Monochrome slider: Betrayer

I don't know if Betrayer had a troubled development cycle or overly much about the game; I do know that it was made by 'at least some dudes' from the sweet team that made FEAR. While FEAR had a pretty iffy story that essentially did whatever it wanted and left you to pay the bill, it was a really enjoyable shooter with a really bad sequel.

You really hope that when they say "the guys who worked on FEAR" they like, left after the first FEAR and watched in horror as the second was made. Not the other option, that they worked on FEAR 2 and just left the digit out. You could say it makes too much of a difference!

(Snakefist)

don't want no skeletons on the lawn

Anyway the thing Betrayer is known for is its original prerelease materials depicted it with a very stark color palette of red on black, giving the game a weird perhaps even noir feeling to it. This may have done a lot to actually hurt the sales of the game, since lots of people went 'oh god my eyes they bleed red on black' and then wrote the whole production off. As it turns out, and the screenshots posted about here will display, Betrayer is on a rather unique slider system that allows you to set the contrast and intensity however you like. While I admit I didn't find I disliked the original artistic design, I do really appreciate actually getting to see some green in my gaming that isn't my wallet being devoured by steam sales so I flipped those sliders to see some glorious leaves. Such glorious leaves.

Also just kidding Canadian money is like blue and plastic now. I haven't seen green money since 2010!


My first impressions of this game aren't really much of a shock. I was raised in a region with a lot of, at the time, coniferous trees which I ran around as a child. I don't know if Virginia actually looks like this, or looks like how I remember my childhood, but give me a pine tree simulator and apparently I'm excited. The game is legitimately pretty and just sort of ... Nice? Nice to see something a bit different. As I noted, the game allows for a pretty unique emphasis on whichever part of the visual experience you desire. Since I was excited to see some green, I shifted the sliders to accent the greenery, but also let the game's gamma stay down. So it is dark, dreary and green. Sometimes I had to move the colors around to see what I was doing, so the screenshots are inconsistent. Alas! The game is easy about graphics settings though, very professional in that regard.

Betrayer is conceptually an FPS, but this is more utilized for the ease of conveying a 3D world. I mean, honestly, would you call Morrowind a FPS? Because Betrayer ends up feeling a great deal like an adventure in Morrowind terms, journal pen scratchings and weird outdoor world, as opposed to shooty shooty bang bang. The Unreal engine works just fine here, though there is a lot of press F to examine, press F to talk, and not nearly enough press F to pay respects. Past the FPS elements, it is actually very close to FEAR, a sort of jumbled horror-occult set up, though being set in 1650~ or so the elements come together very differently and there is far less emphasis on the shooting. The game is more an investigative horror throwdown, with the FPS leanings to tie it up neatly.

I should point out that the game references the conflict between the British and the Spanish, which I feel like it probably should have buttressed with some additional back story. I'm not a history buff, but I know more than is average so I'm a little unsure that the average gamer is going to understand references to 'loyalty to the pope' and 'the heretic king', you know? I mean if we're pointing out flaws, it does seem weird to me that we just sort of assume people know What Is as to centuries old history. I guess the game just kinda forgets about the Spanish presence anyway, they never really get properly explained.

limited mystery here though

It is not really a 'murder mystery' although the game does have spooky occult elements that are mysterious, but you do investigate the surroundings for clues. About midway through the game I'm getting less and less a feeling this is supposed to be the real world and more the feeling I'm in like, British purgatory or something. So yeah, shooty investigative murder mystery with ghosts in purgatory, the game. There you go. Genre all wrapped up.

Combat in Betrayer is as informed by the setting as it should be, albeit with some modern conveniences tossed in for good or worse measure. You do not have by any contemporary stretch of the imagination what people consider as guns. You have a bow, some flintlock, a musket and reload times that spiral off into infinity. Inversely, the enemy is hampered by much the same circumstances, generally standing around filling muskets at each other being the order of the day.

I mean, if you've ever wanted to give clear and concise thought to early firearms-centric combat before guns were any good, just picture a raving lunatic traveler and a grunting monstrous I don't even know what that is re-loading their guns at each other forever. And then remember that people were more willing to do violent murder each other with these tools than they are nowadays, and wonder when the Hell the good ol' days ever were.

I don't think they even had gams like that back in the day

Inversely, you also have explosives - just explosives, no explanation as to what kind - which I find pretty weird. Grenades always feel a little weird to me in shooters, but here I'm not sure they fit the setting at all. It looks pretty neat when you toss some Spaniard a bomb, but I can't help but wonder at the historical accuracy. I mean yes, there also weren't ghosts or curses or sexy underdressed maidens in red but ... Just shut up.

The game has no health packs or regeneration. You heal by drinking water. Early on you get two charges of healing, which has a bit of a delay. Mind you everything in this game has a delay. Lots of time to heal while your enemy is spending a week reloading his musket!

Early on in the game it feels like it is supposed to be about stealth, and most of the early enemies are actually pretty good against you one on one, so you try to use positioning and stealth to take advantage as best you can. The game's audio is to the point, though it does use common elements from other games, which creates a weird dissonance. I think for one the treasure box 'noise' is actually shared with Kingdoms of Amalur and just ... Geez, snore. Audio is pretty crucial to the stealth elements, but later on, the game drops this - the 'other world' sections mostly rely on enemies that teleport to get in close or swarming you.

One little thing I don't like about Betrayer is the old Mr B Tongue standby, 'What do they eat?' problem kinda crops up. The setting is pretty artfully crafted, but I feel like there should be farms and berries and animal hides, deer horns, all that stuff all about. There are burnt out farms in one area, maybe? I also sort of wish you could see the animals, but you do hear hawks, crows and squirrels chattering up above you in the tree cover, which sort of works to reinforce the purgatory feeling I was getting. It feels like the world is 85% finished, which makes that last step or two feel all the more jarring. And raccoons. There would definitely be raccoons staring at you in shitty 1600s hell.

The game's story is conceptually interesting, but in some ways can become almost barbed wire levels of painful generic. The setting while unusual for the day is still somewhat hohum, even if the game world is suitably pleasant to look at, and we've all heard our fill of 'the horrible things people did back then'. Seriously, while I like core elements, investigating what appears to be a check list of every horrible crime and misdeed humans perpetuated upon each other can get a bit pointlessly dreary. Some of the early mysteries are confusing or interesting, and then it feels like you're shifting into the interaction between two factions of Europeans, though mostly from one side.

And then it stops and the game just sort of meanders around for a couple hours as you go down that check list before shoveling itself into the ending, which never really sums up the 'how', only the 'why' before just ending on a pretty hardcore mediocre note. I'm not necessarily saying you need to define how magic exists on a grand level, but whispering about a 'forbidden land' really doesn't do much for me. The game needed to build some art assets or just something to give the final sections a feeling of mysticism.

you get here and there's nothing, and you're like, this is where the budget died

While I think Betrayer is maybe worth playing, I want to point out a couple core complaints I have about the game and those are the criteria for whether or not I think others reading this should play it.

One of the big ones, other than the fact none of the enemy action really comes off as properly defined or meaningful, is that there are really very few enemies in the game and their mechanics are not nearly as varied as they should be. I understand that the game has a limited budget, but there are ways to make enemies feel and act differently, even with the very same enemies. The game doesn't do this, on the most part, and it really drags the combat out at the end. Dudes in hills, skeletons in hills, ghosts in hills.

On a side note, and perhaps not really a big deal, witchcraft and false accusations and the usual rote plod plod through the topic comes up in the game. This is ... By and large ... the lowest note in the game's writing, to the point of just being stupid.

Witchcraft in real life isn't real, or at the very most, is something very few people experience and maybe everyone who does is a little bit touched one way or the other. Here, in this game, you are buried neck deep in witchcraft for the totality of the narrative. Someone being accused of witchcraft when there is in fact witchcraft just looks so ridiculous. Not only is it generic as all get out, its going right against the grain of the game. It just loses all its punch.

On a more major level, the writing in the game seems to miss a core point, and something of all things I think like ... Dead Space did better... Which is that while art comes through suffering, but depicting suffering in text form does not instantly create art. I'm sure there are better examples however this is the most recent one, but in Dead Space 2, Isaac simply absolutely horrified by what is going on around him and direly wants to save everyone he can - the entire Nolan arc is about trying hopelessly to preserve someone else trapped in the same Hell. Here, humans suffer, as they do and the main character seems no more impacted by them, by combat, by their mangled remains, their horror stories or his own suffering. You are trapped in purgatory (so to speak) and you all just sort of go eh, meh.

I get that voice acting is expensive, but they needed two voice actors. Seriously, go look at some web series, some youtube abridged or whatever. There are decent wouldbe VAs out there you can probably get to do the work for free or almost nothing, and then maybe the main character would be a main character. Instead the game seems to depict by the numbers human suffering and then sort of go "It's art, right?"

No, not really.

As a minor note, I was somewhat disappointed in the Native American presence in the game. I don't mean that I thought the writer needed to flesh them out in a culturally unique way or whatever, nor are you meant to infer I think them racist. If anything, I think they kept their hands off because they didn't quite know what to do, which is respectable perhaps. But I think the game should have just had a couple more, a little more in terms of dialogue and representation. Just to be people, give their perspective, as characters within the game. It kinda ties back to my earlier point about not the why but the how. Granting them some discussion, even vague warnings and curiosity over what is, would have added a layer to the story that improves the texture of that element. Instead there is very, very little from them besides little scraps about how they warned us and then everything goes to shit.

And they all died.

Anyway, I think Betrayer was altogether a decent effort bogged down by a weak final act and poor conclusion. It was pleasant to romp around in, but I pushed through the last hour or so hard just to see it to the end, because I knew if I put it down, I wasn't going to come back to it. I do not think the ending was necessary or meaningful, merely generic in a sea of generic and check list. Much more poignant would be the ending simply going where the narrative was actually presenting itself. You don't need a cliche horror ending when things are already pretty horrible, guize.

Actually, saints, I just realized halfway through the game I was wondering if it was going to basically end in much the same way FEAR 2 did. You don't know what I'm talking about unless you've finished that game, but ha! Technically it rather did.

So yeah, probably a pass, but maybe the game still sounds good? I don't know. I think there was a lot more room for something interesting in the setting and instead it just ended up rather plain. I guess I shouldn't expect that much given how garbled FEAR's story ended up?