It's new to me: Policenauts
Hideo Kojima's other detective adventure game has its faults, but it's still worth your time.
This column is “It’s new to me,” in which I’ll play a game I’ve never played before — of which there are still many despite my habits — and then write up my thoughts on the title, hopefully while doing existing fans justice. Previous entries in this series can be found through this link.
About a month ago, I wrote about my time with Hideo Kojima’s and Konami’s Snatcher, a cyberpunk graphic adventure that took plenty of its influence from movies like Blade Runner and Terminator. This time around, let’s take a look at Policenauts, which yes, is a portmanteau of “police” and “astronauts,” even though by the time you’re in control of the game the protagonist is neither of those things any longer.
Policenauts, like Snatcher before it, pulls heavily from Kojima’s love for cinema. Rather than cyberpunk and dystopia, though, the focus this time is on the buddy cop action movie. Try to picture Lethal Weapon, dead wife and all, but in space and with more than a hint of sci-fi-based philosophy mixed in. Also, Riggs now loves to sexually harass every woman he meets. We’ll pick up on that later.
Policenauts’ protagonist, Jonathan Ingram, is damn good as a private investigator, even though he’s a fish out of water. Or out of time, really: Ingram was one of the Policenauts meant to bring order to Earth’s colonization of space, but an accident out there caused him to go into cold sleep for 25 years before he was finally rescued and brought back to Earth. Everyone in his life moved on without him — his ex-wife was without him for 25 years and moved on, for instance, even though for Ingram it mostly felt like he just slept away an afternoon — and the world changed significantly in those 25 years, too. Meaning you are often learning about the state of space colonization at the same time Ingram does. It’s not only great for a story setup, but in terms of gameplay, it gives you even more reason to want to investigate the world of Policenauts and the space colony of Beyond, since both you and the character you control need to learn what’s what in order to progress.
Visually, Policenauts is a step up from Snatcher: Snatcher originally released in 1988 and didn’t get a localized release until 1994 for the Sega CD, so even with the addition of voice acting and such, it still looked older than the time period it released in. Policenauts, though, is a game from 1994 that got a Sega Saturn console release in 1996, so it not only looks of the time, but is a major jump from what Snatcher was doing, animation-wise. Not every scene looks like this, by any means, but there are moments in Policenauts that look a lot like you’re watching an older anime, not just stylistically, but because it looks like one in how the characters are animated. Those moments are rare, but at least the more animated cutscenes resemble, in art style, the more text-based cutscenes, so everything is of a piece even if the more anime-esque segments are rarer.
Policenauts, by the way, was never localized for North America like the commercial failure Snatcher. Probably, well, because of that very thing. Fan translations do exist, however, so if you want to patch that in and emulate the game, or get it working on a modded Saturn, by all means. While the fan localizers are to be applauded for their considerable efforts, some of the kind of content that is often removed in remasters and worldwide localizations of visual novels and graphic adventures is still in there, and by “some of the kind of content,” I mean the weird horny stuff.
It’s not like, meant to be sexy horny or stand-in-for-porn horny, which is what the visual novel genre, especially at the time, was often attempting. It’s more like Kojima’s worst 12-year-old-loving-and-laughing-at-boobs weird horny stuff in full force. Playing around with breast physics in a graphic adventure, having Ingram go from serious detective to giggling, creepy hornball whenever someone so much as implies that there is a boob around, having him openly ogling his partner’s college-age daughter with both the daughter and his partner there to watch and listen to it, and so on. It’s a little much, and while the characters along for the ride with Ingram often deride him for it in the moment, no one really discourages the behavior or changes their perception of Ingram as A Good, Kind Guy after witnessing or experiencing his creepdom.
Like with Snatcher, you can skip the worst parts of it: no one is making you harass the flight attendant with comments about her chest and the effects of anti-gravity on it, for instance, or to continue to interact with her until Ingram decides it’s time he investigates those very effects with a poke of his finger. It’s harder to avoid in general than in Snatcher, though, thanks to Ingram’s far-too-often devolution into a creep in unavoidable dialogue, and also the scene where you try to swat a robotic mosquito that, of course, lands right on the chest of a woman who has also spent the last few minutes of the game doing her impression of that one scene from Basic Instinct. My criticisms of all of this aren’t prude-ish, by any means. Hell, one of my problems with Quiet in Metal Gear Solid V was more that Kojima couldn’t just admit he wanted to make a woman character be his definition of sexy, like he’s so easily able to admit when it comes to guns or the men and their asses in his games. No, the issue here is that the more harassment-focused stuff, of course, sucks simply for existing, especially since it’s not framed as harassment, but the problem otherwise is that none of it fits the tone of the story or of the game, and in a way that detracts from both.
It makes little sense that Ingram is so beloved by the characters who aren’t actively working against him, given how much of a creep he is to them, and that it all just kind of… happens? In the midst of a game that is exploring serious themes about the dangers of humanity in space at a level of realism and cynicism usually only found in works like The Expanse or novels by Alastair Reynolds just makes it all the more annoying. One example in particular, involving news correspondent and central character, Karen, is completely unearned, even if you weren’t a creep to her earlier on. It feels incredible to say that Kojima hadn’t yet learned to be subtle about his worst habits, given how he is like the living embodiment of subtext being for cowards, but it’s true.
With all of that being said, it is worth powering through Ingram’s worst traits — again, you can avoid most of the very worst harassment Kojima has enabled you to commit, and without having to think too hard about how to avoid it — because the story itself, and its themes, are worthwhile. You can really see how Kojima moved on from the kinds of games whose stories were often detailed in their instruction manuals back in the NES/MSX era into the sprawling thematic titans of the Metal Gear Solid era by playing Policenauts. Space is clearly terrifying to Kojima, and that fact is present at every twist and turn in the story of Policenauts. The toll of space living on humans’ bodies is a major plot point, detailed in a way that suggests Kojima doesn’t believe people are meant to be there. It is a great unknown that is meant to stay that way, lest you have total organ failure, or the world move on from the kind of Earth-based criminality that already exists to one that works in a much more space-specific way.
Kojima had something to say with Policenauts, and, despite his best efforts to muddle that message with unnecessary bullshit and ill-fitting tone, he says it, and successfully. If he was trying to make a game that gave the “space is more terrifying than the ocean” folks a few more bullets in their chamber, well, mission accomplished. If he was simply trying to say something about humanity and the depths they’ll sink to even as they rise so high up they leave the Earth behind, well, he succeeded there, too.
It helps, too, that the gameplay is less tedious than that of Snatcher, which suffered a bit more from being a product of its era: far more guesswork, for instance, in regards to where to go next, what to investigate next, and so on, with a whole lot of repeat instances of dialogue and reading to go through as you figure out what you missed. Policenauts still has some of that going on, but nowhere near as much, and its annoyances in this regard have more to do with not being able to skip spoken dialogue after you’ve already finished reading the subtitles. It messes with the pacing a little, but you get used to the rhythm of it all, too, so it’s not a significant issue or anything like that. It just is a fact of the design worth mentioning.
The shooting sections have also improved a bit, since they aren’t built on directional quadrants selected by pressing the D-Pad a certain way, but are instead more what you’re used to in a shooter: aim the reticule to a place with the D-pad, and then fire at that place. Some of the shooting sections go on a little too long, but you basically have to try to die in these, unlike in Snatcher, where a few wrong guesses will see you having to retry. I was taken completely by surprise on the way one battle shook out and had to try again there, but otherwise, it’s just a little infusion of action in a game where you’re mostly investigating the results of action someone else experienced. Though, late-game, you spend much more time shooting than you do investigating: the first two acts make up a little more than half of the game, while the last five go by much faster, as the plot itself speeds up.
I’ve been a little hard on Policenauts here, but that’s in part because I know I would have enjoyed the game even more than I did if not for its inclusion of things it absolutely did not need. Despite its obvious issues, though, the game world is a fascinating one, and the story, while not quite as good as Snatcher’s, is still enjoyable. No one says you have to make your protagonist likable or a perfect human being or anything in order for a story to be effective or worthwhile, and Jonathan Ingram being a creep doesn’t change that Kojima’s fears about the future of humanity in space are the kinds of things that will rattle around in my head for ages just like his fear of nukes, so apparent in Metal Gear Solid, does. If you’re into graphic adventures, it’s worth tracking down the fan localization and playing. If you’re into Kojima’s work, and want to see an important piece of what helped make him into the developer you know him as from his other, later games, then same. If you want to be a creep, or always felt late-1980s Mel Gibson should have had blue hair, well, then I’ve got the game for you folks, too.
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