A bug’s life

With the myriad advancements the industry is seeing these days, video games have long since set off down the slick, pricey road toward Hollywood blockbuster-status, evolving beyond the simplistic bleep-bloop fests of their infancy. In fact, it’s not a far stretch to say that the game industry relies too much on established formulas these days rather than taking risks with new or innovative ideas.

In particular, compelling narrative is one aspect of game design that’s often left out in the cold. These days, anyone can write a weak script that stitches together a series of beat downs, explosions or boss battles—but how many times do you watch events of a story unfold as a bystander, going about your day-to-day life?

This is exactly the kind of unorthodox approach that Deadly Creatures takes, thrusting you alternately into the exoskeleton of a tarantula or scorpion as you play witness to some dirty dealings in the Sonoran desert.

But don’t get the wrong idea—this isn’t like a Pixar film where the titular arachnids can speak. Instead, Deadly Creatures cocoons itself in its own atmosphere, and it is something you notice immediately, from the game’s noir-like opening narration onward.

It’s a taut, dark little tale that involves two men, Wade and Struggs (wonderfully voiced by Billy Bob Thornton and Dennis Hopper, respectively) looking for lost confederate gold buried in the desert.

Simply put, the narrative conceit Deadly Creatures employs is brilliant. Instead of, say, playing as Wade or Struggs and encountering all manner of nature’s beasties on your travels, the tarantula and the scorpion explore their surroundings individually, tunneling through underground passageways and crawling through patches of hollowed out structures and abandoned refuse. In other words, they’re just acting naturally, which in turn allows the story to develop organically.

When not exploring, Deadly Creatures offers plenty of arachnophobia-inducing combat against a variety of insects as well as other predatory animals like rats, lizards and snakes to keep the tarantula and scorpion busy.

Using the typical Wii remote and nunchuck combo, as well as some of the best (read: most accurate) motion controls seen from a third-party developer, the arachnids can attack with a number of interesting moves, unlocked with more combat and exploratory experience.

The tarantula can weaken or disable enemies with webs or a venomous bite, pounce with a stealth attack or feed on overturned foes, while the scorpion can jab, use its claws as a defensive shield, whip and swing its tail, and of course, sting. And if the promise of multi-legged combat sounds creepy, it’s even more unsettling to watch it.

In fact, for those afraid of spiders, bugs and other critters, Deadly Creatures may be too much to handle. More often than not, the game feels similar to documentary footage of insects, whether they’re fighting or eating each other.

The tarantula and scorpion, as well as their enemies, are extremely well modeled and animated, (you can see the wooly hairs of the tarantula if you stop to look) and are overall very impressive for a Wii game.

Occasionally you’ll bump into a hitch in frame rate or glitchy interaction with an object, but it’s nothing to get sore over. And even with the disconnect you get watching a rendered arachnid versus a real one, the game’s oppressive atmosphere and visuals will get to you after awhile, especially in later levels where you’ll be swarmed by multiple types of enemies at once.

What this all adds up to is a wonderfully wrought sense of foreboding which works well with the game’s story and subject matter. The arachnids’ involvement with Wade and Struggs is minimal, which keeps the story tight and sets the tone of the game, allowing for full exposition of mood, the fighting gives the game a brutal, unnerving edge, and the environments, well, they’re another matter altogether.

Aside from the beautifully modeled animals, Deadly Creatures is oozing with attention to detail. The environments, while in scale are probably pretty small, seem vast and wide and Wade and Struggs are like giants.

The game’s warped sense of scale lend ordinary objects and locations an elongated surreal aesthetic, making innocuous places like an abandoned truck or the aforementioned bramble patch look like something designed by H.R. Giger or Tim Burton.

Hell, even an encounter with a discarded lawn gnome or the filtered light from a cracked cell phone gives off a feeling of dread. Kudos to Rainbow Studios—Deadly Creatures definitely works the Wii hardware harder than almost any other third-party game out there, and is easily one of the best Wii games yet.

What Deadly Creatures really boils down to, though, is how the story is presented. Far from simply being a great narrative device, your role as a “deadly creature” eventually becomes apparent: a foil to man himself.

Sure, the game’s protagonists have eight legs. They’re feared in pop-culture and have a reputation as killers in the wild. But that contrast, between arachnid and man, makes the point that much clearer. The veiled social commentary at work is really a statement about the nature of man, rather than of nature itself.

Aside from the discarded garbage and junk that they have to navigate, Deadly Creatures is clearly saying the world is man’s—critters just happen to be living in it. By the time the game reaches its climax that ownership has left the impression that maybe these fearsome animals, so feared and reviled by people, aren’t the real enemies.

Nature can be truly cruel and frightening, the game seems to say, but man is capable of far worse things. Without the provided perspective, that message might’ve been as obscured as course, but Deadly Creatures frames its theme in precisely the correct manner.