Impossible Creatures: Story
Taking a bit of a break from Enforcer for a few days...
Impossible Creatures, compared to Relic's previous RTS of Homeworld, has a fairly 'safe' story. It's 'good guys' heroically punching 'bad guys' in the face for being unsympathetic jerks doing mean things 'cause they're jerks and our heroes are heroes, with not a lot of nuance to the plot.
Unfortunately, the game's tone is fairly uneven. Most of the time it's a wacky adventure in which absurdist superscience is paired up with flying trains and no one is ever actually seen to bleed or otherwise be severely injured.
Anytime a pre-mission hand-drawn cinematic is at work, it's like it's a noir film instead, dark ruminations on dark topics with stark black-and-white art for illustration. This is the most obvious dissonance, but there's also the matter of the 'bad guys' of the game.
Our first 'villain' is Whitey Hooten. His two big sins are that he's a whaler -note that Impossible Creatures is set in the 1930s, where whaling was completely normal- and that he's a jerk to his underlings. Alright, that's got shades of Captain Planet villainy to it, but that's broadly in line with the tone, right?
Well, sure, up until we see him go down with his ship into literally freezing waters. We don't see a corpse, but he's unambiguously dead, and our two heroes don't blink at it, clearly feeling it's entirely deserved. It's... a bit jarring, especially since the scene is played somewhat comedically, with literal rats abandoning Whitey's sinking ship.
Velika La Pette takes over as the second villain, and her two big sins are, if anything, even less dire; like Whitey, she's a jerk to her employees, with 'likes to make designer clothes using the animal-mixing technology' being her other big sin I guess? Like, okay, that's a petty use of a technology capable of mixing animals together and placing them under people's control, but frankly if you're going to whine about the ethics of killing animals to make fancy-pants furs you really ought to be enthused that someone is trying to replace killing real animals with instantly fabbing up 'fake' animals from what amounts to nothing to cover that need. That's the option that doesn't negatively impact ecologies.
Certainly, she's even more rude and condescending to our heroes than Whitey is, but she's not particularly villainous, and critically she is literally the only example the game provides of a non-military use for the Sigma technology. (ie the animal-combining technology) This is important, because Lucy -the female lead/heroine- spends the entire game being appalled by the idea of using the Sigma technology for something other than the good of mankind and never once proffers an idea of what she thought it was going to be used for that would be so good. Indeed, it makes her low opinion of Velika's use of the technology frustrating; what is this 'better' use you're imagining, lady?
Nonetheless, Velika also ends up clearly dead, with Rex (Male lead) and Lucy once again clearly finding the death completely justified and appropriate. They didn't pull the trigger, Velika dies by virtue of hopping into a gyrocopter and having it go down on its own at sea, but still. Why, exactly, does this lady deserve an unambiguous death? Given the tone the game is mostly going for, I'd expect Velika to end up in a life raft, shaking her fist at our heroes as they fly away and yelling about If It Weren't For You Meddling Kids/I'll Get You, Gadget! The kind of situation that realistically has high odds of ending in death, but where the narrative message is clearly 'she's over and done with, an execution is unnecessary'.
Then, having spent around half the game with this uneven but sorta consistent in some sense tone, we meet Doctor Ganglion, and his presence in the plot is baffling to me. He's an evil mad scientist who historically sewed animals together and used drugs to avoid tissue rejection and stuff, which on the face of it seems like it fits naturalistically into a plot about a miracle technology to combine animals together in bizarre ways without an issue... but the game's actual explanation for the existence of this technology is that the Tunguska Event was the arrival of the Sigma technology, and humans just picked it up and figured out how to replicate it and maybe tweak it a bit.
An evil mad scientist isn't being used to justify the discovery of a miracle method of combining animals, and instead Ganglion just adds a further layer of tonal confusion to the plot, because instead of the plot seeming to have two tracks (The noir cinematic track, where the plot is dark and gritty and I'm expecting someone to smoke a cigarette any second now vs the in-engine track where everything is goofy and family-friendly) Ganglion is a supremely awful, awful person in both 'tracks'. And one whose presence is, as I just explained, redundant!
Even more confusing, his death is outright Looney Tunes. He flails around in a panic, stumbles into a giant open-ground fan, spins around for several seconds, and then gets launched into a cliff, which he proceeds to stick to for several seconds before falling away into the ocean to presumably finally die now that he's off-screen and Looney Tunes physics doesn't apply anymore. This is the one character in the plot it would be tonally consistent to have Rex straight-up kill him, and instead it's not even clear whether Rex knows that Ganglion died. Why on Earth was the plot okay with non-comedically killing off a whaler and a high-society fashion lady and clearly signaling they totally deserved it, but a man who literally stitched together living animals to sell to freak shows, engages in ambiguous human experimentation, talks about Rex as a 'specimen' rather than treating him like a person, and outright tricks Rex into walking onto an island with a horrible virus Rex is vulnerable to... gets a funny death where no one goes 'yeah, that was totally deserved'?
For the final bit of dissonance, the villain of the story -Upton Julius- actually does get straight-up murdered by Rex. (Albeit in the PG manner of having a flying creature swoop in, grab Julius, and flying off with him while he screams) The other three villains all end up dying more through their own fault than Rex's; Rex broke Whitey's ship, but Whitey went down with the ship because he refused to abandon it. Rex destroyed Velika's lab and in the process damaged her gyrocopter, but she only crashed in the ocean because she insisted on taking the damaged gyrocopter anyway. Ganglion freaks out in response to his base being burned to the ground, expecting Rex to take vengeance upon him, and in his panicked flailing gets himself killed. Julius is the only character where the plot firmly places it as 'Rex chooses to kill Julius, and makes it happen'.
Like, okay, he explicitly wants to plot world domination, but... why is Ganglion not someone who merits staining one's hands if Julius is? Heck, Julius seems to legitimately believe him taking over the world would improve it, where Ganglion is pretty bluntly the kind of evil scientist who knows he's hurting people and just doesn't care, no justifications like 'progress requires sacrifices' or anything. I would've better understood if Ganglion got killed by Rex while Julius ended up in jail, even if I might've had issues with the plot implicitly not placing responsibility for Ganglion's actions in Julius' hands.
The dissonance of tone stands out as much as it does in part because there's not much of a plot progression. Tone is about all the game has. Rex and Lucy's relationship doesn't advance. Even the ending doesn't clearly signal that in stock fashion the male lead and female lead are in a relationship now that the story is over. The heroes and the player don't gain an increasing understanding of what's happening as the story unfolds, they just get to see some of the specifics of how what we already know is happening is meant to work. (eg there's a mission where we see the flying train factories, and Lucy spells out that Julius is a railroad tycoon and so can adapt existing facilities across the world into producing the flying trains) Rex starts the story wanting to meet his father and get to know him, and it turns out the man is already dead and Rex never even gets to, like, read a journal from his father or anything to resolve that particular plot thread.
In fact, a recurring element of the story is raising questions and never really answering them -Lucy asks Rex why he's so good at commanding in battle and whatnot, and Rex's response is that he's a war correspondent, which is a change of subject that sounds like it's going to lead around to an explanation only Rex never gets to such an explanation. (eg Rex could have had a backstory of ending up in hostile territory and having to turn to fighting, breaking from his role as a correspondent, but he doesn't) Lucy constantly talks about the good Sigma technology can do for the world, and we never get an answer as to what good she could possibly be thinking of. We find out the Sigma technology is probably of alien origin, and the closest the plot comes to following up on that is that the ending has a stinger element to it suggesting there were vague plans for a sequel touching on that. (One that never happened, and probably never will happen)
Also, a frustrating point is Rex repeatedly insisting throughout the game that the Sigma technology needs to be destroyed because it's too much power for a single person. Just as Lucy's claims of the Sigma technology being good for humanity are empty, Rex's opposing position that the technology is too dangerous is also empty, which makes the two arguing on the point completely pointless. There's just no substance to the whole thing, and there really should have been.
In some ways it's not really surprising that Impossible Creatures' story isn't all that together given Relic's prior effort has a strong start but ends up jumping tracks and ultimately petering out, but Impossible Creatures doesn't have even the strong start.
To be fair, it's clear Impossible Creatures isn't trying to tell a very serious story... but part of the reason its flaws stand out to me is that the game puts in quite a lot of effort into the plot. It could've gotten away with being even more basic than it is; Upton Julius wanting to conquer the world while Rex and Lucy are fighting to prevent it is all you need to do a short campaign. It worked for older RTSes, after all. And honestly, as I'll be covering, I would've liked for Impossible Creatures to have its gameplay refined more.
As a somewhat silly aside, I was particularly struck by how many similarities the overall shape of the story/setting has with Resistance: Fall of Man, which Impossible Creatures precedes by a good 3 years. You've got DNA mixing resulting in monstrosities, you've got the protagonist getting superpowers while looking like a completely normal human, both games are weird early twentieth-century alternate histories, both of them have the Tunguska Event be alien technology arriving instead of a meteorite exploding mid-air, and you've got said alien technology being pretty much magic. It has me wondering if, like, a good portion of the staff responsible for Impossible Creatures ended up switching companies and contributing to what ultimately became the first Resistance game, or if it's something 'in the air' of that general timeframe or if it's just a weird little coincidence. It's not as if Impossible Creatures and Resistance are all that similar once you look past some of the core plot threads...
Anyway, next time I'll be delving a bit more into the campaign's gameplay end of things, and in the process expanding a bit more on the storytelling.
Impossible Creatures, compared to Relic's previous RTS of Homeworld, has a fairly 'safe' story. It's 'good guys' heroically punching 'bad guys' in the face for being unsympathetic jerks doing mean things 'cause they're jerks and our heroes are heroes, with not a lot of nuance to the plot.
Unfortunately, the game's tone is fairly uneven. Most of the time it's a wacky adventure in which absurdist superscience is paired up with flying trains and no one is ever actually seen to bleed or otherwise be severely injured.
Anytime a pre-mission hand-drawn cinematic is at work, it's like it's a noir film instead, dark ruminations on dark topics with stark black-and-white art for illustration. This is the most obvious dissonance, but there's also the matter of the 'bad guys' of the game.
Our first 'villain' is Whitey Hooten. His two big sins are that he's a whaler -note that Impossible Creatures is set in the 1930s, where whaling was completely normal- and that he's a jerk to his underlings. Alright, that's got shades of Captain Planet villainy to it, but that's broadly in line with the tone, right?
Well, sure, up until we see him go down with his ship into literally freezing waters. We don't see a corpse, but he's unambiguously dead, and our two heroes don't blink at it, clearly feeling it's entirely deserved. It's... a bit jarring, especially since the scene is played somewhat comedically, with literal rats abandoning Whitey's sinking ship.
Velika La Pette takes over as the second villain, and her two big sins are, if anything, even less dire; like Whitey, she's a jerk to her employees, with 'likes to make designer clothes using the animal-mixing technology' being her other big sin I guess? Like, okay, that's a petty use of a technology capable of mixing animals together and placing them under people's control, but frankly if you're going to whine about the ethics of killing animals to make fancy-pants furs you really ought to be enthused that someone is trying to replace killing real animals with instantly fabbing up 'fake' animals from what amounts to nothing to cover that need. That's the option that doesn't negatively impact ecologies.
Certainly, she's even more rude and condescending to our heroes than Whitey is, but she's not particularly villainous, and critically she is literally the only example the game provides of a non-military use for the Sigma technology. (ie the animal-combining technology) This is important, because Lucy -the female lead/heroine- spends the entire game being appalled by the idea of using the Sigma technology for something other than the good of mankind and never once proffers an idea of what she thought it was going to be used for that would be so good. Indeed, it makes her low opinion of Velika's use of the technology frustrating; what is this 'better' use you're imagining, lady?
Nonetheless, Velika also ends up clearly dead, with Rex (Male lead) and Lucy once again clearly finding the death completely justified and appropriate. They didn't pull the trigger, Velika dies by virtue of hopping into a gyrocopter and having it go down on its own at sea, but still. Why, exactly, does this lady deserve an unambiguous death? Given the tone the game is mostly going for, I'd expect Velika to end up in a life raft, shaking her fist at our heroes as they fly away and yelling about If It Weren't For You Meddling Kids/I'll Get You, Gadget! The kind of situation that realistically has high odds of ending in death, but where the narrative message is clearly 'she's over and done with, an execution is unnecessary'.
Then, having spent around half the game with this uneven but sorta consistent in some sense tone, we meet Doctor Ganglion, and his presence in the plot is baffling to me. He's an evil mad scientist who historically sewed animals together and used drugs to avoid tissue rejection and stuff, which on the face of it seems like it fits naturalistically into a plot about a miracle technology to combine animals together in bizarre ways without an issue... but the game's actual explanation for the existence of this technology is that the Tunguska Event was the arrival of the Sigma technology, and humans just picked it up and figured out how to replicate it and maybe tweak it a bit.
An evil mad scientist isn't being used to justify the discovery of a miracle method of combining animals, and instead Ganglion just adds a further layer of tonal confusion to the plot, because instead of the plot seeming to have two tracks (The noir cinematic track, where the plot is dark and gritty and I'm expecting someone to smoke a cigarette any second now vs the in-engine track where everything is goofy and family-friendly) Ganglion is a supremely awful, awful person in both 'tracks'. And one whose presence is, as I just explained, redundant!
Even more confusing, his death is outright Looney Tunes. He flails around in a panic, stumbles into a giant open-ground fan, spins around for several seconds, and then gets launched into a cliff, which he proceeds to stick to for several seconds before falling away into the ocean to presumably finally die now that he's off-screen and Looney Tunes physics doesn't apply anymore. This is the one character in the plot it would be tonally consistent to have Rex straight-up kill him, and instead it's not even clear whether Rex knows that Ganglion died. Why on Earth was the plot okay with non-comedically killing off a whaler and a high-society fashion lady and clearly signaling they totally deserved it, but a man who literally stitched together living animals to sell to freak shows, engages in ambiguous human experimentation, talks about Rex as a 'specimen' rather than treating him like a person, and outright tricks Rex into walking onto an island with a horrible virus Rex is vulnerable to... gets a funny death where no one goes 'yeah, that was totally deserved'?
For the final bit of dissonance, the villain of the story -Upton Julius- actually does get straight-up murdered by Rex. (Albeit in the PG manner of having a flying creature swoop in, grab Julius, and flying off with him while he screams) The other three villains all end up dying more through their own fault than Rex's; Rex broke Whitey's ship, but Whitey went down with the ship because he refused to abandon it. Rex destroyed Velika's lab and in the process damaged her gyrocopter, but she only crashed in the ocean because she insisted on taking the damaged gyrocopter anyway. Ganglion freaks out in response to his base being burned to the ground, expecting Rex to take vengeance upon him, and in his panicked flailing gets himself killed. Julius is the only character where the plot firmly places it as 'Rex chooses to kill Julius, and makes it happen'.
Like, okay, he explicitly wants to plot world domination, but... why is Ganglion not someone who merits staining one's hands if Julius is? Heck, Julius seems to legitimately believe him taking over the world would improve it, where Ganglion is pretty bluntly the kind of evil scientist who knows he's hurting people and just doesn't care, no justifications like 'progress requires sacrifices' or anything. I would've better understood if Ganglion got killed by Rex while Julius ended up in jail, even if I might've had issues with the plot implicitly not placing responsibility for Ganglion's actions in Julius' hands.
The dissonance of tone stands out as much as it does in part because there's not much of a plot progression. Tone is about all the game has. Rex and Lucy's relationship doesn't advance. Even the ending doesn't clearly signal that in stock fashion the male lead and female lead are in a relationship now that the story is over. The heroes and the player don't gain an increasing understanding of what's happening as the story unfolds, they just get to see some of the specifics of how what we already know is happening is meant to work. (eg there's a mission where we see the flying train factories, and Lucy spells out that Julius is a railroad tycoon and so can adapt existing facilities across the world into producing the flying trains) Rex starts the story wanting to meet his father and get to know him, and it turns out the man is already dead and Rex never even gets to, like, read a journal from his father or anything to resolve that particular plot thread.
In fact, a recurring element of the story is raising questions and never really answering them -Lucy asks Rex why he's so good at commanding in battle and whatnot, and Rex's response is that he's a war correspondent, which is a change of subject that sounds like it's going to lead around to an explanation only Rex never gets to such an explanation. (eg Rex could have had a backstory of ending up in hostile territory and having to turn to fighting, breaking from his role as a correspondent, but he doesn't) Lucy constantly talks about the good Sigma technology can do for the world, and we never get an answer as to what good she could possibly be thinking of. We find out the Sigma technology is probably of alien origin, and the closest the plot comes to following up on that is that the ending has a stinger element to it suggesting there were vague plans for a sequel touching on that. (One that never happened, and probably never will happen)
Also, a frustrating point is Rex repeatedly insisting throughout the game that the Sigma technology needs to be destroyed because it's too much power for a single person. Just as Lucy's claims of the Sigma technology being good for humanity are empty, Rex's opposing position that the technology is too dangerous is also empty, which makes the two arguing on the point completely pointless. There's just no substance to the whole thing, and there really should have been.
In some ways it's not really surprising that Impossible Creatures' story isn't all that together given Relic's prior effort has a strong start but ends up jumping tracks and ultimately petering out, but Impossible Creatures doesn't have even the strong start.
To be fair, it's clear Impossible Creatures isn't trying to tell a very serious story... but part of the reason its flaws stand out to me is that the game puts in quite a lot of effort into the plot. It could've gotten away with being even more basic than it is; Upton Julius wanting to conquer the world while Rex and Lucy are fighting to prevent it is all you need to do a short campaign. It worked for older RTSes, after all. And honestly, as I'll be covering, I would've liked for Impossible Creatures to have its gameplay refined more.
As a somewhat silly aside, I was particularly struck by how many similarities the overall shape of the story/setting has with Resistance: Fall of Man, which Impossible Creatures precedes by a good 3 years. You've got DNA mixing resulting in monstrosities, you've got the protagonist getting superpowers while looking like a completely normal human, both games are weird early twentieth-century alternate histories, both of them have the Tunguska Event be alien technology arriving instead of a meteorite exploding mid-air, and you've got said alien technology being pretty much magic. It has me wondering if, like, a good portion of the staff responsible for Impossible Creatures ended up switching companies and contributing to what ultimately became the first Resistance game, or if it's something 'in the air' of that general timeframe or if it's just a weird little coincidence. It's not as if Impossible Creatures and Resistance are all that similar once you look past some of the core plot threads...
Anyway, next time I'll be delving a bit more into the campaign's gameplay end of things, and in the process expanding a bit more on the storytelling.
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