Overclocked On Caffeine v.1.1

Zeno Clash

PC

When I was a kid, I was fascinated by Heavy Metal - the comic, not the music. That would come later. I was raised on comics like the Beano and the Dandy - good, solid British fare, filled with jokes and funny stories. I don't know how or where I first encountered Heavy Metal - there were no cool uncles or older siblings taking me to one side and saying 'yeah, those comics are fun, but this stuff will put hairs on your chest' - but somehow I did. Heavy Metal was a world away from the adventures of Dennis the Menace, Sid's Snake and Minnie the Minx. The stories, almost entirely artsy European comics, featured within were violent, twisted. There was a weird sense of the taboo within the pages, a feeling that I've never really gotten with anything else since, and as a child, I liked it.

Probably explains a lot, huh?

The reason for this anecdote, as I'm sure you're all wondering, is that Zeno Clash, current Indie Game darling of the week, is, in every essence, a tale out of Heavy Metal made manifest. The atmosphere, the visuals, the overwhelming sense of the bizarre, all of it could be taken, cut up into panels, put in the magazine and nobody would blink.

I'm going to impose a challenge on myself for the rest of this review: I'm going to try and write as much as I can without resorting to the words 'strange', 'bizarre', 'weird' or 'odd' because frankly, that would make things way too easy and boring to read, when you consider the fact that those words apply to 100% of everything ever in this game. So, to business: you are Ghat. Ghat is a member of Father-Mother's family. Father-Mother is a hermaphroditic bird-like creature, parent of what seems like almost everyone in the town of Halstedom. As the game opens, Ghat has apparently tried to assassinate Father-Mother for some unknown reason, something the rest of his/her children don't take too kindly to. On his escape from the town, he is joined by his sister, Daedra, who becomes his companion for the length of the game. The pair of them try to find a new home, while being beset on all sides by bounty hunters, Corwids, statues and the persistent forces of Father-Mother's brood. You follow all that? Yes? Good, because that's as simple as it gets. The rest is sheer madness.

The game itself is a self-admitted throwback to the fighting games of yore - names like Double Dragon have been invoked in interviews by ACE Team, the Chilean developers. Combat is simple: hold down the left mouse button for a three-hit combo, press the right for a stronger right cross, hold the spacebar to block. There's more depth if you want it, with counters and deflections available, but those few moves will serve you the vast majority of the game. Gunplay is similarly stripped down, with four different types of projectile weapon at hand. There's dual-wielded pistols, a rifle, a two-shot crossbow and a grenade launcher available, all with infinite ammo. Keeping hold of them is the tricky part, as anything stronger than a stiff breeze will inevitably knock them out your grasp. Thankfully, the same is true of your enemies, who won't hesitate to use them against you at a moment's notice.

The real treat is with the game's design. Zeno Clash has been praised from every direction on its artistic sense, and it's easy to see why: the game is, to be perfectly honest, beautiful. Halstedom is carved out of coral walls inlaid with coloured glass and skulls; the End of the World is a dark and foreboding place filled with statues of living metal; the sewers are... well, the sewers are pitch black and filled with water, but it's the first sewer level I've ever encountered that doesn't make me want to slaughter the dev team, so it deserves mention. The characters are even better. Daedra's face has a quality about it I found myself staring at without realising whenever she walked over to me. Same with the non-human characters as well, but in a different way. The pig-like creatures are made to look like they've been made out of plasticine, the Corwids, mask-wearing lunatics that do whatever they do because that's what they do, have a tribal feel to them, dirt and muck covering every inch of them from headgear to toe. The statue people look like they're made of melted steel, scraping and clanking with every movement and give a satisfying clunk with every hit. These are some of the most tactile designs I've ever seen, and I found myself repeatedly wanting to reach in and pick them up just to run my fingers across them to see how they'd feel. The deliberately stylized art direction is a welcome shift away from the 'more real than real' aesthetic in games today - it's all very well and good giving us a photo-realistic field, but I've got a real one I could go cavort in ten minutes down the road. This is what games should be giving us more of: wild and outlandish realms straight out of a fever-induced delirium. Take us places we could never go, rather than accurate representations of our own back yard.

If there's a snake in this outlandish paradise, it's this: the game's way too short. The 18 stages can easily be finished in a matter of hours. I wasn't given a final time upon completion, but I don't think it'd be out of the question to say it was 3-4 hours tops. And that was with constant game overs (some of the stages can be outright bastards, even early on). Granted, it's nice to play a game that packs four hours of constant fun into four hours, rather than stretching it out for 20 like a few other recent games I could mention - being able to play a game without feeling I had to commit time to it is a surprisingly refreshing feeling in an age where 30 hours of gameplay is considered 'short'. The problem is, the game ends as its starting to get interesting, and nothing is ever explained. We know there's some kind of connection between Ghat, Daedra, Father-Mother and the seemingly omnipotent Golem, but whatever it is, we never find out. The game doesn't really end, it just... stops. There was a writer in the 1930s and 40s called Harry Stephen Keeler, a Corwid of the Free if ever there was. Legend had it, he would set up his typewriter with a big roll of paper, not unlike a toilet roll, and just start writing. At some point, he'd stop, tear off the paper, call it a book, send it off and start on the next, no matter how little sense it all made. That's how it feels - they were writing up the plot, stopped and decided that would be the game, even though what we're presented with makes an arguable amount of sense. They're probably working on the next roll as we speak.

A lesser problem, but still a nagging one, is the lack of different enemies. Rimat, arguably the primary antagonist, is fought five or six times throughout the game. The only significant difference in her fighting style is that she gains one or two extra attacks in her last few fights. And that's still more than some of the other characters get. It's ironic: as different in looks as each character is, there's really no difference in fighting style from one opponent to the next. You'd expect Rimat to be a fiercer fighter than, say, the rat creatures, who you'd be sure would cheerfully suckerpunch you when the opportunity arises, or you'd figure the tower guards would make a beeline for weapons the first chance they get, but there's a sad lack of personality quirks along those lines. It's a shameful missed opportunity, and I only hope that ACE take the opportunity to expand on this in future games.

I sincerely hope that this is a sign of things to come from ACE: if Russia is the land of dark, hopelessly depressing games, I really want Chille to be home to unceasingly inventive digital acid trips. There's a horrible lack of the fantastic in today's gaming climate, and while Zeno Clash as a game is somewhat forgettable, as a concept and a world, I need to see more. The world of Zenozoik is filled with a colour and lunatic clarity rarely seen in games today, or ever for that matter. Here's hoping the next trip is even brighter and more vivid than the last.