Day Three

• Game: Double Fine/Adult Swim Games's Headlander
• Release Month: July.
• Quick Look: Here. (Vinny/Alex)
• Started: 02/12.
• Completed: 04/12.

Now, you might imagine I wouldn't have more to say about this mechanically traditional SpaceWhipper after yesterday's update, but the game continues to surprise me. I've already discussed how the player moves from body to body by removing the extant head and taking the body over, like some kind of sci-fi penanggalan. (I know you were all wondering when I'd bring up the obvious penanggalan comparisons, so there you go.) However, the game doesn't rest on its laurels with the same color-coded security doors and shoot-outs we've seen so far.

In a particularly memorable portion of the game that I've just completed, the player must pass through a simulated warzone featuring specialized combat units of white and black colorations: this isn't so much a "half-black half-white guy from Star Trek" reference as a big, pointless war game indulgence streamlined down to two sides. Because it's black and white, the theme is chess: every piece has a role and a counterpart. This area is also a repurposed section of the spacestation's archives - because the plot tells us that the corrupt AI in charge of everything has forbidden the acquisition of knowledge, which gives a certain Biblical flair to its oppressive overlord (though really just reflects how real-life dictators will suppress and remove the intellectuals first), the archives have been left neglected and this "Grid Clash" game has taken up the space. In order to move the data around to your allied NPC buddies, you have to jump into various bodies, have them download the information and then make it to the equivalent upload pod without that body exploding.

It seems like a difficult and annoying challenge from the offset, but this wargame has everyone distracted and you're usually only facing a few aggro'd soldiers at a time. What's particularly ingenious is how every unit works: the pawns are practically useless, and tellingly have the same randomized names as the hapless, harmless citizens you've been ignoring; the knights fire in a distinct L-shape, true to their unorthodox movement in chess, making it hard to properly aim but giving them a built-in 90 degree refraction which gives them an edge in combat; bishops fire in two directions diagonally away from the direction you're aiming at; the burly rooks don't shoot at all, but rather use melee attacks to devastating effect; and the king is a special piece that the player has to move into the right position to end this stage of the game. You're then thrown into a boss fight with the antagonistic "Kill Queen" (I so wanted this to be a Queen reference, because they could've scored this game much like they scored Flash Gordon, but I realized it was a play on "kill screen") that I'll go into in just a moment.

When you reach this portion of the game, which I'd estimate at around the halfway point if the various completion stat trackers are any indication, the game had settled into a basic rhythm of "find the right dude, get through the door". The last section involved unlocking a lot of elevator locks to increase their accessibility, but relied largely on the same mechanics. You might say the same about this chess one too, since it again involves relying on two different colors for access to various parts of the area, but the way it's recontextualized as this team battle game that you're trying to inconspicuously sneak around gives it something of a frantic new edge.

The Kill Queen boss fight also relies on a similar Ikaruga-style polarity-switching mechanic, where she'll turn face (literally) and be immune to the other side's color. This is a mechanic that's been persistent throughout this part of the map though hasn't really been pertinent until now: white pieces can't hurt other white pieces, and ditto for the black team. You can still pull off heads while disembodied - the required vacuum pull is the first upgrade you pick up - but when disembodied everyone, black and white, suddenly becomes hostile towards you. They can't attack when you're on their side though, so staying in a body confers some degree of safety. With Kill Queen, you need to constantly switch from white piece bodies to black piece bodies in order to do damage, and make yourself immune to the damaging laser beams she fires.

It's not a particularly novel mechanic - even if we're just limiting ourselves to Indie SpaceWhippers, Outland built a whole game around switching between two colors - but the game makes it work within the framework of the setting and story they're telling, presenting the whole wargaming charade as another exerise of the eternally bored (there's that Zardoz influence peeking through again) and its overseer Kill Queen as a perfectionist chess grandmaster who berates your martial tactical acumen constantly while you're trying to surreptitiously move data around from under her nose.

Anyway, this game continues to be neat. I hope to finish it tonight, or early tomorrow, so I probably won't write any more about it for this feature. I'd recommend it for the aesthetic alone, honestly, though if you're a fan of this subgenre it's a decent entry if a bit too on the simple side. Going from the well-hidden secrets and challenging checkpoint-running of Axiom Verge to this almost too forgiving game where deaths respawn you at the last entrance you passed through and every door and collectible is helpfully placed on the map for you to peruse later, Headlander might end up being too straightforward and effortless for some, similar to how basic and repetitive Costume Quest sometimes felt when it wasn't being far too delightful. Double Fine have long been far more invested in their presentations than in any particularly in-depth game mechanics, but that's not necessarily a bad thing; they're accessible gateways for movie/comic nerds to the various game genres they represent, if nothing else.

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