FORECLOSED is a graphic cyberpunk novel-style adventure game that combines excellent visual style with unsuccessful gameplay. We briefly talk about the strengths and weaknesses of the project.
- Developer: Antab Studio
- Publisher: Merge Games
- Release date: August 12, 2021
On a bad day, our hero Evan Kapnos wakes up in a bad mood. Behind the huge smart windows is a rusty day with endless billboards and skyscraper modules piled up on top of each other. By e-mail, you receive a notification about the imminent relocation for non-payment of a communal apartment and a letter from a friend, whom the nervous tension caused by attacks of paranoia will bring to the grave before the poisoned air of the metropolis.
The day at Kapnos is not set from the very beginning, but these are still flowers. The last in the list of incoming is a video in which an authorized legal entity notifies a man that he officially lost his job in a security corporation as a result of its sudden bankruptcy, and all debts for his ID-chip will be put up for auction after the trial, for failure to appear to Evan immediately will be given the status of a fugitive criminal.
The chip identifier, which in this world is something between a licensed slave collar and the right of a citizen to exist, was frozen for the duration of the proceedings, the accounts were canceled, and as soon as Evan left the apartment, unknown persons in suits attacked him and opened fire to kill … This is how FORECLOSED begins – a strictly narrative adventure game with a stylish presentation of the story and very mediocre, I would even say boring gameplay.
The drawing in the game gives off the work of the Spanish cyberpunk artist Josan Gonzales: a characteristic scale, rough lines outlining the three-dimensional edges of objects in the world, color accents on important details. Throughout the game, the player does not leave the feeling that he is inside an interactive comic. Callouts convey the hero’s dark thoughts, noise effects are emphasized in action scenes, and the screen is constantly split into several overlapping windows.
Angles are also constantly changing. The camera can at any time break away from the protagonist and gain a foothold on the local video surveillance system, and in narrow rooms broadcast what is happening in the first person. Either you run away from pursuers in an almost isometric projection, then you switch between cameras in search of vulnerable nodes, then you shoot, looking over Evan’s right shoulder.
Kapnos’s unique chip turns out to be an experimental prototype with latent potential. For example, with its help, the protagonist sees the silhouettes of opponents through walls and can collect encrypted data, using a special radar to find them. Gradually discovering new abilities in yourself, you will move along the corridors of the story, diluted with stealth, simple puzzles, and a lot of shootouts.
What we liked:
- The story itself, albeit secondary, is quite good. The protagonist, who in one moment lost everything at all, looks at what is happening with gloomy optimism and periodically gives out metaphors no worse than Max Payne. His forced alliance with the former boss of Secure Tec, wandering through the dirty labyrinths of an overgrown metropolis, a war against a superior corporate force – everything is very clichéd and at the same time atmospheric. If FORECLOSED developers had made a regular visual novel, their project would only benefit from it;
- What cannot be taken away from FORECLOSED is the great visuals. The drawing is very cool here, and the comic elements only enrich the immersive. You quickly get used to an unusual color scheme, the graphic style pleases with interesting solutions. Something like this could look like the next film adaptation of one of the novels of Philip Dick;
- Whatever, but the game implements a character development system disguised as a chip self-learning function. After gaining a sufficient amount of experience, the player receives points, which can be spent on new abilities, such as mental shield, energy release, freezing the enemy, or improve the weapon by adding rate of fire, penetrating power, explosive bullets, and so on. Overheating the chip limits the player’s frequency of skill use.
What did not like:
- The camera gets in the way too often. She very often loses focus on the character, which is why, at critical moments, you can easily find yourself in a dead end that you simply cannot see. During shootouts, there is no way to transfer the camera to the other shoulder, which is also very disturbing due to the massive model of the hero. There are no navigation markers in the game either, so sometimes finding the path takes too much time;
- Awful shooting is the main problem for FORECLOSED. It’s hard to even call it a shooting gallery. There are no traces of shots, wounds on opponents and the hero too. Instead of recoil – screen shake, instead of the sounds of “Bang-Bang” shots, and to kill even the simplest enemy without aiming at the head, you will have to fire a dozen shells. There are too many shootouts in the game, the weapon has no reloading, and you just click the shot button until all the pursuers are spread out on the floor. The weapon is not only not felt here, it seems completely out of place;
- It is somewhat frustrating that the game does not allow skipping scenes. It is very easy to die here by mistake or because of an unsuccessful camera angle, and the checkpoint will certainly be somewhere at the beginning of the level or stage, which are preceded by plot scenes, dialogues or monologues.
Is it worth taking?
No matter how ardent a fan of the cyberpunk setting you are, in this case I would think hard. Especially if you play on consoles. On the one hand, the game is beautifully drawn and well presented, on the other hand, the gameplay is primitive and will hardly please you with anything. The developers have an interesting vision and very good artists, but otherwise FORECLOSED is rather weak.
