Lemnis Gate sounds like the future

Lets do the timewarp again

I have made no secret, on this blog, about my love for the creative arts and the way that they play out in this gaming medium. I even try my hand at a bit of creative works myself in my otherwise spare time, but to a supremely amateurish degree and nowhere close to matching some of the decent indie Devs that impress and innovate everyday. But still I persist out of awe and quite a bit of jealousy, jealousy for those that can just dive into their grey matter and pull from it a concept that doesn't exist today so that it might tomorrow with their name on it. Recently I made an offhand theatre reference in quoting the famous King Lear line of "Nothing comes from nothing", well these people do Shakespeare's work for him and prove the very folly of that sentiment on the daily. Pulling genius from thin air, it's like sorcery to me. And it's the sort of creativity that you'll only ever seen from the smaller studios or the indie darlings, those that don't have to weigh up mass appeal beyond "Is this fun to play?" "Yes?" "Then someone will like it." And it's the ideas from that creativity which keeps gaming alive.

And of course it's a title that does just that, taking an idea that has some unique flavour to it and making it real, which I want to focus on today with the multiplayer shooter to change multiplayer shooters, Lemnis Gate, another recent E3 discovery. Now as I understand it, this particular game wasn't a brand new reveal for the event, and there were some who had seen and were interested in this title and what it had to promise beforehand, but for me the whole thing is pretty brand spanking new. Being somewhat late to this party means that anything I have to say about my thoughts on the game will be addressed by the title itself as it launches a little over 2 weeks from when this blog gets published. Which makes this a rare treat of red hot anticipation on my part, I almost just want to wait and see the full thing for myself. But I can't wait.

So Lemnis Gate is a multiplayer combat strategy FPS game, which already sounds like a mouthful but be ready to be even more confused when I reveal to you the most important part of the game, it's time bending properties. So this actually took me a hot-second to figure out myself so bare with me if I misremember a detail or two here and there, but let me try and break this down for the class. Essentially every match is 125 seconds long broken down into five 25 second 'rounds', which sounds incredibly short but it's going to feel a lot longer than that. Each player will have 25 seconds to do what they will do, be that shoot the enemy, set traps, whatever, after which time resets itself and they have to live those 25 seconds again, optop of the 25 seconds they just recorded. It's sort of like teaming up with a shadow driver in a racing game.

Coming to terms with this in my own head sort of feels like trying to explain King Crimson's abilities, but I think it sort of works like this: Teams will be fighting a traditional match (Whether we're talking deathmatch, capture the flag or whatever) whilst setting traps at potential chokepoints that future round enemies might walk into. Meaning that as the five rounds play out things will become a cluster of remembering how the sequence played out, dodging traps that the enemy will have placed down and setting your own for the next loop. The Developers have referred to this as '4D combat', and whilst I find any experience that deigns to crown itself as having "unlocked the next dimension" to be incredibly pretentious, it's hard to argue that they've literally found a way to split up and layer time in a way where it becomes a significant factor. By round 2,3 and 4 you're pretty much playing three separate matches simultaneously.

When it's all said and done, isn't all that just incredible? I mean that genuinely and truly, because if everything works like the developers propose that it does, and the game itself is a lot more intuitive than trying to describe it is, then we might just be looking at the birth of one of the most imaginative games on the market right now. Typically a multiplayer shooter wouldn't be at all up my street, but I've always been anticipatory of the way that games, through the merit of simulating worlds, could advantage the very laws of reality to make something unique. I've waited so long for a title that would gamify time manipulation in a manner that's integral to the gameplay and dynamic, I just never imagined that game would end up being a competitive shooter.

Whatsmore, by it's very nature this concept acts like an acid on the barrier between genres, melting them down and congealing them in ways that shouldn't be possible. Do you want a real-time turn based strategy game? Usually that's the line between players where one will pick turn based and the other will go real-time, with general sensibilities dictating that the majority (in an even lightly competitive multiplayer field) will choose 'real-time' gameplay. But that's a distinction which is irrelevant now, Lemnis Gate just killed it. Now you can have your strategy gameplay stringent on reacting to elaborate plans with your own just-as-elaborate rebuttals without losing any of the momentum of a shooter. How totally and utterly unique. There's no other word for it.

Except, perhaps, fresh; because that's a word I just keep coming back to whenever I think of Lemnis Gate; it's a proposition that seeks to take an institution and make it utterly fresh and new again. I don't think I'm exaggerating too much with my rhetoric either, this well and truly is unlike any other shooter out there right now. When you compare this to Call of Duty or the million Battle Royales both here and on their way, this feels like a whole new style of multiplayer competition whilst leaning on those established genres enough to be instantly recognisable and thus approachable by FPS fans. If the proposition for what this game is turns out to really be representative of the final product, then this will really be a shooter for the new generation.

Of course I'm talking hypotheticals and maybes here, because we both don't know if the final product will deliver and if anyone will actually respond to the game once it's out anyway. People famously flocked to shower praise on Lawbreakers in it's pre-release stage, celebrating it as a fun and tactile departure from the tired FPS formulaic-fossil that the industry was choking itself on at the time, but for whatever reason that never translated into actual commercial success once the thing launched. All I can say for my part is if Ratloop Games Canada built it, I hope the crowds will come because some variety across the competitive multiplayer field is good for all games. Heck, I can just imagine the way a system like this looping might be used for an adventure title or an RPG. (Actually, I guess Chrono Trigger did kind of do this already, didn't it?) Were that I could capture even a shade of this creativity across my entire life, I would consider my time worthy in just that slightest fashion. Way to outflank the AAA market once again, E3 indie games.