By John Walker on December 18th, 2008 at 2:01 pm.
Zeno Clash looks strange. Good strange, possibly the best kind, but so very weird. Built using Source, it’s an extremely hands-on FPS, with plenty of gruesome melee punching. There’s a new trailer showing this off, below, along with some interesting character art developers ACE sent our way.
Make sure you watch to the very end of this.
Click on these for the full size pages of the character descriptions, and indeed the one at the top.
That looks great.
report
Hooray for something different \o/
report
That’s utterly fantastic.
report
It’ll be worth playing even if it’s rubbish.
report
That looks amazing in a way I can’t quite articulate. I hope it’s as coherently mad as the trailer seems to suggest.
report
Very 1995 PC game-ish
report
The music is shit. Other than that, I feel strangely reminded of eXistenZ.
report
How utterly, utterly bonkers. Not sure about FPS melee gameplay, especially on the source engine. Still, it’s certainly interesting.
report
I’ll pass, the thing at the start looks like Big Bird crossed with the child catcher, individually those two things caused 73% of my childhood nightmares, combined it’ll give me cardiac failure.
report
Looks great, although it’s gonna succeed or fail on the strength of its collision detection – early game or not, fighting seemed a little haphazard at times.
report
Anyone else reminded of PS:Torment by the visuals?
report
Dev interview on the game here: http://playhard.ru/Article.aspx?id=3218
Bonus geek points in their favour: “The first inspiration was a set of game books of the 1980′s; the Sorcery series from Steve Jackson, mainly because of John Blanche’s art.”
report
I believe the phrase is “what the shit?”
I think it could be rather good though. I like the look of this.
report
Oh my.
I hope an RPS interview with whoever, or rather whatever, was responsible for the Father-Mother is on the cards.
report
I love it. So surreal and different. And i am one who don’t play games for their “visual art”! Ass Creed, Far Cry 2 and Prince of Persia have great art, but they are mediocre games.
Still, I am hoping for a good game here.
report
Quoting that Q&A:
“- The story is an intriguing part. The name of your hero is Ghat. What can you say about his character?
- The story of the game revolves around the conflict between Ghat and Father-Mother who is Ghat’s father and mother at the same time. Father-Mother is the hermaphrodite parent of many different children who live in the chaotic city of Halstedom where his family is a powerful clan. Ghat’s brothers and sisters are not all human-like and the story goes through several locations and even timelines where the player will meet and face very strange and unconventional characters.
The reason of conflict between Ghat and his family is something players will see when they play the game. We don’t want to spoil it now. ”
Wow.
report
basically:
Whiskey. Tango. Foxtrot.
report
Even if this is good, consumers will punish the innovation.
report
Firstly I thought “Who the f is this game for?!”, but now I’m actually more interested in a story set in an alternative world. Hope they’ll make a decent one!
report
I’ve no idea what to make of it, but I applaud what they’re trying to do none the less.
report
Hooray for PC Gaming!
report
That. Looks. Awesome.
report
Senethro, just like they punished Portal, right? It all depends if developers explain the rules step by step and if they don’t include some completely illogical stuff.
report
If it’s different, which I hope it is, let’s hope people buy it for a change…
report
I think I like it.
report
Gameplay looks…. bad.
report
WHAT
report
Don’t know, the first trailer was way better. The gameplay looks a bit off, but the environment and characters are fantastic.
report
@GibletHead2000: *raises hand*
report
This game seems to feature a guy who lives on a platform on the back of a really ugly Brachiosaurus-thing where he spends his time throwing para-suicide-bomber-foxes at trespassers. That alone makes it a must have in my books.
report
ok, i’m in.
dark messiah, for all of it’s failings – of which there are many – proved to me that fps melee could be done in an interesting and fluid way beyond TES style slashnanigans.
report
“???????”
That’s all I have to say.
report
Am I really the only one who doesn’t dig the art style? I’ve got nothing against innovation or a fresh, distinct look, but this just isn’t for me, I guess.
report
@GibletHead2000: Absolutely, i was wondering what it reminded me of , PST style written all over it.
report
a wha?
report
I like melee in Source. I thought it was decent enough in Dark Messiah and had room to get even better. I don’t really care what it looks like. A big brown playdough head with twigs in that shoots a gun might as well be a space marine for all the difference it makes to me. It’s all about what’s new in the stuff you actually play. That’s why Portal worked for me. The underlying mecahincs sold it, and the sweet ass styling of the rest just ‘completes’ the game. Pushes it into legend. Same with the first TR. Badass underlying modular mechanics, slick style, character and sense of place on top = legend. If you can’t get the mecahnics right (in this case the fighting) the rest is just window dressing. Window dressing which reminds me of Sacifice though, which is nice. Here’s the thing: I’d rather play yet another WWII shooter but one with some undefined and exceptional mechanics rather than some undefined but amazingly styled game that plays like generic shooter 3. Where do you put the effort?
report
This looks almost exactly like what I envisioned in my head while reading “Imajica” by Clive Barker. It even has that same feeling of whimsical, brightly colored menace that I liked so much about that book.
I assume, however, that this game will have fewer loving depictions of man-on-androgynous blue hermaphrodite sex.
Oh, Clive Barker. If it weren’t for your random, weird, super graphic hardcore sex scenes you’d be my favorite fantasy author.
report
What’s wrong with random, weird, super graphic hardcore sex scenes?
report
The fighting at first looked a bit rubbish since the collision wasn’t really doing anything. I liked the gun play a bit more. This looks like a good world/story i just hope they don’t let it down by the mechanics.
report
@ Frans, the problem is the embarassment when you have friends over and they start flicking through your book. Also the fear of recommending it to anyone on the ground that no matter how good the rest of it is, the special scenes will make them question your real motives.
report
looks nice, but why the hell do the enemys have to bend down to ….well they just show one time how the fiend is getting thrown away, but i hope its not all
report
True, true. However, it’s Clive Barker’s unique style. And for that, we should salute him. Same counts for the looks for this game!
report
That left me utterly puzzled…
report
It looks fantastic, especially for a Source game; for such an old engine, it’s really been proving it’s mettle as of recent. The one problem I do have with Source games though, and this applies to every one of them in recent memory, is how floaty your avatar is. DMoMM was really let down by it because you’d often end up sidling right past the orc you wanted to boot in the face, or end up backing yourself right off a cliff. Hopefully Zeno Clash tries to tweak that a little, because it could very easily ruin the punchy bits.
report
Also:
wat
report
Wow. One to watch eh?
also; LOLWUT
report
Wow. That could be awful, but it could be that under-the-radar game that rocks – kind of like Mount & Blade was this year.
report
That is nang, blood.
report
There’s a rule:
“unless you are in prison; never fight another man if either of you are naked.”
It’s right below “Buy your round” and just above “Never try and duck out from buying your round”
report
Loin clothes do NOT count.
report
Melee combat in the Source engine isn’t as outlandish as it may intially seem. The remarkably underrated (especially post-patch) Dark Messiah was about 90% melee combat, and surprisingly great.
The art direction on this game is insane and fantastic, and the gameplay looks to break genre norms as well. So long as it’s not completely unplayable, I’m on-board for this. Hell, I liked Pathologic, even if the translation was terrible.
Tangentially, the new game by Ice Pick Lodge is due for an english release early next year, published by Atari. Formerly known as Tension, now known as The Void. Ice Pick are doing the translation themselves this time, rather than letting a B-list publisher babelfish it.
It looks just as weird as Zeno Clash, and the gameplay is even stranger.
report
Ha – seems me and Pags have completely different opinions on Dark Messiahs combat. I never had any trouble with it – the only attacks that I ever had overshoot were the heavy ones, which are meant to be risky anyway.
report
@Malagate- Yep, exactly. I also really enjoyed Everville, but I fear that anyone I recommend it to will only focus on the gay sex and miss the point entirely.
report
Radiant: you forgot the clause to that rule which adds that it is acceptable if either you or your attacker is of Eastern European origin and you’re in a bath house, a la Eastern Promises.
report
the only thing I dont care for is the voice of the “hero” someone give him some throaties.
Cryostasis: Sleep of Reason Tech Demo
http://files.filefront.com/Cryostasis+Sleep+of+Reason+Tech+Demo/;12688161;/fileinfo.html
No idea what’s inside downloading now
report
Weird and wonderful looking. Let’s hope it is also good.
report
Also!!! Free games on http://www.gog.com
http://www.gog.com/en/gamecard/beneath_a_steel_sky
http://www.gog.com/en/gamecard/lure_of_the_temptress
report
Please let this be good. It sounds so interesting and weird. I’ll definately check this out.
Game’s lenght is supposed to be around a Half-Life Episode, by the way.
report
@Pags
Or if you are fighting one legged drug dealers in a russian sauna ala Red Heat.
“COCAINUM!”
report
Oooh, does Lure of the Temptress run with ScummVM?
BASS definitely does.
report
Did anyone besides me ever play the old single player Quake 3 mod made by the same people? It was called The Dark Conjunction.
I wouldn’t go looking for it as an example of what these guys’ll do. It was fairly clunky and buggy (abandoned and released unfinished I believe). Had an interesting premise though. It was basically Lovecraftian Half Life in design; linear puzzley levels of a real-world sort in a shooter about the planets aligning and the old ones returning. Made me badly want a proper game along those lines at any rate (still room to do it too. Would be less watery and adventure-y than Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners).
You’d have to have been a bit of a voracious mod nerd to have encountered it I think (which I was at the time).
report
@ Meat Circus
I think all the games on gog.com already work on XP and Vista, so no need for ScummVM.
edit- ahh, I just realised you might want to play it on your phone, DS or similar.
report
Yay for GOG!
report
Looked… nifty! Very different. I approve of hermaphrodites in video games – they are an important demographic which have been terribly under-served thus far.
report
Here are the details on the Cryostasis tech demo that Heliocentric mentioned. Unfortunately, it would appear I can’t run it:
This tech demo is designed to show off the capabilities of Nvidia PhysX, but it also provides some very early looks at Cryostasis: The Sleep of Reason. Windows Vista and an Nvidia series 8 or greater desktop GPU are required to run this tech demo. Continue reading for full system requirements.
“In development by 1C games, Cryosatasis is a FPS horror game set in 1968 on a Russian Nuclear powered ice breaker. With freezing conditions around the ship, and only partly working heating the conditions are tough – but ideal for creating a very cool looking FPS with interactive Nvidia PhysX gaming effects. This sneak peak demo gives you an opportunity to be one of the first to see the game actually running on your gaming rig. This scripted flythrough makes full use of GPU-accelerated PhysX features of your GeForce graphics card with some very cool environmental effects.”
report
LotT and BaSS have both been free for a fair old while now (five years in fact, according to wikipedia).
@ Meat: Yup, its been supported by ScummVM for about a year now.
@ SuperNashwan: Cheers for that link.
report
Re: Zeno Clash.
I’m still not crazy about the main character’s moustache-tattoo.
report
@man raised by puffins: RE: BASS and LotT
While they’ve both been free for a while, both haven’t been patched and made to work on XP/Vista, which I’m pretty sure is what GOG does.
report
@Dominic White:
oh, good news about The-Game-Formerly-Known-As-Tension :D
I didn’t even know it was already released in Russia!
http://forum.ice-pick.com/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=4663
yum! (and no, i don’t say that about the high amout of boobage there)
report
Looks like a Ubisoft game, before Ubisoft selled his soul to satan to make uninspiring linear dull games.
report
@Radiant: followed by the important rule “never kiss a women with more facial hair than yourself”
report
Now that’s just unfair.
report
“linear”
Isn’t that, like, the polar opposite problem many people have with Ubi’s current games?
report
The visual style reminds me strongly of Planescape: Torment, which is a good thing. I also quite liked Dark Messiah, so the prospect of more Source engine first-person melee combat is an enticing one.
report
am I the only one made slightly nauseated by the camera movement?
report
Animations could use some work but all in all it’s definitely worth a look, I read an interview with the lead designer on the game, forgot where though, some russian site I believe, interview was in english… the guys are from Chile if that matters to anyone.
report
That looks lovely. I’ll play it for the art direction alone. It’s like David Lynch did peyote, wandered onto a Guillermo Del Toro set and thought to himself “I’m going to fuck this shit up.”
report
@ Leeks! – Nah it dont look that bad.
Cant wait to play it.
report
Has anyone else noticed how great Team ACE’s logo is?
It’s pretty great!
report
The whole look of the thing reminds me strongly of sci-fi/fantasy art from the late 80s/early 90s, of the sort you’d typically find on the boxes of Psygnosis games and heavy metal album covers.
Which will probably be enough to make me buy the game even if it sucks! :p
report
Music is kind of shit, gameplay looks like it could be either really neat or really disastrous, but I’ll probably buy it just because of how utterly unique the world and characters are. I’m not sure if thats a bad thing or not.
report
Looks pretty good, especially like the music
report
@ BooleanBob
Yup.
Glad someone else noticed it too.
report
Yeah, genius logo.
report
So Dave McKean and Hieronymus Bosch had some kind of ridiculous kinky sex, and one or both of them gave birth to this? Freaky.
report
“The one problem I do have with Source games though, and this applies to every one of them in recent memory, is how floaty your avatar is. DMoMM was really let down by it because you’d often end up sidling right past the orc you wanted to boot in the face…”
Thank you! I thought I was the only person who hated the actual movement on the Source engine. I can’t stand how everything feels like you’re skating on ice.
report
Definitely looking foward to this one. I expect it will be limited in the collision detection by the source engine, but I think some of that could be fixed with scaling. (I noticed they were already trying this. Look at the odd distortion on the arms as they go for the choke move). The basic collision detection for scource is great, but it never quite made it in terms of melee. If you ever noticed it, sometimes when you use a melee in Half-life you don’t actually hit the guy, but the attack still “connects”. Again, can be fixed by the animator/scripter.
report
Gameplay didn’t look too hot, but i’m sure they can clean that up… woulda been nice if you could aim your punches but seems to be set to aim straight for the head, easy for them to block you and such, and the grab/throw stuff looked a bit awkward.
We shall see though, nice concept. I really enjoyed Dark Messiah because of the melee in it… it’s something i wish more FPS games would focus on a bit more. Rather than taking the ‘shooter’ part as a base so much.
report
Honestly I couldn’t care less about the gameplay. It looks so far away from normalcy that I don’t think I COULDN’T play it.
report
That is my favourite game.
report
That kind of rabid imaginationizing should be the norm for PC games by now.
It’s almost as if a step backward into the 90s is a step forward in terms of thematic originality. Less military stuff and more like this gamepeople!
report
This looks sexy; I likey.
report
Wacky! It looks like nothing new for gameplay, but it holds your interest just because everything from the weapons to the enemies and environments is so different. It makes you want to learn the story just to find a rationale for all the weirdness. Because unlike the games which are strange for the sake of it, this looks like everything has a purpose which makes sense that world.
Three cheers for creativity!
report
Now, usually I’d lob in to a thread around this point and say words to the effect of “Looks great but…”, but I choose not to.
Sure the collision detection isn’t quite there yet. Sure I thought I heard a re-used HL sound effect. Sure, games this odd are usually naff.
But!
I don’t care, this looks utterly bonkers, and I hope they get somewhere with it. As advised by the news piece, check out the last bit of the video? What the FUCK is happening there? Cant wait. It’s ace, and yes, so is their logo.
report
Much as I like FPSs/action games, I hope this is more than it appears to be. So far, it looks like all these exotic people with exotic backgrounds are just there so you can beat/shoot ‘em.
report
Bolting, Valve’s source engine uses models which are separate from the world for all the first person objects like hands, weapons, crowbars, whatever. It’s just a visual thing, they don’t actually interract with anything, hence why the melee feels off, it’s just a purely visual effect on top of the actual hitting mechanics. It’s basically faked melee, the crowbar is no more than a short range bullet basicaly.
It seems this game has either modified v_ models to really appear within the game world, or doesn’t even use v_models and instead something else, which does physically exist in the game world, either with simply making arms/legs and slap the camera view somewhere so they seem normal, or perhaps by enabling the third person models and sticking the camera in an appropriate place.
I don’t think melee will be restricted to a particular height, as that would make it impossible to hit shorter enemies with it, but even if they do, and make sure all enemies are hittable, it’s probably for the better of the mechanics. There’s really no fighting game which allows you to attack as freely as a first person view would, at the most you get high, mid and low attacks, nothing inbetween, and usually skipping mid altogether for the sake of better, more engaging mechanics.
report
If you read the character profiles you can more or less tell what’s going on at the last part of the video.
I guess reading is beyond even the intellectuals around here, even though they crit the game for seeming like a standard FPS, and yet they react like standard gamers just looking @ the eye candy anyway.
That last part is just father-mother taking care of his/her young.
report
This is rather exciting. If they can pair a great, thought-provoking story with the game-play I’m seeing, I could very well love it.
report
Best design ever. Yes, it is pretty much pure Planescape, but there’s nothing wrong with that, and the concept seems much, much stranger.
report
I’m hoping that this game ends up being at least slightly good because it’s being developed in my country Chile and it would be a first here.
If it is successful I will apply for a job there hehe.
In any case it is really good to see a creative and different game when nowadays most games seem to be clones and generic.
report
Consider my attention motherfuckin’ caught.
report
God this looks mad.
Can’t wait!
report
My only disapointment so far is that given all these wierd and wonderful character designs I’ll end up having to play as a ruggedly handsome brunnete. Why can’t I play as a twenty foot tall crow with tits?
report
I would like to appreciate your innovative thoughts that are awesome and your posting style is also superb! I would like to read your next post.
report