Coming right out with it: I just finished the PlayStation 3 (PS3) exclusive Lair. What a roller coaster ride it has been! I do mean that quite directly. Wow, has that game left me sweating and out of breath. So, before we go off the deep end, let's hang back a little, for context reasons. What's a good roller coaster without a slow climb.
A while ago, I wrote about buying a lot of 45 PS3 games. With my other updates about life in mind, I can admit that I haven't kept up with playing as much as I should. I did, however, recently try to nudge my way through some outliers. Particularly as I've now crossed the barrier of 900 console games, I needed to at least work through a few, so that I'm not just considered to be a dragon, hoarding various discs.
So far, I've played the entire Motorstorm trilogy, which turned out to be an interesting retrospective. Eventually, I moved on to Silent Hill 2 in the PS3 HD collection. It wasn't an easy run, but I completed that game as well. Both deserve to be reminisced, but it continues to be quite hard for me to do these writings. Nevertheless, this brings us to the here and now, where I shoved Lair into my disc drive, after an extensive poll on Twitter.
Lair is, in one word, extraordinary. I've never seen a more appropriate game that serves as a time capsule of the game industry. Let me explain:
On the surface, Lair is a story-driven game about riding a dragon. You'd think: "Oh, like Panzer Dragoon," but you'd be dead wrong. The aerial combat is only a portion of this beast. Gameplay also dives into musou territory, with thousands of ground units to claw through or to devour. Then, there are turrets and catapults that you can lift up and throw at enemies, ships at sea that need to be ransacked. You can "rage" and trigger bullet time. There's even a fighting game branch that happens mid-air. On top of that, add a morale system for troops, as well as a story that touches on climate change and the destructive power of civilization. The list goes on. Lair does all of this at the same time, with exquisite visuals and effects popping off of all its individually moving parts, as an orchestral score by a Disney alumnus sweeps through in the background. Now, here's the kicker: Lair is a SIXAXIS motion controls only game. All of the aforementioned needs to be maneuvered while flailing a controller around the room. Bear in mind, production of this game started in 2004. That's the year that Def Jam: Fight for NY released, plus some other video games, I guess.
In short, Lair may be the most ambitious video game ever made.
You can plainly see the inspirations that made this monster. Part of it wants to be as impactful as God of War was for Sony. This is also the same time span that saw The Lord of the Rings films try to translate their grandeur to a video game format. Developer Factor 5 doesn't hide a cinematic influence either. Aside from a deep production gallery, the game has a completely serious director's commentary track that can be unlocked, once you finish the game. The tracks are tens of minutes long for each mission, even for the starting hub that would take anyone mere seconds to go through. All this, for a game that's trying to latch onto the budding success of the Nintendo Wii. It's madness.
As the Metacritic rating of 53% would indicate, it's hard to get recognition when being avant-garde. In fact, Lair bombed hard enough that developer Factor 5 had to close doors, after 30 years and a bunch of Turrican games. Motion controls were so universally hated that the game is one of the rare examples where Sony released a whole 2.0 patch that offers analog controls instead. I would later find out that this patch is in direct contrast with the vision of Factor 5. I told you; that commentary track goes deep into how the sausage was made.
Am I here to tell you different? Am I going to shake your shoulders, telling you to play the misunderstood Lair right now? As much as it's a cop-out: I just don't know. I've been through the ringer, when it comes to playing it myself.
What started as a quirky novelty in commanding my dragon with SIXAXIS controls, a feature I've only used to jiggle a flashlight in The Last of Us before, swiftly turned to wrestling for control. Along with the overabundance of screen elements, it's hard to know what to do, let alone pull it off with a completely new control style. Not being fast enough drops military morale, so you might even retreat from battle before figuring stuff out. Gameplay additionally transitions from objectives to zone control to boss battles, so there's never really a groove to ease into. Every aspect of this thing is a fight. An unusual game needed unorthodox methods, so I cracked open a few bottles of soju to help me get through it. For context, while many people swear by it, I never play drunk; I hate it, in fact. For some reason though, this seemed to level me out, like drinking to be able to walk straight during an earthquake. Yes, the game is still unwieldy and obtuse, but I'll admit that I cracked myself up several times by whipping my controller around like an idiot. Dance like nobody's watching, eh?
As unintentionally amusing as it may be, Lair has no time for trial and error. Later missions have some of the harshest difficulty spikes in video games. In the tenth mission, I hit a wall and broke down. I decided to consult a walkthrough, only for that article to tell me that this shit is pretty much impossible, even if you know what you're doing. A second walkthrough then confirmed it! That's not something you want a consensus on. Combined with now passing the point of being tipsy, I called it, to fight another day.
With a fresher head, I revised the necessary steps once more and got to work. When I tell you that a game has rarely ever made me sweat as much as this one mission. This is when it clicked for me. This is the transcendent feeling that Lair wants to evoke. After this battle, I'm left out of breath, yet relieved. It occurred to me that the controls had become intuitive, as if I were pulling on the reins of an animal. It's a pretty dang cool feeling to see a vision like that come to fruition.
As the game concluded with smashing the state, to ensure a collective future, it left me wanting more, to the point that I immediately went back for the director's commentary. I wish I could tell you that I replayed the whole thing to hear everything the developers had to say, but I don't think anyone has the willpower to thrash around with Lair twice. Yes, I could technically install the analog patch that abrasively pops up on the screen every ten minutes, mid-mission or not, but the SIXAXIS element is the whole point of the game. There's not even a guarantee that it would make the chaos any less drastic. It's better not to sully the memory.
This is the prime example of what video games were like at the start of the seventh generation. Sony thought that it could do no wrong, as indicated by the original price of a PS3. The publisher bit off way more than it could chew by okaying a project that channels the Wii, Panzer Dragoon, Dynasty Warriors, fighting games, God of War and more. If feature creep had an inception in the modern era, it would start here. Lair is pure arrogance distilled and yet the game never feels like it's malicious in its intent. The new power that a console brought made a developer swing for the fences with a lavish, cinematic concept. And swing it did indeed.
As it stands today, Lair is probably the best 5 out of 10 game I've ever played. The time I spent on it is like no other game ever, but I would find it impossible to recommend, without feeling like I'd set someone up. I wish I could. I wish I could talk to more people about Lair. So,I guess this is my way of coping with that feeling. Gameplay is horribly flawed and frustrating, but also unique in a way that hasn't been seen since. The project has the same pretension as any other spectacle game, but at least it didn't just talk the talk. I will always, personally, value a game that tried and failed over a serviceable effort that's just going through the motions.
Lair kinda sucks and I love it. Maybe one day we can revisit this whole thing. There are, after all, brand new, powerful consoles that just came out. Hell, Factor 5 was recently resurrected. If that studio managed this much in 2007, then imagine the potential current day outcome. They could, however, just as easily fuck it up again. That's also okay with me.
Log in to comment