Posts Tagged ‘horror game’
Clive Barker’s Jericho Game Review–The Title Is Warning Enough
I really, REALLY, hate Clive Barker.
It’s bad enough that he unleashes his misery on us in book form and in movie form, but recently, he’s dropped a video game on us too. Not his first, I know, but it’s no less painful for the fact that it isn’t first. If anything, it’s actually MORE painful, because he did it to us once already—now he’s come back for seconds. It’s called Jericho, and it’s out for the Xbox 360, Playstation 3, and PC.
Anyway, this time, Clive Barker’s bringing us the story of the Firstborn, which he claims is part of Apocryphal and Gnostic texts (parts of the Bible in case you don’t follow that sort of thing) as the first thing God ever created. It’s not male, it’s not female, but it’s both beautiful and horrifying all at once. God, not surprisingly, turned out not to like the thing he made and thus shut it up in the Abyss. He then followed up with humanity, which turned out much more to God’s liking than the androgynous singularity he’d made earlier. And then, just to prove that Clive Barker’s grasp on logic is as tenuous as his grasp of sanity or writing a decent book, it turns out that the Firstborn decided to not be banished any more, and so, he wasn’t. He made seven attempts to break out of the Abyss, and every time, God sent him back, but not without taking a piece of the planet with him. The empty chunks of earth became fragments of time and space, and then did bizarre things to the world around them. The U.S. government, as represented by the Department of Occult Warfare, sends in the Jericho Squad to investigate one such singularity, which one of its former members is using as a gateway to bring the Firstborn back into the world.
See, that’s a real mouthful of a storyline until you consider that Jericho is yet another first person shooter. This is like trying to put a Ferrari chassis around a moped and expecting people to believe you own a Ferrari. Seriously, they’ve put everything into this—time travel, various occultic stuff…lesbians…yes, lesbians. They’re part of the plot, even though they’re really not here for anything more than the inevitable “hey look at this!” effect.
And while the game has spectacularly creepy visuals, the gameplay itself is suffering from some kind of mild brain damage, because your elite team of master soldiers dies a lot more often than master soldiers really should. That may be the worst part about the whole thing—even I have to admit that this is a really impressive story, even if it requires massive suspension of disbelief. And what do they DO with this story? They strap a chain gun barrel to it and say “Here, go shoot something. A lot.” Great—why do I find myself utterly unable to care? Maybe it’s because my character is just a gun barrel people talk to.
While this might have made a pretty good movie (or even series thereof), sadly, it doesn’t make a game worth a hill of beans. There are much better first person shooters out there, with much more action and adventure and fun than this could ever generate.