Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.
- 132
- 1
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Five years ago I tried playing Deadlight, a side-scrolling puzzle-platformer set during a zombie apocalypse, originally released for the XBox 360 in 2012. The PC port was hopelessly broken and routinely freezed and crashed, so I abandoned it after half an hour.
I was curious if the devs had finally got around to patching it in the interim, so I reinstalled last night and was pleasantly surprised to find not only that they'd done so, but it's surprisingly absorbing and fun, to the point that I played about two-thirds of it in one sitting. At times the graphics are so stylised and the camera zoomed out so far that it can be difficult to discern exactly what you're looking at, resulting in unforeseeable deaths and trial-and-error gameplay, but the checkpoints are distributed so generously I didn't really mind so much. The player character is vulnerable and can easily become overwhelmed if there are more than two or three zombies, leading to moments of panic when you're trying to leg it and hoping your stamina metre will hold out long enough for you to scale a fence to safety. Cracking stuff.
What really lets it down is the writing. I've never really cared for zombie movies as a genre, and even the ostensible pinnacles of the genre rarely seem to transcend their fate as a collection of the same handful of tropes rearranged in subtly different patterns (I recently rewatched 28 Days Later and found that it has major pacing and tonal problems, with a flabby, aimless second act bookended by an iconic opening and strong conclusion; the only reason Train to Busan received the acclaim it did is because of people who want to claim they watch "foreign films" without actually venturing outside of their generic comfort zones; I will grant that Night of the Living Dead is a legitimate classic of indie cinema). But even given this remedial standard, Deadlight falls short, by virtue of being set in the US in the 1980s and yet very clearly having been written by a non-native English speaker who never bothered to ask an American-born person to spot-check his dialogue for idiomatic incongruencies. There's a bit where a character called the Rat Man asks the player character to rescue his son, in exchange for which the Rat Man will help the player character information track down his missing friends, to which the player character replies "an eye for an eye, huh". For fuck's sake — "an eye for an eye" does not mean "quid pro quo".
Update: having now finished it, it was serendipitous that I mentioned 28 Days Later.
More options
Context Copy link