Insomniac is one of the few studios who I like to follow closely. Dating allll the way back to Disruptor and up to last week with Edge of Nowhere, I have played — and really liked — most of their games. Being a new Oculus Rift CV1 owner, Edge of Nowhere looked like a compelling game. Having completed it earlier tonight, I can affirm that it is, but it’s not without some flaws.
The game puts you in the spiked-shoes of Victor Howard, a young man who is searching for his fiancé, Ava Thorne, whose expedition to Antarctica in the year of 1932 has resulted in their disappearing. The adventure begins with a flashback to another expedition in Chile, but moments later, you find yourself in the passenger seat of a small plane over the frosty waters and mountainous terrain of Antarctica. And only moments after that, your plane has crash landed and you awaken, unsure of what happened and where exactly you are.
Edge of Nowhere plays a lot of mental tricks on the player as Victor begins to question his sanity. It becomes evident that some strange force may be at work here that’s really messing with your mind. Or, it could be the impact of the plane wreck and the concussion you sustained; hmm. But what soon becomes undeniable is the constant danger Victor finds himself in, either from the harsh conditions of the environment or the strange alien creatures that inhabit it. The game is about equal parts 3D platforming and encounters. By 3D platforming I mean that you’re playing in the third person and performing running jumps from one platform to another and lots of climbing. The platforming isn’t tough, but many scripted events force you to hurry and make good, efficient moves with little or no room to fail, lest you fall to your death. And by encounters, I mean those times when you are near some of those dangerous alien creatures. Often times you can sneak by, but other times you have to shoot them down.
It’s fair to say that Edge of Nowhere blends third person action-adventure with survival horror, but neither genre in the fullest sense. Action comes in melee attacking weak enemies with your climbing picks/axes or shooting them with a shotgun. The survival twist to these is that the climbing pick is fast, but weak and utterly useless against most of the aliens. The shotgun is very restricted by ammo — despite carrying a backpack, you can only carry four shells (until later in the game you find a belt to allow you to hold eight). Moreover, even though the shotgun is double-barreled, you’d think it was a black powder rifle given how long it takes to fire that second barrel, so if you have any ideas of clearing out a cavern of aliens with a shotgun, it doesn’t pan out that way due to the slow firing, low ammo, and fast movement of the enemies, about half of which can insta-kill you while the others need just a few seconds.
Enemy types include stationary environmental hazards, some that poke you and cause major damage, others that spew poison spores. You also have little spider-like types that swarm and move quickly, but can be taken down with melee. No ranged enemies exist fortunately, as you don’t have any ranged weapons other than rocks to use anyway. Rocks are just meant to get the attention of enemies as opposed to harm them, so you can throw these to cause enemies to look and move away temporarily. Some enemies can be stealth-killed, others cannot, and the toughest enemies generally just have to be avoided by sneaking altogether. Quick note on the rocks, despite going through numerous caverns, you can only hold two rocks, then later four, and at times they can be hard to come by. As with some of the other limitations I mentioned, this rock-limit seems unnatural and arbitrary for the sake of game design.
You can learn about items, story notes, and enemies from the pause menu, although you don’t have to ever reference this unless you want to. The reason I say that is many gamers may never even notice it, but it’s worth looking at. It’s presented in a cool way, featuring hand-drawn notes and sketch drawings of the enemies and other relevant topics. Insomniac could have just avoided doing this altogether, but I appreciate that they included this.
Gameflow sees Victor traversing caverns, mostly by sprinting (no stamina meter is nice, but the enemies are fast enough to catch up to you in nearly all circumstances), jumping, rock-climbing, and using ropes to get to lower levels quicker. Sketchy wooden bridges have to be crossed, ice walls shatter as you climb on them, and ice bridges collapse as you go across them, giving you plenty of active scripted platforming that has you making amazing leaps and grabs as the path you were just on becomes inaccessible and collapses into the depths below. The sense of height and scale is quite nice, routinely remind the player just how small he is compared to the incredible heights of the terrain and its tremendous depths, too.
These platforming and general adventuring sequences are also used to flesh out the story of the characters’ past and the events that led them here. The other major gameplay element is the stealth action that works pretty good, but in the last hour of the game I grew fairly fatigued by it because it highlighted some more of the game’s questionable design choices. For example, simply throwing a rock against a wall to shatter it is enough to make multiple aliens shriek and run over to the area. But, being inside artic caverns, aren’t their shifts and rock and ice breaks constantly? Are they this sensitive to noise here? It’s a little strange, but pretty easy to overlook. Getting spotted by them is rarely a good thing, and to help you avoid their vision cones, you can press down on the d-pad to go into Observe mode, which highlights the surfaces they are focused on in blue. It also highlights consumables like rocks, shotgun shells, and medkits in yellow for you to get, and it shows your health meter and supply of ammo and rocks. Side note? I really liked that the level design does not require the player to turn their necks behind ninety degrees to either side. You can do this, and observe the world in a full 360 degree spherical, but at no time are you really missing out on anything by not turning around or straining your neck looking behind you. The game constantly encourages you to look and move forward.
Overall, Edge of Nowhere was a fun ride with only a few short frustrations along the way. It’s a little bit repetitive as far as appearance and gameplay, but at the same time the game doesn’t last more than five to six hours and there’s little reason to go back. Other difficulty levels are available that further restrict your ammo, but the experience wouldn’t be as impressive a second time through. Regarding physical comfort, it’s good, my face would feel warm after about a half hour of playing, but I never felt sick beyond that. With that, let’s wrap up in the summary…
