In Third Person

The next game up on my list of pick-ups from Blockbuster’s epic closing down sales is Enslaved: Odyssey to the West. As with Split/Second and Vanquish before it, Enslaved is another one of those games that was critically acclaimed but a commercial flop. To be honest, I had little interest in this game until the positive word-of-mouth hit, though only enough to buy it on the cheap.

As I work my way through this stash of games in this category, it kind of makes me feel bad to know that I could have made a difference if I bought these brand new when they first came out, as the odds of any of these games getting a sequel are slim-to-none. To be fair, I’m not made of money, and it’s unreasonable to expect me to pay full price for everything. Anyway, this is quickly going into a tangent. Let’s talk about Enslaved based on its own merits.

In Enslaved: Journey to the West, you, a guy by the name of Monkey, find yourself on a flying slave ship headed for a colony. However, the ship crashes, and you find yourself in what remains of New York City. As you wake up from the crash, you’re woken up by Trip, the girl on the slave ship who attached a slave-monitoring device to your head. She needs your help to get home, which is 300 miles away. In exchange, she grants you your freedom. While it seems like Monkey has no reason to help, there’s a catch. That slave-monitoring device ensures that she can kill you if you don’t obey her command, and if she dies, you die too. All said, you have no choice but to help Trip get home.

One neat note about the story is that it’s actually based on Journey to the West, which is one of the four great classical novels of Chinese literature. It’s influenced a number of different pieces of fiction, including the original Dragonball series. Your main character’s name is directly lifted from the original tale, though the staff he fights with, the ‘cloud’ he rides on and other major story beats come back to that original tale.

As you progress through Enslaved, you’ll experience the growth of Monkey and Trip’s relationship. Experiencing that development reminded me a lot of the 2008 Prince of Persia game, where the Prince and Elica formed a bond as they went on their quest to save the world. Monkey and Trip have a similar dynamic, as their relationship grows beyond the initial slave and slave master dynamic. What makes experiencing this enjoyable are all of the gameplay and story hooks that bring these two together. By the end of the game, you’ll feel very invested in the relationship they’ve forged.

Speaking of the gameplay, that relationship plays a big part of your actual experience throughout. Monkey and Trip have complementary abilities, which they’ll need to use in tandem to get from one place to another. There’s a constant back-and-forth between the two characters, which makes the adventuring interesting.

Though the game does a good job of providing context for each section of the game, the gameplay seams clearly show through. You’re essentially placed in a challenge area, you work as a team to get through it, and then you proceed to the next challenge. The game carries this same structure from beginning to end, which is going to wear thin on some people. For me, I thought they added enough context and different scenarios to make it interesting, but this isn’t for everyone.

Along your travels, you’ll come across a number of different obstacles, from rough terrain, to puzzles in need of solving, to boss battles with giant robots. While the game draws much influence from the 2008 Prince of Persia game, it’s combat and traversal elements feel a lot more like a mash-up of God of War and Uncharted. If you were to look at the game and scrutinize each of it’s gameplay components, you could knock it for not having combat that’s as good as God of War, or traversal as good as Uncharted. Depending on your perspective, you may find the game’s structure a bit repetitive as well. However, as a whole, I think that the gameplay, story and characters tie together to make a worthwhile experience.

As a means of limiting the amount of times you die from life-ending jumps, the game has removed your ability to do so. How this works, is that Monkey can only jump in designated places and he’ll never miss a jump between those points. If you try to jump off a ledge that you shouldn’t, Monkey will stop himself before taking a leap of faith.

Some people will hate the fact that they’ve taken some control out of your hands. Personally, I love the fact that I did not die over a missed jump, because that would have happened often if Monkey listened to me and decided to make all of those potentially stupid jumps. You can still very much die off of a jump if the platform you’re on collapses or something like that. However, the game makes it clear to you when a jump is risky.

If you missed out on Enslaved the first time around, I couldn’t whole-heartedly recommend this to just anyone. As much as I enjoyed it for its great characters, good story and fun adventuring, there are some fundamental game design choices and frame-rate issues here that will not jive with some players. My gut says that if you consider yourself a fan of the action adventure genre or games with interesting character development, then I think Enslaved is very much worth a look on the cheap. I’m glad to have experienced Enslaved for myself, and I hope Namco takes a chance on a sequel. With some polish, I think an Enslaved sequel has the potential to be great.