Exekiller is back!

 I walked through the desert on a horse with no name.

Is seems like so far past in a distant life with a long forgotten progenitor of the current 'me'; but I did once ago talk about my excitement for a, then recently revealed, game known as Exekiller. It was very much one of those indie projects that rode in on the wave of disappointment following the release of Cyberpunk 2077's base product. That CDPR origin title was a game that shot like electricity through the community imparting an excitement for the cyberpunk sub genre of entertainment only to leave that same community wanting after a game that wasn't what a lot of us were expecting. In such a void between expectation and reality, there lay a great opportunity for other smaller teams to lay down their own projects and ideas to fill that gaping maw in our hearts. Exekiller was one of the more impressive projects that we saw teased in that space, a single player bounty-hunter-style first person title with heavy Wild West influences and a visual palette very reminiscent of the ominous abandoned zone in Blade Runner 2049.

Of course as with any game that slaps down it's promise of what it wants to be before anything else, there's a healthy degree of scepticism that one would be prudent to maintain. Many of these concept-style trailers are as much about gauging public interest as heralding a real in-development project, and one can hardly observe the world of start-up indie games without acknowledging the endless stream of over ambitious and under-provided ideas that get announced every other week with no possible chance at someday releasing. (Just take a look at The Day Before's video.) But something about Exekiller cut through my hesitations, maybe the very deliberate and explicit visual intent, maybe the concept which shared similarities to the long-cancelled Prey 2 I used to fantasize about, somehow, someway, I believed we'd see this game again.

And here we are, a few years older and wiser, seeing this game progress to the point of an actual trailer and a real Steam page where you can wishlist the thing. Of course, pretty much any game can get itself a steam page if they kick back enough to papa Valve; but acquiring that page is at least an important step to existing. (And if they're smart enough perhaps the team went the actual distance to get their name trademarked in their home territory, because god knows we don't need that omission becoming a trend of development.) I have found myself, in idle drifts of laconic daydreaming, thinking back on whatever happened to this game, and it's so very gratifying to know all that spent thought-energy was not disappearing into the void. Rather now I have genuine gameplay trailer to hyper analyse and critique to an obsessive degree as the game hones in on what it actually intends to be. And what it intends to be really sounds right up my alley if their Steam page can be trusted.

A semi-open world  environment with hub spaces and a gradually uncovered map brings to mind thoughts of Immersive Sims like Deus Ex or Dishonoured, both of which make excellent blueprints for a narrative built around bounty hunting and adventurous sci-fi cowboy contract work. The self-appointed title of a 'linear narrative with non-linear choices' might sound a little paradoxical, but I see that as a way of conveying little choices that build up in a manner that might effect the ending more than the course of the game; which is a decent way of depicting consequence without bloating a project to the scale of overambition. And I quite like the distinctive approaching to 'player progression' that isn't so much tied to EXP and Levelling as much as to mods and augmentations. A fine way to propel the value of equipping iterative and more powerful variations of technology in a manner which I imagine will be synchronous to the world narrative. 

As opposed to some other recent gameplay footage that might have been doing the rounds recently, Exekiller decided to present itself with a tight little sequence which displayed the desolation of the Western Style world in a small but stark location. All we see it what amounts to an abandoned road-side pit stop, but from that one location alone we get a pretty good idea of the elements which make up the Exekiller world. For one, we get to see the holographic dashboard slathered in 80's style sci-fi type font, deftly informing the retro futuristic approach to the visual style. Additionally, if this footage is anything to go off from, the game seems eager to blend together post apocalyptic devastation with the classic iconography of the desert west; bleached skeleton bones and cacti dot the sands, it's all very 'new age Fallout New Vegas'. I love it.

One of the well-drunk design wells of modern exploration games is a basic handle of environmental storytelling, and just our small glimpse of a player picking through the turned over remains of what looks like a roadside diner certainly spells the framework for some great ground made over in that department. From this location in particular I quite liked the flickering and sparking electronic display boards creating some flicker of life to contrast with the otherwise dead and buried feel of the washed out place. It's all very expertly dressed from a design standpoint. All the player tools and equipment fly under the retro-ism design style, from the motion detector to the carried revolver, coming together to create an identity that taps the same sort of visual motif that CDPR played with in Cyberpunk- only for a different decade of design, of course.

As this is an alpha snippet of gameplay, all positives and negatives are subject to the changing whims of the design process; but if I'm pressed to find negatives I would have to start with the main character's voice. It's quite clear that the VA chosen lacks the vocal range for the part he's playing, and next to the surprising quality of everything else in the trailer his lines stick out like an oddly cast thumb. There's also a moment when actual robotic enemies appear and there's a distinct lack of impact in how the guns shoot. I'm not bemoaning the lack of iron sights, I actually like the stylistic choice, there's just a missing punch to the audio and visual stimuli that discredits the revolver. But even than, just the slight tease of the player kicking over an object and then shooting it for an explosive effect erases a lot of my worry about how this game's combat might feel. Play on systems like that some more and there's no limit to the amount of dynamic combat encounters the team could design. Like a more action combat version of 'Divinity: Original Sin's elemental combination system! (Maybe I'm overhyping myself again, it was just one explosive in the trailer.)

It really isn't fair for a game like Exekiller to look the way it does, playing to my heartstrings in all of it's weak spots. You're just going to bring out a game in the same genre as Cyberpunk, with a premise borrowed from the cancelled Prey 2 and a general visual look of a more modernised Fallout New Vegas? That ain't a tiny bit fair at all, it's like this game was designed specifically to attract me most of all. And of course, like a rabbit led on by a carrot on a string, I'm hopping along totally cognisant of the possibilities but blindly loyal nonetheless. Paradark, as I believe the studio is known, have had the benefit of an interested community since their reveal; but I wonder if they know quite how ravenously some of us have wanted a game that looks just like this. I don't mean to apply undue pressure on a difficult process, but darn if Exekiller isn't looking more and more like my personal indie sweetheart game every moment. Count on me keeping my eye out for more details!