Despite its futuristic setting there's a strange, Willie Nelson-esque song in The Surge. It's tucked away in the OPs rooms you encounter - OPs rooms being the equivalent of Dark Souls' bonfires. It's a hesitant, downbeat number that starts with the line 'I was born in a prison with no hope of escape'. I quite liked it at first, but it slowly became symbolic of my time playing The Surge; given enough repetitions it becomes dull and samey - a dispiriting inevitability couched in something that should, by rights, be thoroughly enjoyable.
The Surge starts promisingly enough, with a brief but punchy intro sequence - you're Warren, a man who has applied to work at high-tech corporation Creo in search of a better quality of life. From the moment a company issue exoskeleton is painfully grafted to his frame, however, it's evident that something has gone horribly wrong and that Warren is going to have to fight his way out if he wants to stand any chance of survival.
Much of the story from that point is played out either in collectible audio logs or through encounters with NPCs, and it's a shame that neither really feels especially relevant to the environment or to the immediate problems Warren faces. The NPCs are incidental and while the audio logs give a sense of what things were like before everything went horribly wrong, they don't really help bring the world to life around you. While it's certainly not an ugly game, the environments in The Surge nonetheless feel drab and empty.
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