Razer in Hand, We Walk the Long Mile
Our first demo was a revisit of the Sexual Deviants level. Playing as Danny, the bespectacled asylum escapee, we caught some dialog between him and Leo (his fellow escapee and all-around tough guy) that indicated Danny was coming here because he had some vague snippet of memory related to it. Leo seems more focused on survival, urging Danny away from the "project front," while Danny furiously argued that he had to find out about his mysterious past. Amnesia makes a great hook for videogame stories.
Sexual Deviants played out just the same as during our last hands-on with it. The PS2 controls are a solid default, while the unchanged Wii controls bring an extra layer of brutal involvement to the game as you pantomime key parts of the gory murders. We still haven't seen the PSP version of the title, although Rockstar says that each version differs only in terms of minor content, such as certain weapons. Looking at the game, we're pretty certain the PSP can run a version that looks nearly as good, especially with Rockstar doing it -- it's shown that, more than most other Western studios, it knows how to fit a AAA title on a UMD.
Going through the stained bathroom, grimy strip club, and horrific blood-stained torture chambers of Sexual Deviants brought us to our target: a woman dressed as a doctor, someone who Danny vaguely remembered. Without spoiling it, she sent us off to the next level, the nearby abandoned theater, where Danny had apparently set up a safe house before his troubles started.
Although the new level helped highlight a few things, such as the resounding brutality of environmental executions (read as: knocking a man down, kicking him by way of groin into position, picking up a sewer access lid, smashing his head apart with it, dropping the corpse into the sewer, and then putting the manhole back in place), the variety of opponents (including a few police officers we saw beating another of our attackers to death), and the way the game's levels all hinge around actual storytelling, with each level leading to the next organically, the star of our demo was the new "look" for executions.
Now, executions apply a high-contrast filter to the screen, as well as a color filter, taking the whole scene to a surreal level. It's still chillingly brutal -- this is a Halloween release in date and spirit -- but the appearance gives the whole thing a distance from the "reality" of the game. It may not be quite what we saw a few months ago, but it's still looking to be a solid piece of horror for fans of the genre and the series.
