Foul Play: All the Game’s a Stage

Baron Dashforth is a retired Victorian daemon hunter, looking back at an illustrious career spent vanquishing unearthly creatures. But instead of documenting this very unusual life in the pages of a dusty tome, he stages a vibrant production at a West End threatre. The result is Foul Play, a frenetic side-scrolling brawler masquerading as a theatrical autobiography, of sorts, with Dashforth taking on the lead role, naturally.

And what a career it has been. Dashforth has travelled the world, seen things few men have seen, and consequently the ambition of the production at times exceeds the resources to hand. Although no expense has been spared, there’s something purposefully ramshackle about the way Foul Play stages its action. The game has bright, cartoon visuals but since the levels – no matter how exotic or fantastical – take place on the same stage, there’s a lovely flimsiness to it all.

Take the bad guys, for instance. They’re not really bad guys at all; they’re put-upon extras and jobbing actors forced to dress up as flea-bitten werewolves and swashbuckling squid-men and take a beating. Part of the humour comes from espying their bushy ‘taches poking out from under their masks. It’s more than a little humiliating for such aspiring thesps. There’s warped background logic that’s quite endearing.

More visual humour is found in the visible stagecraft employed to bring Dashforth’s eventful past to life (think Méliès meets Munchausen). Huge creatures are fashioned from taut fabric and painted wood, and brought to rickety life using elaborately-rigged pulley systems.

Fittingly, Foul Play is about performing. You are rewarded not for the brutality of your punches but their theatricality. It’s all about entertaining the audience, who take up the lower fifth of the screen. Depending on how stylishly you’re playing the game, the bourgeois crowd will either whoop with joy or slowly drift into a catatonic stupor. When we saw the game, the audience was still be finalised, but there was talk of them showing their enthusiasm through a variety of wild animations, including ladies of leisure crowd surfing in the stalls.

But the audience is more than just a cute animation. Getting the audience right will be crucial to the success of Foul Play. Too loud, too intrusive, it could prove to be a distraction, but pitched perfectly it’s a really smart way of providing the player with onscreen feedback that also fits with the game’s unique setting.

Foul Play is, at its heart, about beating people up in fun and comical ways. And like the best examples of the genre, Foul Play supports co-op. Dashforth is joined by his friend and loyal companion Scampwick, a cheeky street urchin. Players will be able to link up and launch special team attacks, hurling enemies across the screen for the other player to despatch.

As a genre, the side-scrolling brawler has always flirted with repetition. To succeed, it must provide interesting settings and satisfying enemies, in addition to solid gameplay. Foul Play promises a range of interesting locations and it revels in the genre fiction that made the late-nineteenth century such a vibrant period in popular literature. There’s a Gothic sensibility to some levels, played out in the moonlight, with vampires and werewolves lurking in the dark. Other scenes draw on the colonial adventures of H. Rider Haggard and Rudyard Kipling, with blistering deserts, unravelling mummies, and tales of derring-do. And the influence of Jules Verne and H.G. Wells is also discernible in its aquatic beasties and futuristic contraptions held together by sturdy iron bolts.

It’s monsters and magic and everything Dashforth was trained for. Admittedly, without going hands-on, much of Foul Play’s eccentric charm stems from the way in which the game is staged; the painted pyramids which rise up in the background, telling you that you’re now in Egypt. Or it’s that beefy bloke with a mardy face forced to dress up as a reluctant lobster man. Hopefully, the gameplay will be surprisingly deep – takedowns, throws and reversals are all promised – and much more than just button bludgeoning.

Foul Play is Mediatonic’s first foray into the realm of Xbox LIVE Arcade, but it already displays the humour that has defined them as a developer of mobile games. (If you haven’t already, download Inappropriate Llama Disaster. Do it now.) But advanced previews suggest that Foul Play is endearingly barmy; so much so, we’re looking forward to opening night.

Source : feeds.ign.com