Resurrection is a regular feature in which Resolution gets all nostalgic and basks in the glory of a videogame of yesteryear. This time, editor Lewis Denby returns to a broken yet captivating Russian oddity…

I’m not allowed to do the autopsy. I don’t think so, anyway. There’s a terrible plague sweeping this isolated Russian village, the death toll is stacking up, and there’s a fresh corpse at my disposal to study. But according to a strange man in a dilapidated hut on the edge of town, “just the same cause, which they gave, when didn’t recommend you dissect bodies.”

Ah, Pathologic. How I’ve missed you.

Pathologic is an astounding game. It’s an unthinkably brave attempt to combine a whole plethora of genres into a single, otherworldly experience. It’s an adventure game without any puzzles, an RPG without stats and levels, a first-person shooter with only a handful of shootings. It’s warped, weird and wonderful. And just a little bit rough around the edges.

Rewind to the very start of the game – before the main menu, even. A funeral procession shuffles through the rain. The camera focuses on the group, every one of the mourners a young child, a tattered doll where the coffin should be. The kids bury the doll in the mud, and turn to walk away. Later, you learn that these children were orphans, trapped in their own world of suffering, long before the outbreak started. Taking some time off to pay last respects to their innocence is the only thing they have left.

Every time you kill someone in Pathologic, a child cries. It’s a haunting reminder of the horrible situation that’s unfolding around you. Not that it’s easy to forget. The disease that’s infected this previously sleepy farming town is so powerful, so all-encompassing, that even the buildings are succumbing to its grip. With each day that goes by, more and more become covered in blisters and sores, spreading out across the surface of the stone.

It’s retribution, some say, for the ills of humanity. Others suspect there may actually be a silent murderer walking the streets. Yet you push onwards, your medical knowledge barely enough to scratch the surface, desperately waiting for a breakthrough. Then a potential one arrives, you need a corpse to inspect, and the town’s rigid ethical standards forbid it.

UPHILL STRUGGLE
There’s a reason Pathologic failed to score highly back in 2006, when this bizarre game found its way to UK shores. It’s not just the apocalyptic translation – although any game whose script is often literally incomprehensible has a pretty severe issue. Pathologic’s also a slow, arduous game, where much of your time is spent walking at a snail’s pace between two distant points on a poorly conceived map. Occasionally, your quest log forgets to update for a few hours, which is kind of a problem when you’re playing against a constant time limit. The animation is wonky and wooden, the AI in combat patently artificial and not even slightly intelligent. Its engine would have looked somewhat dated in the late 90s, let alone well into the new millennium. And it’s really, brutally unforgiving, to the point where the smallest mistake can bring your whole journey to a crippling halt several in-game days later.

[Continues...]

You might expect ACE Team to work from some sort of colourful crazy house, the walls painted with vibrant, dreamlike murals.

They don’t. They work in a small, modest office in Santiago, Chile – an eight-strong independent studio who invested everything in their debut project, Zeno Clash. It’s a good job they did. The Source Engine-powered fighting game proved to be one of the most exciting and creative releases of 2009.

“It was born from an older project, which we started developing some years before ACE Team was formed as a professional studio,” explains Andres Bordeu, one of the company’s pair of lead designers. The other is his twin, Carlos, with a third brother, Edmundo, working as Art Director: the A., C. and E of the Team. “At that time, we were granted a demo license of the Lithtech Jupiter System – the same engine used by Monolith’s No One Lives Forever 2 – with which our team tried to create a game called Zenozoik. The goal of this project was to create an action RPG in first-person, but the prototype never took off, mainly because we tried to create something too ambitious for a small studio.”

How, then, did Zeno Clash’s wondrous world come into existence? Its vivid alien landscapes and outlandish character designs are a far cry from most of today’s mainstream releases. In Zeno Clash, the environment feels like part of an enormous, existing culture, of which we’re only seeing a tiny speck. In other words, Zenozoik must have been very ambitious indeed, because Zeno Clash is about as big and bold as indie games come.

“Many years after the development of the prototype, we gathered around our original concept and re-thought the game in a manner that it would focus on few but solid elements that we would be able to produce as a small team,” Andres Bordeu continues. “Our vision had to nail two key elements: the surreal, novel art style and the intense combat in first-person perspective. We needed to scrap all the RPG elements and scale down the game to something that would end up being like a fantasy Double Dragon shooter – a very unusual mix. We knew that we were too few to make a game with large, open and expansive environments, so scaling down the concept of the game was crucial.”

OVER THE HILLS AND FAR AWAY
There was an era when wildly inventive world design ruled. Throughout the 90s, studios experimented with a variety of styles. As the new millennium rolled around, and with it advanced engine technology, these worlds began to shine in a way no one had ever thought possible. The rolling hills of Giants: Citizen Kabuto or the striking otherworldliness of Sacrifice impressed players around the world.

Of course, these games were never in the mainstream. But even iD Software’s early work on the Quake series, Naughty Dog’s insane Crash Bandicoot titles and the legendary Grim Fandango had wowed on a wider scale. Now, it seems as though this creativity is fading, making way for yet another science-fiction romp, or the gritty battlefields of a real-life war.

While Bordeu thinks more grounded, realistic world design can still feature great art, he has noticed a decline in novel videogame settings. “I think it has to do with the avoidance of risk,” he says. “Videogames are consistently getting bigger and more expensive to produce, so for a publisher to develop a title backed up by a known IP or traditional theme would seem the safest bet. Many of today’s games seem to look at competitive titles or related media – like blockbuster movies – when looking for sources of inspiration. You can tell that Star Wars, Alien and war-themed movies are a common source of inspiration for many shooters, or other games from different genres.”

[Continues...]