#the surge
#the surge
by Omar (@siegarettes)
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.