(This review is based upon the Escape from Butcher Bay remake included in the Assault on Dark Athena game.)

Studying literature is a secret passion of mine. And something you find when studying literature is that insights gleaned from one work may find illumination in another, quite disparate piece. The same is true for studying video games. Playing through Super Metroid in February made me think a lot about coherency in gameplay, particularly the role it plays in making a game a classic. The key to a classic, from this perspective, lies in crafting a singular vision that is not compromised by a mixed message. A classic knows what it wants to be, and is simply that. Escape from Butcher Bay, on the other hand, is not certain what it wants to be, and this lack of confidence proves to be its downfall. What could have been a classic becomes a period piece, a game we will look at one day and say, “Wow, look what it did!” - but not play.

Butcher Bay was billed as a first-person shooter set in The Chronicles of Riddick world, and the remake of the 2004 game does not muck with the formula. To my pleasant surprise, however, the game does not begin as expected. In fact, you would be forgiven for billing the game as a character-driven, first-person adventure game ten minutes in, and not a shooter. This isn't a problem, though. In fact, the opening sequences of the game promise something altogether special.

Most of this is based on the characters. Rarely do you encounter games like this with characters so memorable, and in the first ten minutes of the game, you meet no less than a dozen personalities. There is Charlie Green, an appropriately named man who spends the bulk of his days gargling in the fetal position on the floor. Then there is Jimbo, a British-accented con-man who attempts to pawn off exercise equipment on Girish, a hefty inmate who does crunches in his cell while talking to Waman. Waman, you see, is listening to Girish explain a plan to escape, and is increasingly incredulous about it. He also hates Molina, though never explains why. Of course, one must mention Rust, the prison's top dog, and Abbott's bitch. Abbott is the guard captain. Bulder is just a guard. Bulder owes Haley a favor. Haley hates Rust. There is an opportunity here to make Haley owe you.

So unfolds the first adventure game-type puzzle of Butcher Bay. It isn't terribly difficult; you can probably figure it out already just from my character sketches. Nor is solving the “prison yard” non-linear. But then, a good book delivers neither non-linearity nor complex puzzle solving. Generally, it delivers good characters, and that is what Butcher Bay has. By extension, when you are interacting with characters in Butcher Bay, you are having a great time. You are playing a classic.

Then comes the tricky part, because the game has the word “escape” in the title. So at some point, developer Starbreeze Studios and, admittedly, you the player, begin to feel the need to get on with the escaping. The problem is, the closer you get to escaping, the more weapons you find. The more weapons you find, the more the game begins to feel like a shooter. And Butcher Bay is a bad shooter.

Three things make for a good shooter: interesting enemies, interesting weaponry, and interesting level design. Butcher Bay has two enemies: monsters who are not scary and explode into ambiguous gibs after one shot, and guards whose unerring accuracy has you watching your health drain faster than an SUV gas meter on a highway. There are also two weapons: a shotgun and an assault rifle, which are shooter mainstays and decent weapons when done right. They are not done right. The rifle is terribly inaccurate, and the shotgun does not offer the visceral sense of destruction that it should. As for the level design: it is schizophrenic at best, providing either no cover at all or just enough cover that progress becomes trial and error. But the really horrible part about all of this shooting and escaping is that it takes you out of the adventuring bits. There is no character interaction for most of the game, which is a shame, considering it does character interaction so damn well.

What Butcher Bay loses in its gunplay, it makes up for in two ways. First, it provides an amazing sense of context for the inevitable violence. Characters like Abbott and Rust demand showdowns, not because they cackle and throw minions at you like any good shooter villain, but because of who they are as characters. Second, Butcher Bay appears to have invented first-person hand-to-hand fighting action, by which I mean action that works. Melee combat is a tense duel of block, parry, and counter-attack, and each blow is delivered with satisfaction. Camera work has been stepped up from the 2004 version, an odd example of a remake tweaking just the right thing to make the old game even better. There is something of a Mirror's Edge's sense of body at work here, and Starbreeze Studios clearly understood what that game did for the first-person action genre when they came back to their 2004 hit. So it is a shame that they let so much of the game deteriorate into stale gunplay.

But if Butcher Bay breaks the first rule of making a classic (“Do not mix your message.”), it also breaks another, a rule so obvious it has heretofore not been numbered: do not reset player progress multiple times. Obviously, taking a player's weapons has been done before, and it can work. The first time it happens in Butcher Bay, it works, both narratively and emotionally. The second time, though, when you are suddenly put back in jail, without your guns, to begin the escape work anew, it is awkward and depressing. Then the game does it to you again. And then again.

The third time the game threw me back in jail, I was more than a little miffed. The fourth time it happened, I resolved to write this bit of my essay. It's a travesty that is irritating both on a storytelling level and a gameplay one. By the fourth reset, I was beginning to feel like I would rather just stay in the damn prison and enjoy some prison yard adventuring.

It's not that Butcher Bay is a bad game. It isn't, and you should at least rent it. All the same, it is a crime for a game like this to undermine its own strengths. It's like watching your best friend flirt with a real winner only to go home with the cheap hooker that lives in the alley out back. You still love your friend, but if only he knew what he could have been worth.