Friday, January 10, 2014

Enslaved: Odyssey to the West - At the outset

Let me preface by saying that Enslaved was a game that should have been much bigger than it was. There's an unusual pedigree here for a game that wound up in the bargain bin ($5.99 used at Gamestop and cheaper if you go online or to a local store that doesn't suck like Gamestop). Enslaved is a reimagining of a 16th century Chinese story called, you guessed it, Odyssey to the West. According to Wikipedia it is one of the four "Great Classic Novels of Chinese Literature."

Furthering that pedigree is the fact that the game's story was written by Alex Garland who wrote the novel The Beach (later turned into the DiCaprio movie) and penned the script for 28 Days Later. Basically, this was a story that Namco Bandai tackled with an established writer and not some no-name group of tinkerers.

Finally, and i remember this being one of the most intriguing aspects of Enslaved when i first learned about it in 2010, Andy Serkis (Gollum from LoTR) voices and lent vidcap to Monkey, the main character. Serkis is a talented guy and Monkey's movements during gameplay definitely feel like there's a Serkis signature on them.

Despite all of this, the game simply never got spotlighted like i expected and plans for DLC fizzled. It does lack multiplayer and replayability so that may explain the bin price.

Also, i believe there was a rather large lot of DLC planned for it, only one of which ever saw the light of day. Whether we choose to include that in our play through might be worth discussing further down the line.

i'm anticipating finding art for these posts might be significantly harder than it was for our playthrough of Bioshock. Tough to have fan art when you don't have that many fans. Oh wait, here's some.
So, yeah, there's that. 

Chapter 5 by the 17th sounds good. Let's do this. Game on, fellas. 

-joker


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