Get Even
Un Even
Developer The Farm 51 publisher Bandai namco price $ 29.99 AvAilAble At STeam www.getevengame.com/en
Sometimes games tell great stories through interaction, inference and player involvement. Other times games tell great stories through more traditional means, with linear plotting narrative beats and an overall structure designed to tell the one story that the developers want to tell. Get Even is an example of the latter type of game. It tells a fantastic story of memory, manipulation, betrayal and revenge through fairly traditional, if somewhat flashy means. It also doesn’t really require the player to participate to tell the story. Get Even is a great thriller, but it’s not thrilling to play - it’s more like a good movie that pauses every few minutes forcing you to press a button on the remote control to start it up again.
Players take the role of Cole Black (take a second to appreciate how cheesily awful that name is), a hard man who after failing to save a girl with a bomb strapped to her chest awakens in an abandoned mental asylum, soon after encountering a mysterious voice that gives instructions and ignores inquiries. He’s there to help Cole, he says, and that the Pandora headset he is wearing will allow him to recover his memories and aid with his treatment. And what a treatment it is. Cole prowls the halls of the asylum, using his magic phone to solve puzzles in an attempt to find images that spark memories, throwing Cole into a scene from Cole’s past and, for the most part, radically changing the gameplay mechanics.
In the asylum Cole is concerned with finding clues and solving simple, survival horror-style puzzles. The main tool at his disposal is his
Cole prowls the hall of the asylum, using his magic phone to solve puzzles
phone which has a number of apps dedicated to investigation and police work. There’s an infrared camera app allowing Cole to see heat and cold, another that scans for evidence, and one that shows footprints and blood stains. It’s all very silly but for the most part functional and it’s breezily enjoyable. In memories, Cole becomes more of a man of action, sneaking and shooting enemies, either with his pistol or with his Corner Gun, a weapon, that as the name suggests, can be used to shoot around corners without exposing Cole to danger ( They exist and are pretty rad, too - Ed.). The shooting is far less successful than the puzzling. It’s clunky, slow and the stealth feels half-baked. There are some cool ideas in both the combat and the puzzling, but the end result feels like the developers had too many ideas and spread their talent and resources too thin, making each component feel too shallow to be satisfying.
The story of Get Even is very good and has some nice psychological trickery in it, and the soundtrack is genuinely excellent with some fantastic ideas that really lend themselves to the idea of fallible memories, but neither of these factors are strong enough to make up for the game’s shortcomings. The mechanics never fully gel together and never really change, leading to a quite monotonous cycle of puzzling and shooting. TAVISH FORREST