Fade in with the dark synth tunes. Cue the DeLorean-ish flying car with the winged doors, the body splicers, the street gang and the crooked cops. Spotlight the nefarious multinational corporation pulling the strings. Arrange these elements around a ghostly buddy story about a sentient A.I. and its creator. Punctuate the completion of story beats with the sound of a cassette being slotted into a machine.
The cyberpunk video game Replaced does its best to court its audience’s late-20th-century nostalgia for that era’s sci-fi visions of the future. It feels, for better or worse, like a Sega Genesis game made with current technology.
Set in an alternative version of the 1980s, in a United States still recovering from botched nuclear weapons testing, the game opens from the perspective of R.E.A.C.H., an A.I. studying its creator’s erratic behavior. Hooked up to its system via a neuro-link helmet is Warren Marsh, who caustically disregards the system’s health warnings about his prolonged immersion. Frantically, he keeps working until an explosion hurls him to the floor.
When Marsh stirs, it is under the direction of a shocked Reach, which finds itself in the scientist’s body. (How Reach comes to understand itself as separate from R.E.A.C.H. forms the linchpin of the plot.) Alarmed that it can’t make contact with its host, the A.I. sets out to find another neuro terminal to restore Marsh to his body.
While running through the burning facility, Reach sees some police officers in the distance and, with ironic naïveté, reasons that they should be informed of Marsh’s accident. Reach is soon disabused of this notion after it watches a police officer execute an unarmed person and then turn to shoot in its direction.
A narrow escape sends Reach tumbling down into a waterworks station filled with corpses, where it becomes aware of its cold body. Luckily it finds — but what else? — a raggedy trench coat à la “The Terminator.” From the body of a dead police officer, Reach retrieves a gun that doubles as a baton. Climbing back to the sun-flooded surface, Reach runs through a strikingly colored autumnal wooded area that gives way to a clearing. In the distance, beyond a wall, can be seen Phoenix City.
The opening is executed with flair. It deftly conjures the rushed, manic setups of early ’90s games. The side-scrolling camera, which tracks Reach’s movements through wide shots that shift the emphasis between foreground and background, is a highlight throughout.
I remember well when one of the highest compliments you could give a game was to call it “cinematic.” The art direction of Replaced, by the developer Sad Cat Studios, pursues this ideal with gusto. If you have wistful memories of Another World (1991) and Flashback (1992), with their distinctive rotoscoped animation, it may be hard to resist the siren’s call of this homage to the eye candy of yesteryear.
Unfortunately, the game’s dogged adherence to retro fidelity results in combat that reminded me of old arcade brawlers — and not in a good way. Over the length of Replaced’s 10 chapters, the rhythm of the fights wore thin.
Though an average battle might feature Reach using a heavy melee attack to strip opponents of their shields or armor, parrying an incoming bullet and counterblocking another attack to create an opening, it feels rinse and repeat long before the final showdown. Character animations are also stiff in a way that feels authentic to the inspirational source material but irksome in the here and now (you can’t, for instance, turn in midair).
Annoyed as I was by the repetition of the fights, and let down as I was by a number of the unoriginal chase sequences, there was enough visual pizazz to the environments as well as other little details to nudge me toward the end. Reach has a chunky portable digital reader with an analog dial on its side used for scrolling through text that’s pleasantly tactile. In the second half of the game, Reach must use the device to hack its way past turrets and into different computer systems via a diverting, pattern-matching mini game.
Over my time with Replaced I couldn’t help but think how good it would look in an arcade cabinet setup, which I suppose means I got out of it all that I should.
Replaced was reviewed on the PC. It is also available on the Xbox Series X|S.
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