In praise of ladders, paper bags and palm trees

Tom Loftus Columnist • E-mail

This time of year in the news business was once defined by mid-afternoon rounds at the nearest saloon (at least in non-election years). Not so this season with its myriad of disasters which has forced this columnist to temporarily drop his Xbox for LexisNexis.

But non-stop bad news breeds a desire for escape and for the video game minded, three games released earlier this summer do the trick. One celebrates the joys of being an inanimate object — oh to be to be mop bucket for a day!  So safe, so emotionless. In a second game, you bring such inanimate objects to "life." And in the last game, you use these objects the old fashioned way — whomping enemies over the head.

"Geist"
"Geist’s” opening moments leave no action gaming cliché untouched before taking a U-turn into the bizarre.

Expository setup about the game’s bad guy? Check. A quick commando raid to get the heart beating? Check. Perfunctory training in various weapons and gadgets? Check.

Then the going gets weird. You’re transported to a hallucinatory landscape straight out of a Thomas Kinkaid painting. There are waterfalls, rainbows and little bunnies that hop about.

"You have ascended to something greater than you were," a bodiless female voice purrs. We learn that John Raimi, the game’s hero and the character through which players view the world, has been liberated from his corporeal body. He is now a ghost with the power to inhabit objects, both organic and inorganic.

To prove this, Raimi (that's you) is transported into the body of the nearest bunny.

But you hop amongst Kincadian poppies and posies for only so long before the bucolic landscape shatters into static and in place of a female voice comes a metallic, inhuman voice that whispers “Kill them all!"

Rock n' Roll! Of course “Geist” can’t maintain this level of surrealism and before you can say “RPG,” the action slips back into the familiar “run and gun” modus operandi. There are, however, some nice little curves in the road ahead. 

Raimi, we learn, is serving as a lab rat for game bad guy Alexander Voch, an arms dealer and evil old fart. Voch is using science and the supernatural to build an army of spirits. The experiment went awry, however, turning Raimi free (a free spirit, if you will) to roam Voch's dark hallways and exposed heating vents — video game bad guys just love the deconstruction look.

Raimi can’t just glide through walls and raise hell. He needs to inhabit and control things. A locked door can be a game ending roadblock until Raimi tracks down and inhabits the body of a scientist with the pass key. Likewise, possessing the bodies of dogs and rats allows Raimi access to tighter squeezes.

More fun comes with monkeying with the paramilitaries that guard Voch's complex by taking control of one guy and triggering a firefight.

Inorganic objects such as ladders, fire extinguishers, dog bowls and computers can be possessed and rattled or powered up to spook jumpy guards. The more scared a human or animal, the easier they are to possess. The ubiquitous explosive crate can be possessed and exploded. Likewise, grenades where you literally roll yourself between the legs of the enemy.

This ability to inhabit various objects helps to solve puzzles. Early in the game a fuse required to fix a broken fuse box remains out of reach of the engineer Raimi possesses. How to solve this challenge? To paraphrase that old sports saying, “Be the ball.”  Or in this case, be the fuse and roll yourself towards the engineer.

For every puzzle there are miles of darkened hallways to traverse. Why do bad guys refuse to invest in good lighting? When compared against other first-person-shooters "Geist" is noticeably weaker in animation — although the texture mapping looks great — and in pure run and gun performance. But "Geist" plays its particular supernatural twist well. 

Any game that allows you to be a mop bucket deserves points, doesn't it?

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