The Novice Gamer Reviews Condemned: Criminal Origins

Regular readers will know that I like scary things, from horror films to survival horror games. So when I found “Condemned” in a bin at half price, I cheerfully snatched it up and plonked it into my 360 the instant I got home. Condemned is relatively old by game standards, it came out in 2005 and this relative archaism is marked by having a big label at the top calling it a “classic”. Other than this, and the scary-looking graphics on the back of the box, I didn’t know a lot about Condemned. I knew it was inspired by films like “Jacob’s Ladder” and “The Silence of the Lambs”, two of my all time favourites, and I knew it involved hitting people a lot with blunt objects. I also knew it had a sequel that’d been trashed on “Zero Punctuation” (but then most games get trashed on Zero Punctuation). In short, I knew enough to interest me and was expecting some standard spookiness, but nothing too earth shattering.

Image via Wikipedia

What I wasn’t expecting was an inventive plot, some murderously well-programmed enemies and a genuinely terrifying gaming experience. We play as Ethan Thomas, an FBI agent with a flawless track record, investigating a series of nasty murders; trotting onto a murder scene set up with mannequins in a dilapidated building. Ethan and his investigative buddies smell smoke and Ethan goes off to investigate, at which point a shady character steals his gun and wanders off. Ethan goes in pursuit of him, only to be attacked by people I dubbed the Homicidal Homeless. The Homicidal Homeless turn up everywhere in the game, armed with various blunt objects and occasionally guns. We discover that something in the fictional city in which Ethan operates is turning tramps, junkies and squatters into raging, gormless barbarians, whiling away the hours by whacking each other (and Ethan) with anything that comes to hand. And, damn, these people are frightening! Their AI is superb: they move differently each time, they can feint, they can block, they can sneak up behind you or jump out in front of you (at one point, one leapt thirty feet in the air as I was peering over the edge of a barrier). There are different ones that act in different ways, as in most games. Some crawl along floors or walls and pop up in front of you, some lope along, some like to hide behind things, others like to pretend to be mannequins. Oh yes, there are LOTS of random mannequins in the game, which seem to be there only to scare me all the more, since I have a terrible phobia of the things.

But the Homicidal Homeless are not Ethan’s only worries: the shady guy who nicked his gun in the first chapter is a particularly twisted individual, a serial killer who kills serial killers, a meta-killer referred to in later chapters as “Serial Killer X” but more often “SKX”, which I continually misread as “SIXX” but never mind that. SKX is a marvellous character. We never find out that much about him, but we know he’s always one step ahead of Ethan (literally in one chapter, as we chase him through an abandoned subway and he’s always on the other side of a room, with half a dozen Homicidal Homeless in the way). In fact, although there are very few characters in the game (Homicidal Homeless excused) and we find out very little about any of them, they are all well played and believable enough to make the creepiness really hit home.

And creepy it is. If the unpredictable antics of the Homicidal Homeless and the machinations of SKX weren’t enough, Ethan has things appearing in front of him then disappearing, mannequins boxing paths off (more mannequins!), and every few minutes or so his vision goes black and white and grainy like a bad independent movie. Add to all this a series of charming derelict buildings full of huge rooms with plenty of hiding places for the ubiquitous Homicidal Homeless and you, the player, are on edge and quaking with dread for the whole game. In fact, the whole things was so intense that I found myself unable to play for much for than 45 minutes at a time before becoming convinced there was a crazy person living in the toilet.

Frightening, well paced and just ambiguous enough to keep it interesting, but it’s not without faults. Sometimes information leaks through just a little too slowly, for example throughout the game Ethan can pick up dead birds (and then get achievement for them, hurrah for achievements) but it takes a good few chapters to find any explanation for this, leaving me wondering whether Ethan was going the way of the homeless. For some reason you can only get through certain doors with just the right blunt object, sending Ethan half way across yet another lunatic infested ruin looking for an axe or a sledgehammer or a kitchen sink or whatever it is the door wants you to use. Use of forensic tools is shockingly easy (especially compared to the difficulty of the combat sequences) and involves following on-screen instructions. The graphics are a bit dated too, though this is to be fair not a fault of the game’s design and more its age. So, like most things, it’s flawed but aside from minor foibles it’s quite brilliant. The build up of tension is masterful and well maintained, but what really makes it work, and makes the gameplay experience so intense, is the mixture of outright shocks, i.e. a Homicidal Homeless person jumping out of nowhere and attacking you, and subtle, lingering psychological nuances, the eerie atmosphere, the unsettling overtones of class conflict and so on. A nice touch is the way the Homicidal Homeless change as the game goes on, becoming increasingly grotesque and deformed as Ethan nears SKX, a change made so subtly and slowly, I only noticed it when coming to review. Well worth playing through, but only while it’s still daylight!