REVENGE IS SWEET
How The Farm 51 is rejecting videogame conventions to create its fresh, and disturbing, vision
Glance over the shoulder of somebody playing Get Even, and you might think you know what it is. But if you were then to compare notes with someone else who did the same thing a minute or two after you, you might be surprised at how different their interpretation is. Is The Farm 51’s game a first-person shooter? A horror adventure? Some kind of puzzle game, perhaps? The confusing answer is that it is all of these things, and none of them.
“Get Even is a completely different game to what you might expect,” producer Lionel Lovisa explains. “We’ve called it a psychological thriller, and it is heavily influenced by incredible movies such as Memento, Inception, and Oldboy. It’s a mixture of gameplay mechanics, sound, and storytelling that delivers on many levels.”
The game follows protagonist Cole Black’s nightmarish struggle with amnesia, imprisonment, and disorientation. Black remembers nothing from his past except for what appears to be a botched hostage rescue attempt. He awakes to find himself in a partially repurposed, run-down asylum filled with deluded, dangerous, and mistreated inmates. The person who has brought him here, a mysterious presence who only communicates via TV screens installed around the building and uses a male and female voice, explains that everything that will happen is part of Black’s treatment. But to what end, and what it will involve, is left unsaid.
ALL THE FEELS
“The goal here is to deliver an emotional journey that the player will not expect at first,” Lovisa continues. “We wanted to have a game that will speak to a mature audience, something that has meaning, something that will move you, and where you must do something other than save the world. It’s an emotional rollercoaster: we will put you in the cart and make you feel many different things. It’s like when you watch a moving film – you feel excitement, intrigue, tension… Get Even delivers this in an experience which is unlike anything else.”
That doesn’t mean you won’t recognise some of the mechanics, of course. While Get Even isn’t a traditional first-person shooter, it’s certainly a first-person game. At times, you’ll even be armed with a gun and find yourself in the midst of a firefight. And Get Even’s headline weapon, a rifle that can be folded to allow it to shoot around corners, is a memorable toy, too. When you first use it to peek out of cover and land a headshot without ever putting your own head in the line of fire, it’s a revelation. This powerful piece of kit is put to good use in some environmental puzzles (shooting the lock off the back of a gate you can’t otherwise reach, for example), and makes the sections where you’re exchanging fire with enemies feel as riotous as they are polished. But these moments represent distinct bubbles of action
that play out within a much grander vision.
“Get Even is set within the first-person genre, but it’s not a straightforward FPS – it’s so much more,” Lovisa explains. “It’s an FPS made by people who’ve made and love FPS games, and wanted to use that experience to create something more than a game where you just have to kill people. We’ve taken inspiration from everything, whether that’s The Matrix, The Butterfly Effect, revenge movies or even [personal] emotional journeys. It’s a difficult one to explain for sure, but it all makes sense in time.”
“Get Even is a game about loss,” writer Stephen Sharkey adds. “The loss of family, the loss of purpose, even the loss of your mind. Character-wise, we wanted to create real, believable characters – not your typical ‘dude-bros’ that you see in a lot of other games. Even though the setting is fantastical, we wanted to explore some really human themes.
Many of those themes, such as memory, were already present from the dev team when Iain [Long, fellow writer] and I began work on the game. Memory is something we’ve explored at length in our past work [see ‘Mind Games’, opposite], and what fascinates me most about it is not only how it’s the basis of almost our entire identities – with past experiences, thoughts, and opinions coming together to create a sense of ‘us’ – but also how inaccurate and fallible it is.”
FATAL RECALL
Indeed, the decisions you make, and how you deal with situations like this throughout the game, will change the way you experience Get Even. As you attempt to piece together your past, you’ll dive into your own memories using a specially designed headset and attempt to recall what really happened. In doing so, you’ll build a collection of clues and establish links between them in a sort of Sherlockstyle mind palace, and you can play each memory as many times as you like and tackle it differently each time.
As such, firing a weapon in Get Even takes on a little more weight than it does in most games. On an early playthrough we execute a patrolling guard who we think is in our way – it turns out we don’t need to go down that route at all.
“AS YOU ATTEMPT TO PIECE TOGETHER YOUR PAST, YOU’LL DIVE INTO YOUR OWN MEMORIES.”
The guilt stays with us for some time afterwards – and the enigmatic individual in charge of our so-called treatment will become noticeably irritable if we keep going off-script and murdering. In another example, we kill someone we’ve identified as a terrorist while they’re speaking on the phone, only to hear their nowwidowed wife asking about dinner through the now-blood-splattered speaker grille. It’s entirely possible, we’re reliably informed, to complete the whole thing without ever killing anyone, not a single soul.
The moments when you aren’t deciding whether or not to kill someone are taken up by puzzle solving, storytelling, exploration, stealthy avoidance, investigative research, and some unbearably tense escalating situations – carried, in no small part, by Olivier Deriviere’s remarkable compositions and sound design – which we’d prefer not to spoil for you here. For the puzzle sections, you’re armed with a rather capable mobile phone that’s packed with various apps. A thermal camera will help you track pipe systems and electronic wiring; an evidencegathering app vibrates when you’re near articles of note, which can then be captured using the standard camera; there’s a map that shows the positions of enemies; and there’s even a UV light that will reveal grisly trails to follow.
HIDDEN THOUGHTS
Your unstable memories can also be used, in conjunction with the phone, to open up shortcuts, passageways and hiding places that may or may not have been there the first time around. And your deeper, hidden memories of childhood and growing up will percolate and rise to surface in intriguing ways that can help you progress. It’s more fun to discover such things for yourself, but one early example involves birthdays and a door passcode.
Get Even’s bold disregard for genre conventions, and the game’s willingness to change tack and rhythm in its own esoteric way, promise to deliver a unique, and decidedly dark, adventure. If it can maintain the pace and originality of its opening hours, Get Even could be something very special indeed.
“I cannot wait for players to experience how unique Get Even is,” Sharkey says. “I truly believe that Get Even offers something fresh and exciting – there’s a real sense of mystery in its DNA. And the idea of experiencing something in which a player honestly has no idea what’s coming next is something that I hope will become a talking point when people play the game.”