by Omar (@siegarettes)

• The Surge
  
• Deck13
  
• Focus Home Interactive
  
• PS4, PC

The Surge is genre pulp. It’s at its best when it evokes Alien, bathing its industrial architecture and blue collar workplace in high contrast light and shadow. That’s when you begin to wonder about daily life in this sci-fi world, breathing in the heavy air between bouts of sudden violence. This is also something that’s true of half the science fiction games out there–the influences the medium mines isn’t something that runs very deep most of the time. Likewise, nobody who’s kept up with gaming, or even just the conversation around it, is going to be able to avoid comparisons to From Software’s premier RPG series. Even restructured and streamlined, the framework of the Souls series crawls out to reveal itself. But to call The Surge “sci-fi Dark Souls” would be an empty shorthand. It’s about as useful as describing every sci-fi film by pointing out what it owes to Alien, Blade Runner and 2001 A Space Odyssey. It ignores how the structures and themes of the genre have changed in the public consciousness, and what even the pulpiest of entries can tell us about it.

The world of The Surge is obsessed with human resources. It repeatedly returns to the way that workers are used as fuel for the company machine, and importantly, puts you into a loop where you end up using the husks of those workers as fuel for your self advancement. Surviving in The Surge means cutting down a lot of your would be co-workers. The scrap you receive can be used to upgrade your core, which will increase your overall ability depending on what upgrades are equipped, and their limbs can be harvested for parts that are used to upgrade certain armor and weapons. This led to an interesting moment early on where my progress was halted by an area deeply saturated with darkness. In order to navigate it I needed a work lights, which were only available on body armor I hadn’t obtained yet. So I roamed the corridors around it, targeting the torsos of my co-workers and hacking at them until I had the parts I needed to build it. It was a smart moment that hinted at how the limb targeting system could flow back into the progression through the game’s areas. Unfortunately, The Surge never returns to this idea again.

What does follow is a lot of combat. It should be no surprise that this is where The Surge hangs its hooks. At the start you can choose between two approaches, one focused on mobility and the other on heavy defense. I opted for the faster approach, which proved to be an excellent choice. Despite the familiar animation priority heavy combat, opting for a more mobile rig provided a lot of freedom to dance around enemies and batter them before they have a chance to respond. It made blocking redundant. My loadout also allowed me to convert the energy of each hit towards health regeneration, making the damage I did sustain easily negatable with some well timed aggression. Health recovery is also instantaneous, allowing you to regenerate even in the midst of combat. It creates a breathless momentum to the combat, where you only break to get out of an enemy’s range and briefly recharge while they attempt to take their turn at you. Even then, with the right weapons you can easily stagger them before then, opening them up for continued assault. The weight of movement and attacks is still here, but this new approach gives a satisfying sense of empowerment that eschews the slower pace the genre is associated with.

That faster pace becomes an asset later, as you’ll frequently return to the same areas and encounters, fighting through familiar enemies until you scout out shortcuts that decrease the travel time between the medical bay and the latest point in your progression. The med bay is both checkpoint and upgrade station, and it’s usually the singular anchor point for each discrete area, making finding those shortcuts important to making any sense of progress. It ends up building a world with a surprising sense of verticality that feels internally consistent to its industrial aesthetics, even if it isn’t a sensible way to build a workplace.

These looping paths do mean you’ll see the same areas a lot more, and combined with an already murky color palette and plenty of repeated structures it ends up spotlighting the lack of visual variety in The Surge. This becomes a larger problem further into the game, where several almost identical tunnels become your primary method for moving forward. These repeated structures are so densely packed they throw off your sense of direction, and I frequently found myself lost because there any visual markers I was using to navigate were indistinguishable from others in the area. This became the standout issue with The Surge, and at these times progress felt almost random, gained by stumbling into new areas. Its level design and lack of clear visual communication bring down the moment to moment satisfaction of the combat.

By the end of my time with The Surge I found myself fatigued. Progress had become work, and the inherent joy of learning the nuances of the combat had been weathered by the confusing pathing of later levels. And the further progress I made the fewer approaches felt viable, making it difficult to break up my approach and experiment. It became a more rigid game, moving away from the possibility it presented at the start. Still, the core of The Surge still felt like a worthwhile. It worked within its genre and had a clear understanding of it, playing with elements of it in smart ways and providing a fresh approach that kept me anxious to see more of its world. Even if most of that world was made of the same sections of industrial factory.