There’s something defiant about the trend of deliberately ugly immersive sims. It is a statement: mechanics are king and beauty is a distraction, so here is something we scraped out of the vents on a PlayStation 1. I admire it. Not the graphics; the graphics look awful. I admire the sentiment.
The latest in this proud tradition is Parkside: Decayed Soul Manipulation (in environments not restricted by the PC Gamer style guide, that title is rendered in all caps) from Banana Hardsoft, which releases on the 31st of July but has a demo you can play right now. It’s got a System Shock start with a Deus Ex finish: you’re Alexander, a hacker in a rundown world where the billboards blare messages like “Do Not Hinder Law Enforcement”. You hack a little too deep and men with guns kick down your door.
It’s not System Shock’s Trioptimum Corp, though, it’s a gang of zealots set up like the Catholic Illuminati. They strap you into a machine that lets you remotely pilot a combat-ready body and send you off to kill a man. It’s all part of the ineffable plan to serve the Divine Rod. Or something.
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It’s all very aesthetically piquant, even if Parkside deliberately keeps its plot mysterious by communicating it mostly through symbols and non sequiturs in its earliest hours. But who cares? You have a man to kill and many different routes to follow to do it.
This is where everything starts to feel more Deus Ex than System Shock. Your combat-body bristles with augments—cloaking, defence, literally possessing people, and son—that you can activate using experience, gained by poking your nose where it shouldn’t be and pursuing objectives.
Me? I opted to jack up my speed and jump height (which, incidentally, made my body look scarier, and capped my maximum possible reputation with NPCs as a result) in the hopes that I could bound my way up the outside of my target’s building. Parkside’s maps are shot through with vents and ledges and other little eye-catching paths to follow—I figured I would surely find one if I leapt about the place a little.
I’d have to leap carefully. Here’s the thing: Parkside has no saves. Instead, you can sup from a Divine Elixir in certain, limited rooms to give yourself a one-time-use checkpoint. I suspect it might rub some people the wrong way, but as a man who always wants to be protected from his own savescumming tendencies, I appreciated it.
Did my plan work? Well, no. There were vents, but I couldn’t figure out a path up to them. What I did find was the corpse of a dead soldier on a nearby roof, who had also been observing my target, and the large assault rifle he had by him made short work of my mark. It also made short work of the approximately 8,000 cops who swarmed the building on hearing gunfire, and when I ran out of ammo, I simply hopped in a nearby car to escape the rest. Yes, a car. Imsims have cars now. It’s a brave new world.
It scratches a lot of OG Deus Ex itches, and I’ll be curious to see what the full game has to offer when it releases on the 31st of July. Next time I might even avoid having to wipe out every cop in the map, but no promises.
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