Now Playing: Binary Domain

I’m still working through a small backlog of PC games that I’ve picked up on Steam over the years, but I’ve recently whittled it down to the last few. Binary Domain is a 2012 third-person cover shooter that went largely unnoticed at the time, but attracted a keen fanbase.

The main character is called Dan, which immediately earns it bonus points.

Published by Sega and developed by their Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio, this was another Japanese developer dipping into typically ‘western’ style genres, following in the footsteps of Platinum Games’ Vanquish (which I also played earlier this year). However, Binary Domain is not as over-the-top and ridiculous, and I think it’s supposed to be taken seriously (unlike Vanquish, which comes across as a piss-take).

The ‘Hollow Children’ are reminiscent of the snatchers (from Snatcher).

The game still has a distinct Japanese vibe to it, is set in a futuristic version of Tokyo and has themes that are highly reminiscent of Snatcher (robotics company making robots indistinguishable from humans), Final Fantasy VII (a mega-corporation, two-tiered city, and highway chase battle) and many more. But the characters are all generic archetypes straight out of a b-list production and the writing is never more than passable. Burly American military men are soon joined by British special agents (complete with “cor blimey” and “we’re in a pickle” dialogue), a Chinese lady that the leading men drool over, and a Japanese local resistance leader. About the only unique character is Cain, a friendly combat robot who is also French. He’s my favourite.

This giant wheeled robot chasing your team’s truck across a dystopian megacity highway is rather reminiscent of a certain 1997 JRPG.

Anyway, you exclusively fight robots in this game, so there’s lots of satisfying smashy-smashy, limbs falling off, and explosions. Destroying enemies’ legs makes them crawl along the floor, destroying their arms makes them drop their weapons, and destroying their heads makes them target their own kind in confusion – you get the idea. There are some light RPG elements where you can upgrade your weapon stats and earn loyalty with your teammates through dialogue choices. You can also earn their trust by doing really well in battle, or lose their trust by shooting them, which happens more often than you might think given they have a tendency to walk right in front of your line of sight!

Cain, Dan and Faye.

There are apparently slightly different endings as well, depending on character loyalty. I wanted Cain to come back for the end, but he never did for me. Being an older game, the PC version runs fantastically well on my similarly old machine, although I had trouble getting my controller working without resorting to Steam’s input emulation, which always felt a bit twitchy. Also, the game features an extensive voice input system, where you can give voice commands and verbalise your responses to the characters instead of choosing replies using the controller, but I didn’t really fancy yelling at my PC and I couldn’t get it to recognise my microphone anyway. Your mileage may vary.

A boss fight towards the end of the game.

Surprisingly good, then! It’s only a tenner on Steam, and is often cheaper.

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Now Playing Superhot and Superhot VR

“It’s the most innovative shooter I’ve played in years!”

Time stops when you stop, everyone is made of red glass, and it feels like you’re in the Matrix. Superhot doesn’t look or feel like any other shooter. The pure white environments, black objects and red enemies combine to create a minimalist style that is every bit as fresh as it is functional. Unless you move, the world around you stays almost still, allowing time to take in your surroundings, assess the threats and plan your moves methodically. Every action you take, whether it be walking, firing your gun or picking up an object, pushes time forwards slightly – reactions are not important, but strategy is.

It is very cool to see your bullet trails hanging in their air, or dodge those fired by your enemies – as is throwing weapons and other objects at them, or catching the weapon of a disabled foe as it flies through the air towards you. While time stops, you can take as long as you need to aim your shots, but it’s only when you start moving that you can see how successful you are. Upon completing a level, you can watch a replay of everything you just did, but at normal speed, so it looks like you’re some kind of esports FPS champion.

There’s also a trippy virtual desktop narrative framing device, which I was not prepared for. ‘Superhot’ is supposed to be some forbidden hacked game that gets passed around message boards, but it soon becomes apparent that it’s more than that. I liked this game a lot. It’s short, clocking in at just a couple of hours to clear the story mode, but there’s always endless modes to dig into if that takes your fancy. However, I was more interested in diving into the VR spin-off, Superhot VR.

I’ve been waiting to play Superhot VR for ages (it came out for the PSVR five years ago, in 2017 – I don’t know why it took me so long) and it didn’t disappoint. Well, it did disappoint a little bit, but mostly for technical reasons. The limits of PSVR version 1 are now being slowly felt. If I wasn’t blocking my headset’s tracking lights with my hands, I was failing to throw things in the game properly, or drifting outside of the play area, smacking my living room wall with my hand, or having to recalibrate (recentre) my view at regular intervals. These problems have always been there, but it takes a game as cool as Superhot VR to show them up and makes me want a new VR system to do it justice.

Still, technical issues aside, it is exceptionally cool. It’s a separate game and story to the regular Superhot but it uses the same concept of time stopping when you stop. However, because the game is played standing still (ie. you don’t move the character around the levels, you stick to the spot), ‘movement’ is defined as any rapid motion of the hands or head. Having to carefully consider every move while watching in all directions for projectiles and enemies coming towards you is actually quite stressful. Do you have time to reach down and grab that gun off the floor before the man running towards you touches you, or should you risk waiting for them to get closer and try to punch them instead, grab their gun out of their hands, all while dodging out of the way of the slow-motion bullet streaking towards you, like Neo.

Weirdly, for a while after playing, the game left me feeling like I was still in it, consciously making small movements with my hands and keeping my head still as I sat at my desk, worried that a virtual man was going to shoot me in the head if I moved too quickly. That’s some weird behavioural persistance, or something.

Anyway, I completed the story mode, dabbled with the other modes, and I think I’m done. It’s good, but again quite short and a little frustating in parts. But it’s unlike most of my other VR games and it’s a very cool concept that I think a lot of people would enjoy trying out, if you’ve got the living room space. I thought the story/framing device in the regular Superhot game was stronger / more substantial, but that’s not really what you play this for. You play this to throw an ashtray at somebody’s face, grab their gun out of the air and shoot an uzi-toting dude across the room before he can get a round off at you. As the game likes to say constantly: “Super! Hot!”

I didn’t record any footage of Superhot VR, as it really wouldn’t do it justice; but I did record my entire playthrough of regular Superhot, which you can watch below. But, again, this is a game worth trying for yourself.

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