Many post-apocalyptic games feel like our world in cosplay - it’s everything we know and understand, just mutilated, decrepit, and more corrupt. We meet shadow creatures, giant gelatinous sea creatures, and a bottomless cup of bored robots. Not just in nature and architecture and communities, but also in the very evolution of life.īy the 10-hour mark, my compatriots are a talking book, a mutilated child with a Medusa-like curse, and a young half-demon who wears lingerie and carries a big sword. Nier Replicant’s time frame is so distant from today that the world is nearly unrecognizable as our own. Image: Toylogic/Square Enix Time after time
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Time in the movie and time in real life begin to align, and the two worlds blur together. This pacing becomes meditative, transportive, and magnetic. In films like Stalker and Solaris, Tarkovsky would let shots run for minutes as characters did little more than trudge through a tunnel or float in an empty spacecraft. The vibe calls to mind Andrei Tarkovsky’s sci-fi of the mundane. Nier Replicant’s post-apocalypse, by comparison, feels empty and banal, an open world largely empty of things to do and people to meet. Despite the nuclear holocaust or hordes of zombies or rising sea levels in games like these, humans have survived, if not thrived, cobbling together entire towns, subcultures, and edgy fashion lines from the detritus of the Before Times.
Nier Replicant runs counter to most contemporary video game “wastelands,” which paradoxically brim with life. For hours, you learn the backstory and terrain of this open world, taking long hikes back and forth and back again through deserts, forests, caverns, and abandoned factories. One quest scraps the visuals altogether, converting the game into a text adventure in which you have no responsibility other than clicking through page after page of ellipses. The early journey is minimal to the point of parody. The slow intro affords newcomers time and context to get their sea legs.
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We have a top-secret government plan to split soul and body a talking book named Grimoire Noir, who works more or less like Green Lantern’s ring, morphing crimson energy into bullets, spikes, and giant fists and the lore of a largely forgotten series called Drakengard.ĭon’t let any of this intimidate you. If that sounds weird and dense, dear reader, I haven’t scratched the surface of the game’s lore.
That’s a bummer if, like me, you’ve already committed 30 hours and change and realize you forgot to buy some obscure, but important sword.) Without certain tasks completed, some endings will be cut off permanently. (If you plan to see everything, read our guide to unlocking all endings before playing. And like Automata, it features multiple endings, each new playthrough of the game revealing new information that calls into question the actions you took in the previous run. Like Automata, Replicant’s adventure doubles as a critique and parody of its contemporaries. Rather than recreate its inspirations on a one-to-one basis, Nier’s pastiche is closer to a hurried tour through the halls of video game history, winking and nodding with each new locale.
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