The result, at worst, is work that reinforces reactionary ideologies, and, at best, is a kind of tasteless gruel that leaves no real impression behind. Every year, new commercial military shooters are released that try to temper their desire to draw on real-world history and politics with a mushy promise not to offer a viewpoint on these immediate, vitally important topics. But this isn’t always the case, especially as games attempt to more directly interpret historical and modern fact as fodder for a dreamed-of, universal art that appeals to all and offends none. Its thematic intent is unspecific enough that Insomniac doesn’t appear to have compromised or limited the scope of its narrative in the attempt to create something that connects with an enormous audience. The desire to make something broadly appealing works well for Rift Apart. “We make the game that appeals to us.” In the case of Rift Apart, that meant working from the main theme of “duality,” reflected in the game’s dimension-shifting plot and movement design, and “building the story, gameplay, and art design to cater to that.” “We don’t make any adjustments to accommodate for kids versus adults,” he adds. And it features characters who are charmingly flawed,” he says. “The best entertainment that is created for a younger audience is also appealing to adults, because it deals with understandable conflict and emotional connections that are universally relatable. But with its goofy animal characters and sustained environmentalist message, it’s also uniquely driven in its sense of oddball purpose.Ĭreative director Marcus Smith explains that Rift Apart is, indeed, meant to appeal “to the broadest possible set of players,” but he says that isn’t as constrictive as it may sound when considering age demographics or the potentially competing interests within large studio teams. There are a number of stylistic choices that may not work as well as they ought to-its characters speak in cutesy sentence fragments that don’t quite come off properly, as if confused as to whether they’re speaking the terse, punctuation-shy dialog of a Cormac McCarthy novel's hard-bitten criminals or filling the pages of a children’s storybook. Eventually, these decisions culminate in a watery, unmemorable conclusion. A karma gauge moves from one side to the other after picking between sparing or murdering enemies, attacking a newly free captive or sending them on their way. Its story fizzles out into an amorphous set of (literally) black-and-white moral choices between a shadowy "evil" and brightly glowing "good" set of characters who pop up next to text boxes illustrating either viciously cruel or saintly choices. Its world is frequently wonderful to look at in a sprouting-green-field-on-a-cool-spring-day kind of way, but players interact with that setting by running from one mission marker to another, slapping at enemies with all the weight of two pillowcases knocking against one another in the dryer. Biomutant is, broadly stated, a bit of a mess.
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