that includes your answers to different variations of the trolley problem. What kind of company does that during employee orientation? There’s clearly something more going on here, but you don’t even have enough information to construct a theory.
Then the researcher’s coffee mug turns into an alien and kills him.
The screen goes black and you wake up… in your room, the same morning, just as you did before, but with no memory of what happened. (Even the game menu’s record of information you picked up is suddenly wiped.) This time, when you leave your room the hallway terminates in an abrupt dead-end — literally, as the maintenance technician who greeted you last time is now a corpse. You take her wrench and use it to smash the windows of your apartment, causing you to discover your “first-day orientation” was all fake: You’re being Truman Show‘d, living in a fake stage meant to recreate your apartment and the company building where you took the test. By peeking at the employees’ computers, you discover you’ve actually been on the job for 3 years, but your memories were reset to before you joined and they’ve been forcing you to play out that first day over and over again.
The reason for this is because of a flaw in the technology the tech startup pioneered, called the “neuromod”. Neuromods allow people to inject knowledge such as languages or technical skills directly into your brain, but if you want to reverse the process you have to reset your memories to before you ever took the injection. Turns out neuromods are made out of the aliens like the one you just saw, and unsurprisingly injecting alien goop into your brain causes all sorts of problems. (You are apparently a terrible scientist who did no long-term clinical trials before using yourself as a guinea pig. Safety regulations exist for a reason, people!) Seeing his sibling fall apart like this freaked Alex out, so he removed all your mods to reset your personality, in the process also resetting your memories.
You then learn you’re actually on a space station housing the company’s labs, but as you can probably guess, the aliens they were studying broke containment and overran the facility. Before your memory was wiped, you recorded a video to yourself telling you to blow up the station to prevent the aliens from reaching Earth. Alex, who is one of the few surviving employees, insists he can still salvage this and works to stop you from activating the self-destruct sequence.
That’s one heck of an opening! The initial subtle feeling that something’s off compounds and builds as you peel back more and more layers of horror, and that keeps going throughout the game. The simulation aspect is also pointedly meta; we see the researchers constructing aspects of the simulation, and the program they use looks exactly like video game graphics studios. I also like the way the aliens cleverly use gameplay to convey atmosphere. Because they’re mimics, any object you encounter could be a trap; this creates a consistent sense of paranoia and unease, and several characters you encounter express the same feelings when dealing with the creatures.
The real kicker is the ending, which is one of the exceptionally few times I’ve seen “It was all a dream” done well. The events of the game are revealed to be a simulation constructed by Alex. You are not actually Morgan, but one of the aliens Alex has injected with Morgan’s cells and memories in an attempt to create an alien capable of empathy. This is foreshadowed and set up incredibly well: Audio logs scattered throughout the station make note of the fact the aliens lack mirror neurons and are thus incapable of empathy, but some of the scientists point out they could reverse the neural injection technology to imbue the aliens with human traits such as this.
As with most video games of this type, you are prompted to make moral choices throughout the story, and it’s ultimately revealed that these choices were constructed as tests for if you successfully developed empathy. If you take selfish and depraved actions, Alex simply kills you and tries again with a new subject, creating a diegetic New Game+; if you pass the test, Alex frees you, and you are then given the choice to cooperate or kill him anyway. I think this is the kind of twist that only works in a video game; it’s deliberately blurring the lines between player and player character, to the point that Alex even explicitly forwards the possibility that you only made the choices you made because you knew it was a simulation, which is a very real possibility for the player’s actual motivations. After all the debate around if video games can make peoples’ personalities worse, it is interesting to see a game make the case that simulations can be used to make people better.
And even aside from the meta aspects, it’s a really interesting question, and a clever extrapolation of the technology shown in the story! Can you force an alien to become human? Can you take a predator with no capacity for empathy who exists only to destroy, and give it empathy? What would that mean? Is it even a good idea, or have you just taught it to be a more effective predator? Is Alex truly acting in the best interests of humanity, or is this just another expression of the hubris that created this disaster in the first place? There’s a lot to pick at there, and indeed I recently watched a YouTube video analyzing the many possible motives the characters might have in one of the endings. (I don’t fully agree with its conclusions just because I don’t like cosmic horror very much, but it’s interesting nonetheless.)
But I’m never going to experience it properly for myself, because they chose to shackle it to this godawful gameplay. The story wouldn’t have worked as anything but a video game, and maybe it wouldn’t even have worked as a visual novel, but it also does not work as this particular video game. It’s just such a slog.