Should You Play... Enslaved: Odyssey to the West | The Forgotten Uncharted?
177Let’s talk about Enslaved: Odyssey to the West.
Ninja Theory is a developer that people either love or hate, depending on who you ask. Sure they made Blood on the Dance Floor: the Game, which earned them several death threats from people who didn’t enjoy seeing Dante get turned into every teenage girl from 2008’s ideal emo bf, but they also made widely praised and well-designed cinematic experiences such as Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice and the game we’re diving into today: the 2010 action-adventure title Enslaved: Odyssey to the West.
Before we break out our reviewing spades and really dig into this game to investigate what makes it so great and why people don’t talk about it too much nowadays, we must first define what the developers were trying to accomplish with this game. This is, first and foremost, a cinematic experience that is very narrative-driven. I need to emphasize that the gameplay takes a back seat here, because that will contextualize all of the criticisms and praises that I have for this game. In order to review a game, you must always review it in the frame of what it’s trying to convey to the player. For example, you wouldn’t fault Doom Eternal for having a lack of in-depth character development, now would you?
Now that we have that out of the way, let’s begin with the aspect of this game that takes a back seat to the narrative: the gameplay. This might sound anti-climactic, but I have no complaints about the technical feel of the gameplay. Everything is… just fine. The combat isn’t groundbreaking by any means, as it’s mostly just press x to win with some occasionally satisfying God of War-style takedowns *show the mech that gets its arms ripped off from the top*, and the climbing follows the Uncharted and Prince of Persia format, you know, where you grab onto the shiny handholds and let the game whisk you away to another world. However, it works as a means to an end, the end being showcasing the atmosphere, fostering relationships between characters, and pushing the story forward. Sure the combat gets kind of dull, but fighting sections are never really long enough to overstay their welcome and are broken up by lots of different puzzles. The puzzles are very simple, and you won’t need to break out the ol’ Google rectangle to figure out how to solve any of them, but they serve their purpose in being just engaging enough to keep the player’s attention and make them want to see what comes next. Don’t expect anything on the level of, say, The Talos Principle, though. The less straightforward combat sections are also engaging, as they place more of an emphasis on problem solving and prioritizing who to kill than they do reflexes and stringing together combos. There were also sections where Monkey could go surfing on the cloud, which felt fairly smooth as well. In short, Enslaved was very pleasant to play through, if not a bit too easy.
This game’s presentation is phenomenal. It conveys a post-apocalyptic setting quite well. Remember folks, just because most of the humans are dead doesn’t mean everything else has to be. Nature has overtaken everything, and the entire game is drenched in lots of different colors with varied environments, from a city that’s been reclaimed by the forest to a desert that houses a pyramid with the answers that the protagonists are searching for. There is a lot of jank with some animations and frame drop, and there are times when you can clearly see the polygons, but that’s more of a product of its time considering this is a nearly ten-year-old PC port.
The voice acting is also top notch, as this game’s voice cast is fairly stacked. I mean, the main character is voiced by the guy who plays Gollum, not that you’d know just by listening to him, because he looks and sounds more like Michael from Grand Theft Auto 5. It really allows these characters to shine, because we can’t have Enslaved without its character-driven story.
The stars of the show are the main character Monkey and his dominatrix Tripitarka, or Trip for short. You also have Pigsey, who is this game’s equivalent of Frank Reynolds, come in towards the end, but we’ll talk about him later as he’s the subject of the DLC: Pigsey’s Perfect Ten. Monkey and Trip have a very interesting power dynamic, because Trip enslaved him so she could be protected on the way back to her settlement. He wears a headband that kills him if she dies, or if he strays too far away from her. It adds a very unique dynamic to the standard strong protective man and intelligent lady paradigm that many story-driven games have. They each have their own personalities and learn to work together and get attached to one another as the story progresses, but I wish the writers had explored their relationship more as it seems every chance at developing them beyond just “getting along” is cut short by an abrupt event.
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