Opinionated Slant

Let's do the time warp again!

Have you ever heard of this game?

Released in 2010, Singularity might have slipped beneath your radar, which is a darn shame, considering how much fun it is.

When I play games I'm usually looking for something, but I don't know exactly what it is until after I've had the experience. This game scratches a particular itch for me. What might that be, you ask?

A survival horror First Person Shooter.

I know it's not really marketed as such, but that's what it is. The game is creepy and slower paced, interspersed by frantic shooting segments and impressive boss battles. You can take your time and really enjoy looking around the game, finding all the hidden little secrets in the hard to reach nooks and crannies.

It's easy to look at Singularity as just another FPS, but if you really look closely, you'll see that the game developers put a lot of time and energy into the title and it's very polished. I appreciate quality work and I'm rather surprised Singularity didn't sell that well on release.

The shooting is competent, the level design very linear, the survival horror segments are creepy and atmospheric, the storytelling is an enjoyable mess, you have somewhat limited time manipulation abilities, and there's a giant singularity constantly blasting energy into the sky in the background you can gawk at whenever you're aboveground.

So, what exactly is going on here?

Well, the game stars an American soldier named Renko, unfortunately yet another silent protagonist cliché, but it could be worse. Usually when they hand out personalities to FPS main characters you get...heroic hero guy, uh...hm.... I'm wracking my brain for another one that comes up more than once. Usually it's just Mr. Silent or Heroic Hero Guy. Occasionally there's a deadpan snarker or depressed hero type, but I can count on one hand the number of times I've seen those, with the even rarer female FPS protagonist occasionally thrown in.

Yeah, you could maybe put a liiiitle more effort into this, game devs.

Just saying.

Though I understand why they make the main character silent, Renko's words are actually liberally strewn throughout the game.

You see, you don't know it, but you're actually stuck in a time loop and you are literally following in your own future/past self's footsteps.

The game starts off with you and your team flying to a once soviet controlled island called Katorga 12. Once there, a giant blue wave of energy slams into your helicopter and it crashes.

You die, everyone else dies. Game over.

Wow, short game.

Kidding, kidding.

Of course you survive and the only other surviving member of your team is Renko's buddy James Devlin who, though originally in the same helicopter as you, somehow ends up way the hell somewhere else for no apparent reason.

Devlin still has a working radio and a willingness to talk, so as you explore the dilapidated old soviet dock and nearby buildings, you can hear his increasingly frantic radio transmissions and feel somewhat like an ass for never even attempting to respond to him.

Throughout the game you will also find another FPS constant that may be annoying to some. Yep, I'm talking about audio logs. And notes of course. Can't forget the notes liberally strewn everywhere.

What's particularly amusing about Singularity audio logs is that they're recorded on 1950's era equipment. Think 'giant self playing cassette tape' for those of you who even know what those are....

No, it doesn't make much sense for people to be lugging audio equipment around with them everywhere and recording their thoughts, (unless you're a journalist) especially in life or death situations and yes it makes even less sense for people fleeing for their lives to haul around suitcase sized recording equipment in order to put their final thoughts on record just so some nameless future person can find them.

But you know what?

I don't really care.

I like listening to audio logs. I really do. It's a great way to get a piece of the story of what happened to people who are no longer there and these audio logs are fairly well done, by and large. I'm pretty sure audio logs are here to stay for the foreseeable future.

You can blame the original System Shock for that, I think.

Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery and all that.

Anyway, you learn that the Katorga 12 facility was abandoned after some kind of unknown disaster and you can even spend time in the original visitor's center, which despite being exposed to the elements, still has working projectors, recorded welcome messages you can play over the loudspeaker, and of course, working phones.

Yep, you heard me.

This abandoned island has working land lines.

You see, for those of you who don't know, we once had these old things called 'phones'. No, no, not portable smartphones. All these things did was make calls, no calculators or video equipment or texting. Just voice calls. And these phones all have dial tones. You can't actually call anyone, oh no. Why on earth would Renko, having just survived a helicopter crash, think to call anyone on the working phones for help?

I mean, I suppose he's special forces and his mission is a secret and bla bla bla. Still seems strange to me.

Anyway, it's not long before timey wimey wibly wobbly stuff happens to you and you're thrust back into the past in the middle of a burning building courtesy of another blue wave of time energy.

Look! Here's some dude about to fall to his death in the middle of flame central! We'd better rescue him. It's not like anything bad will happen because of this.

Nope.

Everything.

Is.

Just.

Fine.

After rescuing the man, a one Nikolai Demichev, you are immediately transported back to the present. Er, well, 2010 present. Whatever.

There are some disturbing discrepancies and immediate changes that not only you notice, but Devlin notices as well.

Nothing to see here folks, move along.

Thus begins one of the most reckless time travel stories I've ever experienced.

Seriously, Renko is the worst.

Turns out, that guy you rescued? One of the top scientists at Katorga 12. Also, he now rules the world under the banner of the U.S.S.R.

How exactly did he accomplish this?

Well, you see there's this bullshit element called E-99. It is powered by macguffin and nonsense, and allows you to manipulate time itself. It also causes incredibly dangerous mutations in humans and plant life and now the island is overrun by monsters.

Whoo!

We're off to a good start here. What else can we screw up?

Anyway, using the power of bullshit-er, E-99, Demichev was able to develop incredibly powerful weapons that he used to subjugate the globe in the fifty years since you irresponsibly interfered in the past, you monster, you.

How dare you rescue people from burning buildings.

After this revelation, you are recruited by the resistance, called MIR-12. You manage to locate what I can only call the most appropriately named invention ever, the Time Manipulation Device, which...uh, manipulates time.

And works as a cheap version of Half Life 2's gravity gun because...well a lot of FPS titles were doing it around that time.

That whole imitation/flattery thing, remember?

The TMD is one of the most entertaining parts of Singularity. You can age enemy soldiers into dust with a wave of your hand, or create a stasis bubble anywhere you like that slows down anything inside, allowing you to stasis a group of enemies and carefully shoot all of them, which will immediately occur right after the bubble collapses. You can also blast everyone away from you with a pulse of energy and eventually even mutate enemy soldiers into the strange monsters all over the island for some amusing monster vs enemy soldier battles.

Also you can repair stairs.

Which you will do.

A LOT.

It's very cool to be able to age stuff into uselessness or de-age broken things into working again, but man...I did not expect quite this much stair repair when you handed me a Time Manipulation Device. It's like they said, 'hey, here's your TMD, now the island has been abandoned for fifty years and you need to get everything working again, so move.'

There's bridge repair, train repair, plant control, and minor physics puzzles where you age something into weighing less on a counterweight platform, which makes yours go down, and then you fix it causing it to weigh more and your platform goes up.

Geeze. All kinds of laws of physics being broken here, got it.

So, MIR 12 sends their prettiest agent lady to recruit you over to their side and rescue you from Demichev. Kathryn directs you to the TMD and then gives you your next objective.

It's time to return to the past and stop Demichev from murdering another top scientist on the island, a one Viktor Barisov.

Turns out, Barisov is the one who invented the TMD. He hid it from Demichev when he found out that the latter was conducting E-99 experiments on humans.

You hop through a wormhole into the past, murder your way through several squads of Russian soldiers, and shoot Demichev right before he kills Barisov.

Whoot! New timeline!

Only Demichev's not dead, the U.S.S.R. still rules the world, and Barisov spent the last fifty years hiding on Katorga 12, developing upgrades for his TMD, which he has thoughtfully scattered at random throughout the island for you to find.

How very kind of you, doc. Maybe put them all in one place, next time?

Mistakenly believing that the altered timeline will somehow be fixed by destroying Demichev's singularity reactor, Barisov directs you to find an E-99 bomb and you spend the remainder of the game following his directions. Eventually, you blow it sky high in the past and find out that you were the one that caused the horrible devastation of the island.

Yeah, like I said.

The worst.

Honestly, though I enjoyed the hell out of the story, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense.

Renko is terrible. I mean seriously, seriously terrible. He tromps around in the past killing large numbers of people of unknown influence with unknown repercussions. The Butterfly Effect? Screw that noise. Fearing to change the timeline is for wusses.

I don't even know how he manages to get himself caught in a time loop.

Remember what I said about footsteps? You can use an ability called chrono ping, and reveal footsteps showing you exactly where to go. While a nifty navigation tool, you can also find strange messages on the wall with cryptic, less than helpful, and sometimes downright stupid warnings.

At the end of the game it's revealed that these are from your future/past self who has done all this so many times before that it's likely driven him batshit insane.

Don't trust Barisov.

Don't rescue Demichev.

Don't trust Kathryn.

MIR 12 has it wrong.

Don't trust me.

Great. That's incredibly helpful future/past self.

Soooo helpful.

Annoyingly, after you play through the game once and are on your second playthrough, you realize just how futile these warnings are, because you are railroaded to the only endings available and can change nothing, even if you already know what's going to happen.

Huh. I'm beginning to realize why future Renko lost it.

In your attempts to fix the timeline you only end up making things worse and I think the 'real' ending to the game is supposed to set things up for a sequel, which was never made.

I honestly wish there was a new game plus mode with a different ending available where you just refuse to save Demichev in the beginning of the game. When I replayed it, I sat around twiddling my thumbs waiting for him to fall to his death for about ten minutes. Though precariously clinging to the edge of a collapsing wooden floor while flames rage all around and below him...he never drops and he never stops calling for help.

He has some serious stamina, that guy.

You kind of dropped the ball here, game devs. Could've been a great secret ending. But I know, I know, gotta set things up for a sequel.

Singularity is a fun, relatively short little game with graphics that still look pretty darn good even by today's standards.

I definitely recommend it.