Survival: Stephen King Would Be Proud
You’d be forgiven for believing Hypnotic Games are staffed by lunatics. Survival-Horror games have never been popular, especially those without zombies. Yet, the studio chose to not only premier with such a title, but spent upwards of ten million dollars to make it (very little of which was apparently spent on advertising). But, for what the studio lacks in conventional business sense, they more than make up for in game design.
The Aftermath is an open-world first-person survival-horror game, with puzzles, platforming, permadeath, and semi-realistic inventory, injury, and in-hunger(?) systems. Additionally, the story is fairly lengthy (15-40+hours) and packed with branching story arcs. It’s not so much a genre-bender as it is a gourmet genre salad. However, the various genres it’s composed of culminated in the most horrifying salad I’ve ever tasted.
The story is chronologically divided into three parts, each with its own unique game mode. However, due to its chronology, you unlock the later modes by completing earlier ones, the first of which being Survival.
Spoiling as little as possible, in Survival you are tasked with surviving for one week in the ruins of Half-Moon Bay, California. The town is overrun by a new species of parasitic insect-animal hybrids of unknown origin known as Crawlers. Fighting them is difficult and killing them is nigh-on impossible, so stealth becomes the ideal means of progressing through the game. The enemy difficulty (and horrific appearances) coupled with the game’s varied open-world, random events, and omnipresent permadeath, creates a perpetually terrifying atmosphere punctuated by the player’s fear to explore the vast, dangerous unknown. However, because this game was designed by intelligent people who understand the reluctance a player might feel, the game gives the player oppressive time-based pressures that strongly encourage active behavior.
For instance, time flows at 4x real-time and most predatory insects are nocturnal. As such, the scarier enemies appear (and in larger quantities) at night, adding a sense of urgency to daily affairs. This fear however is exacerbated by the game’s incredible lighting engine, which makes darkness absolute and light piercing. Your character also gets hungry and thirsty every six virtual hours, and if you don’t eat your character starts suffering from progressively detrimental physical conditions, which may turn into psychological ones. Because each playthrough lasts a week, a single playthrough can last up to 42 hours (assuming you don’t sleep). The length of days would make for an incredibly arduous and emotionally exhausting game, but after you find a safe-house about 3 hours in, you will be allowed to rest, skipping time. If you just want to quickly unlock the other two modes, you can end the game very quickly, but you will miss out on much of the story and will very likely end up regretting the decision.
Over the course of the week you will also find memorandums (journals, VLOGs, notes, recordings, etc.) and survivors that provide side objectives to help fill out the lore and prepare you for the extremely weighty decision(s) at the end of the week. The story is cryptic by design and has a few plot twists, but what’s most interesting is the way it leads (and misleads) you into making difficult survival decisions.
For example, relatively early in
the game, the player can endeavor to gather cell samples from a wolf spider (not that one, THIS ONE) for a toxicologist in order to develop a powerful
paralyzing agent capable of incapacitating nearly every enemy in the game.
However, in order to gather the cells necessary to begin synthesizing the
solution, the player must either kill the crawler and draw samples from its
corpse or steal some of its eggs. Because of the game's difficulty, I decided
to go with the stealth option and stole its eggs. What I did NOT know was that
the eggs were safeguarded by a sort of tripwire web that instantly alerted the
beast to my presence. Like the rightfully terrified bunny I was, I immediately
sprinted outside of its den. But, much to my chagrin it refused to stop chasing
me. My stamina was running low and I could hear death racing behind me, so I
needed to weigh whether the immediate hope for safety of discarding the eggs
was greater than the potential benefit of effectively fighting crawlers later.
The sneaky aspect of this however,
was that despite the toxicologist stating that I needed three eggs, in reality,
I only needed one (apparently she was just greedy). Out of desperation, I chose
to throw an egg and hopefully live to fight another day, but in actuality, that
was what the task demanded all along. It was an odd, harrowing experience,
yet it effectively teaches that above all, your first goal is to survive.
Prior to becoming the human incarnation of Bear Grylls, you must play through your Arrival: a custom scenario based on how you designed your character. These scenarios both teach you the majority of the game’s core mechanics (such as inventory management, speech, and how to interact with the environment) and contextualize your entry into the quarantine. The most interesting aspect of these Arrivals however, is their variety. There are over 18 different 1-2 hour long Arrivals with dialogue that changes (albeit slightly) based on your character’s traits (both statistical and physical). All of which are determined during the game’s extraordinarily in-depth character creation process.
From the first time you turn on the game, you will be prompted to customize your character. You begin by determining your character’s name, gender, height, weight, physique, and facial characteristics. All of which, except for the name and facial features, affect the gameplay in a noticeable fashion. For example, taller players can’t hide in small nooks, but walk faster and expend less stamina than shorter players while sprinting. Muscular characters on the other hand require more food to keep from starving, but have higher durability and aren’t as encumbered by inventory weight. Next you can choose a voice from a list of 5 (per gender) which you can alter with various depth and tone sliders. You also choose a codename (from a list of 50!), which other characters will address you by. Because this game has a vocal protagonist and you WILL engage in dialogue (more on this later), this choice is actually important.
Then, the game asks you a dozen philosophical questions (which vary depending on your answers from a list of 38). Based on your answers, your character receives a background story and three survival skills (all of which you can manually choose at the end of the character creation process). Each survival skill also has three levels of effectiveness. The lowest level skills have a perk and a penalty, while the highest level skills offer significant advantages (even UI additions like an ammo display from the Prudency skill). Throughout the game, your survival skills will improve and you will gain new ones based on your actions. None of these additions drastically affect the way you play the game, but they assist in both easing the game’s difficulty and making your character feel all the more unique.
Finally, you will be prompted to choose your “preferred carry-on” which translates to the type of inventory you want to start with. There are four inventory classes which each have their own pros and cons. Backpacks, for instance, have a much larger carrying capacity than satchels and attaches, but can be more difficult to pull small items from and have the longest withdrawal timings. If you did not understand the latter half of that sentence, congratulations! Prepare to be introduced to the first of The Aftermath’s three innovative features: Skill-based Inventory.
Unlike, well every other game, The Aftermath takes a very serious approach to realism. Time does not stop when you open your inventory and the inventory itself is limited by its physical mass. A portion of which is taken up by your journal (the method by which you save & check your status) and your wilderness survival guide (game manual and map). This spatial aspect of the inventory system increases the importance of organization. Additionally there is no auto-sort button (for reasons which will become apparent shortly), so memorizing careful arrangements is almost required to quickly access specific items under pressure. Needless to say, at the start of the game, managing the inventory is frustrating and tedious, but the longer you play, the faster it becomes. However, this is not what makes the Aftermath’s inventory interesting. On its face, this style of inventory is equivalent to Resident Evil 4’s inventory interface mixed with Resident Evil 5’s real-time pressure. No, the revolutionary aspect is the quick inventory system.
At the end of this review is The Aftermath’s default control scheme on the PS3. Go ahead, look at it. This text isn’t going anywhere… You finished? Well, to explain the glory you just witnessed, the Aftermath’s inventory system resembles that of 2D fighting games. You hold down the left trigger to enter quick inventory mode, make a directional input then press a face-button at a specific time to withdraw an item. Moreover, depending on which type of inventory you are using you can withdraw some items faster than others and have a slight delay on certain items over others. This form of item swapping is exponentially faster and far more flexible than any I’ve ever seen in my gaming career. It is far more practical than the standard system above and completely eliminates the need for inventory management. As such, the game encourages you to learn the timings and inputs by omitting commands which would ease traditional inventory management. Together, these two inventory management systems accommodate players who are willing to add skill to their gameplay and those who aren’t.
And as if these two methods of accessing items weren’t enough, there’s a third method for those who are less inclined to memorize their item layouts and withdrawal timings in the form of hotkeys. Simply holding the quick inventory button and pushing one of the 4 face buttons (without making a directional input) allows instant access to an item of choice. Though limited in terms of use, it provides a means of quick access for frequently used items/weapons and a crutch for players still coming to grips with the quick inventory system. The amount of effort Hypnotic put into the character creation and inventory system, would lead one to think that the rest of the game is basically empty, but as the varied enemy design proves, this is thankfully not the case.
Crawlers are extremely terrifying to look at and nigh on impossible to kill. Some of which are reminiscent of eldritch horrors (one of which almost unquestionably resembling a Shoggoth) while others are almost direct combinations (in the most unsettling way possible of course) of insects and other species. The best you can do is repel them and even that proves very dangerous and is usually not worth it. However, like modern (more forgiving) rogue-likes, the game remembers your last character settings, so if you die you can load the last character you built and even skip the Arrival (though it’s not recommended because you’ll miss out on opportunities to learn some skills early).
Generally speaking, the flow of Survival follows this pattern: create character -> play Arrival -> attempt to reach safehouse before nightfall -> explore -> ??? -> PROFIT choose ending sequence. The wide range of dimensions that go into the character creation leads to no two characters playing or feeling alike, emulating the randomness of rogue-likes and exacerbating the difficulty of seeking online assistance for the early game when you need it the most. Collectively, The Aftermath resembles a scarier, survival-focused version of Fallout 3 (i.e. S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Clear Skies). As a fan of the genre, that’s more than I could have ever asked for from a modern Survival-Horror game. And yet, Survival is only the first third of the game!
Trust: "I'm Sorry Friend, Sorry For Being Human."
The second mode, Trust, picks up
right where Survival leaves off, so the beginning varies each playthrough based
on your particular ending and the materials you’ve gathered. And just like
Survival it only lasts for one in game week, encouraging you to manage your
time effectively. Where Trust differs from its predecessor is in its more
traditional story focus and increased emphasis on dialogue.
For reasons that vary based on your
ending to Survival, your initial objective is always to find other people. In
most campaigns this entails joining one of the factions you discovered in
Survival. While in a faction you’ll have access to their camp where you can
interact with colorful NPCs, gather information, trade goods, and help some of
the members with their personal issues. Most of these actions are facilitated
through the game’s unique quick dialogue system, in which you interact based on
the flow of the conversation using one of four dialogue choices (referenced in
the control set-up at the end of the review). All of this is done without
scrolling through a menu or dialog wheel.
The quick dialogue option is always
available so you can both initiate a conversation or respond to anything that’s
said (and a surprising amount of non-verbal actions) by merely looking at the
person you want to talk to. And because there is a staggering amount of
dialogue available for each personality and voice. The four dialogue options
change slightly based on the context of the conversation, but thankfully, the
game displays icons and concise text to inform you of what those four options
are and what buttons they correspond to when you hold the quick dialogue
button. It’s a very clever method of simulating speech that, like the inventory
system, becomes increasingly natural the more you use it and assists in
immersing you into the game’s bleak narrative.
At the faction headquarters, you will also
receive timed assignments from the faction leader that gradually tell the story
of the particular faction you are in. For most of these assignments, you’ll
gather supplies, raid or negotiate with competing faction camps, and go on
scouting expeditions. As one might expect by this game’s unforgiving difficulty,
these assignments are rarely as straightforward as their objectives suggest and
usually involve stealth segments or unexpected engagements.
Each assignment lays the narrative
foundation for the next one, in typical RPG fashion. But, unlike in RPGs you
can fail or flat-out abstain from taking any or all of these assignments.
Naturally, each assignment bears its own set of rewards and if you pass up too
many of them you will be kicked out of the faction. So, it is usually in your
best interest to try and complete all of your faction leader’s assignments. And
unlike Survival, you won’t be alone on these missions. Up to two other members
of your faction will accompany you on each assignment.
This is where the mode
differentiates itself from something like Fallout: New Vegas; some of the
faction members that join you are actually other players. Survival features a
persistent subtle drop-in style of multiplayer akin to games like Journey and Demon’s Souls. However, because the game lacks voice chat, it forces
you to rely on its deep yet esoteric dialogue system to interact with these
players, which becomes incredibly interesting as its fluidity often makes it
difficult to distinguish an NPC from a human player (though human players’
tendency to act like rodents with ADD can be a dead giveaway). The dialogue’s
ambiguity shines brightest (or darkest) though, when you are not in a faction
at all.
Again, spoiling as little as possible, at the
end of Survival you can also choose not to ally with anybody and survive on
your own. But, because of the greater resources and manpower of the surrounding
factions, acquiring the requisite supplies and information to escape the area,
proves exceptionally difficult. So, to overcome the inherent weakness of working
alone, you can enter a faction as a saboteur pilfering supplies, spreading
false information, and generally sowing chaos in the ranks of your obstacles. Because
you will often be playing with other players, the characters you end up harming
tend to react more organically, encouraging you to utilize the Quick Dialog
system to shape a persona for yourself thus creating a natural uniqueness to
each playthrough.
As a result of this brilliant
mixture of mechanics, Trust establishes a more dynamic world with much more realistic
character interactions than most sprawling RPGs. And speaking of which, as with
the recent Bethesda RPGs, The Aftermath’s informal character interactions allow
you to adopt this role at any point in time. There’s no arbitrary morality or
“karma” system forcing you to make certain decisions. You simply play how you
want to play, and the game will advance in accordance with your actions.
As one might imagine, Trust can
last for a very long time and strongly encourages multiple playthroughs to see
the two dozen endings. Thankfully, you won’t have to worry about randomly dying
and restarting the entire story from the beginning as Survival’s perma-death is
suspended for the duration of Trust. However, the game still keeps you on an
invisible leash by limiting where you can save to your safehouse and faction
headquarters in addition to auto-saving after every major decision and event. It
is restrictive enough to make you to think about your actions while still
offering enough freedom to explore the world. As this reviewer unfortunately
learned firsthand, killing NPCs qualifies as a “major decision” and WILL force
an autosave, so you may want to suppress your homicidal tendencies for another
game, or better yet, the last mode: Frontier.
Frontier: If Day-Z Were Good
Talking
about Frontier is impossible without spoiling one tiny detail about the end of
Trust: every ending is sad. Yeah, all twenty four of them. No matter how you
play, someone (or more commonly, everyone) gets screwed in some way that leads
to a ruthless free-for-all competition for specific resources. All factions are
abolished, all allies are either dead or disbanded and all survivors are in
competition for a particular set of supplies scattered throughout the
quarantine zone.
In simplest terms, Frontier is a 16
player, open-world scavenger hunt with terrifying monsters just like an
easter egg hunt with children. It shares deep similarities with the
upcoming Survival game Day-Z, but differs in that it has a victory condition
and the map isn’t half the size of the continental United States of America,
firmly removing Frontier from Day-Z’s (entirely accurate) “walking-simulator”
category. Combat is much more frequent than in the previous two modes due to an
increase in Crawlers and roaming players, raising the difficulty and
encouraging cooperation. Of course, it still isn’t enough to make everyone hold
hands and play nice.
Killing other players grants you
their carry-on and everything in it. Surprisingly, their journals tend to be
the most useful thing they have as they both tell you who the player was (their
name, background, and what faction they were with) and give you directions to
their stash of resources they’ve accumulated up until their death. Because there
are only a handful of safe-houses in the game, stashes will always cycle
through one of the spots that is not your own and consequently, far away. Finding
their stashes won’t magically grant you all of their resources either, so you essentially
need to plan a scouting expedition, carrying as little as possible, whenever
you want to loot people’s stashes. Collecting player journals will also fill in
memorandums from before the catastrophe that you might have missed in the
previous two modes, so if you don’t want to replay the game, to grasp the full
story, then you can piggy back off of other player’s findings instead.
Death in Frontier is also a little
bit different than the previous two modes, but the consequences are virtually
identical to those of Survival. When you die, you lose everything you gained
during your Frontier playthrough. However, your character keeps all of the
character skills you gained, potentially making you a little bit tougher.
Manual saves are disabled, mirroring the persistent saving of Dark Souls.
Because your character is never entirely lost, it doesn’t feel quite as
frustrating as a true Rogue-like, but potentially losing 40 hours of progress
still serves as a strong motivator to fight for your life.
The ending is also incredibly
satisfying, tying up the various story threads from across the three game modes
and incorporating each of the major decisions you’ve made. Like most character
creation games, you may recognize that the ending is a sort of jigsaw puzzle
that fills in its pieces with your specific feats and decisions, but simply due
to how long it takes to reach any sort of ultimate closure and the arduous
personal struggle you underwent to attain it, the ending still manages to
succeed in conveying a deeply ingratiating sense of release. And if for some
inexplicable reason you still feel attached to your character, the game has a
New Game+ that allows you to use him or her again losing all of the items you’ve
accumulated, but maintaining your survival skills and memorandums.
There are
also dozens of smaller touches that serve as icing on this amazing game. Beautiful
ambient music (composed by David Sylvian of all people) signals your proximity
to crawlers and people by subtly softening as others draw closer and spiking
when you’ve entered combat. Since many of the game’s enemies will stalk you
before striking, this use of music spontaneously creates heart-racing horror movie-esque
moments that rarely fail thanks to the unpredictability of combat situations. What’s
more, Crawlers spawn based on the season and weather, both of which are
determined by drawing data from the local weather channel’s daily forecast for
Half-Moon Bay. It’s largely wall-dressing, but it significantly aids the game’s
rogue-like goal of making no two playthroughs exactly the same.
The horror genre of videogames
recently demonstrated that granting the player power and understanding
diminishes fear. The Aftermath’s three modes slowly, but deliberately grant
these gifts to the player, at first preventing and then propelling you forward.
And while its tension changes from mode to mode, it is never lost. The
Aftermath is a masterpiece in terms of mechanics, design, and aesthetics, and
is a strong contender for the most innovative game this console generation. Due
to the dynamic reaction of the world to the player’s actions and the game’s
commitment to immersion, The Aftermath succeeds in the two areas horror games
consistently struggle with: maintaining the player’s interest to completion and
with terrifying thrills along the way.
Default Controls:
X - Jump/ [while Sprinting] Leap/ Interact
O - Crouch/ [Hold] Prone
[] - Reload/ [Hold] Holster
^ - Use Item
Up - Flashlight
Down - Speech Mode (w/options displayed)
Left - Compass
Right – Map/Survival Guide
R1 - Shoot/Attack/use weapon
R2 - Quick Dialogue
R2+Up - Defer/Agree
R2+Down - Deny/Disagree
R2+Right - Direct/Challenge
R2+Left - Commend/Support
R1+R2 - Drop Weapon/ [Hold] Aim Weapon [Release] Throw Weapon
R3 - Binoculars/ (w/Analytical Thinker & Good Memory) Mark object or enemy
L1 - Aim/Look
L2 - Quick Inventory/Skill activation
L2+X - Hot Key Item/Weapon 1
L2+O - Hot Key Item/Weapon 2
L2+[] - Hot Key Item/Weapon 3
L2+^ - Hot Key Item/Weapon 4
L1+L2 - Drop Item/ [Hold] Aim Item [Release] Throw Item
L3 - Sprint
Start - Open/Close Inventory
Select - Open Journal
Default Quick Inventory/Skill Combinations:
Weight Class 1 (Withdrawal time = 0.5)
2 O/^/X/[]
4 O/^/X/[]
6 O/^/X/[]
8 O/^/X/[]
Weight Class 2 (Withdrawal time = 0.8)
46 O/^/X/[]
64 O/^/X/[]
28 O/^/X/[]
82 O/^/X/[]
Weight Class 3 (Withdrawal time = 1.0)
236 O/^/X/[]
632 O/^/X/[]
214 O/^/X/[]
412 O/^/X/[]
Weight Class 4 (Withdrawal time = 1.2)
623 O/^/X/[]
Weight Class 5 (Withdrawal time = 1.4)
63214 O/^/X/[]
41236 O/^/X/[]
Weight Class 6 (Withdrawal time = 1.6)
63214 6 O/^/X/[]
41236 4 O/^/X/[]
Total = 68 Possible Items
Pt. 1
Originally Written: August 16, 2012
Initially Posted: March 03, 2013
Last Edited: January 06, 2014
Pt. 2&3
Originally Written: February 28, 2014
Initially Posted: March 2, 2014
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