GamerNode: Reviews - Zeno Clash

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• Zeno Clash
• PC
• ACE Team
• Valve Software
• April 21st, 2009

What really carries the experience is the world design. It's like stepping into a nightmare sequence from a Cronenberg film, or right into a Dali painting. Angular architecture defying you to look at it, weird yet disturbingly familiar characters and animals, strange plants with claw-like branches and almost animal-like properties, it all combines for a world that follows no logic other than its own, breath-taking in beauty and consistent enough to remain believable as a whole.

While the game may lack the graphics of a current-gen AAA, it more than makes up for it in pure strength of design, and puts many if not all of the recent top-level games to shame in its originality and quality. Heck, it bares comparison only to the likes of Planescape: Torment and Sanitarium in how well it pulls off a beautiful, weird world. The game is worth playing purely for the experience of its weird world, and it's not until the last quarter or so when you backtrack through the same old locations and enemies that the roller coaster ride lets up.

You explore the world in a linear romp of a story, tracking through set fights and non-branching corridors, though the game does a good job of making you forget about how linear it is and making the world feel more open than it really is. There's two storylines you play through, one being memories of the events leading up to the game's start, and the other being the story of the main character, Ghat, and his companion, Deadra, fleeing the scene of Ghat's crime. The story revolves around Father-Mother, the androgynous progenitor of an entire clan of brothers and sisters. As the story progresses, you are introduced to a picking of elements of the world, Zenozoik, from the Corwids of the Free who roam the forest near the city, to the rarely traversed desert and the darkness beyond it.

It's a fascinating string of ideas, and the main plotline itself is good enough even if it does leave a few too many things unexplained. But where it sadly falls apart is presentation, which ranges from ok to the painfully amateurish. It's not just that the voice acting never goes above passable (and often falls below the acceptable), a consequence of it being done by the team itself, but the writing just isn't very good. It feels like you're reading the cliff notes of a mediocre translation of Master and Margarita - the ideas are there, the layers of meaning and the possibility of philosophical and political depth exist, but they're just not there in the game itself. The English isn't broken, but it doesn't flow naturally in a way that pleases the ear. The voice-overs don't grate (much), but nor do they really entice.

The Corwids of the Free are a sad example of this. This clan (if they can be called that) are an expression of Aristotelean/Ramana Maharshi self-realization an extreme of the idea that happiness and fulfillment comes from realizing your potential, pushing it far enough to disregard society's standards and morals. For the Corwids this potential often takes the form of a single action, whether it be walking in a straight line or believing you need to be invisible and - for that reason - removing the eyes of everyone who sees you. Fascinating stuff potentially, and the character design is there both in ideas and in visuals, but when you reach this point in the plot and Ghat drones his mediocre lines in a boring, non-committal voice, it takes an effort to see the potential, the game itself certainly not helping you along.

It's a slight down note on a great accomplishment. It pulls off an original combat system well, and created an incredible, novel game world. Through heavily reusing character models and other art assets in well-paced levels, Ace Team shows a finesse in design that overcomes many budgetary shortcomings, it is only the story presentation where it catches up with them.

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