Betrayer

Betrayer's a sort of admirable failure. Playing a game where you are placed into such haunted and foreboding settings such as these abandoned forts and vacant fields, in stark black and white no less, listening to the wind rush through the trees testifying to nature's massive presence and civilization's absence, hunting for clues to discover just what happened to the native and colonial life here creates a unsettling and intriguing ambiance, while offering the player almost no hand or guide at all! Ballsy! Alienated and isolated in this haunted wilderness, the devs want you to crawl around the forest looking for bloody dirt, buried secrets, signs of struggle which lead in some way to a interweaving, tragic story of paranoia and greed in the wild frontier... this isn't a conventional game and it's not telling a story with any likeable figures or hopes for redemption, there isn't anything to find joy in. You'll find ghosts and shadows who have forgotten who they are and won't budge an expositional inch until you dig up their past to reveal their inhuman brutality to them, until they remember all the people they've killed and the anxieties that haunted them in their lives. It's fascinating, but it's a ton of trek-work which is endemic of the problem of Betrayer.

This game asks a lot from the player and doesn't concern itself with attracting you with even a hint towards a promise (like the NPCs who have no facial animation, this game plays with a strict pokerface) for any kind of satisfying reward or resolution; you do a lot of this busy work of solving ghost mysteries and running around the woods only hoping it pays off and, well, I don't think everyone will think what you get is exactly rewarding. In some ways this game is sort of antithetical to a lot of modern, tried-and-true, game design-philosophy that it sort of adopts a, at least in my mind, punk sort of disposition which demands the player engage or walk away. Bt after having gone along and seen their vision through, Blackpowder Games just didn't create a video game that is all that compelling. Betrayer has a strong ambiance, a unique story which is presented in a cool way, and an admirable while somewhat antagonistic philosophy about just how much a player really needs but it's kind of boring, a bit repetitive and schematic, and not always worth the effort.

The addition of map markers in a recent patch speaks as an admission of defeat of vision for this game. If all hidden things are just collectables on a map, what makes this game different than something like Farcry, other than being more obtuse? Try again, Blackpowder Games! I dig the idea, but really do it next time.