Stretcher Men’s lovely wind-ruffled menu screen has to be worth a 9. Maddening fixed cameras and a bizarre approach to pathfinding mean I’d struggle to award the game itself more than a 2.
The idea of controlling two independent stretcher bearers with one keyboard sounded like genius when I first heard about it. Naively, I assumed Chraph would let me manipulate the camera, and pick my own path while gingerly porting droppable rag-doll patients from A to B.
Discovering that I’m expected to view the action from a series of awkward fixed viewpoints, and stick closely to a prescribed route, quickly killed my interest in this £7 curio, stone-dead.
Well, almost stone-dead. Squint and daydream while grimacing at SM’s shortcomings (the physics are a bit questionable too), and it’s just possible to make out Stretcher Bearers, a WWI title that, done right, could actually prove pretty absorbing/affecting. Obviously SB would require the following in order to do its theme justice:
- Mud capable of miring and destabilising
- Barbed wire capable of snagging, tripping, and entangling
- Ground-shaking artillery
- Body-shredding MGs
- Ghastly wounds
- Heartbreaking dialogue
- Rats
- Corpses
- Fatigue
- Disorientation
- Poison gas
- Maimed horses
- Górecki’s Symphony No. 3 as a soundtrack
The combination of fixed camera in a 3D engine that obviously can acommodate free camera movement and often obscure fixed paths that you cannot deviate from if you want to advance feels like the worst of all video game design decisions from the 90s. In this age of so many games that the entire industry is buckling under the weight of them, I’m just going to play something that actually feels enjoyable.
Tim’s feature list combined with that bottom screenshot would definitely draw me in.
Add a hidden vignette where your stretcher bearers come together to perform Górecki’s Symphony No. 3 ?