Overall, the mixture of multiple genres is nearly pulled off well, but the difficulty gums the gears up on Disjunction’s gameplay just a bit. If there were fewer enemies and more push forward then I think this game excels beyond expectations. As it stands with the gameplay, you’re getting an interesting mix that tells a good story, but can only go as far as you can take it with the difficulty pushing back so hard at times.
Ape Tribe Games has put a few formulas together in their most recent venture Disjunction. What I thought might just be a simple action/role-playing game has turned out to be far more complicated. Mixing together stealth, action, RPG, and branching narratives has equaled out to a deeper and richer experience that might have some flaws, but certainly holds its own on borrowed ideas.
Telling a good story is great, but telling a branching story is greater
Murder, mayhem, and mystery are the variety of story plot points you get with Disjunction. You play three different characters with unique abilities that somehow come crashing together in a story that would give any film noir a run for its money. You have a cyborg detective, a steel-jawed father who is suffering loss from the death of his daughter, and a more mysterious third character that ties things together. Each has their own story to tell and each has, for a lack of a better way of putting it, a special set of skills that delivers different ways for gameplay to be performed.
Beyond characters, the game also features a branching narrative that twists and turns how the story can be told. For example, our first character, the cyborg, is given a task to go gather information about a man named Lamar and his relationship to a company that is shady as it is dangerous. Lamar’s life is at stake after he is framed for a crime he may or may not have committed, so you’re tasked with finding out who, if anyone, framed Lamar. Your cyborg’s first mission is to infiltrate a lab. If you decide to go stealthy around the lab and gather info, then you’re going to do well to keep a low profile after the mission is accomplished. Should you go Rambo on the place, killing every living thing in sight, then you’re going to get called down on it by the individual who asked you to do the assignment, or just completely cut-off from that person. How you live in the world of Disjunction will dictate if reactions and cooperation are given. Life gets hard if you go one way or another (see Knights of the Old Republic for further related examples).
The branching narrative and taking responsibility for your actions adds a layer of unexpected complication to an otherwise simplistic-on-the-surface indie game. Ape Tribe Games did an admirable job with this game’s branching story structure, as well as its characters and defining them. This is quite an added bonus to the overall package.
Buffet of gameplay mix, mostly good
Story and characters aside, the gameplay style in Disjunction is mostly good. The gameplay presents itself as a top-down action/RPG. Disjunction allows you to travel through levels either taking down enemies with melee or taking them down with weapons. Weapons come in a variety of shapes from pistols to shotguns. The melee is varied by the characters played. The structure of the characters gives me that Final Fight/Streets of Rage vibe, where unique styles and executions from characters equal out to different experiences that lead down the same path. It’s not exactly the same as those games, but the feeling is similar. This is all that makes up the action moniker. It all works just fine. It certainly fits in with the story.
On the RPG side of things, the game is a bit shallow in this area. While exploring locations, you will find upgrade modules that allow for character upgrades in their weapons and melee (and health-ish items). While not incredibly complicated in design, it does offer up some additional encouragement to keep exploring levels. The better the improvements, the better the gameplay experience. You don’t have to find these items, but by ignoring them you are making your life a bit more difficult, which leads me to the next topic — stealth/difficulty.
Disjunction has a bit of Hotline Miami flavor to its construct. You enter a room gingerly to scope out what’s going on and where the enemies are located. You do your best to stealthily get the upper-hand on enemies one-by-one. Should that fail, you will find your chances of survival considerably downgraded depending on how many enemies you have alerted. The enemies come at you fast and furious with guns or lasers a-blazing. It didn’t take long into the game to realize that this Hotline Miami borrow forced some sense of caution, which will certainly encourage speedrunners to immediately pick up this game. Does this HM tip-of-the-hat work? I think it does for the most part, but you will find yourself counting bullets (limited), making strategic decisions, and becoming consistently frustrated when your plan to ‘get in and get out’ goes to pot. And it will go to pot more often than not in the later stages of the game. Sometimes the difficulty of the game pulls away Disjunction’s narrative storytelling, which ultimately does stutter the design’s intentions. Dying in a game is no biggie, but when you’re trying to keep the player on track and hooked to the story, it can make the process counter-productive and disconnect the player’s attachment to the experience.
As for the enemy variety, I think there is enough here to keep your mind amused. You have enemies with knives, guns, shotguns, robots, exploding robots, and also laser-driven droids (and more). Mix in those (and more than a few other enemies) with sentries that alert the world to your presence, if you’re not careful, and you have a lot to think about as you play this game. Appreciating the enemy scenery will be a chore sometimes, but Ape Tribe did a good job with throwing in a variety who are uniquely dangerous.
Other obstacles in the game will be the levels themselves. You will encounter traps and electrical pains in the ass through your adventures. The levels will also restrict your viewpoint, which means you will occasionally walk into a barrage of enemies waiting to run at you (and they will). Maybe that’s the charm of the level design, but it’s an added element of difficulty in an already tough game.
The levels are also cleverly designed to be traversed in multiple ways, so you won’t always have to find one sure way to go and will ultimately lead you to one exit. As you progress through the game you will see what kind of goodies Ape Tribe has designed and with them an added layer of things to think about while strategizing through a level. There is a lot of complication with this gameplay design, and most of it works.
Old school look and feel
While I mentioned Final Fight/Streets of Rage, the visuals of this game remind me of a prettier Metal Gear on the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES). You get that top-down view with a lot of restrictively designed pixelated levels and characters. It’s an old-school design that has been repeated many times, but it works here in this modern game. It’s perfect and if it became too real, it would look goofy. I don’t want a 3D world out of this story, nor do I want a platformer, though a Rolling Thunder-esque design could work for this story. Regardless, Disjunction looks and sounds absolutely perfect for Ape Tribe’s intentions.
Conclusion
Overall, the mixture of multiple genres is nearly pulled off well, but the difficulty gums the gears up on Disjunction’s gameplay just a bit. If there were fewer enemies and more push forward then I think this game excels beyond expectations. As it stands with the gameplay, you’re getting an interesting mix that tells a good story, but can only go as far as you can take it with the difficulty pushing back so hard at times.
