Murderworld

Earlier in one of the reviews in this thread – I confess I don’t remember which one, I’ve written like 75 of them over the last month and a bit – I cited the X-Men as an example of how things like superpowers can be used as a metaphor for race, queerness, or other traits that set a group of people apart from quote-unquote mainstream society. Marvel’s mutants have a long track record of this sort of thing, with plot-lines through the decades echoing segregation, genocide, religious discrimination, and the AIDS epidemic; some more recent stories have leaned hard into socio-political themes by having the X-Men and their allies reject the long-standing idea of integration in regular-human society and set up their own independent nation state – backed by high-level super-powers as a deterrent against aggression – instead. Sure, it’s all people in spandex zapping each other, but there can be big ideas too.

Murderworld, an epic piece of X-Men fan-fiction in parser form, is fine with all that but would rather stick to the spandex and zapping, thanks. There are a few places where the broader social context is touched on – mostly through the backstories of some newly-created students at Xavier’s Institute for Gifted Youngsters, who are a bit more diverse and notably queerer than their canonical teachers – but aside from a smattering of non-grawlixed cursing, that’s about the only element that wouldn’t seamlessly fit into a late-80s issue of Uncanny X-Men. Or better yet, a late-80s spin-off video game, since the plot (hitman supervillain Arcade kidnaps the team and subjects them to funhouse-style deathtraps) and lineup (Storm, Cyclops, Colossus, Nightcrawler, Dazzler, and Wolverine) map pretty directly to those of 1988’s Madness in Murderworld.
Where that was a wonky action-adventure hybrid, though, this Murderworld is a smoothly-implemented romp that just leans into the puzzling. There are three distinct acts on offer across the game’s generous runtime – after a quick introduction to the characters and the setup, you pick your favorite X-Man to guide around the mansion in the aftermath of an attack, repairing the damage and rescuing the aforementioned students from a variety of predicaments, before the Murderworld proper bit kicks in and you control each mutant, round-robin style, as they escape their individual scenarios, with things culminating in a fun endgame that takes a swerve into the unexpected.

Throughout, your mutant powers and super skills are the primary means of getting through challenges: Nightcrawler teleports and swashbuckles, Colossus turns into metal and smashes stuff, Cyclops has his signature optic blasts, Storm can control the weather and fly, Wolvie’s got claws, his healing factor, and preternatural smell (er, he’s got a very powerful nose, I mean), and Dazzler can turn sound into light and is good at roller-skating, look, disco was still a thing when they came up with her. Obviously some of these are more versatile packages than others, but the game comes up with unique challenges for all the characters that require you to get creative with your powers.

Sure, the funhouse nature of Murderworld means that some of the scenarios can get a little contrived, but realism was never the X-Men’s forte. And there’s a pleasing variety on offer – Nightcrawler’s vignette requires careful attention to space and how you can use your teleportation abilities to get around (while featuring a perfectly in-character pirate theme), while Storm’s is a logic puzzle that requires a little bit of lateral thinking, and Dazzler plays against type by doing some math before breaking out the tunes. Colossus’s and Cyclop’s scenarios are a bit more de rigueur, standard-issue deathtraps that just happen to be vulnerable to their particular powers, but it’s only Wolverine’s that feels like a dud. I wound up running around a robot-staffed food court investigating the death of one of their own, which didn’t feel especially in-character and was laborious enough that, unlike in the other vignettes, I kept running afoul of Arcade’s countdown and having to restart. Possibly that was my own fault, though, since checking the walkthrough after I finished revealed that I could have just started slashing everything in sight, an alternate path perhaps more in keeping with that particular hero’s approach.

The mansion segment, meanwhile, is an even tighter bit of design; I played it as Nightcrawler, and found that my teleportation abilities were perfectly suited to getting past barriers or bypassing fallen stairwells. But with only slight tweaks, any other character can go through the scenario and find their powers are the ones that just happen to come in handy to save the kids, which must have been an astonishing amount of work to get right. As for the endgame – I won’t spoil the surprises there, but I’ll just say it’s a wonderful reward for getting through all the torture Arcade subjects you to.

In a game of this length, there are inevitably some puzzles that are a bit weaker than the rest – one puzzle in Colossus’s section seems pretty close to impossible until time starts running down and you’re given a direct hint on how to solve it, and there was a bit where the default font in the Gargoyle interpreter wound up making a clue very misleading (Spoiler - click to show) (the “g” looks like an upside-down 8, not an upside-down 6) – but the average is quite high, with most feeling satisfying and fair to solve.

The writing is similarly good, though not without its wobbles. Most of the character’s voices come through clearly, in a reasonable facsimile of the comics, save for Cyclops – admittedly, he doesn’t have a particular accent or catchphrase to rely on, but sometimes I found his dialogue awkward, like this bit where he reflects on potential uses for the head of a Sentinel robot:

“I wonder if we can turn it into some sort of art piece for the lawn. Though, that would probably create a too-militaristic, ’head-on-a-pike’ kind of aesthetic that I’m not sure a school for children should be dressed in.”

When it comes to the implementation, though, I can’t even muster up minor complaints. Besides the odd extra line-break and a few errant periods, I didn’t run into any bugs, and there are a lot of smart touches, like the way location descriptions automatically shorten after you’ve visited someplace once and the diegetic hints that kick in after you’ve been dawdling for a bit. There’s also a convenient VERBS command that spells out how to use each character’s powers, which was a godsend given how complex some of them could be.

All told Murderworld might not be the most novel of games, and might not have the deepest take on the human condition, but if you’re at all a fan of superheroes in general, and especially if you like the X-Men in specific, playing it is a real treat – games of this scope, depth, and quality don’t come along too often, and are worth savoring when they do.