So I decided that I'm going to be a little more dedicated to this blog this year, and I figure the best way to go about this is to start out with something that I wrote approximately six months ago. So without further ado, I give to you my review of no one's favorite Xbox game (no, not even for ironic reasons):

            These days, there’s a lot of emphasis on Indie games. Indie games allow for small groups of people to put their heart and soul into whatever they’re doing and create unique, beautiful experiences. Games like Limbo, Bastion and Dear Esther have proven to be the cream of the metaphorical crop. That being said—as anyone who’s ever listened to Jim Sterling’s most recent stuff will tell—being indie doesn’t automatically make you a clever hipster who fights convention. For every genre-defining Braid, there are half-a-dozen Day One: Garry’s Incidents, Earth: Year 2066, and bullshit flappy bird knockoff. Just as not all indie films are genuinely good, so are all indie games. I bring this up because I’ve recently been playing “Dead Lights,” a game which rips off several other games, with only shitty writing and shittier voice acting to show for it. Frankly, a more appropriate title would’ve been “Generic Mediocrity: the Game.”

            So here’s how I envision the creator of DeadLights going into his, or her—because suckiness knows no gender--“opus”: “well I just spent $100 on a copy of Microsoft game studios, but I have the imagination of a lobotomized monkey. How do I make my money back? Well, let’s see what’s popular on Xbox Live: Walking Dead, Limbo, and Shadow Complex. I know! I’ll combine the shooting and generic white dude—because god-forbid I create anything original for my first gaming outing—from Shadow Complex, the dark and dreary atmosphere, puzzle-platforming, and arbitrary inability to swim from Limbo, minus the German-Expressionist inspired surrealism, and setting from Walking dead, minus the racial/age/gender diversity. Oh and voice acting, because even though my writing is worse than the combined efforts of Stephanie Meyer and E.L. James, it’ll be way more legit if I have voice actors. I’m sure my friends down at the local community college would love a spare five bucks plus pizza. Professional voice actors are overrated, anyway. Alright now for the plot: To the online Plot Generator!”

            As you may have guessed, after having played through the majority of the game, I’m not exactly impressed. That being said: let me get this out of the way: yes, the aesthetics are pretty damned decent. And yes, the controls work just fine. That being said, those aesthetics and controls don’t exactly gel with the rest of the story.

            Here’s the thing about 2D plat-forming: it doesn’t exactly work with the whole “Zombie apocalypse” setting. 2D plat-forming is at it’s best when it’s slightly cartoony, either due to the limitations of the technology or plain old aesthetic choice. Limbo is dark as hell, yeah, but the whole thing has this very German expressionist feel, which already bordered the weird. Dead Lights on the other hand  is supposed to take place in the real world, and last time I checked, there’s no way in hell one underground hobo can create an entire labyrinth of traps that reset themselves. This isn’t fucking Indiana Jones here. I thought one of the aspects of the Zombie apocalypse were at least some vague pretentions to gritty realism. At the very least the puzzles in Limbo had a sort of disturbing edge to them. Any moment could involve using the corpses of fellow children to swim across a river or using the very spider that had been hunting you as just another box to climb over. The closest we get to that in Dead Light is tricking zombies into traps, and they’re not even your undead comrades.

            As for the story, well let’s play a little drinking game: I’m going to describe the plot and every cheesy videogame/zombie apocalypse cliché you come across, take a drink. If you’re not drunk one paragraph in, you clearly need play more videogames and/or watch more zombie movies. So the world has succumbed to the zombie—in this version called “shadows,” which only makes sense because everything is nice and contrasty—apocalypse has happened. You play as Randy, a survivor out to save his friends and family— and incidentally the latter group might as well have “bad shit happened to us” taped to their backs if only based on those arbitrary little trips down nostalgia lane we experience every other scene. Along the way, you’ll encounter a sewer level which is a good third of the game, run by the blandest crazy old man I’ve ever seen, as well as, naturally, a group of rogue humans who have decided that the zombie apocalypse is the perfect opportunity to act like complete psychos despite the need for man-kind to stick together, and a military which has gone bat-crap crazy “containing” the virus. Oh and you save two people in total, one of whom dies in the middle of piloting a helicopter, and the other is a young woman who almost gets raped but Randy saves her—in cut-scene no less, because god-forbid anything interesting happen gameplay wise.

            Don’t get me wrong. The aforementioned setup—as clichéd as it is—would be decent in the hands of some decent voice actors and decent writers. Even if it hasn’t been proven time and again that the zombie apocalypse can be an effective setting for everything from deep reflections on how far people are willing to go to survive (see 28 Days Later  and Walking Dead) to social satire (see Dawn of the Dead and the first two Dead Rising games), to paraphrase Movie Bob, “you can make a good story about anything.” That being said, it isn’t the set-up that kills this story, but, like most bad stories, the execution. As mentioned before the voice-acting is… mediocre at best. Randy is constantly making bland statements pointing out the obvious like he has some sort of disability that makes it necessary to say things in order to process them. If you’re going to pull that sort of crap, at least do it in a way that tells us a bit about the character as a whole (see the chronicles of Riddick games)—Batman in the Arkham games only got away with it because he’s Batman and you’d hardly expect him to be waxing philosophic while taking down thugs or solving environmental puzzles. The Rat—the aforementioned inventive sewer hobo—has to have the most boring voice for a guy whose supposed to be so eccentric and insane that his own son ran away from him. And then there’s the girl you rescue near the end. Seeing as how you rescue her, you’re forced to escort her. That’s right, the last half-hour of this puppy’s an escort mission, because the game hasn’t bothered taking any risks up to that point, so why should it bother giving us a climactic ending? If that wasn’t bad enough, she manages the impossible task of making the Ashley RE4 seem like Elizabeth from Bioshock Infinite by comparison. I swear, if I hear “Randy! Shadows!” Or “Randy! Soldiers!” one more time, I’m gonna gouge someone’s eyes out, preferably the developer’s.

            Despite the last thousand words or so, though, the game isn’t that bad. The plat-forming works and the aiming system works well with the setting. That being said, if you are going to buy a downloadable game, there are an endless supply of better ones to spend your hard-earned cash on, such as “Shadow Complex,” “Limbo” or one of the episodes of “Walking Dead.” Hell, Goat or Surgeon Simulator would be better uses of money than "Dead Light," or as I've come to refer to it, “Generic Mediocrity: the Game.” At least some genuine imagination went into those last two.