RPS Feature Shadowy
As a professional ninja, I’m constantly frustrated by the representation of my noble traditions in video games. There is so much more to our art than teleportation and sneaky backstabs. Where is the game that shows our penchant for wicker work? When shall I see the portrayal of every ninja’s natural instinct for Polynesian cookery? Yet again, this is all ignored in Aragami [official site].
Remember Twin Souls: The Path of the Shadows? You know, that Tenchu-inspired stealth ’em up that first surfaced in 2014 and used a teleport mechanic similar to the one found in Dishonored? Well its back. Only it’s called Aragami [official site] now, and has a cool shadow dragon summoning combat mechanic thing going on. It’s also out this year, developers Lince Works have announced, and has a brand spanking new trailer.
RPS Feature Getting Away With Botched Murder
Any time a new Hitman [official site] game rolls around, I need to know the answer to one question: can I royally screw basically everything up and get away with it? Not for me the Silent Assassin, but more a series of pratfalls, murders performed inadvertently in plain sight, panicked costume changes and awkward scuffles, inevitably culminating in a desperate sprint to the exit with a chain of armed and extremely angry guards pursuing me. So I am delighted to discover that the new Hitman game supports this kind of rolling disaster.
I even managed to complete a mission which began with me choking a man unconscious in front of roughly 200 people who I somehow hadn’t realised were watching me.
Newly-announced top-down stealth game The Church in the Darkness [official site] will see a former cop infiltrating a suicide cult’s Jonestown-y compound – by stealth, by persuasion, by force – to rescue his nephew from the influence of charismatic leaders played by Ellen McLain and John Patrick Lowrie (Portal’s GLaDOS and TF2’s Sniper).
Or maybe it won’t. Maybe they’re not a suicide cult. Maybe they’re fine and happy, and you’re a monster. The Church in the Darkness is procedurally generated, see, and each run will change people’s allegiances and beliefs as well as obvious things like the camp layout. Sounds interesting, dunnit?
Clandestine [official site] has been tickling my fancy since Alice first brought it to my attention. Then in Early Access, it has now launched as a full release with a complete story line rather than a few standalone missions. While it can be played singleplayer, switching between the two characters, the concept requires two players for full effect. One plays the actual agent infiltrating various facilities and the other takes on the role of a hacker, watching via a screen and doing what they can to assist.
RPS Feature A stealth puzzler with delusions of grandeur.
Volume [official site] is a third-person, sci-fi stealth game, in which you direct a little dude around VR-styled, maze-like levels, dodging guards with wits and with gadgetry, with the aim of grabbing all the loot and getting out again. It’s out now.
I hope Mike ‘Thomas Was Alone’ Bithell’s new game wasn’t hoping to pre-empt any ‘turn down the…’ gags by hiring a celebrity voice cast, because sadly it wasn’t long before I started muting things.
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“The stealth looks too easy, but these murders sure do look pretty,” declare news overlord Alice, as she strokes a cat made out of pale, white bytes. We all nod. In the interstitial place that is the RockPaperShotgun headquarters, all hearts are one. Lince Works’ Twin Souls: The Path of Shadows [official site] is an interesting beast. For a stealth game, the stealth-y parts of this Japanese-flavored work-in-progress don’t look terribly difficult. But the kill sequences, at least in this gameplay video, seem quite elegant.
Do you remember how the awkward controls enhanced the atmosphere of ZX81 classic 3D Monster Maze? Well, probably not, but you can happily find out just how effectively tense controlling Teddy Tea Leaf via your keyboard’s Q,A,O and P keys can be by, shockingly, actually playing the thing.
I’ve been playing Light, the top-down cyber-stealth game published by Team 17, and the art style has set me to thinking about the visuals of stealth. Light has a clean design, like a sedated and sanitised Monaco, which lends itself well to sneaky route-planning. I’ll most likely write more about that game when I’ve completed it, but I mention it here because of its similarities to the just-released Third Eye Crime. Both have the player avoiding guards’ cones of sight while infiltrating buildings but the aesthetic design is worlds apart. Light’s style and substance are in colour-coded harmony, while Third Eye Crime offers a new perspective on noirish comic books.
I haven’t played enough of new Thief to judge it fully one way or the other, but I can’t imagine many people disagreeing with the sentiment that The City has seen better days. With the creative guidance of Looking Glass, The City was one of the weirdest and most distinct environments in fiction, embroidered with lore that gave it spiritual, social and political character. The new Thief’s City is predictable and comparatively barren.
While Garrett makes a new home in steampunk Gotham, the latest screenshots of immersive stealth sim Tangiers show evidence of a greater visual imagination than the hours of Thief that I’ve played. These are astonishing landscapes and I insist that you click on every single one to see the full size versions.
If you remember Shank, you might also remember that he was less stealthy than Andre the Giant driving a monster truck across a minefield. Mark of the Ninja shares a developer and has a similar graphical style, but it is all about stealth, at least when it’s not about beetles swarming over and consuming people. That can probably be quite noisy. Already out on XBLA, Blue notes that a Steam content description for Klei’s latest side-scrolling stab ’em up has been spotted. Give the jollity that’s met the Xbox release, that’s reason for excitement. Given that I haven’t played it, take this next bit with a sizeable pinch of salt. It’s 2D Arkham City. The trailer below is proof!
I still don’t quite know if Sniper Elite V2 is as open and as stealthy as I’d like it to be. My hope is that it’s a bit like Hidden And Dangerous, just sniper-centric, but then I wake up every morning hoping for that game. This new walkthrough video shows one mission, trying to get an angle to snipe Müller, sliced into tiny chunks, so we’re left with little glimpses through the sniper’s scope rather than a complete picture. I want to know the choices made, the potential for the player to tell his own snipey story, but there’s not enough here. There’s some talk of recreating the places accurately, so it could be there’s enough open space to move around in, but until I know ‘ja’ or ‘nein’, I’m remaining snootily interested. I’ll have to wait for Brendan’s upcoming hands-on to know more.
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RPS Feature 47 Turns It Up To 11
Hakan Abrak, lead producer of Hitman: Absolution, held a developer session at the Eurogamer Expo this weekend and I was there to see the game in action. The version we were shown was a pre-alpha build running on PS3 and only covered a single level but, notepad in hand, I managed to scribble down enough impressions to share the bits that made me excited and the other bits that made me raise an eyebrow in a quizzical fashion. Now I’m trying to work out if I’m any closer to understanding the game than I was before the session.
Splinter Cell: Conviction has been in development for quite a while. It seems hard to focus on this, Ubisoft having entered a phase of churning out their franchises once a year, saturating the market and our consciousness with too many games, multiple teams working on alternate sequels for each series. But then that madness stopped, and now Conviction is over two years late. Which all seems to be pointing toward its being two years better, too. And the co-op – this could be another good reason to be excited about it. Rather than a tacked on mode for the main game, it’s a two-player prequel to Conviction’s main story, lasting around six hours. There’s a trailer about it below.
