CONDEMNED: CRIMINAL ORIGINS
hunting SERIAL KILLER X as clueless fbi agent ethan thomas is a real good time if you grew up watching america's most wanted with your white trash neighbors. this is an excellent game if one of your core memories revolves around a re-enactment of a man murdering someone with a sledgehammer, and doubly so if most of your childhood was spent with your mom acting like child predators were gonna climb out of every van, truck, and computer monitor and snatch your ass., if a shady vehicle drove by your friends and asked them to help close the back door and you weren't the one to say Don't Do That Shit, you might not get it
much of the fantasy here was something presented to me in earnest growing up, so i inadvertently developed an interest in the material. if you're under the assumption that murderers are literally everywhere you start wanting to know more about it. next thing you know you're reading about how albert fish jammed so many needles up his ass his x-ray looked like a pine tree. sometimes you eat boiled hotdogs while your paternal grandfather lights cigarettes with other cigarettes and the TV screams about how the worst people on earth are actually at large and probably in your neighborhood and under your bed. it's just how it's gotta be. it's tangled around all my lobes and matters, so when freaks and weirdos bounce out behind a pillar, it's not only a shocking moment, it's the shocking moment i'd been waiting for my entire life. i knew it. i fucking knew it. i told you idiots there were guys with sledgehammers. i told you the odds of being murdered were like 10 to 1
basically there's always gonna be a part of me with some buy-in to this garbage. if a serial killer has a goofy nickname and some pretentious lil m.o i'm there. hands steepled. brow furrowed. cigarette dangling. i'm gonna catch this sick son of a bitch if it's the last thing i do. i can turn my shit all the way off while i'm playing and then come back from the fugue state with a bit of discomfort at how much i enjoyed swinging the crowbar and scanning the fluids. sometimes heart cooks brain
it helps that monolith were always expert stylists. where FEAR had you inhabiting intentionally boring everyday environments and watching them flower in real time under hails of expressive gunfire, here you've already come too late & everything's already happened. everything's already filthy and pockmarked and ruined. there's no room for you to impart yourself on these laboured tableaus. they're completely inert; locked in time in their worst possible moments
this is a world of crimewave neuroses made manifest, where everyone's either a murderer, a victim, or a cop. there is no evidence that anything exists outside these three archetypes, nor that it ever has or could. every building's the shittiest building you ever saw; there are a dozen active serial killers in direct competition at any given time; you MUST be willing to slam rebar into a man's head at a moment's notice
being the quintessential american horror game, the entire premise revolves around those on the margins of society being less human than avatars of elemental evil. it's a direct offshoot of the same warped representation of the underclass used to justify the obstruction of everything from shelters to affordable housing to safe injection sites to encampments to sex work, and while these mythical roving gangs of psychopaths don't exist in real life, it's not infrequent that municipal policy's steered in direct response and capitulation to the fear that they might. really, the only thing condemned gets wrong in its articulation of this particular brand of middle class paranoia is that it's nowhere near racist enough
beyond that much of it functions as the kind of militant dave grossman style cop horror that treats city streets as warzones and civilians as insurgents. one where the ends always justify the means and it's always You or Them. the violence is unerringly depicted as necessary; the foes so thoroughly debased and dehumanized that the act of murder is simply that of obligation. ethan thomas has to snap these necks. he has to crush these ribcages. he has to carve thru the rotting stinking crust of the underworld to Make Things Right, because sometimes keeping the streets safe means keeping the streets empty
unlike gruel i do think it's an unsettling experience and that the scenarios convey the discomfort and dread of a stranger's physical proximity extraordinarily well, partially due to how grungy and frantic the combat is, emulating the graceless volatility that street fights erupt into, and partially due to the anticipation of violence that occurs in the lulls between that volatility. at its best it approximates the discomfort of walking away from the only street light on the block or the sound of footsteps behind you on a lonely stretch of road. it's the queasiness of being aware of your body and the harm that others could effortlessly cause it
it should be said that i don't read much of this as intentional. if anything, a lot of its theming's more the byproduct of the medium than anything monolith set out to deliberately accomplish. were it a film one can imagine it'd be very similar to se7en; there likely wouldn't even be a need for all the punch-ups at all. but when you start having to orient your grindhouse narrative around a completely disconnected combat loop things start getting real weird real quick. in some ways this fits alongside seminal works like The Two Towers as one of the purest examples of how VideoGames process raw material; neither game is particularly unique in its methods, but both stand out starkly for how the translation process perverts the end result. in The Two Towers' case it probably just took a few years off christopher tolkien's lifespan, but here it made for an exceptionally politically acrid game
when i swing that crowbar i don't really think of much. the driving force thru these spaces is that of heaving motions, grunts, and gurgling, and outside of that immediacy there isn't much of anything. it's a repetitive, thumping, throbbing game with basic rules and functions that never muddy themselves with complexity or nuance. just the texture of repeat killings, over and over. it's a routine, dependable process. never changes. perfect homogeneity. thump thump thump thunmp tnhunmp tuh mpn tunjpn thhjpn. it's goya's fight with cudgels; a snapshot of the moment before god says enough's enough and everyone drowns
that the only major thematic or narrative swerve is adjacent to satanic panic is pitch perfect; that the oro wear oni-like orthodontic appliances, wield tanbo, and manifest as martial arts demons even more so. this is a game made by highly theatrical nerds, and geeking out over japanese shit only makes it more american
the end presents you with a choice over whether or not to kill the killer you've been hunting, fulfilling the ultimate big cojones fantasy of being selectively above the law you're expected to uphold in a scene reminiscent of the ending of cop -- only in that one the villain isn't tied up in the trunk when he gets his brains blown out. truly diabolical shit. almost as vital to understanding the medium as The Two Towers