Picking Up Steam: Zeno Clash (PC)

The strange and fantastical world of Zeno Clash immediately catches your eye when you start playing this first-person action game. It’s a world filled with human hybrids, unusual architecture, and abnormal wildlife, but while you take the time to marvel at the care and thought put into realizing the world of Zenozoik, it takes an interesting gamble by making almost no effort to explain it. After all, for the people living in this land, there’s nothing special about the towering trunked creatures, the people in town who almost look like living pots, or the odd mix of dead snake, human, and hookah found only in a single lounge area. Zeno Clash will tell you what is needed for its story, but by letting you drink in its imaginative and deliberately crafted world, the sights feel more special than if the game had to stop to introduce and explain how they all fit into this world.

 

Zenozoik is a land with a great deal going on in it, but Zeno Clash is primarily concerned with the Halstedom, a small city shaken up by the actions of the character you’ll be playing as. Ghat has learned a dark secret about the Halstedom, particularly the creature known as Father-Mother who raised him and those who now hunt him. After fighting Father-Mother to the death, Ghat flees from his angered brethren, looking to find somewhere to live out in the lands unknown to him and his companion Deadra. Deadra is a pretty crucial part of the game’s story-telling, giving us someone a bit less familiar with certain elements of the story so that Ghat can slowly recount what lead to his attack on Father-Mother. The adventure ends up a mix of playing through the pair traveling through the wilds as well as the flashbacks to what lead up to their exile, certain mysteries intentional while Deadra presses for details that are relevant to the personal plot.

Even if you’re not interested in the questions the environment raises, the plot of Zeno Clash also does a good job of piquing your interest. Outside of the Halstedom are people known as the Corwid of the Free, mentally disturbed individuals who have turned their entire being towards one singular pursuit unique to them. This can manifest as the harmless Oxameter who crosses your path as he is driven only to walk forward no matter what, but it can also lead to foes like Helim whose sole desire is to be invisible which he reasons can only be achieved by making the whole world blind by force. The dangerous secret of the Father-Mother looms over the story as its most important mystery if not ultimately its most tantalizing one, the player eventually encountering things out in the wilds that hint at greater forces at play in Zenozoik. Unfortunately, Zeno Clash also wraps up before it fully pursues these elements, delaying some of its bigger ideas for its sequel, this game primarily interested in resolving the conflict between Ghat and the Halstedom. It is a pretty effective sequel hook, it was difficult to resist the urge to dive into the sequel right after, the desire to better understand this world that frequently provides you intriguing new sights reeling you in deeper and deeper as you wish to become more familiar with its quirks and what it is willing to share about how it works.

 

Zeno Clash takes an interesting approach to how its combat unfolds as well, electing for its first-person action to primarily take the form of physical fighting. It doesn’t avoid a common video game issue with this approach, that being it can be hard to gauge how far a punch or kick will go, and there will be times you wonder why you missed with an attack partly because you can’t see past your own arm to confirm contact. Thankfully, the fighting system still works quite well despite this occasional hiccup, Ghat able to use an expanding range of physical strikes to take down foes who also grow more competent the deeper in you get. You can block, but only so much before it breaks, but you can dodge and then execute a counterattack, parry to leave a foe open, and you pack quite a few attack options that are easy to work into a fight. A simple punch combo is easy to throw out any time there’s a clear opening, but you can also smash through enemy guards with a powerful blow, and by varying your movement you can also go for heavy knock-down punches or a rapid elbow strike to disorient them. The fist-fighting feels meaty and works well, and even when enemies are grouped up you can usually avoid being ganged up on thanks to solid movement. Battle arenas even have little health pick-ups to scurry off to and grab if you’re in a bind, and a death only leads to the current fight restarting so you can get right back into trying again.

There will definitely be some tougher skirmishes, usually involving bigger foes who can hit hard or agile foes who require more work to pin down. Interestingly, the game labels its default fighting difficulty as Hard, but it doesn’t feel unmanageable because of the range of attack options and enemies aren’t given any unfair edges in combat. However, you’re not fighting with your fists alone. It’s not too rare for a fight to have objects or weapons to pick up and use to deal heavier damage or gain special advantages. This game’s take on firearms in particular are satisfying to wield due to their strength but they are also easy to lose. A single hit is often enough to make you or an enemy drop their guns, although calling some of the weapons guns may not be apt. One does look like a pair of pistols, quick to fire but not as strong for it, but it still lets you keep a ranged advantage for a while. A crossbow equivalent can only fire two bolts before reloading, but its strength when the shots land can often knock foes off their feet, giving you time to load up the bolts. An explosive launcher, a slow reloading rifle, and skulls that work like grenades also round things out, but notably, besides those grenades, all weapons have infinite ammo. While a club may crack and lose effectiveness, guns can be fired as long as you reload regularly, allowing them to aid in the more difficult moments but still be precious as you can not only have them knocked from your hands, but turned against you if you aren’t the first to pick it up off the ground.

 

You’ll probably always prefer using weapons if you can because of their strength and some dedicated sections require using a special tool, but the fist-fighting doesn’t lose its efficacy either thanks to solid counters and its general reliability. It’s a suitably challenging system for the game’s plot to be based around, and even whiffed punches don’t lead to major setbacks as long as you’re treating the fights seriously rather than flinging fists about hoping for a win. Zeno Clash does offer a purely combat focused mode through its challenges, the game throwing together rooms full of baddies that aim to draw out new dangers by mixing and matching foes not normally encountered together. This isn’t quite as captivating as exploring the world and encountering new situations, especially since it is contextualized as ascending a tower or descending down into a pit without much visual variety, and it definitely gets much tougher as it can throw boss encounters together or give multiple foes some high ground to make them particularly pesky. The main adventure might take around 6 hours to complete and does leave you on a cliffhanger towards those grander mysteries, but the challenges provide much more pure combat for those wishing to take their learned skills to something meatier and much tougher.

THE VERDICT: Zeno Clash’s captivating world pulls you in with its unspoken mysteries, the desire to see more of its unique imagination pairing well with a first-person fist fighting system that works surprisingly smoothly. Guns are appropriately integrated to be strong but not all-consuming in their value, and your own regular attacks remain flexible and powerful so being forced to use them isn’t a drag. The story does unfortunately leave you a little wanting, more because it whets your appetite for so much more, but fighting through the fascinating world of Zenozoik is an unforgettable excursion.

 

And so, I give Zeno Clash for PC…

A GOOD rating. Zeno Clash feels foreign, exotic, but consistent. When you see something abnormal, it feels like it was duly considered for its inclusion, not as some big pivotal piece of understanding its world, but as a small corner of a grander setting. World-building without explanation can risk the player feeling lost, but Ghat’s personal tale of trying to come to terms with what he learned about Father-Mother and how his actions have shaken up the Halstedom condenses the necessary information to something manageable while you’re free to wonder about the incidental and unexplained elements of the setting. It’s that smart touch of knowing where to explain things and where to let them stand that makes progress interesting on its own, but the fighting system at the game’s heart is surprisingly smooth despite it hitting on the occasional first-person hit confirmation issues. Combat isn’t so difficult you need to land every single punch, but it also has enough depth for encounters to evolve into something a bit more robust. The weapons definitely add an appreciated extra layer that likely alleviates some potential strain the fist-fighting would have hit if it was the only system in place, the player able to break from fighting up close and try to make their firearms work for the fight as long as possible. A particular portion of the game swapping to focusing purely on a single weapon and its own unique features also injects some of that appreciated variety, Zeno Clash not a long journey but one that keeps trying to shake up its action outside of the challenge tower and pit where standard fighting is practically the point.

 

Zeno Clash is pretty much exactly the kind of game I hoped to find from the Picking Up Steam series. On December 12, 2013 I bought it as part of a cheap bundle, and besides always appearing near the bottom of my Steam library, I didn’t think much about it. I had no idea what a fascinating world was waiting for me, the depths of my own collection no doubt containing a great deal of unique and imaginative games like Zeno Clash so long as I take the time to explore them. Already I’m intrigued to try more of ACE Team’s output due to the thought and creativity they put into realizing the world of Zenozoik. If it has also found its way into your library, Zeno Clash is a game too intriguing to be left ignored.