Fat Ninja

I can vividly recall my first survival-horror experience. My buddy Greg had picked up a copy of Capcom’s Resident Evil for the Playstation, and neither of us had a clue as to what was in store for us. From the introduction movie, we got a rough sketch of what it was all about, but it wasn’t until rounding the corner on that first zombie feasting on a human corpse that either of us really recognized how pivotal a point in gaming we had reached.

Fast-forward to nearly 10-years later and you’ll find Capcom’s formula not only intact, but also slightly evolved. Minor changes to gameplay mechanics and vastly improved visuals have kept the genre fresh, but there hasn’t been too much venturing off the beaten path. Take, for instance, Sega’s survival-horror piece for the Xbox 360, Condemned: Criminal Origins. As the first next-generation offering in the genre, Condemned offers a harrowing and nerve-wracking glimpse of the future of survival-horror.

I should begin by filling you in on Condemned’s storyline. You play as Agent Ethan Thomas, a criminal investigator for the FBI. As the game opens, you find yourself at a crime scene in an abandoned apartment complex. Accompanied by local law enforcement, you begin your investigation of the scene. Using your forensics equipment, you begin collecting evidence and sending it digitally to a Bureau counterpart, Rosa, who is at the lab ready to provide detailed analysis of the data.

Clues begin to indicate that the murder is the work of serial killer referred to as the Matchmaker by the law enforcement community. As you continue examining evidence, you find that the killer is still at the scene, and in an effort to capture him, you split with the two local cops to cover more ground. Before long, you find yourself pitted against a host of  psychotic squatters, all of whom are the unfortunate victims of a new drug epidemic that has been sweeping through the city’s dark underbelly.

When you manage to catch up with the killer, you find yourself at his mercy and the barrell of your own sidearm. As he rants about how much you have in common with him, the two cops you were with enter the room, demanding the perp drop his weapon. But when the killer shoots both officers and throws you out the third-floor window, things suddenly become a great deal more difficult for Ethan Thomas. Sought for the murders of two police officers, you’re an agent on the lam, desperately trying to prove your innocence and bring the killer to justice. But the closer you get to the truth, the less you want to find it.

This plot unravels quite rapidly, and while it offers some interesting twists and turns, it generates more questions than it does answers. One can assume (hope) from the way the game ends that these answers might be found in a sequel. Nonetheless, the plot-holes are fairly easy to forgive when you consider the intense gaming experience offered by Condemned. Following a similar formula that pits you against an onslaught of murderous foes, Condemned offers all of the classic elements of its genre. However, it also offers a step up from many of its predecessors.

The most influential difference in Condemned’ is the implementation of a first-person perspective. In the past, a combination of the third-person perspective and fixed camera angles was used to limit peripheral vision and generate a suspenseful experience.  Breaking this mold, Condemned’s first-person perspective not only adds a very palpable tension, but it fully immerses the player in the game’s dark, macabre world. Other cool effects magnify the immersive nature of the perspective, in particular the fact that you will “see red” in the form of the pulsating veins  when struck by a foe.

Working in perfect symmetry with the first-person perspective, litter strewn tenements of Condemned’s urban environments are brought to eerie life through the use of photorealistic textures and a calculated placement of light sources. Some of the locales look so real you can almost smell the refuse at your avatar’s feet.

But it’s really the careful use of lighting that makes Condemned so haunting and edgy. Countless shadows simply swallow the light of your character’s flashlight, offering safe haven for the many drug-crazed lunatics who want nothing more than to descend upon your hapless being and serve up a savage beating with whatever object (blunt or otherwise) they can lay hand to.

While you’ll seldom have a firearm on hand to dispatch your assailants, you’ll find that Agent Thomas is pretty handy with just about any form of weapon he comes across, be it the arm off of a mannequin or the blade off of a paper-cutter. Combat is far from varied in its execution, but it nonetheless remains entertaining to bludgeon the hordes of ultra-violent social dregs that literally pour out of the woodwork to beat you to death. While the swing-and-repeat formula is not entirely taxing on an intellectual level, the challenge comes in finding the right weapon for the job and timing your blocks successfully.

Final Thoughts

In closing, I just want to say that Condemned is the most intense gaming experience I’ve had to date. I’ve never really played a game that actually had me stalling outside of an unopened door. Nor have I walked away from a gaming session with a lingering sense of fear and apprehension. I mean, I remember the night that I beat it, after playing through the last level I took the dogs out for a walk, and as I was walking through the park I just couldn’t shake this paranoid feeling that at any moment some bloody-faced hobo was going to charge out of the woods with a fire-axe over his head. Maybe I’m just easily frightened, but I have to hand it to the developers for putting together such a hauntingly visceral survival-horror experience.

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