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Hooray for indie revivalism! Boo to the 600-man triple-A sweatshops! But hold on - maybe there’s something to be said for mass market gloss. If any game were going to make the case for buffing a design to a bland, focus-tested finish, it would be its exact counter-example: the indie voxel shooter Cell: Emergence, which stages its visually incoherent action on a bewildering biological metaphor and then outfits it with inarticulate controls.
You can see what they were trying to do - a 3D Missile Command mash-up, in which you spin your ‘ship’ around a volume, zapping cancer-like voxel tumours before they can consume the space. Growths shoot voxel tendrils which then colonise the healthy membranes they hit. Zapping the purple cancer clumps causes a wave of destruction to ripple out from the pin-prick of your laser and through their structure - although rarely eradicating them completely.
These cellular propagation simulations are admirable, but your interaction with them isn’t deep or dramatic. Comparable shooters feature similar panicky population-control tactics but elevate them from chaos with a delight in movement and evasion. In Cell, meanwhile, a dominant method is to scrub your mouse back and forth across the desk, holding down the fire button, just to fill the space with lasers. Lots of numbers tick up and down on the HUD, though it’s not clear what they represent, and eventually the level ends, for reasons that aren’t always apparent.
In fact, Cell makes few concessions to comprehension. How’s your medical jargon? Do you know what a T-cell is? What does KAMU stand for? We’re happy to look it up, but what’s the harm in just telling us? The game’s visual design is similarly abstruse, with its vast, voluminous mess of different coloured semi-translucent cubes, each representing something vital. Simply fixing your ship’s position in the 3D space is tricky enough, and the controls which flip you between different orthogonal planes are not apt to the task of rapid targeting.
The prinipal designer here is Sheldon Pacotti, a writer behind the first two Deus Ex games, founder of New Life Interactive, and teacher of game writing at the University of Texas. Cell creates an austere cerebral atmosphere and comes appended with a sombre story, told through a crudely drawn comic. Concerning the attempts to resuscitate a dying child, snatched from the slums by a medical team with mysterious intent, it’s neither expansive enough to engage emotionally nor so minimal that it barely intrudes. Disconcertingly, you can hear the child weeping and wailing as you laser away at bits of its innards.
Let us also briefly acknowledge the bad menu design (two options, one white, one red - which is selected?), and the fact that when you try to exit, it forces you to watch an animation before quitting to desktop - two small indicators of the lack of empathy that riddles Cell’s design. It makes you wonder which is the greater evil: the personality bleach of mass-market appeasement, or impenetrable indie idiosyncrasy. [4]