An absurd premise is an invitation to a greater idea. Invasive surgery with zero regard for patient mortality and a collection of hilarious ways to present its content transitioned Surgeon Simulator 2013 from a one-off joke into a relatively diverse and increasingly weird collection of challenges. Similarly, Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon worked it’s 80’s action aesthetic alongside a proven set of design principals lifted wholesale from Far Cry 3. It’s not enough for a game’s central conceit to be adorably foolish; there has to be something else for it to grab hold of and present to its audience.
Infinity Runner nails the absurdity of its premise. A man awakes from a thirty-year sleep on an enormous spaceship and must run completely naked from one end to the other, beating the living shit out of armed assailants and dodging obstacles along the way. The man is also a werewolf.
This sounds amazing. Infinity Runner’s recent trailer feels like Mirror’s Edge processed through that grimey, dank aesthetic from Alien³. The reality of Infinity Runner being a first-person runner-styled game with minimal required input isn’t disappointing – it’s that the game never really aspires to go deeper than its first level. Infinity Runner’s thinly sliced narrative doesn’t contain any satisfactory hooks and its moments of player agency rarely reach any sort of plateau. Its amazing premise is left as an excuse for incidental design rather than an indulgence in delightfully chaotic science fiction.
As a genre, runners typically revel in chaos. Canabalt’s emerging apocalypse justifies its endless collapsing structures. Runner2’s acid-trip of a world arrives with an anthropomorphic pickle named Unkle Dill and enough rainbows to drown a leprechaun. Infinity Runner’s contribution to the genre starts and ends with its shift in focus to a first-person point of view. This actually does feel sort of novel as it provides a better interpretation of literally running for your life, but its brisk pace and narrow field of view severely limits how the player is able to play inside its space.
Most of Infinity Runner unfolds inside a series of connected hallways. Approaching a ninety-degree turn, the player can look to the right or left to properly proceed along that turn. The player can also move right or left to dodge any respective hazards in the way. There’s also a slide/duck button as well as a jump button to hop over laser fields or any objects that restrict lateral movement. A few of the laser fields take a chunk of out a health bar, but generally failing to dodge out of the way of an oncoming object or looking the wrong direction when turning a corridor results in face-planting death.
I understand death as necessary mechanic for a fail state, and any sort of narrative injected into Infinity Runner is constructed in service to its mechanics. And yet it seems dumb that running into a wall is enough to take out my superhuman avatar. I get why it has to happen for the game to work, but it doesn’t excuse the disagreement in stated context. In any case, Infinity Runner’s checkpoints are rather generous; levels are usually no more than five minutes and there’s a checkpoint about every twenty seconds, Continues, however, are limited. On default difficulty you begin with just three tries to complete the whole level.
Infinity Runner is at its best when you last long enough to achieve a manageable flow. Each level appears to be assembled of recognizable hazards stitched together to form familiar traps. I learned, for example, to dodge right and jump/step to the left to avoid a certain double-laser field just as easily as I learned to manage sliding under and around a familiar room with exploding debris. Trial and error is required to be able process all of this with any reasonable success, but when it hits, when during those brief instances where you’re sliding under one thing and perfectly going in and out of the way, Infinity Runner really works. Feeling its flow, a process only achieved through repeated trial and error, is where you’ll find its highest highs.
The problem is these sequences are few and far between. There just isn’t enough to do inside each level. You’ll occasionally run into armed opposition, all of which are easily dispatched by obeying a quick-time button sequence. Occasionally there are awkward sequences of zero-g falling down a tube, but they’re devoid of any reasonable challenge. A couple times you’ll find yourself hunted by a fellow werewolf, and when he somehow elevates the ground ahead and slows your speed it starts to feel like you’re being chased. That was an honest to god thrill, leaving the game-y elements of Infinity Runner behind in favor of a purely terrifying experience. Unfortunately, nothing else in the game comes close to introducing a similar level of anxiety.
The tubes and tunnels that compose the play space are also heavily populated with data packets. In terms of the narrative these are written off with one throwaway line of dialogue, but regarding the gameplay they’re supposed to serve as an extra challenge. The game never specifically told me what collecting packets does, other than the fact that they’re tallied at the end of a level and sometimes I think they earned me another continue. Generally I found their presence to be device injected to give the player something – anything – else to do while running down the corridors of a derelict spaceship.
The man is also a werewolf. This endearing hook is also Infinity Runner’s greatest disappointment. By obtaining an unavoidable syringe-gun typically placed mid-level, you instantly morph into a werewolf. This changes the field of view slightly, accommodating the bobbing up-and-down of a head running on all fours. It also allows the player to bypass sequences of quick-time combat, as the wolf eviscerates anything standing in its way. Wolfman seems to move faster and there are a few unique-challenges suited to its brisk pace, but generally turning into a werewolf feels less like a man shedding his human inhibitions and embracing his inner demons and more like a vague twist on an already shallow experience. Becoming a werewolf does nothing for Infinity Runner.
The werewolf conceit also fails Infinity Runner’s narrative. A werewolf aboard a spaceship is a bit of a reach, obviously, but it’s a fun indulgence that would benefit from the support of an equally outrageous story. Instead, you’re provided with generic voiceover from a woman named Riley who goes on and on about the incredulity of your survival and says almost nothing regarding the greater world or immediate context. Moments where you encounter a bigger, meaner werewolf, accompanied by disinterested voiceover, turn potential menace into another drab obstacle (harmed further by the fact that the big bad in question looks no more threatening than a man in a bad gorilla suit). As a final insult, right when the story finally starts to explore its dangling threads, a sequel is teased. I wasn’t expecting much, really, but anything would have been better than Infinity Runner’s inane instruction and vapid dialogue.
The remainder of Infinity Runner’s presentation also leaves a lot of the table. Each zone of the massive ship is represented by a different theme; the Brig is supposed to be a holding cell for criminals, where as the Bio Dome is the trash remnant of a failed self-sustaining ecosystem. None of the levels play or look that differently from one another, amounting to different skins wrapped around the assortment of hallways with few, if any, perceptible differences to gameplay. The text attached to each zone’s description seems largely independent of how it actually appears on screen. Music also changes from level to level, running the gamut from brooding ambience to pounding electronic thumpers – all of which generally supports Infinity Runner’s dark and moody atmosphere.
Infinity Runner’s story mode carries the player through six levels, each with two zones, and takes around three hours on default difficulty. Arcade mode opens things up a bit, allowing the player to select a particular backdrop from the story mode and populate it with time limitations and power-ups (and power-downs). Multiplayer, which wasn’t available at the time I reviewed Infinity Runner, functions by comparing player’s times against other player’s times in real time.
It’s important to mention that my experience with Infinity Runner was restricted to a personal computer. Infinity Runner also arrives with full support for the Oculus Rift. It’s entirely possible the game is better optimized for that device, or, at the very least, its escalating series of gimmicks may be more easily forgiven in a virtual reality display void of similar content. It could work better in that space purely on the strengths of its novelty, but on the PC, where its body of work can’t hope to support its incredible premise, Infinity Runner is better left alone.
