The Signal from Tölva is an open-world wasteland game of unusual profundity, its trash activating a set of cultural reference points that extend far beyond Mad Max-bred cliché. Sculpted by former Aardman Animations artist Olly Skillman-Wilson from concept pieces created by ex-Rockstar doodler Ian McQue, the game's titular planet is a wilderness of crash-landed starships and war machines, picked over by robot factions lured to the surface by a persistent, inexplicable whispering in the aether. Rendered using a desiccated industrial palette that is lent further texture by sporadic visual artefacts and interference, it's a superbly allusive stew - an arid yet evocative snapshot of a sci-fi universe dreamt up by lead designer Jim Rossignol and writer Cassandra Khaw. (Disclaimer: Jim is a founder of our sister site Rock, Paper, Shotgun and a former Eurogamer contributor, and Cassandra is a current contributor to the site.)
At times the game taps into a mythic register, with enormous "Architect" and "Librarian" exoskeletons sprawling in death like the titans of Greek legend, their eye sockets and nostril passages rimmed with flaking paint. You'll come across chunks of synthetic vertebrae, stripped of circuitry, that recall the bones of dinosaurs; were it possible to dig beneath the soil, I imagine you'd discover vast, precision-engineered fossils. At other times, the game's landscape feels like a nod to 21st-century aircraft "boneyards" such as Arizona's Davis-Monthan Air Force Base, whose tenants include Cold War stealth bombers and outmoded Predator drones, or the scrapheap of Rassohka, where irradiated helicopters used during the Chernobyl 1986 nuclear disaster lie piecemeal and poisonous, tempting the hands of souvenir hunters. Tölva has its share of radioactive hotspots, their edges marked by flaring red striplights, though the quest here isn't for isotope-ridden mantelpiece trophies but for caches of information about the planet's origins: gristly half-revelations which pay into a wider examination of the nature of consciousness itself.
Like any graveyard, Tölva has ghosts aplenty - in this case, the cybernetic kind. It casts you as an anonymous hustler with a faster-than-light hook-up, exploring the planet from afar by hacking into the brains of Surveyors - one of three robot factions battling for control of the surface. Surveyors are automatically constructed at allied bases, clumps of pale concrete that pre-date the game's events, or discovered at friendly radio beacons, and you can jump between them without penalty from the game's map screen. It's a way of justifying the concept of infinite respawns that is neatly, and nastily, entwined with the story's philosophical preoccupations - each Surveyor has a prominently displayed unique ID, and it's suggested that they are self-aware, but the fact that there's an endless supply encourages you to treat them as cannon fodder. By the end of the game, I had appropriated and discarded dozens of the poor creatures, burning through them like a dopamine junkie burning through rounds of Candy Crush Saga.
0 comments:
Post a Comment