All stories involve a degree of misdirection by definition, but it often feels like misdirection is the only card Get Even has to play. Even the game's cast seem frustrated by its taste for obfuscation. Following one particular breakthrough, Cole Black, the (yes, ironically named) ex-military roughneck who serves as protagonist for most of the tale, asks his enigmatic contact "Red" why he couldn't have just been given everything away upfront. Red and developer The Farm 51's answer is that you have to experience some things as they unfold in order to grasp their import - and there are times, during the game's final moments, especially, when this hoary old maxim rings true. But Get Even's twists and turns are more often evasive and defensive than tantalising or engaging. It has the mildly frantic air of an emperor who's just noticed a bit of a draught around his nether regions.
Much of the design work seemingly consists of getting in the player's way, lest you realise that the psychological soap opera you're piecing together is, at root, a pretty humdrum tale of overweening pride and blundering villainy. There are the guards who insist that you play Dodge The Viewcone while you're searching gloomy, peeling interiors for critical documents. And there are the interfacial glitches, cutscene rants and narrative red herrings that strive to keep you guessing about the secrets at the game's heart, a heart of darkness that proves to be made of tin.
Get Even isn't an awful game - indeed, it suggests a team capable of making a great one. The title is pleasingly double-sided, for one thing. It evokes the kind of cheesy, on-rails revenge fable Midway might have shipped in the mid-noughties, and there's certainly a B-movie pong to the "cornergun", a weapon you acquire early on that folds 90 degrees to let you snipe from safety. But as the boxart's inverted lettering implies, the title also refers to the act of evening out discrepancies between accounts, reconciling versions of reality - a process elegantly summarised by one, later puzzle, in which you must arrange a room's contents to mirror that of another room through the window.
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