Ever since I finished Alan Wake 2 I felt like revisiting Remedy's older games to give myself a much more nuanced perspective on not just Remedy as a studio but their artistic outlook and the studios main creative director and lead writer Sam Lake.
As first games go Death Rally isn't really a great example of Remedy's future outputs. It's a pretty decent car combat game with much more of a focus on winning races rather then killing all your competitors. You earn money from races, which you use to upgrade your car so you can enter harder races in which you earn more money until you go head to head with the champions to become the king of the death rally. It's pretty simple and besides some small story text in between races there is next to no story; which is pretty standard for the era. Really what makes this game stand out among other top down racing games of its era is its aesthetic and its writing. The general tone the games goes far is apocalyptic; while other car combat games like Twisted Metal or Carmageddon also have this general motif Death Rally stands out as its own thing by giving its apocalyptic tone a more melancholic feel, think Death Race 2000 meets The Last Man On Earth but with more fire and less vampires. The other aspect that really stood out to me was the small story blurbs that show up after every race, they all have staples of Sam Lakes writing going forward in which a lot of them are very metaphor latent and in the case of this game also have a bleakness to them which add to the game's lonely apocalyptic tone.
Knowing that Max Payne comes after this game makes a lot of sense since I can see a lot of that game's tone and aesthetic emanating from this game. It's a neat novelty to look at as Remady's first game but besides some neat aspects there's really nothing of substance here anymore.
As first games go Death Rally isn't really a great example of Remedy's future outputs. It's a pretty decent car combat game with much more of a focus on winning races rather then killing all your competitors. You earn money from races, which you use to upgrade your car so you can enter harder races in which you earn more money until you go head to head with the champions to become the king of the death rally. It's pretty simple and besides some small story text in between races there is next to no story; which is pretty standard for the era. Really what makes this game stand out among other top down racing games of its era is its aesthetic and its writing. The general tone the games goes far is apocalyptic; while other car combat games like Twisted Metal or Carmageddon also have this general motif Death Rally stands out as its own thing by giving its apocalyptic tone a more melancholic feel, think Death Race 2000 meets The Last Man On Earth but with more fire and less vampires. The other aspect that really stood out to me was the small story blurbs that show up after every race, they all have staples of Sam Lakes writing going forward in which a lot of them are very metaphor latent and in the case of this game also have a bleakness to them which add to the game's lonely apocalyptic tone.
Knowing that Max Payne comes after this game makes a lot of sense since I can see a lot of that game's tone and aesthetic emanating from this game. It's a neat novelty to look at as Remady's first game but besides some neat aspects there's really nothing of substance here anymore.