The Friday Game: Past Enemies

The price of marketplace dominance is measured in, well, excitement, I guess. Almost everyone plays shooters, but it’s a rare person indeed who hasn’t grumbled about them too. They’re everywhere, they’re all the same, they’re steadily staining the world brown. It’s this kind of thinking that makes the 7 Day First Person Shooter design jam so timely: loads of new gun games, but they seem so fresh, so unusual.

Last week we looked at Cloudbase Prime, a blaster with skin made of hexes and the soul of a trampoline. Today, it’s Past Enemies by Eddie Cameron – and that trampoline suddenly feels like a very distant memory.

It’s a typical story, really. You awaken in a row boat filled with money and something that could be a passport, and you look up to see a wobbly island paradise spread before you, painted an eternal near-dusk blue. Then you discover you’ve got a single bullet in your gun and no idea who to use it on. Past Enemies is a demo, in other words  – a slice of a larger game with many things absent and undecided. This makes it wonderfully interesting to investigate, however, because you’re not only exploring the geometry, but the current state of the design, too. How far will you get? Come to think of it, how far did the creator get?

Oh yes – and what will you find? I went ashore, climbed a tree, and wandered into a hut. I won’t spoil what happened in there, but I will say I used my bullet up, and then I went outside again to blunder my way around some invisible walls. After that I walked into the sea only to find out I couldn’t drown. It was a pretty enjoyable way to spend ten minutes, all things considered. After I’ve finished writing this I’m probably going to do it again.

There are two things that make Past Enemies exciting, I think. The first is all those hints of a wider narrative: the money, the single bullet, the shadowy NPCs and the suggestive name. What’s happening here? Where’s it all going? What’s the deal with my vision, which keeps sending the game into watery ripples?

These elements are going to be thrilling regardless of what state the project is in when you decide to play it. The second thing is a little more time-dependant, however: Past Enemies is exciting because it’s unfinished, and not in a dry, vertical slice way like Cloudbase Prime. Instead, it’s unevenly unfinished: some stuff is in there and some is missing, waiting to be coded, waiting to be invented, waiting to be decided upon – and you never know which bits are going to be present, and which bits aren’t.

If you’re a fan of Fitzgerald – he would have appreciated that row boat with all the cash washing around inside it – chances are good that Gatsby’s your favourite book of his for much of the time, but The Last Tycoon is the one you find the most intriguing. Of course it is: only half of it is completed, and the rest descends into notes, ramblings, annotations and those little timelines writers are so fond of constructing. Past Enemies is exactly that kind of half-completed, if you ask me: I almost don’t want to see it whole.