Bad Habits - Long suffering - September 14 2005

You walk into a food cooler and see ghostly images of your two children hanging from ropes. They say, “Mommy, it’s cold in here.” The chilling scene disappears almost as quickly as it appears in The Suffering: Ties That Bind. Then, you go back to the physical horror of blowing the heads off zombies.

??
Clearly, this is an unsettling and unsettled world in Ties That Bind. You’re an escaped prisoner, haunted by chatty images of your dead wife and kids, who are your guides on a 20-hour journey through the slums and drug dens of Baltimore.

??
Did you kill them? Did a villainous drug lord from the underworld kill them? You can’t remember because of amnesia. It’s your mission to kill other people, though. Why? So you can find out if you killed in the first place. Yes, it is circular logic.

??
To recover your lost memories, you fire tommy guns and grenade launchers at legless-torso monsters who bloodily slime their way across tile floors. There are demon dogs, hulking fiends and machine gun-toting spiders the size of cars. It’s best to stick your sawed-off shotgun to the backs of their heads and pull the trigger.

??
For those who abhor violence in video games, Ties That Bind represents the grittiest of the grimiest. For the rest of us who have become deadened to the blood-splattered walls and the filth of decapitated corpses, Ties That Bind is an emotional and visual fright that sucks us in.

??
It’s intense. Quite a few times, I jumped, startled, on my couch, as I heard monsters with machetes for legs scraping together, as they ran at me in the dark, and I couldn’t tell where they were rushing from.

??
What I do recognize in Ties That Bind is that it, like other gaming tales of terror, is more engrossing than much of American cinema horror. The reason for that is the lengthy sadness that follows sympathetic storylines of main characters. That is true of the Resident Evil, Silent Hill and Max Payne series.

??
In Ties That Bind, Torque is a tortured predator/victim/hero we rarely see committed to scary films. He is a killer. But the psychologically harrowing bloodbath is now a 40-hour mystery (including the first Suffering game of 2004) as to how he got that way.

??
Is he a scapegoat? Or did he make the choices that earned the blood splotches on his orange prison pants?

??
Ties That Bind is artistic in ways, though to call such a game artistic takes the viewer’s being numbed to the scene when Torque walks into his old apartment and sees his ghost child in a tub of blood, saying, “Mommy, do I have to take a bath?” It is gruesome in the way that the movie, Seven, was horrific.

??
The difference between this game and movies is that Torque’s path of righteousness is painted with the interactive creativity of our playing as him. It’s his/your late wife and kids who comfort and chastise him/you, for hours on end. We sympathize with Torque, because, unlike movie heroes, we are him. We proceed at his, and our, peril.

??
thegamedork@creativeloafing.com

??
Doug Elfman is an award-winning columnist who is also the TV critic at the Chicago Sun-Times.

??
New To You — Used Game Of The Week

??
One of this year’s most anticipated releases was Jade Empire for Xbox. It was supposed to be a big, sprawling action-adventure game with lots of pretty scenery. It did have those descriptive things going for it, but it wasn’t as much fun as promised.

??
Even so, Jade Empire is decent, and now it’s showing up in used-game stores for a more reasonable $20 vs. its too high price of $50. Be warned, the dialogue can be dull, the fighting repetitive. But the sword fighting and violence is intense. It’s rated M for blood, gore and violence.