Platformer of the Month Nov. '14, Kid Klown in Crazy Chase

The platformer is the seminal genre of video game history. Always adapting to trends and technologies, never out of style, it provides an underpinning for action games of era after era. Platformers are responsible for our sense of space and navigation; they form the bridge that transports reality into digital worlds. Without platformers, we'd all may as well be playing shuffleboard. Each month we dive into the deep well of platforming history, hoping to find forgotten treasure or even an extra life. We'll be bringing you everything we uncover here at the Platformer of the Month Club.

Game: Kid Klown in Crazy Chase
Year: 1994
Developer: Kemco
Publisher: Kemco
Platform: SNES, GBA

Oh we are starting this off on one hell of a foot. A size 23 foot. I've got two words for you. Up. Down. Clown. Town. Kid Klown. Crazy Chase. Okay, back to using full sentences. Actually my first note looking at that boxart is that our mascot here (indisputably one of the most acclaimed of the 2D era) is more your classically-styled harlequin (or Christmas elf) than what I first picture as a clown. I guess it's only in 21st century America that clowns have developed that firm image of "orange afro rainbow pants and party hat". Kid Klown looks almost... respectable.

Speaking of classically-stylization, that's one thing this game doesn't! Kid Klown himself might remind you of a Sonic the Hedgehog or a Bonk, but the tightly timed uni-directional gameplay is hedged in future memories of now-popular "endless runners" like Canabalt, Flappy Bird, or Bit Trip Runner. But hey, the game uses traditional running and jumping controls and challenges the player to navigate a course, so it's only reasonable to approach it as a platformer.

So is Kid Klown a Lost City of Atlantis, defining trends a decade yet to come, or is it shallow tripe meant to capture the lowest common denominator? Don't make a joke about "what if it's both?". I did that in my head and it got sighs all around.

How is the game's aesthetic appeal?
Yourself: It's impossible to play Kid Klown without visions of Road Runner dancing through my head. The developers definitely made the most of their trial-and-error gameplay as a setup for varied physical comedy bits. While the individual traps aren't much to look at, Kid K's pratfalls are drawn out to downright whacky levels. He jerks his body three or four times before tearing his head out of a block of ice, floats gently to the ground after being flattened to a pancake, and shakes off water like a dog. A lot of old platformers show cartoon influence, but Kid Klown takes it an extra one half to three quarters of a mile.

The soundtrack has an appropriately jaunty tempo but I can't say I found much to like in the composition.
Golem: By 1994, the Super Nintendo was churning out high quality graphics, and Kid Klown benefits from an attention to detail. In the city level, Kid passes by mundane skyscrapers and through standard construction sites, only to be flattened by a swarm of comically undersized sedans. The contrast between realistic settings and jokey elements goes a long way to sell the humor here.

As for music, Kid Klown sets the right pace and tone for a nutzo chase, but  fails to provide any memorable melodies.

How does the player character control?
Golem: Hold down to make Kid Klown run diagonally down-right along a straight path, and use left or right to strafe either direction. Up will let you slow and eventually halt Kid, but he can never move backwards. Aside from running, the only other function is a jump with a fixed height.

Holding down to move diagonally allows Kid's path to take more screen space, but it also makes judging his trajectory more difficult. Additionally, having to hold down can be troublesome when you need to be precise with moving left and right (it's just easy to fumble on the control pad).

Interestingly, the options menu offers an upside-down control scheme for left-handed players.
Yourself: 4-way isometric control tends to bother me, but here it works mostly fine since you're only moving in one general direction. Using d-pad down for what amounts to an accelerator is unpleasant though. Kid has momentum and controls essentially like a car, which leaves me wondering how smoothly the game might have felt had it used A for accelerate and B for brake. Hell, I actually might get out my emulator and try it.

What kind of non-aggressive elements guide the player's path?
Golem: Balloons. Each stage in the game is littered with balloons Kid can grab by jumping. They can either have a coin, health recovery, some damaging element (like a bomb), or an all-important card suit (heart, spade, club, or diamond). However, what's inside remains a mystery even on repeat playthroughs.

While most balloons will contain the same thing time and again, on each play of a stage, the four suits will be randomly distributed to different balloons. The catch is that you need all four suits to clear the stage. Luckily, if you reach the end of a stage without all four suits, the game loops you with no penalty and keeps all balloons the same.

Aside from balloons, stages feature the occasional platforming element. A springboard here, a moving platform there, and a balloon to ride down a cliffside.
Yourself: There are also coins strewn about the path which unlock bonus stages.

What kind of enemies impede the player's path?
Yourself: Most of what you'll battle in this game aren't so much enemies as they are traps. Banana peels, lava arcs, crab claws and fire hydrants all stand in between Kid and his rival, a bomb with a spade on it. There are typically three means of avoidance: run around, jump over, or stop. The game is pretty reasonable in introducing new and more complex enemies, as stage 1 is comprised largely of things to be jumped over (bushes, cannon balls, spike pits), stage 2 features a lot more that need to be run around (cars, caution barriers, falling pots), and stage 3 is the first time you'll really need to stop (for fire walls, falling boulders, and lava).

Though there are essentially only three responses they'll inspire, the challenge is in learning the traps' timing. How long is it between a shadow appearing and a boulder falling? When is the next car going to speed across the road? You'll generally need to pick up the rhythm of the level and get a good sense of the distance Kid can jump.

Many traps can be dealt with by any of the available means - when Kid is stopped he can walk left or right without moving down at all - but they may not be equally cost-effective. Likewise, being in the right position on the cross-axis is crucial for grabbing balloons, so you may be forced into jumping over a preceding trap that you would've just run around were you ignoring them. Taking the safe route is something that comes into play on repeated loops when you know which balloons you're aiming for.

How are player character mechanics varied?
Yourself: While Kid Klown is absent any power-ups or character selection, some level-specific elements affect the way the character moves. Steep hills show up in a couple places (I think only in Stages 1, 3, and 5) to introduce a speed boost, linearly increasing difficulty via reflex time. Stage 4 is entirely an ice level, as usual decreasing friction so the character takes longer to get going and stays in motion longer after the control is released. I didn't have much trouble with the ice stage, and in fact I think the game let up a bit on the trap difficulty to account for it.

Not really a mechanic, but Stage 5 decreases visibility to a small circle around Kid K. Like the speed-up, this basically just increases necessary reflex time.

How are individual levels built from these elements? Does this facilitate exploration?
Golem: Towards the start of the game, in the first two stages,  elements pop in for brief moments soon to be followed by a different challenge. In stage one, Kid scampers away from rolling logs, weaves between hurled axes, and leaps over shrubbery all in the same breath. In the later stages, ideas pick up a little more consistency, such as the ice stage that places two rising/falling block segments right after one another.

There's always a great variety to the hazards, but their placement picks up a more consistent verse/chorus structure later in the game. This keeps the early game fresh and frantic while lending the later game more of a get-down-to-business-and-study feel.

Yourself: The game uses mild randomization to create some variety on replays. As mentioned above, the suits hidden in balloons are shuffled around every time you die or restart. Occasionally individual traps will also be position-shifted (a bush that was on the right is now on the left, etc.). There is theoretically an optimal path to each level established by the consistent placement of coins in balloons; however, the unpredictability of suit location means on a first run the player will need to check every balloon anyway. So the randomization defeats the purpose of the collectibles altogether.

On continued loops, a player can refine their approach to account for balloons they've already checked. Since looping is a punishment for not succeeding on a first try, it feels weird for it to add complexity to the gameplay - the structure suggests a good player is one who can grab all the balloons on the first try, not one who can learn their contents.

How is the boss variety and how do boss fights generally work?
Yourself: No bosses to be found here. Our main villain, the Ace of Spades, is just a constant nuisance.
Golem: There were bonus games after stages (sometimes). They weren't bosses, and we didn't figure out how to win them.
Yourself: I kid klown you not, there was an air hockey game where scoring in either goal costs you a chance. How do you win this? Sigh. I looked it up and it's that you have to score three goals to get a one-up. Meaning if you don't have three chances to start out with (chances are determined by coins divided by 10) then there's no point in even trying.

What is the overarching structure of the game?
Golem: Five stages, all in a row. If you run out of health or time, you spend a continue and restart the current stage. If you reach the end of the stage without every suit, the stage loops while preserving balloon layout. If you grab all suits on each stage on your first run, the game can move at a quick clip; miss just one suit, and you replay a stage, slowing the pace considerably.
Yourself: At the end of each stage, Kid grabs a key. If the stage is completed on the first loop, he also gets a heart. At the finale, the player is presented with ten keyholes, 60 seconds, and a princess locked in a cell with a time-bomb. You can select the placement of your keys, but each can only be used once and there is no indication which might be the one and only correct keyhole. So it's pure luck whether you screw up and witness the princess explode right before your eyes. The internet tells me that getting it right leads to a better ending (depending on opinion) and getting it right AND getting all the hearts is necessary for the best. The hearts challenge makes sense for replay value. The keys not so much.

Word on the street is that getting the best ending opens up hard mode *<:O]

How is the learning curve and difficulty?
Yourself: For a game that allows only 3 retries, Kid Klown is pretty forgiving. Allowing the player to loop through the stage if they missed any items is a good call and alleviates the frustration of close misses and screw-ups. The levels mix things up enough that they require individual learning, so that's solid too. Unfortunately, the core gameplay - timing jumps within fixed windows - does nothing to differentiate style or skill of play, so each challenge is extremely binary - either you get hit or you don't. A minute to learn, no additional time to master.
Golem: Kid Klown features tweaks to make it more forgiving, such as loops and a generous health bar, but the core concept--collect four randomly placed balloons without passing them (on a diagonal course, no less)--is harsh. On the other hand, building a mastery of the courses led us to collect balloons more consistently, so the learning process itself had a nice incline to it. We'd start out a course entirely confused, gradually warm up to its challenges, and eventually zip to balloons as needed. It's just that, as Yourself says, there's not much past that. Perhaps the suits could've been an optional challenge rather than a necessary one.

Play again or recommend?
Golem: While Kid Klown finds excellent execution, its core concept is so ornery and shallow that it's hard to recommend. I had fun yelling at it.
Yourself: Check it out on Youtube or something. It's a "cool, I didn't know this game existed". The wacky face-plants are where the game finds most of its identity and they don't have much lasting value.

This was a really inappropriate game to flex this survey. Look forward to a better entry next month, when we'll be playing Maximo: Ghosts to Glory!

October Spook-tacular Playoffs: Event Horizon

The List:

The Conjuring (2013)

The Mist (2007)

Event Horizon (1997)

Parents (1989)

Halloween (1978)

Rosemary's Baby (1968)

The Quartermass Xperiment (1955)

Cat People (1942)

The Mummy (1932)

The  Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920)

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Infinite criticism.

Title: Event Horizon

Director: Paul W.S. Anderson

Writer: Philip Eisner
Actors I recognize: Sam Neill, Laurence Fishbarn

What I know going in: One mans goes to space, but what happens when he can't come back... from space? Actually I know that Sam Neill is going to turn evil and that an event horizon is the point of no return from a black hole. Little science bomb to drop on your head there.

I had a morbid curiosity about this one, as it has a positive reputation among bad scifi apologists the net over. Moreover, I'll watch Sam Neill in anything because I have yet to see him star in a bad picture. Until today. Let me drop a metaphor bomb on your head here: Event Horizon is on the wrong side of the event horizon of movie awfulness. Nothing good escapes from this black hole of creativity and entertainment, not even the great Sam Neill. It's not often I find a movie beyond forgiveness, but for me the fatal flaw is something to do with a lack of concept. Not since Jacob's Ladder have I seen a movie so confused and confusing about what it is or is trying to say. Event Horizon isn't so much a wild flurry of ideas; like a bad X-Files episode, it's a viewing experience where nothing happens and a wide array of flat, uninteresting, and far too specific self-commentary is strewn on the floor like as many dead bodies.

The basic idea is that a ship is lost in space and comes back seven years later, whereupon a bunch of Aliens-wannabes go check it out and find it had been in another dimension and came back as an apparently living haunted house? but people there can never die? and it still has a portal to the other dimension? Which it turns out is either basically or literally Hell; the movie is never particularly honest on whether people are capitalizing that word. So we have dimension-shifting, religious suggestions, inanimate things coming to life, possibly demonic possession, isolation, and a whole. lot. of. hallucinations. About half the movie is unrelated hallucinations.

The plot is so weirdly strung together that it feels like the filmmakers had a series of images in mind but no clue how to rope them into the same story. It reminds me of the music-video-esque Hellraiser 2, but at least Hellraiser 2 was relatively focused and genuinely out there. Really there isn't much story; what we get is mostly back-story - in the words of the illumined Ebert, "the screenplay creates a sense of foreboding and afterboding, but no actual boding". The gang gets stranded on the evil Event Horizon, we hear a lot of Sam Neill explaining/worshiping the ship, some side characters try to repair their escape shuttle entirely off-screen, and everyone else wanders about, either experiencing hallucinations or whining. No one does anything. Nothing about their scenario changes from beginning to end, and once we reach the end we actually learn they couldn't have done anything even if they wanted (they were past the event horizon! except two people still escape...).

The pacing here is a puked-in dumpster. The intro is dramatic nonsense, act 1 is pure exposition until someone finally finds a corpse, act 2 is people having inconsequential hallucinations and a bunch of undeveloped hanging threads (like fixing the ship and finding the Event Horizon's crew logs), and in act 3 finally someone fucking dies. The action becomes relentless but so scattered that everything remains an unsatisfying headache.

The handling of the burdensome hallucinations is utterly piss-poor. Dream sequences are a very difficult beast to slay, requiring a careful balance of deceit, implication, and consequence. Once I know events aren't for keeps, I tend to disengage. Incidentally, this is one of the reasons Twin Peaks is so good - it betrays that expectation and makes dreams/visions matter more than waking reality. But Event Horizon does not understand this balancing act. Hallucinations take form as things whose if-this-is-real implications are just really stupid. A crew member sees her son with wounds on his legs. Oh my god, what if he's really on the ship? Not only do I not see how that could be true, I don't care. So what if her son is on the ship? Or in hell? Is there anything she can or might have done about it? No. Does it tell us something about her character? She doesn't want bad things to happen to her son. Delightful. What a visionary trait. Is it an incarnation of a past sin? If it is, I certainly can't figure it out, nor does this character get enough screen-time for me to know what that means to her. I hate this part of the movie so much. 

The function of the dream sequences in the overall plot is perplexingly nonsensical. The crew is eventually clued in to the root of the terror: the ship is alive! Wait, the ship is alive? What does that have to do with people going insane? Ohhhhh, the hallucinations are a "defense mechanism", like "some kind of immune system" (hi terrible screenwriting cliche!). Those are two completely different ideas. Crew members tripping balls. Ship is alive. Since when do we automatically assume hallucinations have an external origin? This is like when Mulder throws off a perfectly reasonable hypothesis about hypnotic suggestion by declaring "it's a form of psychokinesis!" The fact that we're given a single setup line about the scanners detecting life signs from all over the ship is essentially an insult, like one of the characters picking up a page from the script and reading "holy cow, the ship is alive?!".

And, unsurprisingly, the ship being alive creates exactly zero original conflict. The crew is fighting to escape the Event Horizon because they're running out of oxygen. That is the main boss of this movie. Was that supposed to create a sense of realism or something? With all the other shit going on, you'd think they'd want to leave anyway, but the fact that it's a failing oxygen supply that kicks them into gear makes it seem like it doesn't matter at all what happens, because they're going to be dead in four hours anyway. This redundant timer saps all the tension out of the would-be conflict with the ship or Evil Sam Neill.

The tone is also bad. Mostly I would call this dumpy perfunctory self-seriousness; the kind of scifi that acts realistic (people feel contemporary) but never earns it (they are still extremely movie-like). Yet occasionally we get an insane jolt of yakety-saxical comedy thanks to Eddie Murphy stand-in Cooper. Coop isn't in most of the movie, but when he shows up occasionally it's with whoopy-cushion one-liners and huge exaggerated expressions. Whoever wrote that character is an idiot. Whoever directed those scenes is an idiot. Whoever chose not to leave them on the cutting room floor is an idiot. Better yet, in the middle of a couple dramatic scenes with Mr. Justin (such as when he tries to commit suicide by explosive decompression) characters refer to him as "Baby Bear". This is never explained and extremely (unintentionally) hilarious. [watching guy bleeding out of his eyes] "Hang in there Baby Bear!"

Here is another scene that has a very very dumb tone

At the heart of all the movie's problems is the noncommittal approach to characters - I can't tell who the hell (Hell) this movie is about. It seems like maybe originally it was supposed to be the tale of Sam Neill's battles with guilt over his dead wife, but then it was decided that they wanted a third act where he's evil and that another character would need to take over. So Laurence Fishburne gets some haphazard exposition and, yay, a hallucination, revealing that he once let a man die because it was necessary in order to save others, and he never wants to do that again. Again, this is the yawniest of motivations ever conceived. Oh my god, the captain doesn't want anyone to die! It's not even like it's his fault that they're in this deadly situation; the whole crew was basically tricked into the mission and he didn't know their destination, let alone what had happened to it. There are enough periphery characters that get expository but not active development that I'm sure someone considers the novelization an ensemble tale. It doesn't work that way in movies. Remember how everyone has really strong personalities at the beginning of Aliens, and then they all immediately die anyway? Man I wish that had happened in Event Horizon.

Though it never makes a philosophical statement on any coherent level, Event Horizon has a bit of a Jurassic Park problem. See, Jurassic Park is a movie about the power of nature and mankind's attempts to control it. Giant dinosaurs are brought back to life and it is amazing and the scientific discovery of a lifetime, but terrible coincidences and one self-serving asshole cause a handful of deaths at their hands. But still, man has brought life to extinct species! Think of what we can learn! Except the moral of the story, as our Jeff Goldbums so clearly elucidate, is that that was a fucking mistake and should never have been done and it was playing god which is evil. That's a science-phobic crock of shit and a pretty damn ironic conclusion for a movie that revitalized pop-interest in paleontology and evolutionary biology. Come on, dinosaurs were not going to get out and destroy civilization. Event Horizon gets caught up in the same stew of equating technology to hubris; here it's theoretical physics. There's an attempt, presumably to make the movie seem like "real" science fiction, to explain some astronomical phenomena at a third-grade level. Why a trained space crew needs wormholes explained to them is a pretty reasonable question, but whatever. It's setup so that when shit hits the fan, the angry dumb guy can say, "you can't break the laws of physics without paying the consequences!". Hacky dialogue or not, the idea that experimentation is a gateway to hell is pure sourness. Should we shut down the space program every time a shuttle crashes? (perhaps appropriately, a NASA Antares rocket just exploded this week)

But maybe Event Horizon is just reaching for our instinctual fear of the unknown, forget about science. A tale Lovecraftian in purpose. But the essence of Lovecraft is that mankind is irrelevant - we aren't the ones ignoring the rest of the universe, the rest of the universe is ignoring us. A happy ending and a sense of containment undercuts any such thematics. The universe of Event Horizon is still anthropocentric. I mean, apparently the ship cares enough to give people personalized visions of their loved ones and past mistakes. There is no awe here, no cosmic loneliness. This is the kind of story that makes the invocation of Lovecraft a punchline rather than an honor.

It feels almost disingenuous to show you cool pictures as if they are in any way representative of the movie's quality

In other poorly executed concepts, I hate movies that conflate insanity with evil. This is not a legitimate criticism so much as an example of the the movie setting its sights really low, but it is boring when someone going "insane" just means they become a jerk like Sam Neill does here. Watch Carpenter's In the Mouth of Madness or the fantastic French art-horror Possession if you want Sam Neill to show you how to lose a mind. God I wish I had just re-watched Possession instead of this.

I have a single compliment for Event Horizon. Some of the sets, with their intricate techno-gothic architecture, are very cool-looking. If you are the set designer for Event Horizon, congratulations for providing quality work amidst what I'm sure was a waterfall of shitheaded retardation. Though I do have to say your output feels a bit derivative of Warhammer 40K. Since that's not a movie, that's cool though.

Actually, hang on a second. Future humans create a warp portal that accidentally encroaches upon a chaos dimension from which spout possessing spirits and torture demons? And techno-gothic whatever? That's the plot of Warhammer 40K. This movie is WH40K: The Prequel. It's also a really huge ripoff of Hellraiser, but I gotta bring this bitchfest to an end sometime.

What I know going out: This movie is an insult to my intelligence.

Oh man, I forgot to mention Space Latin. Well, maybe next time.

Surviving The Evil Within, Chapter 3: What was that noise?

So, if it hasn't occurred to you yet, things might get kinda spoily from here. Probably not plot-wise, but it's impossible for me to narrate the gameplay without revealing monsters and their locations. It's been a pain just finding screenshots without seeing every last twisted boss. At least it's made me confident that chainsaw guys and zombies are just the tip of the iceberg.

At the onset of "Clause of the Horde" Sebastian and I pulled ourselves out of the muck and started working our way into the village on the other side of Chapter 2's stone bridge. Approaching through the mist, the town square seemed quiet. Nothing was amiss - nothing except the bodies hung upside down below a wooden walkway. I busted through the window of the nearest house and was startled by a loud beeping - that's when Sebastian exploded into a dozen pieces.

Restarting from the checkpoint I returned to the same window and this time ran into a corner as soon as I'd hopped through. The beeping died out as I moved away from the entry point, and turning around I got a look at a new type of exploding trap: the exploding trap. A quick tutorial window told me I could sneak up to exploding traps to disarm them, so I gave it a try and was snapped into a QTE minigame. Not ready for what was happening (other traps are automatically disarmed when you press A), I failed Sebastian and he exploded again. Returning a third time, I timed a button-press for when the rotating dial crossed a safe zone and the trap was safely disarmed. I moved past another one, dropped by a safe house, and made my way through the upstairs until a cut-scene was triggered.

Here Sebastian joins up with Dr. Dave and some very confusing dialogue. The doc points out a heavily guarded gate as the only escape from the village and suggests one of us should create a distraction so the other can make a run for it. Then he says "you're the one with the gun..." and gameplay restarts. Now, maybe I'm stupid, but I could not figure out from that line who he was suggesting should be the diversion. I kinda assumed he meant me, since gunshots would grab the zombies' attention. Before I had a second to think it over, I heard zombies breathing down my neck and he streaked off across the square yelling "HEY, LOOK OVER HERE!!!".

So he meant he would be the one getting their attention. Whatever. I made a run for the gate and got immediately swarmed and killed by zombies. So... did the diversion not work? Did I not understand what was happening? When I retried I went with a different route, this time going behind the houses, but there were still zombies everywhere and I couldn't open the gate - not to mention my diversion had locked himself in one of the houses. Still confused, I decided to ignore the "make a run for it" plan and just hid in a closet while Dr. Retardo did his thing.

From the closet I could hear loud rasping zombie mouth-sounds, so I knew I wasn't alone. After a minute or two it looked like no one was going to waltz by and invite a stealth kill, so I wandered out and headed down the hallway. That's when I heard footsteps on the roof or a ladder thudding against the wall and two baddies splashed through the window right on top of me (RE4). With exactly two bullets to my name I dished out a couple swats and made a run for the basement. On the way I took out one of my pursuers by ducking below a trip-wire that he blindly triggered. The other went down with an ax to the head (the occasional expendable ax provides a one-hit kill identical to the torch). There was one more zombie waiting in the basement, so I carefully lined up a headshot and splattered an unreasonable amount of blood across the room.

It definitely felt nice (heart-pounding, but nice) to get some fast-paced spontaneous gameplay going. There were enough bullets in the basement (four) to take out my attackers, but the pressure was so high that I was taking the immediate reflex solutions which let me continue to conserve ammo. That said, I took a lot of hits and used up all my healing items in all that fumbling around. Maybe the smartest thing would've been to run and re-hide after I had been spotted, but I was alive and armed, so I kept going.

Though there were no other monsters in sight, I was still surrounded by wheezing, gurgling sounds that reminded me they could be anywhere. Let me tell you, the moans these things make are so much creepier than your run-of-the-mill "braiiiiiiiiiiiiins"ing. They sounds like demonic cats trying to hock up barbed wire hairballs. I'm desperate to kill enemies just to clear the air of that awful fucking noise.

After sneaking out of the first house I shot my way through two more zombies into a barn that looked mostly empty. Again, it didn't sound particularly empty, stirred by metallic scraping sounds, more groaning, and even some pig squeals. I collected some supplies in the rafters and moved on.

On my way to the next house I got a good view of a zombie's back and tiptoed up for a stealth kill... except a goddamn bear trap latched onto my leg and ruined that plan, causing me to waste another two bullets. When I got inside and took out another three foes head-to-head (with the help of a torch and some matches), I had two exciting discoveries back to back: an attache case (RE4) holding a shotgun, and a crossbow leaning against a barrel. The crossbow is a little unusual, but I'll talk about how that works in a later chapter. As a veritable walking arsenal (I had also picked up some grenades by this point), I was feeling pretty confident and plowed through another two houses, mostly relying on stealth kills and crossbow bolts.

In the attic of the final house (which didn't have to be the final house, it just happened to be thanks to my approach), I bumped into The Doctor. This triggered some more confusing dialogue, starting with "How did you open the door so quickly?" I assume he meant the gate out of town, but I hadn't even opened it yet, and even Sebastian's line (something like "Gimme some time, doc") acknowledged that. It just... is this bad translation or what? The dialogue doesn't connect. It's not like it's mysterious, it's just non sequitur after non sequitur. Like someone cut-and-paste rearranged the script.

Once I had the town cleared I checked out the gate, which of course was locked tight. Sebastian suggested we find a chainsaw to cut through the chain holding it in place, but I had pretty thoroughly cleaned out the place already, so I was a bit perplexed. Combing through a second time, I noticed the barn was still ringing with that metal noise and moaning. I took a closer look around the ground floor... and that's when the Chapter 1 chainsaw guy Kool-aid Man'd his way through a wall and sawed off Sebastian's head.

Something unusual about this chapter, which was set in a single free-range area, is that after every four or five kills I would see the game saving a checkpoint. Whenever I died, I was reset to the center of the area and I guess all the kills/pick-ups up to the checkpoint were remembered. It was hard to tell since the zombies would never be found where I remembered killing them, and my location got reset pretty far from where the checkpoint was recorded or where I died. In this case, when the chainsaw guy killed me, I didn't remember when the last save had been so I had to retrace my steps for a while, making sure I still had all my supplies, and even found a few zombies in new locations. I guess in theory it revives the tension that threatens to disappear on a replay, but realistically it was disorienting in a tedious way. Hopefully other areas don't suffer from this problem.

Since I now knew where Mr. C. Saw was hiding, I was ready for round two. I used my crossbow to place a couple proximity mines and got my grenades at the ready before triggering his appearance. It wasn't hard to drag him into the traps, but he was too fast to easily peg with grenades. My shotgun didn't seem to slow his pursuit, but thankfully two mines, a grenade, and ~3 shells were enough to put him in the dirt. Chainsaw in hand (sadly as a key item rather than a weapon), I cut open the gate and completed the chapter.

The thing that worries me about Chapter 3 is I have no clue how I would've beaten the chainsaw guy had I missed the crossbow or the shotgun, or even if there had been zombies still wandering around. If there's no other way to kill this guy than to clear out everyone leading up to him, that's action, not survival. It worked with my current approach, but I'm not sure what I would've done - except die a lot - had I stumbled across him when I was in the barn that first time.

Actually, I just looked it up, and there are a bunch of other ways to kill him. Still seems like it'd be hard if you haven't mopped up the zombies, but there is an alternate crossbow way and a complete no-weapon way (similar to Verdugo, U3 and most of the RE4 bosses). I also learned I missed a whole bunch of items :-(

Overall, the pacing of this area felt a little off. Going through houses became methodical and that whole intro with the doctor was just bizarre and confusing (I still don't know what the plan was and feel like the game was telling me to do something I extremely was not supposed to do). Also, three new weapons at once is a lot, as I suddenly went from completely outgunned to teeming with firepower. As a stage of RE5 this would be great, but Chapter 2 had such a perfect balance that by comparison this hits as overblown. I think realistically I don't have a problem with Chapter 3 so much as I just don't want the remainder of The Evil Within to be this. The game could definitely work if it continues to oscillate between the super-stealth of Chapter 1, the Goldilocks balance of 2, and the heavy action of 3.

Surviving The Evil Within, Chapter 2: Deep forests with deep gameplay

Maybe I'll do a daily journal of Evil Within chapters. We'll see how long they get. I know there are 16 and the game is said to be about 15 hours, so they might be just the right length to play one a night. Depends on how much I die.

So Chappy 1, as mentioned yesterday, is an uninspiring Mental Hospital Chainsaw Massacre. The gameplay is purely run-and-hide of the Clock Tower variety; however, the environment is complex enough to provide numerous avenues of sneaking. Crowded rooms with boxes, curtains, and lockers all over - not to mention bottles that can be thrown for distraction - allowed me to at least experiment as I repeatedly died and retried.

The player character is called Sebastian Castellanos. I just felt like getting that out of the way instead of trying to work it into a sentence.

Chapter 2 provides the tutorial that's missing from the dramatically hard intro. Sebastian is back to walking/running at normal speed - a bit faster than the standard enemies - and he's got a loaded revolver in hand. After an introduction to the save/upgrade safe-house accessible through mirrors, it's - as the saying goes - out of the hospital and into a nighttime forest encircling decaying cottages.

I know what you're saying. "First a chainsaw, now a forest? What is this, RE4?" Trust me, we haven't even scratched the surface of the RE4ness of this game, including bear traps, trip wires, not-a-zombies, the part where you use binoculars to look ahead at a villager gathering (just weird that that minor moment would be reused), and the being chased across a stone bridge by a torch-waving mob. Yes, from what I can tell, The Evil Within is Resident Evil 4. That is to say, the tagline should've been "Within this game resides an evil. That evil... is Resident Evil. Fooouurr.". Still, the open forest is a much cooler and scarier setting than a mental hospital and it doesn't look much like RE4 - the palette uses deep greens, blues, and greys rather than dusty reds and browns - so I'm not complaining.

Sorry, I wish I could use my own images for this coverage but I don't have any way to screen-cap from a 360 game

Shortly after I set off through the trees, I was forced into a showdown with a standard enemy. Three misses and a headshot later, I was down to two bullets and had a good idea that these sorta-zombies were faster than actually-zombies, liked to charge straight at me, and were soft in the skull. Against the next guy I wasn't so lucky - quickly wasting my remaining bullets, I had the choice to run or swing my fists. With a dead end behind me and no clue what was ahead, I thought it would be safest to test out the melee combat. It took about a dozen pistol whips and some stomping to put my foe down, not to mention almost my entire health bar, so it became apparent that melee was not to be relied upon.

Some dimly fire-lit houses lay ahead and I could make out a few zombies standing guard or walking in rigid patrol routes. In my ammo-less state and still not confident in my ability to run, I decided to go with a stealth approach. The first couple foes were easy to take down - just sneak up behind them and press A for a knifing - and I was cued onto others from their groaning sounds. Gradually clearing out the opposition gave me space to disarm traps that I would've tripped straight into had I been running.

The map at this point had really opened up and enemies were spaced far enough that it was easy both to manipulate angle/order of attack and to accidentally expose myself. Without an in-game map I was constructing a mental one instead - in an open, dark space with irregular geometry, that quickly became disorienting. There were a lot of houses to investigate and I occasionally came across ammo and healing items that I would've missed had I been taking a more rigid path to avoid/flee enemies. Then again, those extra items may not have been necessary if I wasn't relying on close encounters. Essentially the game was rewarding my style by facilitating it, encouraging thinking ahead and commitment. That's solid survival design.

At one point I picked up a torch from a fallen foe to help disperse the overwhelming blackness. Unfortunately it quickly gave away my position and I ended up with two zombonis bearing down on me. I swung the torch at one for an instantaneous - but single-use - kill, and blew through all the bullets I'd just found taking out his friend. Here the game kicked my ass for screwing up my own strategy, but it was fairly balanced - the bullets I had spent time collecting got me out of a sticky situation.

When an enemy went down its corpse remained, giving me a chance to torch it. The game doesn't explain why that's necessary, but matches are limited so I opted to conserve them during most of Chapter 2. That set up the best scare of the night: when I found some spare matches in one of the houses, I went back to torch some bodies I had left behind. But I couldn't find the bodies! At first I thought I was just lost, then I found the bloodstains where they had lain and realized they were actually gone. I don't know if this was a glitch, if they rose up and wandered off, or if they'll come back to haunt me later. Regardless, considering the implications was freaky.

After I made it through the cottages I came across a big zombie gathering. Before Sebastian had time to finish his cautious "I should leave them be" I had walked too close and drawn their attention. With what felt like a dozen enemies coming at me there was no way I could fight, so I made a run for it. It was pretty worrisome at first - I had no clue where I was going - but after I hit a wall and managed to loop around while still keeping the mob behind me, a lot of the tension dissolved. It was a little too easy in the open space to outrun the zombies, even slowing down every few seconds to let my stamina recharge. When I reached a bridge, a cutscene took over and I was home free.

Ultimately, stealth remains key to offsetting the scarcity of ammo, but the options to shoot or run are now open. There's no requirement to exterminate the enemies, so it's my call whether to run, gun, sneak, or assassinate. As a matter of fact I have half a mind to replay the chapter and see if I can run through, though I think that's better saved for a later play. Circumstances can quickly change to force adaptation - getting spotted forced me to shoot and running out of ammo necessitated melee and later flight. This is definitely starting to feel like classic Resident Evil-style survival horror. 

Surviving The Evil Within, Chapter 1: Rebirth or plain old neo survival horror?

Look at me, playing a current events game. Aren't I proud. With nearly (exactly) six games knocked off my queue in the past month, I had the "allowance" to grab Shinji Mikami's latest just in time for the pumpkining season. Mikami is perhaps the single most relentlessly visionary and effective director in the past 200 years, so I'm always excited to put in one of his games and see what it has to say. The Evil Within was much hyped in regards to a return to survival horror, but where exactly will it fit in the survhor portmandu?

Survival horror has traditionally been a merging point between adventure and action, where key goals are built around exploration and puzzles but accomplishing those goals requires the utilization of limited means to overcome active opposition. The player is driven not by their need to kill enemies, but by their need to open doors, thus they must press on regardless of their ability to fight. Preparation is meant to trump technical skill.

They say street ball leads to street violence

In the most iconic games, namely the Alone in the Dark, Resident Evil, and Silent Hill series, that concept manifests as mazes with ammo limits. There are always going to be zombies between you and that hexagonal key, and every bullet spent is one less available for the rest of the game. Exploration and survival feed into each other: evading enemies and taking shortcuts means ammo saved, finding stashes means greater reserves, and better weapons make for high risk/reward. You can choose your fights, but the imprecise action means that you can rarely rely on technical skill to get you out alive - supplies are a necessary fallback, and supplies can only be replenished through further exploration.

In the last decade or so, the progeny of Resident Evil 4 ran with that model until demanding action standards successfully honed out all the adventure/action exploration/combat interplay that defined 'survival'. Tighter controls, mandatory combat, performance-regulated ammo, and structural linearity dragged mainline horror into the greater action portmandu, largely in the name of "improving" visceral feedback and pacing. While fans of the classics might blame the low-brow demands of the conquering casual gamer, it could also be said that this was simply the natural progression of the style - by the fourth (really the eleventh) Resident Evil game, should it be any surprise that the architecture needed a blast of minty freshness? Whomever you want to blame, Resident Evil 5/6, the Dead Space games, and The Last of Us have more in common with straight-up shooters like Lost Planet and Gears of War than with their own origins.

But there was always a second kind of survival game aside the classic scrimp-and-shoots. Going back to Clock Tower (and before) are combatless games wherein the player must rely solely upon running and hiding to survive. Longevity in games like Fatal Frame falls more to knowing the environment than managing supplies; the style trades player-driven variety for elegant simplicity, creating a more "on rails" - but also more spontaneous - experience. While Resident Evil is all growing dread at increasingly dire circumstances, Clock Tower is a histrionic up-and-down roller coaster. Though sometimes described as "adventure horror", these games generally do rely on action techniques like reflexes and stealth, so ultimately they meet the action/adventure quota that defines a survival challenge. It's just a different approach where preparation comes down to knowing escape routes rather than wagering on excursions.

"Riding scissors" is actually the Japanese equivalent of "riding shotgun", thus imbuing this scene from Clock Tower with a humorous pun-infused tone

While the Resident Evil approach has been blending into action games at large, simultaneously there's been a serious reemergence of the run-and-hide haunted house. Just recently we were graced with the AAA release of Alien: Isolation and shortly before that came the acclaimed Outlast. Thanks to indie hits like Radiohead's Amnesiac and The Slendering, type 2 horror is probably at a peak in popularity, bigger and more accessible now than it's ever been. If anything, the on-rails style has taken over and formed a basis for neo-survival horror, while it's the ammo management games that have lost their significance and assimilated.

So that makes it a bit interesting when The Evil Within entrenches itself in hype about a revival of survival horror. Mikami's been totally off the horror wagon for years, his post-Resident Evil resume being more a who's who of deep technical action, from P.N. 03 to God Hand to Vanquish. And of course the game that spearheaded the trajectory into pure action was his own Resident Evil 4. Even his last horror game, the Suda 51 co-created shoot-em-up Shadows of the Damned, seemed to confirm that the father of survival horror had acknowledged its dissolution. But survival gameplay has survived - thanks to those Clock Tower-type games like Alien: Isolation - so one could take the hype to mean Shinji and co. had something else in mind. Most likely that extinct breed of ammo maze games that was absorbed by third-person shooters.

That makes it all the weirder that The Evil Within starts with a stealth/evasion sequence that could've come straight out of Amnesia or Metal Gear Solid. The player is being stalked by a chainsaw guy through a mental hospital and has to sneak around behind boxes and in lockers to get through the stage unharmed. It feels downright conservative in its reliance on principles that are all very popular right now. Hopefully this is just a starting point for more evolved gameplay, but over the first hour Evil Within feels kinda like an acknowledgement that Clock Tower was right and Resident Evil was wrong. I just got a gun in chapter 2, so fingers crossed that things open up and some classically resonant (or original) gameplay emerges.

Also, it probably isn't coming through, but the actual reason I care is nothing to do with the hype and everything to do with the fact that I don't particularly like the run-and-hide type of game. It is boring and lacks tension. It is a lot less scary to replay a segment for the sixth time because I keep getting caught than it is to waste all my ammo on a mistake and have to go into the unknown with only 3 bullets. As illustrated by my session last night in which I died like 10 times trying to get past that guy and tension turned into tedium. 

While I'm at it, a chainsaw guy in a mental hospital? Come on. I know everything under the sun has been done, but that is as cliche as cliche gets and is really hard to get excited about. RE4 was a horror pastiche and the Texas Chainsaw Massacre: They Took My Baby Away from Me reference fit in both the context and the gameplay, not to mention it was fairly original for its time in gamedom. Seeing it in Evil Within just makes me think Mikami is out of ideas, especially when the death animations are nearly identical to those in RE4. That saw revving sound used to be genuinely scary. Today I respond to it the same way as the sound of some asshole's loud car exhaust. Again, hopefully this is just setup stuff and the content will get more interesting as the game moves on.

Also, moving further along the tangent of things that have nothing to do with anything, why isn't there acceleration on the aiming controls??? Who does that? It feels extremely awkward after having played any video game ever made.