Velvet Assassin - 2/20 hours

Let me get this out of the way first - I hate stealth games. I probably undersold that fact in the initial thoughts post because I was like, "oh, it's not fair to judge a game so preemptively, so I should at least give it a shot before dismissing it due to its genre." But I think my two hours with Velvet Assassin have cinched it. Stealth is just a no go for me.

I mean, I'll play a game with stealth elements, like Beyond Good and Evil or Alpha Protocol, but honestly I tried to get through those with as little sneaking as possible. And I couldn't bring myself to enjoy Dishonored, despite it having a really cool setting and story and giving me awesome magic powers. So I doubt very much that there is a stealth game on earth that can change my mind.

I say this because I don't want to be too harsh on Velvet Assassin. The things I don't like about the game are fundamental to its makeup. It turns out that if I'm going to be an assassin, I'm going to be one like Travis Touchdown. The fact that Violette Summers is much better at her job (despite being a morphine addict, apparently), is probably mostly indicative of the fact that I am not well-suited to the field.

Velvet Assassin does some genuinely interesting things. You can peek through keyholes to scope out rooms before you enter. You can dress in a stolen uniform to try and blend in with the Nazis. Walking over leaves or rubble makes you easier to detect. Unfortunately, none of these things really appeal to me, because the whole time I'm thinking "ugh, why can't I just rush in there and shoot these guys with a gun."

I'm not quite sure why the stealth genre gets under my skin as much as it does. It's especially strange because, if I'd never played this kind of game before, it would sound like something that would really interest me. Instead of just brutishly plugging away with bullets, you have to be cautious, assess the environment, and take calculated risks to solve the levels of the game as if they were puzzles An intriguing twist on the typical action formula.

It's a mystery. My current theory is based on the fact that there's another genre that provokes similar feelings for me - real time strategy games. Both genres are things I should, on paper, like, but wind up stressing me out terribly in practice. I think the common factor is that both genres require me to divide my attention. If I'm going to make a move on a guard, I have to remain aware of the position, movement, and line of sight of the other guards, and my own position and posture, so as to not alert the guard I'm stalking while also remaining hidden from any other potential witnesses. It quickly overwhelms me, and as a sort of rebellion, I get impulsive and reckless, like, maybe if I can do the mission fast enough, I won't have time to get caught (I never said my reasoning was especially solid). And since, in order to enforce the central conceit of the genre, being caught is almost always a quick death, I have plenty of time to stew in my own repeated failure.

For obvious reasons, this means I can't say one way or the other whether Velvet Assassin is a good stealth game or a bad one. My impression thus far is that Violette Summers is kind of a dork, who spews grim monologues with the familiar rhythms of just about every action anti-hero ever. Also, while I enjoy the morphine mechanic on a gameplay level, from a story perspective, it's questionable - you shoot up some morphine and get transported into this pink cloud where you wear a nightie and can move in bullet time. I think this is supposed to be related to the game's framing device - the missions you do are actually Violette's memories as she lies wounded in a hospital bed (apparently wearing a nightie instead of a hospital gown, because video games). However I'm confused about what's actually going on. When you use morphine as a power-up, is that future Violette using morphine and getting her memories all tangled up, or is it past Violette using morphine and thus the memories were never recorded right in the first place. The first scenario makes more sense, but the morphine you use is found in the levels itself, the same way you might pick up a gun or a medkit, so the causality here is hard to pin down.

Luckily, I have not yet encountered any of the real nasty stuff that happened in WW2, but I have overheard some Nazis talking about it (eavesdropping on conversations is my favorite part of the game), so I still have my fingers crossed that this will be a white-washed affair.