"Then came the beasts. From inside one of the Rusted Places. Hunted us. Drove us into the cracks and crevices. Came the beasts on orders. Directed by the will of one. The Dragon."
--Grandmother, Chronos: Before The Ashes
Chronos, originally a VR game from 2016 before its 2020 enhanced release for consoles and a prequel to Remnant: From the Ashes, introduces an exceptionally unique gameplay mechanic in a game with little thoroughness in its overall production values: every time the player avatar dies, the in-game character ages by one year. You start at age 18 after choosing your gender and then head out into an enigmatic, threatening world containing occasional orange crystals with teleportation capabilities. Reaching milestone ages like 20, 30, and so on gives you a choice between three permanent bonuses, but dying enough times shifts your character away from strength and agility based combat into greater reliance on the arcane (magic). The very bland level of graphical detail and simplistic range of attacks hold it back so that it is still ultimately a very mixed game, one with genuine innovations and very lackluster elements all at once.
Production Values
A sluggish framerate, general lack of visual detail, and disappearing/reappearing objects make for a very underdeveloped level of aesthetic quality. Ground vegetation can appear and disappear with slight camera movements when you are already right next to it, as opposed to simply phasing into view upon reaching a certain distance from the plants. What makes this more unfortunate than mere wasted potential is that the design of the environments as far as the gameplay sequence goes is not abysmal at all--much of the game is played in a series of serpentine regions linked by teleportation of some kind, and one of the later areas of the game does have a more unique layout, with floor pieces that are constructed ahead of you as you walk. The voice acting fares significantly better; there is simply not much of it, which is not an automatically negative characteristic in itself. With all of the genuinely significant visual drawbacks, though, the game would as a whole be hardly even mediocre on the Switch (perhaps it has stronger production values on other platforms) if it was not for the gameplay, where conventional, sometimes limited combat is supplemented by an aging system and numerous puzzles.
Gameplay
Remnant is a shooter with melee attacks; the combat of Chronos is exclusively about blocking and physically striking enemies. The style resembles a mixture of Legend of Zelda and Dark Souls, combining the lock-on mechanics of the former and the slow, stamina-based dodges and blows of the latter. The stamina bar depletes when blocking attacks with the shield but recovers even when holding the shield in a defensive position, albeit at a slower rate than when it is lowered. Despite the sharp simplicity of the move set, enemies can wreak havoc on you if you are careless, yet revisiting older locations after leveling up many times and spending the affiliated points shows just how far you have come in durability and power.
The very unique aging mechanic is the highlight of the game, or at least the specter in the background during combat. Aging by a year with each player death (in-game, they spend the year finding their way back to the closest World Stone) changes the character's appearance over time, though there are special permanent bonuses available at the aforementioned intervals. Counterbalancing such features, the fact that you cannot refill your health bar except by two means increases the challenge: you can level up, which requires more experience points with each jump, and use a dragon heart, an item of very limited quantity that is itself only refilled when the player literally dies. At the hands of enemies ranging from bosses to elemental priests to werewolf-like fiends of a molten appearance, death can be very close at hand.
The whole of the game is nonetheless not spent fighting creatures. Environmental navigation and a host of puzzles occupy much of the playthrough. Passageways that are initially locked are eventually opened, items are gathered, and puzzles solved. Items can sometimes be reduced to their parts of merged together as needed for progression, a mechanic that slightly sets Chronos apart from other games with inventory systems. Some of the puzzles are even quite clever in other ways. For instance, a tiny slate in a locked bookshelf turns out to be a portal that you can exit in shrunken form by aligning runes on a normal-sized teleportation mirror elsewhere. More developed than the limited combat, the puzzles provide variety and greater gameplay depth.
Story
Some spoilers are below.
Set in a future where a dragon and its monstrous cohorts have forced humans out of the technology-based society of the 1960s, Chronos follows a young warrior as he or she (depending on player choice) journeys through remnants of the former human civilization and through several other regions inhabited by cyclopes, pans, and other creatures. The hero connects with a spirit that grants aid at key moments, such as by providing a flame ability that can briefly empower weapons, traveling from one region of an interconnected multiverse to another.
Intellectual Content
It is expected that players will die in Chronos, hence the prominent nature of the aging system. Though the general lack of dialogue allows the themes to largely manifest themselves to the players on their own, dying over and over is set up to naturally prompt reflection about mortality and human life at different ages. The character grows visibly older depending on how many times you die--up to the point of 80 years old when the character no longer ages, I have merely read, as I beat the game at age 36. The explanatory messages do not lie to the player about dying enough times erasing progress so that you have to start the whole game over, as with Senua's Sacrifice. This does not mean there is no ambiguity about what is true in the plot. To a much lesser extent than its seeming inspirations like Dark Souls, Chronos does benefit from genuine ambiguity about certain metaphysical and epistemological matters.
It comes to light by utilizing a key card found in the Pan world, which opens a sealed door on Earth (at least, it appears to be Earth), that there are humans on life support systems integrated into what look like virtual reality headsets tied to major bosses in various realms. The final sequence of the game involves one such subject grabbing the protagonist and pulling him or her into another landscape to fight the former in dragon form, who claims to be an "infinite mind" that has outlasted civilizations and given humans enough prompting to discover teleportation and other worlds. Clearly, these are very philosophically charged matters, but the game uses them more for ambiguous narrative purposes than for exploration of logical necessities for the sake of truth itself, logical necessity being the only thing that has to be true in itself, and thus the only thing that has to exist in all real or hypothetical scenarios.
Conclusion
A game with elements that together bring its quality to the middle of the spectrum is not unusual, but Chronos is especially aggressive in its characteristics of conflicting strengths. Its low points are very low, and the high points are very high. What the game does successfully offer, besides the more unique and well-implemented mechanics, is a more introductory example of a pseudo-Souls game. Not as punishing as the likes of Dark Souls or Bloodborne yet still requiring consistent attentiveness in combat, here is a prequel to Remnant with a very different combat style and one of the most novel game features in years. The terrible visual production values that fail to hint at the true capacities of the Switch do not cancel out the highly creative aspects of the game.
Content:
1. Violence: The player avatar swings melee weapons to strike enemies. Small amounts of dark blood might appear for a short time when killing certain creatures like Pans.
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