PURE

These days mods are a de rigueur accompaniment to any major game release, but of course this wasn’t always the case. While I remember a few games with limited user-modifiability here and there through the late 80s and early 90s (the one that sticks out the most was Civilization I, which stored a bunch of its text in uncompressed files on the hard drive; it was fun to futz around with unit names, and for some reason I once put a declaration of love for my middle-school crush into the ending scroll, I guess because I thought inviting her over and having her achieve victory in a notably long game was a more plausible course of action than just, like, telling her I liked her) – wow that parenthetical got away from me – despite some limited antecedents, Doom was ground zero. Soon after its release, there were user-created maps by the score, but also more ambitious changes: tweaks to weapons, new enemies or even gameplay features. You – or at least I – couldn’t easily download such things in those days, but you’d usually find a couple dozen of the most popular mod distributed as filler on video game magazine pack-in CDs, alongside demos for the latest games.

Some of the most visually-arresting were so-called total conversions: mods that didn’t just add some new content here or tweak a setting there, but purported to transform the whole game. There was an Alien total conversions, a Batman one, even, bizarrely, a Chex tie-in, and they all looked amazing, with bestiaries and arsenals and level graphics entirely different from what iD had shipped. But when you started playing one, it became clear that sometimes there was much less to these “total conversions” than met the eye. You see, some TCs did get into the guts of the engine to create brand-new gameplay, but a lot of them simply swapped out the graphics. Your eyes could tell you that you were firing a pulse-rifle at an oncoming Xenomorph, but if you’d played a lot of Doom, you could immediately tell that actually you were wielding the chain-gun and shooting at a pinky demon: same firing speed and damage for the gun, same AI and hit-points for the monster. Sometimes there weren’t even new levels – you’d be running through the same old maps with the same old secrets and enemies. I had friends who didn’t mind, because swapping in the aesthetics of Alien for the techno-satanism of Doom was sufficient difference to make things feel fresh and compelling, but for me, the graphics were beside the point: appearances to the contrary, this was still just Doom, and I’d played a lot of Doom (you can see how I wound up a fan of IF).

PURE – yes, this is a review – puts me in mind of those old TCs, because it’s a game whose form and whose structure wildly diverge. The narrative elements lay out a compelling down-spiral of biological and moral horror, little of that is interactive; the gameplay, meanwhile, could have been drawn from an unassuming 80s puzzle-fest, tasking you with running through a linear gauntlet filled with riddles and simple mechanical challenges. There’s a lot to like about the former, and the latter isn’t bad, exactly – though the implementation is often pretty thin – but the mismatch between the two is jarring, like putting a body-horror skin on Nord and Bert.

The best part of the game is the line by line writing. There’s a Dark-Souls-meets-H.R.-Giger kind of vibe to proceedings, with blood and viscera sluicing everywhere across the dungeon complex you’re tasked with exploring; meanwhile, you’re accompanied by a pair of guards who seem offended by your very existence, and an aristocrat who seems to be way too intensely into you (but is probably just using that as a tool of manipulation). There are some typos, including an unfortunate scone/sconce confusion, but those don’t do much to detract from the power of the prose, which emphasizes physical sensations, tiny but exquisite, that escalate as you delve deeper into the earth, the environment becomes more twisted, and the behavior of your companions grows more depraved:

"The carved surface of the door is an undulating expanse of slopes and curves. As you look closer, you realize the shapes are naked bodies, entangled together in a congealing mass of stone flesh. The faces are all turned away, pressed into the crooks of another’s body. Black liquid like that which bled from the shadow’s body trickles out from small cracks between the forms. The Boar follows one of the streams with his gauntlet, settles his thumb into the crevice of a statue’s thigh, and breathes deeply."

This is all vibes, though – there isn’t much in the way of context or explanation offered for anything here, beyond a helpful authorial note highlighting trans themes in the uncomfortable transformations visited upon the protagonist, and this is another Part I, ending just as the journey through the subterranean complex reaches its end. So without much traditional plot to speak of, the story of Pure can feel mostly determined by what you do, and what you do is, well, traditional: there’s a match-the-numbers puzzle, a series of riddles you answer by putting one of a series of objects into the appropriate chest, a keypad lock you defeat with powers of observation…none of them are especially challenging, and while there are a couple late-game obstacles that require some grand guignol actions to bypass, it’s hard to ignore the fact that mechanically speaking all you’re doing is putting a key in a lock.

Part of what makes the disparate halves of the game feel so distinct is that most of the stuff playing out in the narrative layer isn’t easy to engage with. While the other characters will occasionally fiddle about in the background, and take active roles in the short cut-scenes that play in between bouts of puzzle-solving, there’s not much you can do with them while you’re in control; there’s no conversation system that I could find, for example, and they’ll just hang around forever waiting for you to solve the puzzles (I did check the walkthrough after finishing the game, and it turns out you can try to kiss all the NPCs, which would be interesting but to be honest neither they nor the protagonist felt like they’d be into that kind of thing under the circumstances). There’s also not much in the way of scenery, and a lack of quality-of-life polish (I spent like eight turns trying to figure out how I was supposed to refer to some “shadowy dog-like things”) wound up disincentivizing me from poking at the world in favor of just getting on with the logic puzzles.

To be fair, there are some nice bits of craft in the game – PURE makes heavy use of color-coding to denote interactive objects, for example, which is explained in a simple and clear tutorial. And I did always enjoy unlocking the next bit of interaction between the characters, and seeing the next degradation of the protagonist, each time I solved a puzzle. But where the best pieces of IF ensure all the elements of their writing and design echo and reinforce each other, PURE struggles to find consistency; I can’t help but wonder what a choice-based version of the game that cuts out the busywork and builds its gameplay around actually talking to the NPCs, and making decisions about how much corruption to accept, would feel like to play. The good news is that, as mentioned, this is only a prologue, so there’s time to think about a different approach for Part II, or at least a refinement of the current structure: either way, my interest is definitely piqued.