Let’s go for gaming memories in June 2016, 2011, 2006 and 2001.
You are reading What We Played, a monthly column where we remember which games came out exactly five, ten, fifteen and twenty years ago. In the June issue, we try to survive in the conditions of a classic horror movie, sharpen the Eastern knife in Wonderland, run as fast as we can from City 17 and save the world in the company of a talking planet.
5 years ago – Dead by Daylight
The first anniversary this June celebrated Dead by daylight – asymmetric multiplayer horror movie simulator. The essence of the gameplay will be clear to everyone who has watched at least a few horror movies in their lives: here is an ominous location (swamp, mental hospital, laboratory, old farm, and so on), here are four survivors who are trying to escape from a maniac who is following on their heels. The task of the survivors is to start the generators and escape into the opened exit from the map, the task of the killer is to chase them and eliminate them one by one.
For five years the game Behavior Interactive came a long way: on release there were only three assassins and four survivors, and the balance was skewed. It was much easier to win playing as a maniac with traps or a chainsaw than on behalf of the Ghost, who simply disappears into invisibility, and for some heroes, “invincible” builds were quickly found. There were also plenty of other typical indie problems: bugs, lags and an abundance of loopholes for cheaters, for the influx of which the studio was not ready. Some of these shortcomings of the project, the developers have not gotten rid of to this day, but still it is impossible to deny the huge progress of the game compared to its own version of 2016. There are now 24 killers, 27 survived, and the roster includes not only faceless archetypal butchers and their victims, but also characters from famous horror franchises: Freddy Krueger, Pyramid Head, Demogorgon from “Stranger Things”, the masked assassin from “Scream” and even Nemesis from Resident evil… New maps and heroes are added to the game every few months with the release of paid and free (but mostly paid) DLC, and this, in turn, provides Dead by Daylight with almost permanent popularity on Twitch: streamers regularly return to the game. to show the audience new curiosities. And the gameplay in the face of such a variety of content and skills of the characters has become much deeper than it was at the start – now almost any player will choose a hero for his own style of play, and matches are becoming more and more variable every year.
Another thing is that a significant share of all this content is available only for money: you can, of course, earn in-game currency to buy licensed characters, but at a snail’s speed, which also requires a huge investment of time. In addition, Dead by Daylight boasts a rather toxic community: cheating tactics and the inevitable insults in chat rooms are still in use. But the fans of the game are not diminishing – while some are shouting that Friday the 13th: The Game better in almost everything, others call Dead by Daylight perhaps the most fun and unique title of all PvP hits in recent years. Whose side are you on?
Dead by Daylight perfectly recreates the culmination of almost any slasher film: when the audience is already entertained with scenes of abundant bloodletting, and it comes to a denouement. The surviving heroes found their way to salvation. They already know what exactly needs to be done in order to escape from the maniac and return home, saving all the limbs. But the ruthless killer is on his heels. Minutes decide everything. The story is about to end. The audience froze in suspense.
It is these feelings that the game conveys exactly, and even allows you to look at the situation from a different angle – from the person of the killer. And everything would be fine, except that the “magic” dissipates very quickly.
10 years ago – Alice: Madness Returns
Ten years in June equaled the last (hopefully not in life, but who knows) the full-fledged game of American McGee – Alice: Madness Returns, a sequel to his 2000 hit. For many, it is she, and not the original American McGee’s Alice, became the first acquaintance with the dark game universe based on “Alice in Wonderland”… Everything that Carroll presented as harmless fruits of childhood fantasy turns into a nightmare in McGee’s iteration, where rivers of blood flow through Wonderland, the Queen of Hearts lives in a meat castle, and Alice herself wields a huge knife, trying to separate her true memories from ideas that imposed on her by the manipulative psychiatrist Angus Bambi.
A unique visual style and an exciting (no matter how primitive it may be) plot with an abundance of mysterious phrases thrown by all heroes, without exception, ensured Alice: Madness Returns popularity for many years – but more as a phenomenon of mass culture than as a game by itself. yourself. No matter how genius McGee the artist was, McGee the game designer was hopelessly stuck in the early 2000s: the awkward platforming and swaying action that were appropriate in American McGee’s Alice (and in many ways also worked better in the 2000 game), ten years later seemed already obviously rudimentary – and the developer did not really suggest anything new. Nevertheless, you can still admire the perverse beauty of this universe: the stylized graphics still look decent, and the ominous soundtrack instantly immerses you in the atmosphere of a scary fairy tale for adults. And if annoying mobs and monotonous battles get on your nerves too much, you can always lower the difficulty and dress Alice in one of the bonus dresses that simplify the passage.
McGee’s new play is still a celebration of outstanding art style. On both sides of reality, everything seems warped, dirty, hopelessly spoiled, but at the same time frighteningly beautiful. The author again puts on surrealism and intricate designs hanging in the air in the style of the first part, but this does not mean that his imagination has become scarce. It is full of new images. So, the harbinger of the death of Wonderland is a huge infernal train, which is trying to catch up with Alice throughout the game. The usual characters have also changed: the Mad Hatter has turned into a huge cyborg, which we collect in parts, and the Mouse-Sonya and the March Hare suddenly turn out to be industrialist dictators who are trying to stop Alice with a combat robot.
15 years ago – Half-Life 2: Episode One
Fast forward even further into the past – in 2006, when the regular release of new parts (even if not numbered) Half-life was taken for granted, while Valve there were big plans for the rapid development of the series. June 1, 2006 came out Half-Life 2: Episode One – a four-hour plot continuation of the second part, designed to start a chain of three “episodes” on which the studio had high hopes at that moment. Already then large single projects began to lose popularity among large developers. Due to the growing competition in the industry and rapid technological progress, they took more and more time and money, and the risks became higher: the more months you spend polishing the next long action, the more chances that it will become outdated by the time it is released. With the sacred series Half-Life, this, of course, could not be allowed: on the contrary, it always set trends, and did not catch up with them. So Valve made a choice in favor of episodes – they say, they are made much faster and are cheaper, and players will probably enjoy short new chapters once a year more than always waiting for one big sequel (who would have thought).
The plot of the “First episode” started exactly after the end of the second part: Gordon Freeman and Alix Vance had to urgently get out of City 17, which was about to explode. Several hours of this escape proved to be much more intense than some fragments of the original Half-life 2: locations were rapidly changing, the battles were kept in suspense (Alix also grew wiser as a combat partner), puzzles demanded to think quickly, and bright plot moments followed one after another. But the final battle with a single strider disappointed many: in HL2 we already mowed them down in batches.
A year and a half later, in the fall of 2007, this chapter was followed by Episode Two, which turned out to be even better, although it ended at the most interesting place. But the grandiose third episode, which was supposed to complete the story, began to be postponed indefinitely: by that time, the studio was already head over heels into development. Left 4 dead… What happened next, you yourself know. New hope for the revival of the series was given to the players only in 2023, when Half-Life: Alyx in VR. But this is still a prequel – but whether we will ever wait for a real sequel is unknown: Valve is allergic to the number 3.
Episode One is, without question, the best addon in the history of the series. Half-Life is still an exemplary action game that you can and should be equal to.
At the same time, it is clearly seen that both Half-Life 2 and Episode One were no longer developed by fans of their craft, but simply by professionals. Experienced, skillful – but nothing more. The first part of Half-Life became a masterpiece in large part because it was made by real madmen. Many of them had no experience, individual levels were simulated in just a few hours (you can read more about this in the book Half-Life 2: Raising the Bar), but thanks to overwhelming enthusiasm, the game turned out exactly as we all know it. Half-Life 2 and Episode One were created by the same people, but in eight years they were rather tired of the series and lost their former enthusiasm.
This explains why Valve is sticking to the old formula so stubbornly. Throughout the game, we do not hear a single sound from Freeman, we observe scripted videos exclusively from the first person, and instead of a normal plot, we are again offered a game of riddles – the whole story of Episode One fits into the description that we gave at the beginning of the article. The music sounds, God forbid, in two or three places, although it has long been known that the soundtrack copes with forging the right atmosphere better than anything else (see Metal Gear Solid or, well, we don’t know, the same Silent Hill). The reason for this behavior of the developers is quite obvious: they are simply afraid to do something wrong, because they seem to no longer have the former instinct. And this is just the saddest thing.
20 years ago – Anachronox
And twenty years on June 27th Anachronox – the same game Ion storm (in the same place, we recall, we made the first two Deus Ex) that no one knows about. It’s a pity: this is perhaps the only one of its kind … American JRPG. Project Director Tom Hall, before the start of its development, managed to work on Wolfenstein 3d and Doom – it would seem, how much further from the story-oriented role-playing. But by the mid-nineties, Japanese RPGs like Chrono trigger and Final Fantasy – they just conquered Hall. Therefore, having founded with his former colleague from id Software John Romero’s new studio, Ion Storm, decided to take on a radically new genre for himself and assemble his own turn-based RPG – with cyberpunk, blackjack and chatty robots. Moreover (quite in the spirit of the postmodern spirit that reigned in the 90s), he went from the opposite: he did not emphasize the pathos, epic and impenetrable seriousness of the plot, which most JRPGs then sported, but invented the most absurd, funny and deliberately exaggerated scenario for his future history …
The unlucky private detective Sylvester Buchelli travels the galaxy in a gonzo style: he gets completely involved in trouble, thumps recklessly, and in between, he collects eyebrows and partners that seem strange even by the standards of a space opera. In your team, you can take not only a muttering grandfather, who literally poisons opponents with his chatter, but also a retired comic book superhero (yes, comics are alive in this universe), a whole planet (yes, literally a planet) and a talking cursor (yes, a mouse cursor in Anachronox is a separate character). Together they have to save the universe: after all, some of the pillars of the JRPG genre Tom Hall, apparently, decided to keep. At the same time, combat in the game quickly fades into the background – turn-based battles are not that boring or too complicated, but rather monotonous. But everything else boggles the imagination: from black humor and completely wild twists and turns in which the main characters fall, to unexpectedly deep lore, mentally written characters and excellent work of voice actors. The pleasure from passing can be obtained even now, since Anachronox is still available on Steam for some one hundred rubles, and it costs even less on GOG.
So how did it happen that everyone forgot about this masterpiece? To understand this, you need to go a little deeper into the past. After founding Ion Storm in 1996, John Romero took up his Daikatanaand Tom Hall threw all his strength into Anachronox. But here the owner of the most luxurious head of hair in the gaming industry put a pig on a colleague: first, the studio was criticized for scandalous advertising (recall, the Daikatana slogan read “John Romero’s About To Make You His Bitch”), followed by devastating reviews of the game itself. Back in the spring of 1999, the founders had to sell 51% of the studio’s shares to their publisher. Eidos Interactivejust to stay afloat. Anachronox was originally planned to release everything in the same 1999, but after financial problems and a change of engine, transfers followed. As a result, in order to still release the game in 2001, the developers under Hall’s supervision had to crunch 16 hours a day – and then almost half of the planned content was cut from the final version. Fortunately, even in a stripped down form, the game has garnered rave reviews from the press. But sales at the same time left much to be desired: for the entire 2001 in North America, only 20,000 copies were sold. Hall and Romero left Ion Storm shortly thereafter, Eidos closed their Dallas office, and a sequel that could have lifted Anachronox out of oblivion never came to light, although the original’s ending clearly hinted at it.
Eidos itself, by the way, later bought Square enix… Ironically, the same company that once inspired Anachronox now owns the rights to it.
For some, Anachronox has become the game of the year and has sunk into the soul of many. An absolutely incredible, albeit incomplete plot, an amazing study of the universe, inimitable voice acting, great direction, killer humor – you can sing hallelujah for Anachronox endlessly. But the name of the game, translated as “poison from the past”, after the release began to sound like an evil pun. The poison of this turned out to be the outdated Quake II engine, which scared off the bulk of the players. However, those who value in games not the graphics, but first of all the atmosphere and the plot, got a lot of pleasure.
What did you play in June five, ten, fifteen and twenty years ago? Be sure to let us know in the comments.
