(update: I mistakenly referred to this as "new weird" in the original title of this post. It is not by any means subversive enough to be new weird.)
“I had a perfect nightmare
“I had a perfect nightmare
On a starry, torrid sea
I am cast to prison
At a crippled demon's plea”
—from
the initial trailer
This is a sequel to The Dishwasher:
Dead Samurai, which was
published on Xbox Live Arcade, and which I have not played. I
downloaded the demo to Vampire Smile one
evening, figuring that the sequel would be the better experience, and
I was immediately blown away. I cannot overstate this enough—I was
blown away. Within this maybe-ten-minute intro level I was not only
sold on the game, but sold on the game so hard that I had to buy it
on the spot.
In Vampire
Smile, you play as either the Dishwasher himself, or his sister,
Yuki (in an rather odd arrangement, the game tells Yuki's story, with
the Dishwasher playing through the same levels in her wake and
arriving late to most of the major scenes, yet you have to play his
story to get the better ending). Yuki is the easier character to
play, as the Dishwasher feels slightly less responsive, but once you are used to him he plays with his own, perhaps
more graceful, rhythm.
The story starts with Yuki, framed for the destruction of Earth in the first game, imprisoned in a supermax space prison orbiting the moon. She endures nightmarish hallucinations regularly, and after the latest, awakes to find herself outside her cell, surrounded by the dismembered bodies of the guards. She grabs a katana and tears her way through the security to the escape pods, losing her arm in a battle with the prison warden on the way. She wakes up after a crash landing on the moon, with a chainsaw unexpectedly grafted to her mutilated limb, and sets out through a dystopian world populated by zombies, Jack-O'-lantern-headed robots, cyborgs, ninja-commandos, and the like. Over the course of the game you will pick up other unique weapons for each character—a man-high pair of scissors, an equally over-sized hypodermic syringe, a pair of meat cleavers, kusarigama...not to mention some magic super-moves. Each character also has their own minion—a flying, laser-shooting kitten and a crow respectively, and these can be controlled by a second-player controller.
The story reads
like madcap fanfiction. The Dishwasher has destroyed earth, which was corrupted by "cyborg blood" created by something called "The Fallen Engineer," the moon becomes the last redoubt of humanity, but the Engineer is now poisoning it in the same manner, corrupting its leaders with his "web of lies." This, dear readers, lends itself to a very fun interpretation of what a disease spread by lies might be. It is wonderfully weird, and feels like there
might be world-building here that we are not privy to. It takes
such a kitchen-sink approach to the universe, and the narrative is very
bare bones, and has so little grounding in sanity that it breezes by
without much impact until the end, which is satisfying, though oblique. It's all surreal and
dreamlike, complemented by a grotesque gothic-punk art-style drawn
with rough, charcoal-sketch outlines, and scattered with un-voiced comic-panel
cutscenes. It's all in chalky black-and-white, with only a few
touches of color in pale-pastel lighting, soft backdrops, glowing health
pickups, psychedelic magic explosions, and the blood.
There is a lot of this latter. The grotesque violence is central to the gameplay and the narrative, with blood splashing the walls, the
ceilings, the floors and even the fourth wall itself, and each
finishing move against each roughly-drawn, cartoonishly-proportioned
enemy reducing them to a gaseous explosion of gore, splitting torsos
from legs, heads from torsos, and scattering limbs to about the area. All this palls into inoffensiveness quite quickly, as a
matter of fact, due to the unreal nature of the art, and quickly
ceases to be noticeable as much more than another part of the aesthetic
palette. But it never ceases to enjoyably compliment the cathartic action.
The gameplay
follows the mold of Devil May Cry in a 2D space, with combos and
directional inputs for different attacks. It has just enough depth to
require and hold your attention on any difficulty above easy, while being simple
enough to understand fairly well within a sitting. It's possibly fastest and most frenetic combat I have ever played. It is never not fun, and it is absolutely transcendent when you achieve flow (also known as being "in the zone") during battle. And did I mention the enemies can, and constantly do, hit each other?
Hidden here and
there in the stages are various perks, some helpful, some humorous
(the game is rife with cheeky, informal remarks and Easter Eggs that
do a far better job of establishing kinship with the developers of
this two-person project than the same sort of humor does in a large,
impersonal, corporate production). There are also a few literal
stages, complete with amps and electric guitars, on which you can
perform distorted, wailing solos via a little rhythm game (and yes,
the lead developer is a fan of Brandon Lee's The Crow), which
interludes compliment the already superb rock soundtrack. And the
icing on the cake is that the entire game is playable cooperatively,
with a new tweaked take on the story in which Yuki and her brother
fight side by side rather than alone.
There are a few
cons: I think the simplicity and low skill-ceiling does lower the replay
value a tiny bit, and the game could have been a few levels and bosses
longer; enemies can
about-face in (seemingly) just a frame or two mid-attack to hit you
if you dodge past them, and these attacks often come out so fast that
they can instantly interrupt you if you end a dodge within range,
hindering aggressive play.
The frustration
caused by this last is tangible, but it
does not ruin or even greatly mar the experience. The game is entirely stylish, mostly
fun, weird as all hell, and delightfully inventive. It's a flawed
little masterpiece, a must-play if you like action games or slick visuals. It is even a little Lovecraftian in its own unique way. To my
mind, it's about as good a piece of modern weird fiction as you can
hope to find in the mainstream.
An almost perfect
nightmare, and its on Steam now, too.
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