Deadlight/Stella Artois Cidre

Game: Deadlight, Tequila Works, 2012, PC
Beer: Stella Artois Cidre, 12 fl. oz., 4.5% abv
# of beers consumed during play: 4
Level Reached: Someplace full of dead things.
Level of Intoxication: Woozy

Game
Deadlight is a post-apocalyptic zombie platformer brought to us from a studio called Tequila Works. The only thing I know for sure about these people is that they're based in Madrid, Spain and all the interviews with them have to have subtitles because they speak one of those languages that isn't English. Also that all their names have those slanty apostrophes above them and that they are comprised of former employees of a number of well known game studios including Blizzard and Sony Computer Entertainment Europe. This fact alone should be enough to get gamers to give more than a passing glance at anything Tequila Works turns out since Blizzard and SCE aren't exactly known for hiring retards. Also noteworthy is the fact that Deadlight is Tequila's first commercial project, and if this is the level of quality they are working at with their initial offering, I get the feeling that Tequila Works is definitely a group to watch. Oh, and before you jackals start inundating me with hate-mail, yes, I know what language they speak in Spain, it's Spain-ish.

Gameplay
Deadlight is a 2.5D platformer, meaning the graphics are 3D polygons, but all the action takes place along a strict 2D plane. While this may sound needlessly limiting, nothing could be further from the truth. In examples such as Deadlight--which share a number of platforming mechanics with games such as Shadow Complex--the exclusion of a third axis of movement actually frees game designers to focus more on refining the core gameplay and fine-tuning level designs. These kinds of tweaks are clearly evident in Deadlight, where the player will frequently find themselves monkeying through the level using a seamless series of jumps, ledge grabs, slides, and rolls. This is a natural evolution of old-timey games such as Flashback and Oddworld: Abe's Oddysee, where moving through the environment was a bigger gameplay hallmark than dealing with any actual baddies. In the case of Deadlight (the title of which I still cannot disassociate with Pennywise the Clown), the platforming gameplay is greatly bolstered by the setting of the game, which features unsteady ledges, crumbling floors, broken down fences, and plenty of classic zombies. The first few levels of course offer tutorials on controlling your character, with each new obstacle serving up a different button to learn and add to one's gaming toolset. As the levels progress, you are subjected to increasing combinations of platforming challenges, until you eventually find yourself performing daredevil jumps and landing parkour moves on and around scripted set pieces that make you feel like a digital contestant in the most unforgiving version of American Ninja Warrior ever.

The gameplay will take a bit of getting used to. While your character will do as you demand, there is a bit of a warm up thanks to the animation, meaning the few milliseconds between button press and onscreen action may cost you a few game over screens until you've acclimated to the timing. I will say that Deadlight will kindly help you in this regard by gleefully introducing you to the burning hell that are the chase sequences in this game. The chase sequences are generally portions of levels where some form of instant death is introduced and you must run and jump nonstop until you find a safe haven. A variety of obstacles are placed in front of you, and failure to surmount said obstacles will result in a slow, frustrating death animation and a quick reset to the beginning of the chase sequence in order to attempt it again. Split-second timing and cat-like reflexes are key to surviving these horrid sections, although depending on how many times you die, a good memory may come in handy as well. I know I've been fairly forthright in proclaiming my distaste for this kind of gameplay convention before, but just in case, I'd like to take a moment and elaborate once again as to why chase sequences in platformers can kiss the most fragrant portion of my asscrack.


Remember the Crash Bandicoot games? How every so often there would be a level where a giant boulder would go all Indiana Jones on you and one mistake would mean a wasted bandicoot and possibly a replacement controller on your parent's shopping list? This is that. Look, I get it, this is an extension of the old auto-scroll levels from Super Mario Bros. That doesn't make it any better. All I have ever taken away from such levels is the sneaking feeling that a developer was forced to work late on Thanksgiving and put these kinds of sequences in the game as a form of quiet revenge. As soon as one of these levels start up, I can practically hear the game makers jeering through the television screen, almost seeming to say "Run little piggy!! Run your fat, Red Bull-swilling ass off because my family is at home having dinner and I'm here because you want your goddamned game before Christmas!! Run and die you faceless, neckbearded asshole!!" The reason I have a problem with this, aside from the obvious frustration that goes with cheap deaths brought on by needless panic is that I shouldn't have to pay for the developer's poor time management. If he really loves his family so much, he should have worked extra hours in October.

Moving on.

The game will usher you through a variety of environs, each with its own set of challenges. From negotiating around spinning blades in Ratman's sewer obstacle course, to hopping from rooftop to rooftop, to cutting down zombie hordes with a fire axe inside office buildings, Deadlight is always trying to offer something new to keep things interesting. By and large the platforming is highly tuned and quite satisfying, although every once in a great while certain sequences don't seem to play out as one would expect, or the actions needed to prevail aren't as clear as they could have been. One such rough spot is while running through an office building while avoiding a helicopter and its infuriating machine gun. Hiding behind cabinets and walls will only temporarily shield you, and running out into the open will get you insta-killed. It isn't until you die enough times to start trying counter-intuitive strategies that you will discover how to pass through unscathed. If you were hoping that I would reveal how I got past that part, allow me to be the first to welcome you to Games 'N Beer. We are not Google.

Even without the chase levels and cheap deaths, Deadlight manages to set an incredible feeling of dread and unease. Zombies are often clumped in numbers that are juuuust enough to make you spam that attack button in a panic and when a bunch of them break through a door and you don't have any weapons, let's just say that if someone put a walnut between your buttcheeks you could have a topping for your sundae in pretty short order.

Graphics/Sound
The visuals in Deadlight are quite good, the color palette has been carefully selected to evoke a ruined world overrun by the undead. Browns, tans, and greys work together with muted reds and other dirty and faded colors to communicate the fact the city you are in is as much decayed as the monsters that now control it. The 3D backdrops are filled with burned out cars, rubble, and other stark reminders that the local tourism industry isn't likely to be handing out brochures anytime soon. There are some very creative set pieces, such as neon hotel signs that you must climb over before they fall apart and drop you into the abyss below or fallen power lines which arc and spark using nice particle effects. One art cue I found interesting is the fact that all the characters and items in the foreground are bathed in black shadows. This is actually a page taken partially out of Limbo's book, and due to the similarly creepy subject matter, works wonderfully, not only to accent how bleak the game world is, but to lend a certain degree of anonymity to your character, making it much easier to suspend disbelief and subsequently be psychologically affected by the trouble your onscreen counterpart finds himself in.


The sounds are also well done, with incidental sound effects being very authentic and well balanced. The sounds of boards being broken or of a platform crumbling beneath you goes a long way toward communicating instantly that you're in trouble, or if you aren't in trouble, that you're going to be very, very soon. I did find the motor of the helicopter was more annoying than terrifying, although that could have been due to the fact that I had to hear it so many times in a row that I just got sick of it. I will say with complete certainty that the voice-overs, while not terrible, did seem to lack a certain polish, and a couple in particular seemed like they had been recorded by one of the janitors or something. There was just a feeling that more money was budgeted for the Christmas party than for at least a couple of the voice actors. While this may come off as nit-picking at times, I must make the case that when your characters are all just black silhouettes, the one thing that can mean the difference between breathing life into them or relegating them to cardboard cutout hell is good voice work. The problem is made all the more obvious when you have the main protagonist whose voice-over is pretty good interacting with a minor character whose voice-over is on par with Anna Nicole Smith's turn in the movie Skyscraper. If you don't know what I'm talking about, go to YouTube and look it up, it's hilariously abysmal. All I have to say about that is: "Well excuse me for still believin'...*breath*...in Sunday walks in the park and little babies!"

Story
Via Wikipedia:

The game takes place in Seattle in 1986 after the near-total decimation of society following the outbreak of a virus that reanimates the dead. Randall Wayne, a park ranger from the town of Hope in Canada, is a survivor of the event, and has since been separated from his wife Shannon and daughter Lydia. Randall has come to Seattle because of reports that located within the city is the last remaining "Safe Point" on the Pacific Northwest, and he is convinced that this is where Shannon and Lydia have come.

See, this is what I love, every zombie story in existence has attempted to justify itself with the trope of someone being separated from their loved ones and subsequently going on a death-defying road trip to find them. Here's the thing...Have you ever gone to the mall with someone and gotten separated? I have. I guarantee that without a cell phone or pre-appointed meeting place, you will wander forever and never find them, even without all the other shoppers trying to eat your face off. Now take that nice clean shopping mall, make it bigger by about ten million percent and destroy everything that makes it easy to get from one place to another. When people coined the phrase "needle in a haystack" they were considering odds infinitely better than this. This is more akin to finding two pollen spores in the Horsehead nebula using nothing but a magnifying glass and a coffee filter. I'm not saying the stories aren't fun, but really, the "searching the country for my loved ones" plot has been used by everything from The Walking Dead to World War Z and apparently no one's bothered to do the math on how unlikely such a scenario is going to end in anything but brains being eaten.

Beer
Stella Artois has offered something a bit different than usual. In place of their normal beery choices, they have brought out their own version of hard apple cider. To punctuate this difference, they have opted to spell their latest offering "Cidre", which my brain immediately took to pronouncing as "Sid-ree", although "See-dray", "Kid-er", and "Sid-er-ee" were also briefly considered. Then again, the person who sold it to me calls the brand "Stella Ar-toe-is" so really, mispronunciation is really more of a brand trademark for this brewery than anything.

As it stands, seeing a company such as Stella doing something different is heartening, it's just a pity they chose to do something different by doing what everyone else in the beer world has already been doing for the last few years by releasing a cider-based drink. On the other hand, Stella releasing a cider is more of an attention grabber for me than Anheuser-Busch or Miller doing so. This is due to the fact that I pretty much expect A-B or Miller to simply piss some fermented apple juice into a bottle and call it a day, since by and large, that's what they do. Stella on the other hand has been pretty well known for keeping quality and drinkability on the higher end of the scale, making something like their Cidre a bit more likely to find its way into my fridge. Of course, as we've seen with several side-brews from other companies, just because someone can make a good pilsner, doesn't mean their success will translate to other products.

Smell
This might be teasing the limits of understatement, but the best way to describe the smell is "apple cider but different." Allow me to expound. Most apple ciders have a sharp odor that straddles the tart/sweet border. It is an olfactory sensation that falls just short of overwhelming. Stella's Cidre manages to be much less overpowering and actually smells a bit flat. This is not in and of itself a bad thing. While one does have to get a good whiff to really get the bouquet on offer here, it does a fine job of staying mostly out of the way for the rest of the experience, making the smell more of a complement to the drink and less of a counterpart. Apples are certainly in there, as is the distinctively alcoholic flavor of fermentation, but no one component is more than a hint, leaving the tastebuds to do most of the heavy lifting with this beverage. Definitely a far cry from most of the other ciders out there which when cracked open in a crowded room will cause everyone to look at you like you just shat applesauce.

Taste
I understand that most alcohol drinkers come to a pretty clean split in opinion when it comes to ciders. While some may accept and even embrace ciders along with their favored beers (such as yours truly), others will have nothing to do with them and will only order one of these things for their girlfriends. Such is their loss. While I will admit that most ciders--particularly those recently introduced by the Big Three Brewhouses in an attempt to plug the holes in their sales reports--are little more than bottles full of Granny Smith-flavored-discomfort, there are a select few such as Hornsby's and Woodchuck that manage to really show what a true cider can accomplish. Fortunately for Stella, they seem to be quick studies at this apple-fermenting thing, because the taste of their gratuitously misspelled Cidre is actually one of the best things about this alcohol.

The taste is more than a bit muted and hits as a nearly united front. The sharp, acidic taste of apples is what is most pronounced obviously, but the saccharine overload that one may have come to expect from this particular subset of the beer cooler is curiously absent. In fact, the taste is quite in line with the smell, providing a surprisingly sophisticated drink that doesn't hide behind candy-flavoring. In fact, the taste makes me think of wine on a couple of different levels, not only for its lack of sugar, but for its complexity and boldness.

Yes, the initial sensation is very much green apples, but what follows is crisp and tangy, with a tartness that lingers and spreads out on the palette, making each sip satisfying. There is a slight beery taste, but it's way at the end, almost before you go for another drink, and doesn't really bother me as much as I would expect. Overall it's a good taste that would go great on a summer afternoon sitting on the porch.

Intoxication
While it is a universal truth that drinking any form of alcohol quickly enough will bring on a startling level of drunkenness, your average run-of-the-mill brewski has nothing on a 4.5% bva cider for the sheer befuddling ability to give a good, debilitating intoxication. I happened across this phenomenon before when reviewing Hornsby's Hard Apple Cider, and thought it a bit of a fluke, but since then I've subjected myself to multiple ciders and discovered that they all happen to give me a level of whirlies that I don't expect. I'm not entirely certain if it's just how ciders affect me personally, or if it's a universal thing. In the interest of public safety however, I will go ahead and say that as a general rule of thumb, watch yourself when drinking Cidre, or cider, or anything else like this, as apples may have you on your ass a lot sooner than you think. The inebriation brought on by Cidre is rather body-centric, giving your legs an uncertain feeling and your center of balance a slight readjustment. As long as you are prepared for these minor but significant changes, you'll be fine, allow them to sneak up on you however, and you may find yourself in a world of hurt. Hurt in this context likely being the sidewalk sandwich you just ate because your legs were too numb to pick your feet up over that curb back there. In such cases I can only hope you're a stuck up bitch and somebody was recording you and laughing as you succumbed to gravity.

Feel
With just enough fizz to tickle the back of the throat, the feel on this brew is pretty light. The drink isn't heavy by any means, and the feeling in the gut is almost non-existent. The bubbles are quite refreshing, and don't explode in the mouth or the digestive tract as many other, lesser drinks do, making this a good drink for bar-hopping, BBQ's, tailgating, or gaming. While it does stay quiet in one's gut, it also seems to move through the body at just under light speed, requiring access to a restroom early on, and with increasing frequency as the night continues. This by itself isn't a bad thing, but with coordination strategically reduced, one misjudged sidequest to the head can easily cut a night of revelry short, particularly if you're out on the town or at a friend's house without a change of clothes. Keep a spare set of clothes in your trunk and you'll be able to drink this stuff without fear. Do it. Do it for the apples.

The Matchup
Matchup time. With Deadlight being a nice little surprise with just a few rough edges and Cidre also being a nice little surprise with just a few rough edges, these two properties are curiously well matched with each other. In Deadlight's case, it's a new slant on one of my favorite genres from a fledgling codehouse who manage to impress with the careful balance of style and substance, with only a few stumbling blocks that prevent it from achieving a higher echelon. As for Cidre, a storied brewing company has created a product that--at least for them--is rather out of left field and disarmingly good, with the only major niggle being that they apparently can't spell. Then again, the fun to be had with either one of these products is palpable, and when combined, make for a pretty damn good weekend.

Cheers/Game on.