The opening setting
You wake up in a derelict asylum somewhere in Britain, remembering very little of what happened in your life up to that moment. Your name is Cole Black, you’re an ex-agent and all you can recall is that you were supposed to save a girl with a bomb strapped to her body and you failed. You’re wearing a weird apparatus on your head that looks like some sort of VR device and you can hear an inner voice, not your own, telling you that you will now be the subject of a special procedure…
This is the opening setting of the new video game Get Even created by the Polish studio The Farm 51 which is set to premiere on 26th May 2017. One could say finally premiere because the game was originally scheduled for release in 2015. Fortunately, it looks as though it was worth the wait. The game promises to be an intense title, one that evades pigeonholing and engages the player.
Real mixed with the unreal
During the time between the appearance of the game’s enthusiastically received first teaser and the creation of the final version, the developers were carefully looking for an appropriate formula for their idea and for the right publisher, the kind that would truly understand their need to create a title for mature players who’d like to experience something a bit ’out there.’ It was Japan’s Bandai Namco, known for the hit series Tekken, who understood the Poles’ concept and decided to put out the game. As a result, the Gliwice-based The Farm 51, creators of the remarkable Chernobyl VR Project which lets you pay a virtual reality visit to the real-life nuclear disaster zone, created a game that’s been described as ‘deep,’ ‘mind-boggling’ and ‘ambitious’ by the media. In Get Even, the storyline plays a central role, your main objective being to discover who you are and uncover the secrets of your past. Equipped with a smartphone-like device capable of recreating memories and scanning your surroundings, you embark on a trip during which the boundary between reality and the unreal blurs. The dark, psychologically charged plot explores feelings of guilt and regret and unfolds chiefly through interactions with the environment – including dialogues and solving puzzles. Another of the games important features is the option to experience the same situation from an entirely different perspective: that of Black’s main opponent.
Everything is a potential instrument
The first-person game involves the use of firearms, but it is not what you’d typically call a ‘shooter.’ The shooting is more of an additional piece of the action of the compelling story rather than the main purpose of the game. Although one should mention that the developers made the combat sequences quite interesting, e.g. by introducing the Corner Gun, a device fitted with a camera that allows for shooting from behind corners without leaning out. Some of the interiors (including the corners) are based on the interiors of an actual psychiatric hospital near Poznań, Poland. Get Even’s atmospheric graphics were made using 3D scanning and the hospital was one of a few locations used in the creation of the game. Also, the game's characters were based on 3D scans of professional actors.
As you play Get Even you can listen to music recorded by the musicians of the Brussels Philharmonic, with a score by Olivier Derivière, a composer known, among others, for his work on Assassin’s Creed IV: Freedom Cry. The background music, recorded in 3D sound, is engine-rendered thanks to which it’s highly reactive to what’s currently going on in the game: it can, for instance, incorporate sounds coming from the digital environment. This innovative approach, which references the game’s borderline world, is possibly best summed up in a quote by the composer, found on Bandai Namco’s website:
Through the use of real-time MIDI, live musicians recorded in ambisonics, and other audio tricks, the gaming environment itself is now an orchestra waiting to be conducted, and everything in it is a potential instrument.
Get Even will be available on Windows PC, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One.
Author: Marek Kępa, Mar 17