Stricken from the record

I’ve often said that the worst thing a game can do is fail to elicit any emotional response. A complete lack of connection, followed by being forgotten. [REDACTED], to its credit, did educe two reactions over my time with it: pity, followed by contempt.

Pity first, because that was what I felt as I saw what it so desperately wished to be. Redacted (I am not adding the brackets from here on out) is a roguelite, heavy emphasis on that T, and it wants to be your new go-to timewaster. Think Hades, Dead Cells, or Enter the Gungeon. It’s clearly got some money behind it too, considering they had Judd Nelson record hundreds upon hundreds of lines for his “Bastion-narrator-if-he-hated-you” role as The Watcher. There’s nary a technical issue to be seen (though I was disappointed by a lack of control remapping options) and its presentation is exactly my shit: a colorful, dynamic, action comic-booky art style with a blaring rock soundtrack that always knows just when to kick in and when to go out on a high note at the end of each combat. With all these factors lined up, it lures you into its familiar gameplay loop: run, die, upgrade, repeat. And each of those steps fall so very, very short.

Runs are beyond repetitive. Each run’s four biomes and their contents are always the same, always presented in the same order, and always capped off with their sole respective bosses. Once sufficiently geared from reruns, the first three crumple effortlessly while the last one DPS checks you to see if you’ve earned your victory lap. Eventually even that becomes trivial. You can start layering on difficulty modifiers, but Redacted fears you’ll balk at the challenge and only allows slight increases with each subsequent run in what may be the most slow paced ascension system I’ve ever seen in a game of this kind. It betrays a lack of confidence in its players, but moreso itself, specifically its ability to hold interest.

Death, or more specifically undeath, is not nearly as important to the loop as the game’s marketing copy would have you believe. Fighting your previous run’s zombified corpse is featured front and center, but it’s a vestigial feature at best and never required. Across my dozens and dozens of runs, I want to say I found a corpse to fight maybe a whole 5 times? And that’s counting the case where I killed the last boss for the first time and intentionally left my previous body there, so as not to risk a loss after the fact. It seems like the corpse just fails to spawn more often than not, and that’s only made easier to swallow by a single extra grab bag perk from your previous build just not being that great of a reward for the effort. ZombiU made fighting your undead past self a tense, rewarding, and game defining mechanic far better back in 2012. This incarnation is just sad.

Racing other escapees is Redacted‘s actual most unique feature. After a few introductory runs you’ll find yourself running alongside 3 NPCs that are all gunning for the same escape pod, or more accurately, running past them and never seeing them again. They’re a colorful cast of incredibly shootable faces, always spewing some Borderlands-ass drivel whenever they’re on screen. What they are not is a credible threat. They send some remote harassment your way and you will fight them now and again, but once you get more stats and gear than none at all they lack any and all ability to keep up with you, especially if you keep using the long-lasting slow attack on whoever is in second place. I did have one successful run with a particularly inefficient build in which I had to fight not one, but two of the other survivors before I climbed into the pod (I had already killed the third), and this made for a stronger finale than usual, but it was just a consequence of my run being a bad one that I managed to salvage instead of the game actually doing anything with this theoretically clever set of mechanics. I look forward to the next game to iterate on this concept, but this ain’t it.

Win or lose, you are only allotted a crumb of progress. Redacted has more currencies than some gacha games and they are constantly displayed on the right side of your screen, forever reminding you of your 52 keys, 78 fingerprints, 34 electronic chips, and so on and so forth so you can choose which widget to collect as you trudge forward during each run. Arguably the most important collectibles come from bosses, completing runs, and opting for doors that let you unredact dossiers on your fellow escapees instead of fun things like upgrades for your gun. You will never have anywhere close to a reasonable amount of any of these things. Most runs end with you scrounging enough widgets for a whole one permanent upgrade, and the impact of said upgrade is often a miniscule numeric tweak. There are far fewer weapons to unlock than you’d think and even fewer that are actually worth investing in. Once I got the backpack mortar it was a wrap for everything else, and the barman’s shankers that you get early are dramatically more effective than almost any other melee option, not that you’ll need them because, you know, mortar.

What you’ve read thus far is essentially the review. It’s yet more roguelite slop. You know what that looks like, you’ve played it, you’re probably ambivalent toward it. My contempt came when I began to fully realize what Redacted‘s full scope was, or its lack thereof. You see, winnable runs become far easier after several guards sacrifice themselves on the altar of Number-Go-Up, at which point it becomes kind of difficult to lose, so it’s clearly not interested in challenging you. It also has no plot and hardly any ideas of its own, so it’s not exactly trying to be Hades despite nakedly borrowing so many of its mechanics. No, Redacted‘s sole ambition is more insidious: being the most addictive habit-forming skinner box it can be to the exclusion of all else. It’s unfortunate for it, then, that Redacted isn’t just sauceless, but also completely soulless. I kind of hate this thing’s guts.

I touched on why the runs are unsatisfying up top in a general sense, but what I didn’t mention is how awful it feels. Simply put, Redacted‘s control scheme is awkward to the point where I periodically found myself claw gripping the right half of my controller just so I could flick the right stick and mash dodge at the same time. I adapted, clearly, but I resented it the more I played it. The second control scheme it offers was a total non-starter, requiring even more input to perform basic murders. Combat is incredibly low impact, especially in melee, which is only useful against the sole enemy type that’s capable of putting up a big ass “no guns allowed” sign until you punch them a few times. They went through the motions of including all the mechanics a game like this “should” have, but they gave absolutely zero thought as to the implementation of these elements beyond making sure to have them in the first place.

Is the combat at least satisfying once you’ve acclimated to the bed of nails? No! Fuck no! Enemies are as predictable as Geoff Keighley’s award show nominations and twice as stupid. You point until the meter goes away, switch targets, mash dodge whenever anything puts a red circle on the ground, repeat. We’re talking musou dumb, only they’re fewer in number and hit hard enough that your brain will try to lie to itself and produce dopamine on a room clear despite the total lack of effort it takes to do so. Put those chemicals back, you haven’t earned them.

The writing, my god the writing. I knew better than to expect anything from the studio that thought a Dead Space knockoff should be inexorably tied to PUBG, but I underestimated just how committed they were to the strategy of desperately attempting to associate their game with completely unrelated things that are more popular than it. There are three credited writers in the credits, and I am convinced that each of them were locked in an office against their will and only permitted to leave for the day when they came up with another 100 lines referencing literally anything that Striking Distance didn’t own the trademark for.

Redacted‘s references are written with all the deftness of a Family Guy cutaway gag, except instead of the cutaway we’re treated to dead air until the next one. These things are missing punchlines to a fault. Just for the sake of this writeup I decided to do one more run and note every joke-free reference across its 15 minute duration. They were as follows: Mentos, Karens calling 911, Blitzkrieg Bop, Once More Unto the Breach, Monster Hunter (debatable), D&D, Life Alert (“I’ve fallen and I can’t get up”), and Thor (very specifically the Marvel movie). That’s approximately .5 pointless brand reminders per minute. Did they get paid by the mention? Is this some kind of laundering scheme?

I want to reiterate for emphasis: the game tells no jokes. No think, only remember. Doesn’t matter that this is canonically set in the year 2320 in a space prison or whatever, what matters is taking the automatic shotgun approach to associating itself with something, anything you might hold dear. It’s the shambling husk of nostalgia lazily ambling towards you with a fistful of prechewed memberberries clutched in its outstretched claws. The game desperately wants to be loved, but will only take shortcuts to achieve it.

If you’re anything like me, Redacted‘s endgame will repulse you more than even the worst offenders this fetid swamp of a genre has to offer. Its grand reveal is that the escape pod is a lie, or more specifically, the claim that it’s the last of its kind is. In actuality there are as many pods as you want, they’re just cycled in one at a time for…some reason? The real goal is fully un-redacting each survivor’s dossier in full, then beating them in a fight to collect a code that you can punch into a vault at the end of each run. There are 8 enemy survivors and each of their dossiers have 10 bits of info to collect. On any given run, you’re lucky to enter 3 dossier rooms if you fully commit to hitting those instead of rooms with things that are actually fun. Each of these gives you a single piece of intel out of the 80 that you need in total. If you can look me in the eye and tell me that’s your idea of a good time, I’m calling you a wellness check.

I’m just going to tell you what’s inside the vault. If you balk at spoilers, don’t worry, they literally published this in an article before the game came out. When you finally collect all the bullshit you have the option to take on a run as the watcher with a preset loadout (it’s fine, but not as good as the mortar). Without getting into the weeds, you’re generally faster but also need to murder every single survivor and boss. Don’t die by the way, because if you do you will lose the entirety of your meta progress. The game’s last trick, its grand reveal, is that everything you’ve done up until that point was in service of dropping the T and turning this into a roguelike where your run is however many hours you spent up until that point. You could compare it to Nier, or something, and sure maybe it’s yet another thoughtless fucking reference, but that was the point where the scales fell from my eyes and I saw this game’s true nature. Redacted fully intends to ensnare you in its sloppy grip for eternity, playing the same 4 stages on loop, making runs for the privilege of making more runs, you inserting time, it returning numbers, pooping back and forth forever.

I’ll see Redacted‘s reflection in roguelites going forward. My game tastes have been forever altered as a result of coming in contact with it. I’ve already declined review copies for games that it resembles a bit too closely, lest the wound be ripped open before it has time to scar. Our site’s scale typically does not score games as low as this if they function on a technical level, but I dislike this thing and what it represents so much that I’m docking additional points on principle. I will not forget Redacted any time soon, but I look forward to the day when it’s finally stricken from my memory.

2/10