When I finished Matt Hazard: Blood, Bath, and Beyond to sit down and write this, I was the 12th ranked Matt Hazard: Blood, Bath, and Beyond player in the world. This does not bode well for Matt Hazard: Blood, Bath, and Beyond. The game begins with a joke about how you can find the first Matt Hazard game in a bargain bin near you. I remember, around a month after that game came out, printing a coupon to purchase it at Best Buy for under ten dollars. The coupon remained on my desk for a week before I threw it away.
Blood, Bath, and Beyond has been out for a few weeks now, and from the leaderboards it looks like less than four hundred people have beaten it. When I was sent a review code for the game, it had already been redeemed by someone else. I’ve talked with another game critic who had the same experience. The PR person distributing these codes is a very nice person. When she sent it, she enthusiastically told me to be sure I checked out that I can steal a partner’s life in co-op and that there is a difficulty setting called “Fuck This Shit.” These are decidedly inconsequential features (what game of its type doesn't let you steal a partner’s life?). Matt Hazard: Blood, Bath, and Beyond is a game that knows it's got two feet planted firmly in the grave, shouting this fact from its narrative, to its design, to its publicity.
The only thing strange about all of this is that, for the two hours that it lasts, Matt Hazard: Blood, Bath, and Beyond is a solid run-and-gun shooter. Two summers ago, the XBLA catalogue hadn’t really picked up steam yet. One of the best games available on the service at the time was a crappy port of Super Contra. I played it every day for around a month, even though the amount of fun you’ll have on any given playthrough is determined within the first few seconds: did you grab the scatter shot, or did you miss it? Blood, Bath, and Beyond isn’t nearly as difficult as Super Contra, and it doesn’t have the benefit of nostalgia going for it. But if you’re a fan of Super C with a hankering for the old bird, who remembers that your twitch isn’t quite as honed as it used to be, Blood, Bath, and Beyond might just be the perfect thing to scratch the itch.
The premise of Blood, Bath, and Beyond is that Hazard’s arch-nemesis has gone back in time and kidnapped the 2D-pixelated version of the hero. If Hazard doesn’t stop him in time, his present self will be erased. For whatever reason, the villain has retreated into a series of 2D mockups of popular historical and contemporary games. The mechanics are standard: run, jump, and shoot. One addition to the formula, ripped from last year’s Shadow Complex, is the ability to fire into the third spatial dimension by holding down the left trigger. Most enemies fire flashing, slow-moving bullets at the player, much like in Super Contra. If Hazard takes three or four of these (read: you’re horrible at jumping and ducking), he’s down for the count.
Back when 2D was king, and before JRPGs stormed onto the scene to pollute play with storytelling, level design made or broke a game. From this perspective, there’s no way to fault Blood, Bath, and Beyond. Enemies enter from six directions, often taking up defensive positions behind crates or in the third dimension. Some set pieces require the player to jump back and forth between platforms or environmental hazards while shooting into the background. The variety of villains, which fall into your standard light/heavy/mechanical/boss dichotomy, is impressive. With each new level, there’s a completely new cast of soldiers to gun down. Instead of letting the player simply run through any given encounter, most require the area to be cleared before allowing the player to pass; in this way it’s more like a TMNT brawler than any other type of side-scroller.
On your first run through the game, you will die a lot. That’s okay though, because each level contains a number of hidden Matt Hazard game cartridges that grant extra lives and continues. Enemies drop plenty of power-ups including health, extra grenades (which can be thrown into the background), and a variety of limited-ammo weapons: machine guns, shotguns, rocket launchers, ice rays, plasma rifles, and lasers. When Hazard kills enemies in quick succession without taking damage, a score multiplier begins to accrue. Downing foes also fills up a Hazard meter, which, when full, grants temporary access to a “Hazard Time” mode that makes you invincible and converts any weapon fire into Super Contra’s all-powerful scatter shot.
Most of your deaths, until you learn the patterns, will come from environmental hazards and bosses. I’ve read about players getting stuck in infinite respawn loops beneath traps, but this didn’t happen to me in any of my three playthroughs. Many bosses can one-shot you on medium difficulty, but players will learn how they telegraph their more powerful attacks after suffering one or two embarrassing casualties. The design of these encounters is a strong point of the game, my favorite being a version of the mecha-dragon from Mega Man 2, but even on the easiest difficulty there are two or three bosses with needlessly high amounts of health. If you run out of continues, you’ve got to restart the current level with the amount of lives and continues you came in with. Sometimes this means you’ve screwed yourself, but most levels can be easily beaten without any deaths once you know where the biggest threats come from.
From a design standpoint, I’m sure all of this sounds fairly standard. And that’s because it is. Hazard’s selling point isn’t that it’s a solid run-and-gunner. The entire idea behind the IP is that it’s a joke, or an homage, or... something. What titillates you while you play Blood, Bath, and Beyond is the mise-en-scene, a visual pastiche of the games that inspired each level. I’ve got my own opinion about how intertextuality should work in games: namely, you should quote mechanics instead of visuals and narratives. While the game does contain mechanical adaptations of Elevator Action and Lunar Lander, most of the intertext is superficial. A cruise-themed level features heavy enemies that look vaguely like Bioshock’s Big Daddies, the background peppered with those portholes used by Little Sisters. One stage sports Shinobi-style ninjas and a translucent foreground reminiscent of Okami.
Pastiche has a valid aesthetic grounding. Theodor Adorno argues that a work of art must foreground the conditions of its creation. If past works inspired you creatively, then you should find some way to work their ghosts into your own artifact. In film, the best uses of pastiche come from the French New Wave: in Godard’s Breathless, Belmondo stops in front of a poster of Humphrey Bogart to run a thumb over his lips. It's a famous scene that doesn't even utilize the film's greatest cinematic innovation, the expressive use of discontinuity editing. The danger of pastiche is that, if there’s nothing essentially unique to your work, it will overpower your voice. So long as the player of Matt Hazard: Blood, Bath, and Beyond keeps running and gunning without pause, there’s a chance that she’ll be able to remain present within the game. But if she stops for one split-second to admire a background inspired by Mirror’s Edge or Team Fortress 2, Hazard drowns in memories of the far better games from which it pulls.
Some games never make it to release day. The history of videogame development is littered with games too trite, broken, or mis-managed to ever go gold. A hardworking group of people, their heads filled with very decent ideas, cared enough about Matt Hazard to bring this game to fruition. But Matt Hazard knows, as he regresses to a 2D form in a false effort to save himself from being erased, that he won’t be returning from this journey. When he gibes enemies about their poor AI and ragdoll physics, he recognizes the dissolution of his own franchise going on all around him. And as the credits roll, Hazard performs the ultimate act of self-referential nihilism. The player has beaten the game, but the hero has been hoisted by his own petard. It’s a petty, hackneyed way to go. If only more of us were around to see him off.
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Playthrough: Completed twice on normal, once on easy, for a total of 5 hours of play.
Disclosure: Download code provided for review by D3Publisher.
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