Critique: Enslaved, Odyssey to the West

*Spoilers ahead!* Since I am talking about how the story works, I obviously have to talk about specific things that happen.

I must say, Enslaved is a pretty game. It’s nice to see that the artists found colors other than gray, brown and gray-brown to paint their post apocalyptic world with. Often times while playing I would find myself stopping to just gaze out upon the game world, even while other characters yelled at me to save them from killer robots. But Enslaved didn’t sell itself on the artwork alone; instead it’s one of those games where the developers decided to emphasize the story as the main selling point. A well fairly well placed bet as it turns out, but like drivers going 45 mph on the freeway there are a number of elements within the story that seem to hold everything back.

Character Rundown:

–     Monkey: Player character. Starts off as a loner who jumps and swings around like a monkey, hence his name. Gets enslaved by Trip, hence the name of the game.

–     Trip: The girl who enslaves Monkey to help her get back home and later exact revenge. Tends to be insecure, remorseful and cry a bit. Also pretty selfish in retrospect. She’s also the tech person because honestly, what else could she do?

–     Pigsy: A hilarious, squat, fat man with a grappling hook arm and a piggish looking robot nose. Has a crush on Trip and initially tries to get Monkey killed due to it. Later he finds his true love, piloting a gigantic super mech. Unfortunately he dies when he self destructs the mech.

–     Pyramid: For 99% of the game you think it’s an organization or something. Then you find out in the epilogue that it’s one guy. Basically he’s like the robots from The Matrix, enslaves people against their will and plugs them into a virtual world. Doesn’t use people for power though.

 

It’s somewhat into the future where mankind has fulfilled every crazy prophet’s fondest wish, and managed to blast itself to smithereens. In fact, it’s so far into the future that Mother Nature has started to reclaim her turf and now trees grow out of skyscrapers while sewers once filled with alligators have transformed into rivers or waterfalls. Some humans are still alive and running around, but things are obviously kind of cruddy for them. For one thing, the world is filled with active killer robots (called Mechs in-game) leftover from the war. Plus some humans have gone back to the bad old days of enslaving one another. Enslaved starts with Monkey having been caught by some slavers and stuck on one of their flying ships. Trip has also been captured, but breaks free and causes havoc, allowing Monkey to escape. They both escape on the same escape pod, with Trip inside it and Monkey hanging on for dear life. When Monkey wakes up he finds that Trip has stuck a slave collar on his head and can now control him if she wants. Monkey is very unhappy about this. Trip wants Monkey to take her home, and he complies with little coercion beyond a single (rather painful) brain zap. So off they go.

 

As one might expect, Trip is rather annoying as a character. She attracts attention from killer robots, whines, cries, puts Monkey in harm’s way on a continual basis. Oh, and she enslaved Monkey against his will and set it up so that if she dies Monkey dies, there’s that too. Yet I can’t help but feel that she is a very ‘human’ character. A lot of video game characters suffer from the same problem, that they don’t seem like they could exist outside of their video game. They frequently come across as too shallow, violent, stupid and/or boring to seem like they could so much as go to the grocery store to pick up a carton of milk or hold a non-combat related conversation. I could see Trip as a normal, if irksome, person. She has logical moments of weakness within the game, such as when she totally freaks out and breaks down after finding out her home is destroyed and her dad is dead, which helps her believability. Whereas most video game characters would just yell a bit and then shrug it off with some pummeling. Her actions throughout the game in regards to enslaving Monkey make sense, she’s just a skinny girl who cannot possibly fight the Mechs and Pyramid alone with Monkey being really her only way to get home/exact revenge. Trip and Pigsy are probably the most ‘human’ characters I’ve seen recently in a game, the odd ones out are Pyramid and Monkey.

 

Pyramid doesn’t show up for real until the epilogue (talk about fashionably late) so I won’t talk about him until the end of my article. Monkey on the other hand is the very first character we see, but also the most confusingly developed. Supposedly the name ‘Monkey’ isn’t his real name at all, it’s just what people call him because he spends all of his time living alone out in the wastelands. But his character doesn’t reflect this at all. If the game didn’t explicitly tell me this I would have never guessed he used to live alone. He is perfectly civil with Trip and after the first cutscene, completely empathetic and supportive of her. Yes, at times he does speak harshly with her but it’s always in a kind of ‘big brother’ or ‘supportive but tough boyfriend’ kind of way. I don’t get a ‘wild man of the wilderness’ vibe from him, he’s just too…clean. Clean is probably the best way to put it. He knows exactly the right things to say at the right time, and is far too nurturing for someone who supposedly has near zero experience with people beyond trading for food/weapons or whatever. Yet, in combat Monkey acts like a blood thirsty lunatic. He smashes apart robots with primal yells and an expression on his face that an angry cage fighter would get if you told them you burned down their dog house, with their dog still in it. His violent in-game attitude seems to have absolutely no bleed over into his dialogue or cutscene actions. Yet the game continually likes remind us that Monkey is supposed to be tough, dangerous and independent.

 

Which brings me to my next issue with Monkey, namely his complacency with being enslaved. When he first wakes up with the collar on his head he takes it rather poorly and tries to attack Trip. This completely makes sense, especially considering that during his escape from the slave ship Monkey saw a slave get their brain melted by their slave collar after disobeying an order. However, after Trip stops Monkey he seems to just accept his enslavement. Why?! He lived in the wilds as free as could be, he didn’t even have a name he was so free and disconnected from society! Now when it’s forced upon him under pain of death he just accepts it without so much as a “you’re a jerk, take it off my head.” I just don’t buy that he could be totally and instantly ok with being enslaved after one failed attempt at freedom. Even the most complacent of dogs kept by the nicest of masters will attempt to push the boundaries of their confinement. You see them try to tunnel under fences, or test how loud they can bark until someone tells them to keep quiet. Monkey metaphorically does none of this. He should have at least verbally challenged Trip instead of instantly agreeing with her all of the time. As it stands, he was very boring as a character.

 

As for the plot itself, it’s alright. The first half of the game where it’s just Trip and Monkey running around is, well, dull. Nothing of note happens other than finding out that Trip’s home was destroyed by Pyramid. It isn’t unexpected however; Monkey tells Trip very early on that ‘if you were caught, they know where you live’ so it isn’t a surprise for the player when they find out that yeah, Trip’s home is ruined. The story only really gets interesting when Pigsy shows up. Pigsy is a great addition and should have showed up far earlier in the game. Trip works as a character but is annoying, and Monkey is boring and obedient. Together they aren’t very interesting. Pigsy helps stir things up by pushing Monkey’s buttons and very obviously hitting on Trip. Plus he’s pretty vulgar and funny so it keeps the game from turning into a melodramatic show staring little girl and beef boy. Pigsy also helps in that he’s just serious enough of a character that the player starts to respect him (or at least sympathies with him) despite the fact that he doesn’t really do a whole lot to help you, and even tries to get you killed a few times. But that’s just part of his piggish charm.

 

Then there’s the epilogue, where essentially a whole new story gets dumped on you. Here you learn that Pyramid was really just some pre-war guy who was enslaving people against their will so that he could show them home movies of his past life with his family. Gameplay wise Monkey has been randomly experiencing images from Pyramid’s life up to this point but Monkey always waved it off as the slave collar malfunctioning. Now Monkey wants to turn off Pyramid, but Pyramid tells Monkey to ‘just give the videos a try’, so Monkey does and Trip gets jealous that Monkey seems to like the videos and kills Pyramid herself. Trip then wonders if she did the right thing as the slaves start to wake up from their slave collar induced alternate reality, roll credits.

 

It’s interesting, but very strangely placed. In retrospect I feel that the writer of Enslaved wanted the player to draw parallels between how Trip enslaves Monkey and how Pyramid enslaves pretty much everyone else. This would make the ending more morally ambiguous, which I am sure about, as the last thing you hear is Trip saying “did I do the right thing?” But, this doesn’t work as well as the author had hoped. For one thing Pyramid is depicted as far too evil to ever be viewed as sympathetic. He flat out states that he enslaves people against their will, murders anyone else who gets in the way and even controls some of the Mechs that are out killing people seemingly indiscriminately. Hell, he states that one of his reasons for ‘collecting’ people is that there are Mechs out in the real world…despite possibly controlling said Mechs. So I guess he is both the cause of and solution to all of life’s problems within the Enslaved world. No real sympathy points there. Trip also cannot really be viewed as evil. Sure, she’s kind of a jerk if you think about it but in game she is always portrayed as an eternal victim. Her dad dies, her friends die, her home gets ruined, she’s scared most of the time, the list goes on. Only her enslavement of Monkey and her thirst for vengeance could be seen as negative, but since Monkey always agrees with her these points are rendered moot.

 

My Creative Changes

 

I am going to assume that Enslaved was going for a morally ambiguous ending, and these are my thoughts towards making more so.

 

Monkey needs some depth and dirt. Like I said earlier, he is far too clean for his role. Monkey needs to be very unhappy (at least initially) with his enslavement. He needs to say the wrong things from time to time, and occasionally be selfish or even hostile. This doesn’t mean that Monkey has to be a Clint Eastwood-esque badass (as awesome as that huge change would be), he just needs to have some rough edges. After hearing him talk the player should sometimes feel like putting a smile on their face and their hands on their hips while saying “Oh Monkey, you socially inept jerk.”  Later he can grow to like Trip, but it has to be gradual.

 

Trip also needs some villainous elements. It would also help if the start of the game was not quite so slow as well. So how about this, instead of having Trip enslaving Monkey to go home, have it so that her home is already destroyed prior to the start of the game and have her enslave Monkey specifically to get her out of the city and exact her revenge on Pyramid. Her actions are still sort of understandable, but far more morally ambiguous all without needing extra game time to explain it. She would be literally using Monkey as a tool instead of as a guide which is how it works now. Again, like Monkey she doesn’t have to be evil or anything. Trip could still act the same way she does now. It’s just that the player will not trust her quite as much initially and be willing to sympathize more with Monkey’s plight. As Monkey gets used to Trip the player would as well since the player and Monkey would have started off with the same mistrustful opinion of her.

 

Speaking of opinions, one facet of the game that really rubbed me the wrong way was how Pyramid was characterized. If you are going to have a specific, external antagonist you need to set up early on how the player should feel about them. Up until the second to last level I was completely confused over what Pyramid was. I couldn’t figure out if it was a band of mercenaries, a cult, or just the name of a corporation that built the Mechs before the war. It’s hard to be focused on the story when I keep replaying the same question of ‘who the hell is the antagonist?’ in my head over and over again. As I write this I still have no idea who controls the Mechs. Whenever you encounter Mechs in game the characters will sometimes refer to them as just “Mechs” and other times as “Pyramid Mechs”. In both cases the Mech’s act and look exactly the same so I never really knew who the heck I was pummeling. If the game wants us to take a vested interest in the character’s struggle against Pyramid the antagonist, you really need to give it a proper introduction. Just because the characters act like they know who the antagonist is doesn’t mean the audience does. We need to ‘see’ or experience what the antagonist does, that way the audience can form opinions about the antagonist and start building up emotions towards them. And when your main selling point is the story, you really have to make people feel some kind of emotion. Frustration doesn’t count.