DLC MC: Shadow Complex Is a Game Changer
In which a non-shooter fan becomes a shooter fan and finds understanding on the beach.
8/18/2009 3:44 PM | 12 Comments | Page 1 of 2
"Are we demented or am I disturbed?
The space that's in between insane and insecure."
-- Green Day, "American Idiot"
To help inaugurate this new column about downloadable games, Chair Entertainment's Donald Mustard came over to the house to show off his twisting, turning
Shadow Complex. His delightfully well-mannered six-year-old sat on the floor, completely engrossed in
Cooking Mama DS as mom Laura played the PR game by answering e-mail on her Blackberry. I sat with anticipation on the leather couch as Mustard hooked things up to my Vizio: The revolution will be televised.
Look out below! You get to blow up a helicopter in the first minute or so.
Like many Joe Journoshmoes, I had seen 15 minutes of
Shadow Complex at E3 and felt there might be something of note here: a downloadable, 2-D side-scrolling game made by a small team that somehow offers up the almost holographic mimetics of a full console game. How? With tight cut scenes and failsafe camera angles.
As Mustard took the game through its paces, I fessed up that I wasn't the biggest fan of shooters. Brandon Sheffield's candid editor's note in this month's
Game Developer easily summarizes how I feel about shooting games: "In first-person games, there is no reaction on the part of the character, and it becomes difficult to feel anything about him or her." I've felt the same about 2-D and 3-D shooters, too. With a few exceptions, it was utter anhedonia.
Yet during the home-office demo, I saw the exceptional heed paid to detail that had gone into the Xbox Live Arcade offering -- even with the soundtrack. The haunting and menacing first four notes of cello set the mood almost as well as those two suspenseful E and F notes from "Jaws," the movie. These four notes from
Shadow Complex stay with you. That's no small feat.
It's not shaving cream in a gun. This foam protects you, and not just from razor burn.
Artists often refer to work as their baby, a living, breathing creature they have made. Nowhere is that most perceptible than in
Shadow Complex's careful arc of game design. Like the dramatic arc of a taut mystery novel -- basically a puzzle within a tightly woven plot that suspends disbelief -- the game's difficulty ramps up slowly.
It's not like the developer is treating you like a toddler, though, reaching down as a godlike parent and taking you by the hand. You almost don't notice the leveling up, the power of new guns or the fact that you learn to crouch down and search in dark ducts and past tiny bots to find power-ups like grenades. You almost don't notice the superheroic increase in character Jason Fleming's health so you can more courageously battle the science-fiction minions, those who would foist a new Civil War upon our nation, during the Big Push.
Yeah, they add a videogame staple: You have to find and free your girlfriend, Claire, as well. Jason's a little too macho in comic-book writer Peter David's riffing on Orson Scott Card's novel "Empire." The idea of the tough, strapping guy is terribly cliché in games, although Jason's issues with his father add some depth to his character. And Claire's too skinny and beautiful, another woman who needs saving. She does tell Jason what to do when he first finds her in one of the hundreds of rooms in the underground complex that comprises much of the game, so she's not
that cliché. But I wish the dialogue in
Shadow Complex were more multi-dimensional, more novel than comic book.
