Teleglitch: die more edition – Review
There used to be a time, when games used to be for men. I’m not talking about the biological definition of man. It was meant for a young audience of course, but at the same time it wasn’t child’s play. You had one life, no cheats and certainly no walkthroughs. Teleglitch goes back to these days of sieving boys from men. It’s brutal, it’s fast and there are no two ways about surviving the horrors of the more often than not narrow passages. Paradox interactive sends us to the slaughterhouse and this time we’re under the knife. So how does Teleglitch fare? Read on to find out.
Story
Teleglitch takes place in a distant future and on a distant planet. The planet is called Medusa 1-C, it’s radioactive, desolated and it’s got an atmosphere so charming it’ll melt the flesh right off your bones. Of course this is the perfect place for a military facility, because the friendly atmosphere must surely be contributing so that everything stays safe and sound. Well as we all know, nothing can be further from the truth. Fact is that, when there is a military facility and it happens to be working on something extremely dangerous, fecal matter is bound to hit the mechanical aeration device! One of the experiments has gone awry, because of a teleglitch (hence the name). Every scientist and staff-member gets reduced to a pile of ground meat. The whole facility gets a hostile make-over to a more than hostile environment. Of course you are the poor bastard stranded on the planet and you have to find a way to get your sorry ass off it.
While the story is nothing spectacular, it is also tried and tested (take doom for example). Anyway the game’s insane difficulty is going to make you forget that there is a story at all and that faster than you can say “poppycock”.
Graphics
Retro is in and by that this game qualifies as retro. Which makes it “in”, which in turn doesn’t seem to make it retro anymore than an iPod. Teleglitch is pixilated and the hub-screen is akin to the old DOS days. But whoever said it needed any decent graphics? It could have had them, surely they would have been capable of doing that and the gory mess could’ve been admired in detail. But looking takes time, which in this game one mostly doesn’t have. Once the monsters, mutants and killer-robots start popping out of the shadows, there is nothing left for the player but to try to just stay focused on them. Everything will turn into a blur of sorts as you move forward, or more often than not backwards, waving your knife in utter despair.
Sound
Teleglitch doesn’t have any mind blowing sounds. “Speech is silver, silence is golden”, this saying holds true for this game. I mean there is really nothing to hear as you walk all alone through the godforsaken laboratories. Up until, the moment that you get jumped by one of the many ways to die. Then everything turns into gunshot-sounds, knife-sounds and monster grunts. If you are lucky enough, you’ll manage to witness some more silence until the next ambush.
Gameplay
Teleglitch is a unique experience, in the sense that the levels are often generated randomly. So no two times are the same. This contributes greatly to the difficulty of the game. Whereas in other games where the player will be thrown back to some saving point should he die. Teleglitch lets you start from scratch, scratch being amplified by the fact that the whole level will just be rebuilt. So one cannot simply rely on previous knowledge of twists and turns, this makes the game nigh impossible to predict.
There is also a crafting system in Teleglitch, where the player can craft items out of random junk. It’s a neat little feature that makes the game so much more interesting. It’s particularly noteworthy that crafting items is mostly a masochistic endeavor. The fact that it is a necessity makes it even worse. Because no matter how hard you try to prepare or foresee the following situation, you will most certainly not have the right item for it. Unfortunately in Teleglitch, you only know if you made the right choice after death. Ammo is scarce and more often than not is your fate decided the moment you made the choice between stabbing and shooting. The A.I., whilst nothing to write home about, is decent in the sense that they can be attracted easily but once attracted are fairly hard to shake off.
The die more edition introduces the option in appearing with a random weapon. Well this makes things even harder since a random weapon in a randomly generated environment really doesn’t seem to help your chances for survival.
Conclusion
Teleglitch is all about guts and glory (mostly guts). It’s unforgiving, frustrating and tense. Why would anyone ever want to play this game? Because it’s unforgiving, frustrating and tense, players will enjoy the adrenaline rush, forced upon them like lunch in 2nd grade. Surviving itself becomes a great achievement, there is no need for trophies or scoreboards. Real gamers want a challenge and there is no challenge if one has infinite continues. Life doesn’t offer second chances, neither does Teleglitch.
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