Smartly executed thriller taps into concerns over social media misuse
STRANGE Brigade comes from the same developers of the Sniper Elite series, though possessing a decidedly more eccentric tone than that of its long-shot-obsessed cousin.
Strange Brigade is a rose-tinted view of the quirks of a long-forgotten era, bringing Colonial British aesthetics to the fore. You are afforded four playable characters - none of whom would feel out of place in a role during the Golden Age of Movies. The whole game is a rather camp affair, though the healthy does of self-awareness helps keep everything on the right side of tongue-incheek.
Strange Brigade’s story is largely relegated to a smattering of pre-combat cutscenes that never really offer more narrative meat beyond ‘ kill wave after wave of undead foes’. Levels also offer small prompts towards to overall plot in the form of collectable letters and diaries that go some of the way towards fleshing out the game’s characters.
The objective of Strange Brigade is to explore its multitude of forgotten crypts and lost cities, in search of hidden bounty, means to progress your character and of course to slaughted wave after wave of the undead hordes.
Strange Brigade can be completed either solo or in four-player online co-op. Like most cooperative games available nowadays, Strange Brigade truly shines when you manage to get a few friends together. When in online co-op, Strange Brigade’s levels become more challenging, with a greater number of enemies but also a greater number of puzzles.
One gripe I have with the game’s cooperative play is that loot is not shared between teammates, meaning an extra and wholly unnecessary level of competition is introduced between you and your friends.
Each of the four playable characters share simililarities - including your weapon loadouts. Where they express their individuality is in their fierce amulet powers. Slaying foes goes towards charging your amulet, which once charged can be used to unleash a number of different amulet abilities. Unfortunately, some of the powers are simply objectively better than others, unfortunately making some of these powers feel redundant.
Strange Brigade feels a little dated, but nonetheless is great fun. There are some odd design choices that definitely take marks off the final score but that isn’t to say that
Strange Bridgade isn’t a generally well-made game that will offer ours of fun to individuals or online groups. A father’s quest to track down his missing daughter unfolds in overlapping windows on a desktop computer screen in writer-director Aneesh Chaganty’s smartly executed thriller.
Tapping into timely concerns about cyberbullying and social media peer pressure, Searching employs the same stylistic conceit as 2014 supernatural horror Unfriended and its sequel to test the bond between a parent and child in a 24-hour digital age where appearances can be dangerously deceptive.
Chaganty’s script, co-written by Sev Ohanian, invites us to piece together evidence by following the distraught paterfamilias’ cursor as he clicks on video files, initiates a video-conference call or makes several wrong guesses at his daughter’s passwords.
Every second could mean the difference between the closing shot of a funeral or a tear-filled reunion and the film ratchets up suspense by drip-feeding us information that points to the teenager’s fate or muddies the narrative waters.
Searching loses a little of its focus in a messy final act, which incorporates GPS tracking and TV news coverage, but by this point in the serpentine story, we are fully invested in the fractured central relationship and its resolution.
Chaganty tightly anchors our sympathy to father David Kim (John Cho) in a heartbreaking opening 10 minutes of home video footage and photographs, which chart his marriage to wife Pamela (Sara Sohn) and the birth of their daughter Margot (Michelle La).
Pamela’s diagnosis with cancer galvanises the family and the Kims rally with beatific smiles as the mother goes into remission. Alas, a second hard-fought battle ends in defeat and David struggles to articulate his grief to Margot, a gifted pianist whose filmed recitals provide a fleeting musical soundtrack to accompany the tapping of keys or clicks of a mouse.
Late one night, while he is asleep, David misses two telephone calls and a video call request from his daughter.
The next morning, Margot is missing and David’s concern festers into terror.
He contacts the police and Detective Rosemary Vick (Debra Messing) is assigned to the case.
A trawl through Facebook and other websites reveals that the father doesn’t know his little girl very well.
‘It’s time to start considering the possibility that she ran away,’ suggests Vick.
The case gains media attention and everyone with a smart device contributes to the debate using competing hashtags #FindMargot and #DadDidIt.
Searching refracts a deeply human story of loss and healing through the prism of 21st-century technology.
Cho is on screen for almost the entire 102 minutes, cleverly creating the illusion of a multi-layered investigation unfolding in real-time.
Chaganty and co-writer Ohanian hardwire the plot with satisfying twists although they tip the wink too early to one potentially lucrative line of inquiry.
We derive considerable thrills and pleasure from the characters’ pain.