Books of Blood
For those of you not yet indoctrinated to the Jericho-celebrating hegemony, the game is basically a first-person shooter dressed up in the oozy entrails, steaming giblets of gore and gushing blood that has become the hallmark of Clive Barker. Famous for his numerous horror novels, Barker is probably most renowned as the creator of the Hellraiser series, in which demons from Hell visit people that "call" them by solving an ancient puzzle box (like a Rubic's Cube, only way more goth). Jericho follows a similar formula, except that this time you lead a kind of occult SWAT team into a city-sized dimensional rift between Hell and various periods and locations in Earth's history. Of course, as with most of Clive Barker's works, the end result is lots of hooks, flesh, blood, pointy teeth and viscera mixed together in as nauseating a way as possible... As far as setting a mood, it works fantastically.
Unfortunately, in the preview build that we received (about 75% complete, according to Codemasters) the most tantalizing elements remained obscured, because we could only access short snippets of gameplay from a variety of the game's levels. This meant that the story was largely unintelligible, but the taste that we got from these brief snatches was enough to whet our appetites. The few cut scenes that we got to see looked stunning and hinted at a story that we're dying to finish (or at least learn more about).
One of the more puzzling story elements that we encountered was with one of our squad mates named Cole. Cole wears a crazy kind of techno-body armor that enables her to shift out of phase with the usual flow of time and allows her to slow and stop time as long as she has enough juice. It's a cool power, but like all things, it has its drawbacks. See, Cole has a very fragile psyche (something which was intimated to us through a cut scene in which Cole has a nervous breakdown after being attacked by flying demon babies) and so loses touch with reality the longer she remains out of the timestream. Her suit will pull her out of it before she slips into total madness, but the backlash will fill the screen with static for a couple of seconds.
The Damnation Game
After just a few hours with Jericho, we're already loving the dynamic of switching between characters in order to access different special abilities. On the surface, this character-swapping feature could seem like a gimmick to spread out weapon variety, but in several of the missions we played, certain characters would break off from the main group, limiting your abilities and requiring you to approach puzzles from a different angle.
Overall, we're still super excited about Jericho's upcoming release... what we are not excited about is the fact that it is due to hit store shelves sometime this September (although a quick check of EB Games has it scheduled for mid-October), which puts it square in the Master Chief's Halo 3 blitzkrieg. While we'd hate to see Jericho delayed, it still might be best for everyone because at least that way maybe somebody besides us will pay attention to it.
