Introduction
Enslaved is a post-apocalyptic re-telling of the classic Chinese tale ‘Journey to the West’. It spins off from the original tale significantly but still retains a great deal of the character and themes of the original, even though the main theme – redeeming a chaotic land by finding missing enlightenment – is one of the casualties (or at least ends up transmuted into something else). It’s a gorgeous game, with very few niggles, which seems to have – unfortunately – gone relatively unnoticed around a lot of higher profile releases.
Story
The game opens with you, Monkey, trapped inside a prison cell by slavers. Your prison is an egg-shaped metal orb – a nod to the origins of monkey – and as you languish helplessly in your prison, things start to go wrong all around you. The slaver prison – which turns out to be a flying ship – starts to explode and fall apart and its a race against time to get to the rapidly depleting number of escape pods. Once you do get off the disintegrating ship you find yourself in the company of ‘Trip’, a beautiful and technically gifted girl from a wind-farming settlement, technically gifted enough to fit you with a ‘slave band’ and to make you do what she wants.
You then engage in a journey, escorting and looking after Trip while you make your way across and out of a ruined New York to take her home and later, on, aiding her in a quest for revenge. Along the way you meet Pigsy (but not Sandy) and getting to experience a beautifully realised wasteland. It’s a bit more lonely and empty than the original story or its many wonderful interpretations, but it has a unique character all of its own.
This seems like a short summary but, while each step in the story is relatively simple, there’s a lot going on in each part and a good mix between acrobatic progression and swift violence.
Gameplay
Enslaved plays as a third person beat-em-up with a few shooter, RPG and platform elements. Your character – Monkey – is upgradable in his capabilities using an ‘experience’ system, you charge around in third person mode swinging your power-staff and smashing robots to pieces, you can fire energy bolts from its tip and you can leap from handhold to handhold with all the confidence and agility of a hopped-up gibbon. You progress from step to step in an almost completely immersive screen with only the bare minimum of readouts and displays. The only problem with this is that sometimes what you take to be a cutscene is, actually an action scene and while you’re goggling at what’s going on, you die. Once this has happened a couple of times you get wise to it and its not so much of a problem. Controls are largely intuitive and, in addition to the normal sections of the game, there’s a few in which you get to zip around on your ‘cloud’, which are tremendous fun, even if they’re not big, or long enough.
Trip gives you access to upgrades and can also fix things, bypass doors and distract enemy mechs. Unlike in many other games she isn’t too much of a liability to the point where you end up resenting her and doesn’t get attacked so much that you begin to hate having to drag her along. You do need to watch out for her though and often need to throw her across gaps or give her a boost to reach areas that are otherwise inaccessible.
Controls
Controls are largely standard 3rd person run-around-and-hit-things fare, you switch to an over-the-shoulder view when you’re firing your staff bolts, which can be a little annoying since your own body can block some of the field of view. Very occasionally you’ll leap off something in a direction you weren’t anticipating but, by and large, while the flow of motion/climbing isn’t quite as fluid as, say, Assassin’s Creed 2, it is plenty good enough.
Atmosphere
This is where the game excels, the aftermath world in which you find yourself is not the bleak wilderness of Fallout and other, similar post-apocalyptic games, rather this is a world in which man has become largely absent and nature has taken over. This is a world ‘after man’ where vines, plants and animals have reasserted themselves and the ruins have become a new habitat and landscape for the lush growth to take over.
Wandering through this wilderness is a profoundly lonely experience, everywhere there is the mark of human habitation in the past, but little to no sign of anyone being alive in the present. The whole world is like wandering a tomb.
One thing that particularly stands out in this game, for me, is that the death of the world is as much a mystery to you – the player – as it is to the inhabitants of the world itself (Monkey, Trip and Pigsy). You – and they – can only piece it together from reading the in game signs, listening to the few bits of folklore that you’re told by the others and experiencing the flashbacks you get from the slave band. This is, in its own way, far more effective than simply spelling it all out for you as happens in some games and experiencing the strangeness of the new world – as it has been remade – is almost as effective as it is in Half-Life 2. As you take in the broken vistas of the ruined New York near the start of the game, you almost can’t help mouthing silently to yourself ‘What the fuck happened?’
Graphics
The graphics are sleek and bright – another contrast with many modern games which seem to have settled on ‘beige’ as being ‘where it’s at’. While it stops short of being technicolour this tropical colour palette actually enhances the weird experience of exploring ruined New York as it’s nothing like you might expect an East Coast urban centre to be. The characters are well designed and while Trip is attractive she isn’t ‘pneumatic’ which is a welcome break from the ‘Lara Crofts’ and ‘Dead or Alive’ girls. Monkey is a great big, gristly lump of a man, covered in scars, brands and tattoos and exuding muscular danger. It’s nice to see more brutish, assertively male characters as well in games, rather than slimline metrosexuals.
Conclusion
I’m a sucker for the story of Journey to the West in whatever form it appears, most especially – of course – the TV series ‘Monkey Magic’. Perhaps this biases me in favour of anything that explores it or perhaps it makes me more demanding of things that do draw upon the story. Either way, I loved this game despite the change in the story and despite the absence of Sandy and the only real drawback to it that I can think of to the game is that it really isn’t long enough.
On the plus side:
- Beautiful graphics.
- Non-annoying sidekick.
- Immersive, unsettling world.
On the minus side:
- No Sandy.
- Too short.
- Diverges a lot from the original story.
Score
Style: 5
Substance: 3
Overall: 4
Postmortem Studios 