Barbelith Underground > Games & Gameplay

First of all, for those who’ve not been following it, the storyline. You’re a syndicate of hitmen, the Killer7. Only, there’s really only the one of you – Harman Smith, a wheelchair-bound priest with multiple personalities. Each of the seven alternate personalities – all with the surname Smith – can be physically manifested and each has its own skills and abilities. Coyote Smith can pick locks or jump through high gaps. Kevin Smith can turn himself invisible. MASK de Smith can shift heavy physical objects. KAEDE Smith can remove barriers by slicing her wrist open and spraying blood over them. You’re sent on various missions to take out specific targets, each protected by a number of puzzles and an army of Heaven Smiles, lurching human bomb zombies that, apparently, don’t really exist.

I've been waiting for this game forever. When the first screenshots were released, it was a similar moment to seeing Jet Set Radio or Mario 64 for the first time - the suspicion that somebody somewhere was telling porkies, because there was no way that a game could look like that and remain a playable experience. This suffered more than most because of the admission that the look came first, before anybody came up with an idea for the how the thing would play. And then, when Capcom slowly began revealing gameplay details, it all started to sound like a wasted opportunity. An on-rails shooter without a light gun to support it. Visually beautiful, but lacking any real interactivity.

Got the Cube version yesterday. Any and all worries disappeared the moment I started playing it. Far from taking control out of the player's hands, the movement system feels streamlined, like they’ve thrown out all the unnecessary baggage that games have been collecting over the years. Hold down A to move forwards. Press B to turn around 180 degrees. When you come to a junction, the screen shatters into shards, with each available direction written on them – hold the analogue stick in the direction of the shard you want to take (the shards are relative to your character’s position on the screen, so you’re basically just pointing to the door or corridor you want to move towards) and hold down A again to move on.

It’s inspired. On paper, it sounds like the most restrictive experience ever – it doesn’t feel that way in practice. Full 3D movement in most adventure games is a waste of time, because when you take a step back and think about it, you're still being ferried down corridors and only making a decision when you come to a doorway or a junction. They’re forever showing you doors that are permanently locked, buildings that you can't enter. The movement system here just makes it more obvious, but in reality it's no more restrictive than most other third-person adventures. The problem's even there in games that are supposed to be totally open and free - I lost count of the number of times I tried to get into a house in Thief: Deadly Shadows, only to find that the doors and windows weren't doors and windows at all, but were just walls that they'd decided to paint those textures onto in order to make the game look bigger than it was. There's none of that frustration here, no getting stuck on a puzzle and thinking that you must have missed a room somewhere on the level. This game just makes it obvious how many others are simple corridor treks, by being one itself and revelling in that fact.

As you become accustomed to the layout of the levels, you find yourself instinctively holding the stick in the direction of the junction you want to take before the options have even appeared on the screen - and, brilliantly, doing so allows you to keep on moving without having to pause at all. The shards system is also used for interacting with items within rooms – again, it prevents the usual nonsense of having to press ‘use’ on every surface available before you find an item that you can actually manipulate and isn’t just a static bit of the scenery.

The Heaven Smiles are invisible. The only indication you get that one’s around is when you hear its inane giggle. The right shoulder button takes you into a first person mode – once there, the left trigger scans the area you’re looking at. If there’s a Smile in the vicinity it’ll become visible. The A button fires your gun, Y preps your character’s special shooting ability, a flick of the C stick reloads.

The rest of the game is insane. Visually it’s like nothing else around – the harsh, hugely stylised two-tone shading always looks stunning. There’s some mental mixing of styles, too – every now and again you’ll come across an intricately detailed bit of patterning amongst the simplicity, or an anime cut scene when you were expecting an in-engine one. It keeps surprising you. The music is all over the shop, changing styles every time you enter a new room. Sound effects are satisfyingly heavy and crisp – each Smile has its own distinct giggle, each of the characters you control has their own soundbite as reward for hitting an enemy weakspot (including a liberal splattering of “fuck it”s, “fuck you”s and “you’re fucked,” all fairly shocking coming from out of Nintendo’s little purple box). There are ghosts spread around the levels that dish out random burblings which masquerade as hints – they’re all heavily treated, some sounding like Twin Peaks’ Little Man from Another Place. Subtitles at the bottom of the screen occasionally conflict with the spoken words that you can just about make out, increasing the unease.

You can change personalities whenever you want, storyline permitting. Doing so sees the one you’re currently in control of explode in a slowed-down shower of blood drops, before being sucked back together in your new form. Killing Heaven Smiles sees them leaking blood out of holes in their bodies, if you’ve just plugged them with random shots, or else exploding in a similar eruptions of droplets if you’ve targeted their instant-kill weakspot. The blood floats towards you and is collected in test tubes and one large jar, depending on its type. Thin blood can be used to refill your health. Thick blood can be taken to the doctor who lives inside the television sets in each level, who’ll then turn it into a serum that can be used to upgrade character skills.

The entire game feels so fresh and so totally fucked up at the same time. On top of the whole multiple personalities thing, there’s Samantha, Harman’s ‘carer’. When she’s in her maid’s outfit she’s demure and willing to help, while he’s lucid and in control. When she’s in her ‘street clothes’ she the exact opposite – vile and violent, beating the shit out of him or screwing him, while he sits prone, head lolling, tongue hanging out and drawling spittle. Then there’s the bosses – all very memorable, none of them being wars of attrition as in so many games, but all totally screwy and not a little worrying. And then there’s *that* room in Garcian Smith’s house – sealed shut with a metal safe door, the only hint as to what’s inside being the screaming and pounding.

It’s littered with touches that make no logical sense, but that combine to fit into the bizarre gameworld perfectly, or clever, funny little moments that will probably pass most people by. Carrier pigeons are dotted around the levels, each holding a note which may or may not have some bearing on the plot. When you go into your inventory to read them again, you find that they’re distinguished from each other by being named after Smiths songs – Still Ill, Well I Wonder, Meat is Murder. The Smiths theme is also present in other small moments – the words How Soon is Now are scrawled on a wall in blood and form part of a puzzle. There still doesn’t seem to be any reason why the pigeons are there at all, nor any indication of whether or not the writer of the notes has any part in the story. They’re just thrown into the mix, along with everything else – the woman who crawls along walls to show that they form part of a puzzle, the ghost of one of your previous victims who wears a red gimp suit and hangs from the sky by a rope around his waist, his finger in front of his mouth as though he’s about to tell you a secret, the small boy with empty eye sockets, the decapitated head that appears in unexpected places and talks in emoticons.

So far I’ve only got the one minor complaint, and that’s that the Normal mode is maybe too easy. Some of the hints given by the ghosts take all of the challenge out of certain puzzles, which can be annoying. With that in mind, I’m considering abandoning the progress that I’ve made so far and starting the game over from scratch on the Hard setting. In its defence, though, the relative ease of Normal mode – in the first couple of missions, at least – combined with the superb reduction of the controls should make this a game that’s far more open to casual gamers than a lot of Capcom’s recent output.

This is undoubtedly an important game. In stripping the standard gameplay experience back, in reducing it to its constituent parts, throwing away everything that isn’t needed and rebuilding the form from scratch, without any attention paid to what other people are doing, Capcom have made something that’s staggeringly new and that shows that there are still huge innovations to be made. I’d be surprised if certain elements of the control scheme – the genius that is the ‘one button to move, one to turn around’ system, in particular – weren’t ripped off wholesale by less imaginative developers in the near future. But, more than just being an important game, it’s a thrillingly entertaining one. I’ve never played anything else quite like it.