Snatcher and Policenauts Review
When you watch a Tarantino film you can easily sense his influence behind everything you are seeing and hearing – he is both famous and infamous for it. There's very little in the medium of video games like this; a situation where you can truly feel the presence of the creator behind the art. In the short history of video games there are only a handful of notable directorial minds who have shaped the industry and the artform: Shigeru Miyamoto of the Zelda, Mario, and Star Fox series; Hironobu Sakaguchi of Final Fantasy fame; and the early iD Software team behind Doom (including John Romero, John Carmack, and American McGee).
There is only one, however, to be considered a true auteur of video game direction: Hideo Kojima, the man most popularly adored as the man behind Metal Gear Solid. Kojima's games are famous for various hallmarks, some positive and some negative. While they are lauded for their deep understanding and subversion of gaming stereotypes and motifs, they are equally ridiculed for their hyper-sexualisation and long-winded exposition. Like Tarantino though, gamers happily take the best with the worst in Kojima's games. This is because, while the low points can sometimes be frustrating or even hilarious, the highs his artistry provides are unparalleled anywhere else in the industry. Take a look at E3 2016's line-up and compare his ambiguous, deeply visually metaphorical trailer for Death Stranding to made-by-committee tripe like WATCH_DOGS2. While it's not for everyone, no one can deny it stands head and shoulders above the rest of the big-budget industry in terms of artistic vision.
Not everything Kojima touches turns to gold, however, and this is certainly the case with two of his early cult hits, Snatcher and Policenauts.
Snatcher, developed a year after Kojima's first game and smash hit, Metal Gear, was initially only released on the PC-8801 and MSX2 in Japan in 1988. Kojima, who's second-best dream job growing up was to be a film director, wanted to move away from the action-oriented Metal Gear, which he felt restricted his story-telling ability, and create a first-person story-driven detective game. Snatcher, quite obviously hugely influenced by Blade Runner, which Kojima will have watched in cinemas six years prior, follows the story of Gillian Seed – a Junker who's job it is to hunt down and destroy Snatchers; bio-robotic androids that murder people and steal their identities. Set in Neo Kobe City in the distant future of 2042, Snatcher is presented as an almost beat-for-beat copy of Blade Runner in its visuals and tone, right down to Gillian's tan duster coat and sci-fi pistol.
The gameplay is played out from a first-person detective work, done by selection options such as 'Move', 'Look' and 'Ask' from a text box at the bottom of the screen. Occasional action sequences involve shooting enemies using a grid system overlaid onto the first-person perspective. It is all very serviceable if not a little spartan but the true joy in the gameplay is the story unravelling through this detective work. Some important dialogue and cut-scenes, presented in a nice anime twist on the Blade Runner-esque visuals, is voice-acted (quite dreadfully) but most of the conversation and detective work is limited to reading text. The cast is mostly one-dimentional but they are colourful and entertaining.
After Snatcher, Kojima worked on and released Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake in 1990 but, once again, swiftly turned to the adventure/detective genre again with a spiritual successor to Snatcher. If Kojima's second-best dream job was to be a director, his most chief aim was to be an astronaut. Of course this didn't come to pass but his underlying passion collided with his profession as a director in 1994's Policenauts (yes. Police Astronauts).
Like Snatcher, Policenauts is a detective game played out in first-person with anime cutscenes. This time, the story follows Jonathan Ingram, a Policenaut who was lost in an 'accident' while building a future space colony in the year 2013. Floating through space he puts himself in stasis and is woken, alive and the same biological age, 25 years later. Three years on from his rescue he is a private investigator in Los Angeles (Blade Runner, anyone?) when his former wife, from before the accident, requests his services in investigating the disappearance of her new husband – an awkward position indeed.
The gameplay only differs slightly to Snatcher in that it uses a mouse cursor, controlled with a gamepad, to look at and interact with objects on the screen. Despite being released six years after Snatcher this system actually feels far more clunky and obtuse, especially when it comes to the shooting scenes which are done via the same input. In fairness, using the mouse in the original NEC PC-9821 release may have mitigated this but very few people in 2016 will have he opportunity to experience Policenauts in that way.
While both games are presented beautifully with wonderfully emotive soundtracks – especially Policenauts which has some amazing pieces – the gameplay and the pacing of the stories makes them both chores to play. At first the detective work is engaging but within a couple of hours it grows tiresome. You feel less and less like Sherlock or Deckard when you are constantly clicking on every single item on the screen just to make sure you didn't miss something. This sounds subjective but when the thought processes behind the detection are so obtuse it really becomes an objective issue that the player is expected to interact with nearly everything, often in a specific order, to advance to the next part of the story. Indeed it is especially frustrating when you are a step or two ahead of the story, and so feel you can skip out on being so careful in combing the environment for clues, only to realise the story won't advance because you didn't use the 'inspect' command on a certain item three times.
As a modern player in 2016 the game is also hampered by terribly dated and borderline offensive attitudes to women. While various anime include characters obsessed with the female anatomy and a disregard for politeness, it is often passable because you are simply watching other characters interact – the viewer can decide for themselves their opinion of what's unfolding. Often too these characters are lampooned for their actions; very rarely is it that the pervert gets their own way. In Snatcher and Polienauts however, the player IS the pervert and DOES get away with it. While many fans would argue you can simply ignore these elements of the game, that is not always possible. Often, using a command as as vague as 'Inspect' or 'Console' while looking at a female character results in dialogue or actions completely unexpected. 'Hmm... maybe I should check that lab technician's coat for clues' and you recoil as the technician screams 'OOH DON'T TOUCH THAT!'. How is the player to know that every other interaction with a female character is going to result in sexual assault? It's surprisingly distracting and aggravating and removes the player from otherwise believable science-fiction worlds.
Policenauts also suffers sorely from Kojima's almost hilarious obsession with detail. Snatcher mostly escapes these crippling moments of exposition but almost every room in Policenauts is rife with them. 'Look' at a couch in a room and get ready for 400 words on the science and history of this near-future couch technology, which apparently reads your body temperature through your ass and communicates it to the apartment's climate control systems. Yes seriously. What is most baffling about this exposition is idea that the player is supposed to believe the characters are actually saying this stuff – we're talking about a police investigation here and two guys are chatting about couch science for twenty minutes at a crimescene. And how do these guys even know this stuff? If someone came into my office right now and 'Looked' at my computer I wouldn't be able to tell them anything of note.
It is interesting that these games are somewhat cult hits. This is due most likely to the cult of personality surrounding Kojima himself. Also it is certainly due in part to how difficult these games were to obtain until only relatively recently – Snatcher was only released in the US and Europe on the Sega CD in 1994, six years after its initial Japanese release, and Policenauts was never released in the English language until fans painstakingly translated it with subtitles and released their version in 2007, more than a decade after its original release.
There are many things to love in these games: the audio is phenominal, they are unashamedly violent and crass (depending on the version you play) which is especially impressive for their era, and despite the dodgy pacing they have genuinely engaging stories in amazing settings with great plot twists. They are hard to recommend to any average gamer in 2016 though – the slow and sometimes obtuse gameplay is difficult to penetrate and many people will be turned off by its dated attitudes and awkward dialogue. Big fan of Kojima, gaming history, or just adventure games in general though? Give them a go. At minimum, be sure to check out some of the music.
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