Progress in a stealth game is a case of two steps forward, one step back. I'm so close to the end I can taste it, but it has not been a straight path. Making my way through the levels has involved a lot of trial and error. I'd venture into a new area, look around a bit, and get slapped down. Then, using the knowledge I'd gained, I'd survive that first trap and then stumble into the next. I'm not sure that I was killed by every, single enemy, but I surely came close.
It's more than a little frustrating. Success can feel rewarding, giving you a sense of power and knowledge and control over your environment. However, that is inevitably followed up with a new challenge that sets you back to square one. It can make the game very stressful.
Velvet Assassin is especially bad about this because in addition to the moment-by-moment challenge of sneaking past the guards, you also have a very limited stock of ammunition, health, and heroin. This gives the game a level-by-level rhythm that makes sense from a game design perspective, but sometimes sacrifices verisimilitude. For example, why can't you take the weapons off a slain Nazi? Their guns certainly work well enough against you, and the heavier weapons you find are virtually identical, yet apparently you can only wield a weapon you find in a cupboard.
It was especially frustrating in the most recent level, where you wake up from your coma and find yourself in the hospital as it's being attacked by Nazis and a major mission objective is to acquire a weapon. Around the fifth or sixth time you manage to shiv someone who has previously shot you, and then you get a quest prompt saying you need a weapon, it starts to get farcical.
Not that getting a weapon makes things much easier. You don't have a lot of endurance, there isn't a good cover system, and the enemies are a lot more accurate than you. I had to reload a dozen times or more, taking cover in a shed and waiting for them to file in one by one (the big problem there was enemies spawning in a wide-open field after I emerged from hiding and taking me out in just a couple of shots).
The story in the back half of the game has gotten very dark. My first mission had me "rescuing" a bunch of allied spies, only to find most of them dead and the last one being held in a Gestapo prison, the only help I could give him was a cyanide capsule. In the course of getting to the prison, I had to make my way through a ghetto that was in the midst of being purged.
Later, I was tasked with assassinating a German counterintelligence agent called Kamm who Violette tried to build up as kind of a dark mirror of herself, but who did not actually get enough on-screen characterization for that theory to stick. While sneaking around the inn where he was staying, I wound up seeing the innkeeper and his family hanging from a tree in the courtyard while nearby Nazis talked about rounding up the resistance.
It's funny. I can tolerate a lot of violence in my video games. Hell, I'll often insist on it. But there's this tenuous emotional line whose edges I can't quite define. I don't like to see suffering. I enjoy playing martial artists and space marines and gunzerkers and commanding armies, but that is all cartoonish in character. I don't like it when video game characters are helpless before violence. It seriously bums me out.
Maybe that makes me a bad critic, unable to appreciate a sophisticated story told in a visual medium (my taste in games maps pretty closely to my taste in movies). Velvet Assassin is certainly trying to tell a complex, mature story. Details like Violette giving cyanide to captured spies. the offhand mention of the fact that allied bombing killed thirty thousand after she helped guide the planes, the way the mysterious strangers in Violette's hospital room turn out to be Resistance agents debating on whether to give her to the Nazis to save themselves, or the casual conversations you overhear from the Nazis (which can range from Pulp Fiction-esque discussions of cultural minutiae to painful soul searching to disgustingly matter-of-fact speculation on the best way to burn bodies in a mass grave) all speak to a central theme - the way living a life of violence makes you a compromised person. Even the heroin mechanic plays into it, blurring as it does the boundaries of the self, and the lines between memory and fantasy. Violette says as much herself in the game's first cinematic - she feels more kinship with the people she fights than she does with the civilian world and she does what she does as much because she's good at is as she does for the benefit of any high ideals or loyalty to the Allied cause.
I can't say whether I find this story affecting or not, primarily because the gory details make me cringe. I don't want to praise it too greatly, because I still find Violette to be kind of a flat character who exists mainly to be coldly professional and generically unflappable. However, the game has definite ambition, so that's worth something.
It's just that it's already a stealth game, so it has its work cut out for it grabbing my attention, but add on top of it that "tiptoeing around the bodies of Holocaust victims in order to make my way through a deserted ghetto in order to make a point about the general griminess of 'heroes'" and you get a recipe for distilled anti-fun.
And while there are some who'd say that the focus on "fun" above all other concerns contributes greatly to the stultification of video games as an art form, I would say that I tend to appreciate games as more of a "craft" than an "art" (though the best games contain aspects of both) and thus prefer it when form follows function. If that makes me a philistine, so be it. I like to play with toys. And "moral fable set against the backdrop of humanity's darkest hour" is no toying matter.
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