The death of a fellow marine carries as much seriousness to characters as Kenny dying in South Park. Perhaps the horrors of war have become routine for them, but witnessing the extreme trauma of seeing their best friends imprisoned and murdered in front of their very eyes, in the most brutal way possible, doesn’t seem to warrant much a reaction. My only complaint about the story is that your fellow marines seem rather… unphased from their surroundings. The game’s visuals are metaphorically and literally dark, but the fuzzy glow of computer panels, and piercing rays of your flashlight penetrate any abyss which gives you just enough to read your surroundings. The lighting is superb and is the game’s strongest graphical asset, as reflections of bonesaws project onto the wall silhouetting the horror of the Strogg. My favourite level has you traverse the “waste” facility of a Strogg conversion factory, which is filled with excess human organs and fatty tissues spread across the floor, hills made of skulls, and zombie-like creatures who were unusable to the Strogg.
You’ll witness “Stroggification” whereby a human is violently mutilated on a conveyor belt and installed with cybernetic implants, during a particularly famous scene which I wouldn’t want to spoil.įurther to this, detached human torses adorn the walls of dark, polluted factories pumping gas across the processing facility. However, this is amplified 100x in Quake 4 and serves as the game’s core theme. This horror was present in Quake 2, during a level in which you witness first-hand your fellow marines get ground up into organs and fired through various machinery and tubes. The enemy Strogg are an alien race which capture and transform humans into grotesque pieces of machinery, harvesting their organs and body parts to power their complex industrial machinery. Quake 4 boasts a strong body horror theme and truly deserves its 18 rating. This dark, gory vision of the future would be too depressing to stomach if it wasn’t for the tight gunplay, beautiful graphics and gripping narrative which make it an absolute joy to play. Quake 4 features a horrifying vision of humanity under threat while engaged in a terrifying and brutal alien war.
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