Reviews
[Review] ‘Void Bastards’ Nails the Comic Book Look But Needs Better Stories
Void Bastards is like if Borderlands actually wanted you to believe you were playing a comic book.
While Gearbox’s series of loot-shooters has often looked like Unreal Engine 3D models with a Dark Horse coat of paint, this new roguelite FPS from the former BioShock devs at Blue Manchu fully commits to the bit. The story moments between each run play out as a series of comic panels. A white border boxes the screen in during gameplay. Enemies even move like comic characters, rotating to face you with the two-dimensional front-to-back flip of DOOM’s pixelated imps.
It’s gorgeous, and for the first few hours at least, each new vessel you board is a candy-colored marvel. The decadent magenta Lux Cruise Ships where loot is stashed away in chaffing dishes in high-ceilinged banquet halls. The intestine-like tunnels of the taxi yellow Krell Freighters, where massive barn-door-sized entrances give way to burning hallways. The periwinkle CNT Tax Boats where fuzzy blue carpets mask your footsteps as you creep into cover.
These colorful ships are arrayed along a branching path on a star map segmented into nebulae; the deeper you go, the more difficult the challenge that awaits. The game plays like an endless series of potentially fatal fetch quests, as you take control of the latest in an endless line of procedurally generated prisoners, risking your life to hunt down vital building supplies represented by ink pens, glasses and disembodied fingers you’ll scavenge on each ship.
Once you’ve collected enough materials (divided into plaz, bio, slag, data and volts), you can build new weapons, tools and upgrades— all of which persist from run to run. A spike gun lets you silently poison enemies from the shadows. The Clusterflack sends grenades flying in all directions, a great option for wiping out a room full of enemies. A tazer lets you stun your opponents; a must for taking down relentless (and not easily avoidable) enemy turrets. The build tree reveals wackier items, as well. Kittybots are Roombas shaped like cat’s heads that explode once their health runs out. The Rifter lets you pick up a powerful enemy and move them behind a locked door or, more interestingly, onto a live electric cable. I’ve put in about 15 hours so far, but I anticipate more weird weapons down the line.
You’ll also scavenge for other parts, like Surgery 4 Dummies and a Distended Testicle wrapped in a plastic baggie, to build quest items. You’ll combine those wackily named ingredients to create mundane MacGuffins—an HR computer, an ID card, a printer—which will inevitably, comedically malfunction, sending you back to the old grind.
And, despite the humorous, beautiful set dressing, Void Bastards’ gameplay does, eventually, become a bit of a grind. To be fair, that’s sort of the point. Blue Manchu satirizes the endless, minutiae-obsessed bureaucracy of corporate life through mechanics, placing biting commentary within the structure of a roguelike; a genre defined by performing the same tasks again and again with only slight variations. Void Bastards is basically Same Shit, Different Day: The Game.
But, sharp commentary doesn’t excuse a dull loop. Every single mission plays out like this: Board a ship. Head to the helm to download map data (allowing you to see the location of each loot container on the map). Head to the biggest yellow star on the map to collect the mission item. Leave.
There are minor variations on this formula. Sometimes you’ll need to head to the generator room first to turn the power on. Sometimes (if you don’t have a torpedo in your inventory) pirates will board a ship at the same time you do, and will almost certainly kill you. Sometimes a void whale will swallow you whole resulting in instant death. Other variations depend on your current needs. On the occasions when I was low on health and ammo, I would try to get in and out as quickly as possible. When I had a well-stocked armory and plenty of health-giving sandwiches, I would take my time, scavenging every inch of the ship. Most of the time, you really need to check every nook and cranny, because the bigger more monstrous monsters that lurk on these vessels often take quite a few bullets to bring down and will chew through plenty of your health in the meantime. But, generally: get in, get data, get the mission item, get out. It’s a simple loop that hardly ever changes.
So much of Void Bastards works (and works well) that the lack of interesting mission objectives is deeply disappointing. Many of the folks at Blue Manchu worked on games like BioShock and System Shock 2 — immersive sims defined by well-realized worlds designed to empower player choice. Void Bastards is self-consciously placing itself within a genre that prides itself on offering interesting objectives and a suite of tools to pull them off in creative ways.
Recent immersive sims, empowered by technological advances since the genre’s ‘90s heyday, have doubled down on pushing players to forge their own unique playstyles. Dishonored: Death of the Outsider tasked players with infiltrating a bank guarded by murderous automatons, then gave them three different ways to break in. Prey let players upgrade their strength stat until they could pick up every item that wasn’t bolted down and murder inky black Typhons with a writing desk. The rebooted Hitman games have loaded their worlds with dozens of optional objectives, challenging their players to think creatively; to adopt the logic of their world.
Void Bastards, unfortunately, stifles creativity at times. No matter how you approach the game, much of your time will be spent rifling through drawers. It succeeds at evoking the best of comic book art, but will need some work before its emergent narratives approach the heights of explosive comic book storytelling.
Void Bastards review code for PC provided by the publisher.
Void Bastards is out now on Xbox One and PC.
Reviews
‘Unhinged’ Review: Netflix’s Interactive Horror Thriller Is Short But Serviceable Gaming Fare
Netflix has such a strange history in gaming. I wouldn’t be surprised if most people don’t even know that there are free mobile games you can access through the service. Many of them are adaptations of their TV series, like “Too Hot to Handle” or “Squid Game”, while some are mobile versions of existing games, like Into the Breach or Hades.
In addition to mobile games, they’ve also created interactive movie experiences where you use your remote to select narrative options at branching points. Black Mirror: Bandersnatch was a fairly successful version of this, but my sentimental favorite was the one where WWE’s New Day had to escape a murder house boobytrapped by The Undertaker. Even if some of these made a bit of a splash, it seems it never really hit with mainstream audiences the way their shows do.
One of the studios they purchased while trying to break into the game space was Night School Studio, the creators of the spooky narrative series Oxenfree. This struck me as a particularly smart acquisition, as this type of narrative game seems like something that would feel at home under the Netflix umbrella. While they did release Oxenfree II while owned by the streaming giant, it was released on traditional platforms, which led me to wonder when their first Netflix exclusive would show up.
While they did produce a game called Thronglets, a mobile version of a plot element from an episode of “Black Mirror”, the recently released Unhinged seems to be one of the highest profile Netflix games in a long time.
Unhinged is a first-person, narrative-driven thriller starring Zoë Kravitz, Sadie Sink, and Troy Baker. This 30-minute experience, played on your TV through the standard Netflix app, is controlled by your phone, using some clever tricks to make the whole thing feel more immersive. It’s a neat variation on the “interactive movie” subgenre, with a tiny bit of point-and-click adventure game DNA thrown in for good measure, but it doesn’t exactly offer you as many options as something like Until Dawn.
Kravitz plays Ava, a woman who is hunkering down in her apartment complex during a dangerous hurricane. As she talks with her friend Claire, who lives in a neighboring building, about possibly leaving to find shelter elsewhere, she finds herself in a desperate chase with a crazed killer that stalks her through the halls of the building. It’s a decent setup for a very contained story, but I wish there was a little more meat on the bones. The voice acting is great, but there’s not really a ton of characterization for the two leads, and the killer was a bit “generic psycho” for my taste. There’s some implied backstory with other tenants in the building, but it’s not enough to make me feel like there’s a web of relationships that would give the story more emotional weight.
To play the game, you open up your Netflix app wherever you usually watch, then select the game. This will bring up a QR code, which you’ll scan on your phone, prompting you to download a controller app that will sync up to the game. The majority of the way you’ll interact is by pointing at the screen like a Wiimote, which selects on-screen options for Ava and shines her flashlight around the environment.
While this does give it the feel of an FMV game, Unhinged is rendered in a photorealistic graphics style, and while not quite to the level of something like P.T., it does the trick of drawing you into the action. You’re still put on a pretty strict path while moving around, which is done automatically when you select a direction, but moving your phone gives you the ability to look around your environment, even if only slightly.
The real immersive part of the game is the fact that your phone also acts as Ava’s phone. The plot is frequently moved forward by calls and text messages that you answer as you would on your own cellular device. As sound blasts out of your phone, it does put you in the shoes of the main character, momentarily worrying you that the sound of the call or text is going to alert your on-screen stalker. This part of Unhinged truly takes advantage of the format to draw you deeper into the story, though unfortunately it’s so effective that I wished the game found even more ways to use it.
There are a couple clever moments that make for unique ways of delivering twists or doing extremely light puzzle solving, but most of the time it’s just used to allow your friend to give you instructions on how to move the narrative forward.
All these mechanics come together to give the illusion of tension without actually fully delivering on it. When you get to a situation where you’re under pressure, a timer bar will appear on the top of the screen, indicating how long you have to get to safety. It’s a fine gimmick, but it comes off as a little hard to gauge. Since you don’t have direct control over your character, all your actions are very heavily animated, and sometimes your choice ends up taking longer than you think it will not because of the idea behind the choice, but because of the length of the animation. Fortunately, if you die, you’ll just pick back up at a checkpoint right before the choice, and you’ll even be treated with a voiceover discussion between police officers examining the crime scene, describing how you died.
So in theory, there is tension, counting down as the killer gets closer and closer to reaching you, but what you’re actually doing almost never feels like it’s testing you in any meaningful way. Actual choices come up very infrequently, making most of your interaction with the game world just scanning your pointer across the screen looking for an interaction point to progress, hoping the animation doesn’t take up too much time before the timer runs out. I didn’t hit a ton of friction points with it, and there’s even a Story Mode if you want to take out all possibility of death, but I found myself wishing there were more ways to affect the world around me. The phone calls and texts felt really fun and clever, but the rest of the gameplay just didn’t match that, making me wish there was more emphasis on the unique interaction model rather than the more traditional one.
Even though the mechanics aren’t necessarily pushing the tension as hard as they could be, the actual content of Unhinged’s story contains some pretty brutal situations. The villain isn’t the most unique or fleshed out, but he’s responsible for some gruesome moments that raised the stakes to make the game feel more intense. It makes your fight for survival feel that much more desperate, so even if you’re just highlighting icons on the screen, it feels more visceral thanks to what Ava is witnessing.
While I appreciate the game being lean and mean, I wish it was just a little bit longer. Thirty minutes is a pretty short runtime, and it doesn’t feel like the story for Unhinged has the time to come up with something that really sets it apart from other stories of its kind. The focus on the hurricane at the beginning made me think that was going to be more integral to the plot, but it didn’t really do much aside from explaining why the apartment complex was so empty. Thrillers like this live or die on how memorable their killer is, and there wasn’t anything really clever or unique about him. If this game doubled its runtime to the length of a standard Netflix show, it might have given them more room to build character relationships that made the action more meaningful, or at least given it a bit more personality of its own.
Night School Studio is on to something with the format of Unhinged. The combination of on screen and on phone prompts makes the game feel more immersive, drawing you in even when the narrative itself doesn’t feel fully formed or unique. The short runtime is both a help and a hindrance, keeping the pacing tight at the cost of adding any depth to the proceedings. This feels like a great first draft, and I hope that Night School is given the freedom to continue experimenting with the model, as the level of polish shown here was promising.
Even with its flaws, if you’ve already got a Netflix subscription, there’s no reason not to sit down for half an hour to check out Unhinged. If you can keep your expectations in check, it’s a nasty little thrillride that doesn’t overstay its welcome.
Unhinged is streaming now on Netflix.
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