ah-hooo!
what if the 1% truly were a secret race of reverse vampires who are literally feasting on the lower class? baby, the order 1886 says just maybe they are.
and it says it with a completely straight face. no shed of irony and playfulness. and i can see how, if you're coming to a piece of fiction that clearly has so much of itself steeped in an absurd genre premise, maybe you want something more like devil may cry.
but what i appreciate about the order 1886 - beyond the fact that it might the single most expensive looking game i've ever played, like it still looks better than just about any game made since - is that it's the inverse of uncharted. almost identical gameplay and camera. maybe order 1886 is a little heavier, a little more meaty and visceral. maybe it's gunplay is a whole level above anything naughty dog have managed to pull off. but instead of taking the real word and adding in quips and the supernatural, the order shoves you in to an alternate steampunk history full of werewolves (who you knife fight) and then removes all the genre personality. it winds up feeling like a story about real people in a lived-in world where things matter as opposed to just action movie archetypes parading through a pirates of the caribbean movie set. it also has two NPCs who show their dicks.
i like uncharted a lot. but gaming is full of uncharteds. it doubles down on uncharteds every day. sony in particular would spend the following years making technically impressive and visually pretty yet soft-hearted open world checklist games that go on and on (see: spidey, horizon, days gone, tsushima). where are the punchy, poe-faced linear narrative games? where are the games that have the balls to show you some dicks every few hours, interspersed between werewolf knife-fights? there is no AAA gaming equivalent to deadwood. this ain't that either. but it's sort of close, and was definitely a step in that direction. shame it's basically the black sheep of sony's ps4 first-party lineup. gaming would be marginally better today taking notes from this.
what if the 1% truly were a secret race of reverse vampires who are literally feasting on the lower class? baby, the order 1886 says just maybe they are.
and it says it with a completely straight face. no shed of irony and playfulness. and i can see how, if you're coming to a piece of fiction that clearly has so much of itself steeped in an absurd genre premise, maybe you want something more like devil may cry.
but what i appreciate about the order 1886 - beyond the fact that it might the single most expensive looking game i've ever played, like it still looks better than just about any game made since - is that it's the inverse of uncharted. almost identical gameplay and camera. maybe order 1886 is a little heavier, a little more meaty and visceral. maybe it's gunplay is a whole level above anything naughty dog have managed to pull off. but instead of taking the real word and adding in quips and the supernatural, the order shoves you in to an alternate steampunk history full of werewolves (who you knife fight) and then removes all the genre personality. it winds up feeling like a story about real people in a lived-in world where things matter as opposed to just action movie archetypes parading through a pirates of the caribbean movie set. it also has two NPCs who show their dicks.
i like uncharted a lot. but gaming is full of uncharteds. it doubles down on uncharteds every day. sony in particular would spend the following years making technically impressive and visually pretty yet soft-hearted open world checklist games that go on and on (see: spidey, horizon, days gone, tsushima). where are the punchy, poe-faced linear narrative games? where are the games that have the balls to show you some dicks every few hours, interspersed between werewolf knife-fights? there is no AAA gaming equivalent to deadwood. this ain't that either. but it's sort of close, and was definitely a step in that direction. shame it's basically the black sheep of sony's ps4 first-party lineup. gaming would be marginally better today taking notes from this.