I've finished playing Betrayer, a title I wanted to look into for a fair few years. My thanks to GOG.com for salvaging it from falling into obscurity, even offering it as freeware - and I've been fairly impressed.
While I think the game has certain flaws or that its elements don't
always gel together in the most coherent, non-immersion-breaking manner,
it's still one of the more original first person games of the past
decade.
Pity that the former Monolith Productions devs who worked on it, as Blackpowder Games, have not worked on anything since and have probably disbanded as a dev team.
Betrayer definitely feels like an indie effort of just six to
seven people, because as great as I've found it, it's also a bit
underwhelming in some of its aspects and presentation. The game tries to
juggle several genres and it's mostly successful and nicely atmospheric
in those efforts, but it's also got some areas where they don't gel
together as well. Where the more naturalistic design of the game
mechanics clashes with a more explicitly game-y design. I'd say that
even though the exploration and adventure-game-like mechanics of the
game are crucial, helping you piece together the mystery/backstory of
the abandoned North American colony you've found yourself in, they
sometimes rub against the more mundane concerns of the health and combat
mechanics. Insofar as I found myself worrying a few times whether I've
still got enough health and ammo to fulfill this or that task in the
current location, whether I should turn back or not, and sometimes this
forced me to conduct conversations with certain NPCs in the wilderness
in a hurry, or pick up clues and notes I've found in a hurry, wary of
enemies. The game can be a little too successful about making the player
paranoid about enemies prowling in the wilderness.
Though the default colour tint of the game gives it the feel of a
black-and-white film or black-and-white old illustration, I personally
set it to depict the environment in natural colours. I felt that the
contrast between the sunny, daylight half of the setting and the
supernatural and horror elements already in that half made for an
interesting and even more striking contrast. Whenever the player enters
the "otherworld", as the secondary half of the setting, with more
explicit survival horror atmosphere, the contrast between the natural
colours and pleasant ambience of the wilderness seen until then was even
greater. So I've felt my tweaking of the settings (which is very easy
in-game, you can do it at any time) added to the experience, rather than
detracting from it.
The atmosphere in the game is one of its true strong suits, and is very
immersive for the most part. I did catch myself wondering several times
what waits ahead in the wilderness, and whether I'm ready for it, so I'd
say the devs managed to build up immersion and anticipation in a player
fairly successfully. And even though I've played plenty of survival
horror games where the psychological dread was handled masterfully, so
I'm not easily phased by spooky visuals and ambience in games, the
"otherworld" segments of the game were still nicely creepy, and the
enemies specific to that "dimension" were appropriately unpleasant.
Maybe not exactly terrifying, but still decently intimidating. I also
liked the fair bit of variety in the wilderness environments, and the
specific architecture of each settlement. I'd say Blackpowder Games
worked hard on creating nicely immersive environments, and it's part of
the reason the game holds up so well even a decade later.
Aside from the main menu theme and the credits theme, there's no music
whatsoever in the game. They bet everything on the sound immersion
through the ambience and sound effects of the surrounding world.
Admittedly, as a shipwrecked colonist exploring an abandoned Virginian
colony beset by a mysterious and gruesome set of tragedies, it wouldn't
make much sense if you heard epically overblown music all the time, or
spooky ambience all the time. The sense of loneliness and isolation is
all the greater when all you hear are sounds of nature, and
occassionally, the sound of your mysterious or creepy adversaries during
an encounter. So I didn't mind the lack of music. (Even so, in the
final few locations, I turned on Winamp, and played the arrangement of
D. MacLean's "The Gael" from The Last of the Mohicans on a loop,
at a very low volume. Didn't destroy the atmosphere and made things feel
a bit more adventurous as I neared the conclusion.)
There's also a complete lack of voice acting. Which isn't that
disappointing to me, as I've been used to older games (RPGs included)
not including much voice acting or not every line of dialogue being
voice-acted. So I simply try to imagine character voices and read the
lines in said imagined voices. The best film you'll ever see is the one
you invent in your own mind, and all that. All that said, as much as
it's clear to me the dev team didn't have the resources to hire voice
actors, I think some voice acting might have added to the experience.
Overall, though, the less-is-more approach does work in achieving
that details like this are left to the player's imagination, and can
vary in ways that pre-scripted and completely specific voice acting
could never achieve.
Another thing no doubt influenced by the small team working on the game
is the lack of any wildlife NPCs. I would have appreciated if there were
a few animal NPCs you could occassionally glimpse in the wilderness.
Nothing permitting you hunting them, or anything like that (food is not a
concern in the game at all, something I welcome, given its tight story
focus), but it could have added to the atmosphere in the wilderness if
you'd occassionally see a deer buck running away in the distance, or a
grouse or something flying out from the bushes, flapping to safety,
startling the player. I think they might have missed a trick in this
case. You do hear a lot of animal sounds, though, especially birds
chirping, and some wolves howling and such (the latter is also a warning
sound of sorts), so it's not just wind and vegetation ambience. If the
devs were making a point that the local environment feels lonely and
deserted, to the point that even animals are eeriely absent, then that's
an okay excuse. Still, I would've liked to see a bit of wildlife here
or there, just as set dressing, given that this is the wilderness of
eastern North America at the start of the 17th century.
The game is set some 420 years in the past, around 1604, in the absolute beginner years of English colonization of North America. (At that point, Virginia wasn't even a crown colony yet.) The technology, social attitudes and cultural conflicts reflect that timeframe. Besides the skeletons in the closet of the local colonists, and the slowly emerging conflict of some of them with the local natives, all crucial for how the story gradually unfolds, I really appreciated that the devs tried to make combat as authentic to the early 17th century as possible. You're not a professional soldier, you're not a killing machine, you're a shipwrecked settler who's all alone and scared in a sparsely populated land, in a now-abandoned, mysteriously depopulated colony. Even when you get your hands on some necessary weaponry, you need stealth, patience and skill to fight your adversaries.
You're a believably vulnerable
human being, going against distinctly stronger enemies and capable of
losing health fast if you're not careful, but that adds to the feel of
being on your lonesome and needing to focus on stealth, your wits, good
shooting and ambush skills, etc. For that reason of not being a soldier
or warrior, just an average Joe washed ashore in the early colonies, you
don't even get to use a sword or cutlass, you only have a hunting knife
for melee. You're very much an average Joe protagonist, well over your
head in a creepy mystery you wanted no part in.
Which brings me to the focus on ranged weaponry in the game's combat.
You can use archery weapons (three archetypes), firearms (two
archetypes) and throwing weapons (two archetypes, one of them
explosive). Betrayer is thus, at heart, something of a
historically-themed shooter. The rare breed of a shooter set in the
early modern era, making it more of a genre cousin to low-tech setting
stealth games or RPGs, with all of the game's weaponry being late
Elizabethan era and early Stuart era tech.
You start off with longbows,
you can later also acquire native shortbows or the colonists' crossbows,
and in terms of firearms, you can wield muskets and blackpowder
pistols. As for throwing weapons, you've got tomahawks for precision
damage and grenades (round-shaped bombs, ceramic or iron) for splash/area
damage against enemies. I've found the throwing weapons useful as a
backup weapon (similar to your knife melee attack) or a sort of
ace-up-the-sleeve if you need to thin down a small group of enemies.
Besides the five main archetypes of ranged weapons, you get them in
gradually improving variations (in terms of how worn or well-made they
are) and also some unique, one-of-a-kind variations, hidden in caches or
stashes by the European settlers and the natives. The game also contains certain types of amulets, referred to as charms, the wearing of which improves the player character's performance in a specific area, e.g. increasing accuracy of aiming or faster reloading (even of slowly reloading weapons). You're limited to wearing three charms at any given moment, similarly to the limit of three weapons ready for immediate use.
In terms of weapon
performance, longbows are great in terms of range and power, but
slightly slower to shoot, native shortbows are in turn the speediest
archery weapon, but are more effective at shorter-to-medium ranges.
Crossbows need to be spanned and reloaded (by hand) before each new
shot, but they're the most powerful archery weapon and very accurate and
powerful. Muskets are the slowest reloading weapons of all, as you have
to go through the entire procedure of filling them with gunpowder,
adding the bullet, patch/wadding, push it down with a ramrod, etc.,
after every single shot. They're fairly deadly if you hit a vulnerable
part of an enemy at up to medium distances. Pistols are very similar,
though probably slightly weaker in terms of power, but they are far
faster to reload. About the same amount of time as a crossbow. I'll confess, the
fairly quick reloading of the pistols somewhat surprised me. More on
that later.
In a previous paragraph, I brought up the fact that the player is
vulnerable and has to think about their combat tactics, rather than
going in guns blazing. This, despite the 17th century setting, makes the
game into almost something like a tactical shooter. You can't keep
pushing your luck with health, as your healing doses only last so much.
You also need to avoid wasting your ammo too much, because though you
can recover ammo after successful use (especially arrows and bolts stuck in enemies or into wood, and tomahawks), but
you can't carry that much ammo with you, even with upgraded ammo bags (quivers, musket ball satchels, tomahawk
holsters, etc.). You also need
to be fairly accurate with shooting to bring down your adversaries.
Though you're rarely fighting bigger groups of enemies in the game, the
fact that some of them are fairly powerful and you're fairly vulnerable
makes it advantageous to use stealth or just be cunning in the way you
fight enemies.
If I could compare Betrayer to another existing
game, an atmospheric shooter where you have gear-based progression, no
character stats or RPG levelling whatsoever, a tactical emphasis in
combat, and a focus on environmental exploration, I'd compare it to... GSC's famous STALKER series. Yes, really. Other than the different setting elements, in terms of design/gameplay philosophy, it's a STALKER-like game, just in 17th century North America, with a survival horror style mystery story. (And the STALKER games can get pretty creepy too, though in different ways.)
There's two or three points in the game's storyline when a larger group
of enemies ambushes you, and you're fighting in a last stand sort of
situation. I loved one of those fights, set at one of the larger
settlements. It wasn't easy to win, but it was almost like a shooter
puzzle game, so I'm giving it props for that. Also reminded me of
similar "hold out against the enemy" scenarios in a few better Western
genre games I've played over the years, Western-themed mods for Mount & Blade included. (Though Betrayer's
setting isn't a Western, it still has a similar "frontier" feel, so the
settlement ambushes by the enemy were a pretty cool challenge to face,
at least in my book.)
One great idea concerning the stealth mechanics in the game is that,
while in the real world, you can use the sound of the wind and the
swaying vegetation as cover for your sneaking around the wilderness. If
you decide to sprint loudly during a gust of wind, adversaries won't
hear you and you can sneak up really close to them. Other than that,
hiding in more shaded areas and behind bushes and trees covers the rest
of the sneaking, so nothing surprising there. Another neat idea for the
stealth gameplay is that if you manage to kill an adversary stealthily,
without them noticing or suspecting you beforehand, they'll drop a small
amount of loot, which they wouldn't usually drop if you got into a
straightforward fight with them. As some reviewers have noted, with a
bit of practice and some better equipment later on, you can fight most
adversaries head-on and don't need to rely purely on stealth, but the
stealthier approach to combat is more rewarding overall. Since the
environmental mechanics to the stealth parts of the gameplay allow you
to sprint between locations and speed up your travel somewhat, you don't
need to be sneaking all the time. Also, I've found the stealthier
approach a bit more crucial in the game's spooky "otherworld" dimension,
where it pays off even more that in the real world version of the
individual locations.
Another interesting idea is the ability of the player (acquired relatively early into the game, activated by a specific key press) to have a certain kind of audio, aural premonition of whether there are enemies nearby, or whether the player is going in the right direction, in search of an interesting clue or bit of evidence. Sometimes, this ability also works in the real world, especially within a newly visited location, but its most significant use occurs whenever the player enters the "otherworld" dimension of the relevant locations. When I say that this audio-based ability helps not only as an early warning, but also helps the player with finding clues related to the story, I also mean help with eventually locating NPC characters that you sometimes encounter in-game. I won't spoil more.
Some of my own criticisms related to the game design's handling of
mechanics in an attempted immersive environment is that a few feel a bit
too game-y. The most obvious example is the shop mechanic. It's just a
trading post chest, where a local travelling merchant drops off goods
you can pay for (leaving the money behind for the merchant, who picks it
up at a later point), but the issue is that it sticks out as a somewhat
artificial game feature in a setting that otherwise tries to be highly
immersive and justify the various abstract mechanics with reasonable
in-universe explanations. Even though the equipment shop also gets one
such explanation, it is a bit contrived that you can find it in each
location. I felt it became immersion-breaking when I found it in the
very last location of the game, which has a very different tone than all
the preceding locations, due to main storyline reasons. Even so, the
trading post chest was still there, and this time, without a note
scribbled by the merchant to justify the chest's presence in-universe,
LOL. It's not a huge dent on the immersion in the game, but it is one of
the weaker spots.
Another somewhat odd thing is that you can't seem to find a shovel until
one of the late locations, a shovel which you need to recover some of
the better-buried caches. What, they don't have shovels in any of the
settlements you've passed through, including the biggest town in the
game ?! Weird. It's another odd contrivance that hurts the overall
immersive impression. I also feel that, as nicely minimalist as the HUD
is, the graphic design for the compass at the top of the screen and your
ammo and health readouts, look a bit too boxy, too modern. I would've
preferred if they were textured and framed in a way that evokes the 17th
century. All the more when the in-game maps and the location loading
screens are designed in exactly that manner, to provide some historical
setting immersion to the player. Other than that, I feel most of the
basic game design does try its best to avoid contradicting the feel of
the setting and story.
You can also see that effort at avoiding contradictions by having the
character carry a waterskin (which can be upgraded over the course of
the game) containing drinking water. That's your only source of healing
in the game (rather than food or medicine). The only sources of drinking
water you can use are barrels of water at certain settlements,
occassionally also camps in the wilderness. The exact number and
placements of the barrels varies depending on the exact location/map
you're exploring. The barrels act as a safety net and you'll find
yourself naturally gravitating to the settlements and camps that have
them, in order to heal yourself when necessary, and replenish the water
supplies in your waterskin (a loose equivalent to carrying around a
medkit in other shooters).
Though the game's story is largelly linear, each of the locations in the
game after the tutorial location is in the vein of an open-world game.
You have locations of interest on your map, and if you find certain key
locations like camps and settlements, you can later click on them for
fast travel. Especially if you don't want to constantly backtrack within
a single location and want to speed things up a bit. (The only time you
can't use the map for fast travel is when enemies are nearby, both in
the real world or the "otherworld" dimension. Sneak away far enough or
defeat them and fast travel is enabled again.) The fast travel also
works between the major locations, after you've unlocked each as the
story progresses. You open the overall world map, choose one of the main
locations, then a specific camp or settlement within that location, and
off you go. One aspect of travel in the game I did find a bit annoying
at first, around mid-way through, was having to backtrack a few times to
major locations, for unlocking certain loot or completing certain
remaining quests.
However, in the final stretches of the game, when you
have only a handful of main story quests remaining, it becomes somewhat
less bothersome to backtrack through the world map and the location
maps. By that point, you've essentially uncovered the entire game, so it
feels rather breezy, rather than complete busywork. Still, by far one
of the biggest structural flaws of the game is that it is a wee bit
repetitive. They try to vary it up with the different aspects of the
story and your investigations of what happened in each location, but the
locations all follow a bit of a pattern, where you go recover clues
here and there, seek loot stashes/caches here and there, fight enemies
in the real world and the "otherworld", try to liberate certain
cursed/corrupted spots in the "otherworld" (which usually involves a
small boss battle with enemies), try to find and communicate with the
spirits of deceased settlers and natives, interrogate them about what
happened, try to resolve the case. Having a certain pattern to the gameplay is perfectly fine, but maybe a few things could still have been reworked slightly, to vary up the gameplay in every location.
Some of my relatively few criticisms related to the combat mechanics and combat-related gameplay pertain to enemy variety. The adversaries encountered in the real world, though clearly influenced by the fantastical (indicating unambiguously that something very wrong has happened in the local region), come in the form of European-themed adversaries, native-themed adversaries, and even wildlife-inspired monsters. Good variety, each enemy is artistically and mechanically distinct from each other, no quibbles here. However, once the player enters the "otherworld" dimension, the enemy variety takes a nosedive, with only two enemy types for nearly the entire game. This makes the combat in the "otherworld" dimension feel a bit same-y after a time, including during the mini boss battles (of a sort) that you have to perform at certain carved native columns or at treasure stashes (the in-universe reason for the fights being the lifting of a curse, the gameplay reason being an unlocking of pathways to a new location). The only time a third type of adversary appears in the "otherworld" is in the very final location of the game, and even that third enemy type is just a tougher variant of the already established second enemy type. Sure, it's not that long a game, so it doesn't need amazing enemy variety, but I think they could have added one more, distinctly different enemy type into the "otherworld" dimension, for a better balanced variety.
One other minor criticism I have of the combat mechanics are the
muskets. I actually really, really like they take the longest to reload,
the reloading increases the tension and necessity for a tactical
approach to combat, but... as soon as you get even the weakest of the
pistols, you find out pistols can be reloaded much faster. The player
reloading any of the pistols takes only about a third of the time needed
to reload any of the muskets. The pistols also do a similar amount of
damage as the muskets, maybe just slightly less. Even if you find or buy
the best muskets, already having a decent pistol in your inventory sort
of defeats the point of equipping a musket, as the game's pistols are
far easier to reload in a fight, especially the more fast-paced fights
in the "otherworld". So, if you decide to fight with a musket,
espeically later in the game, you're largelly doing it for the sake of
roleplaying a musket wielder, rather than for a tangible combat gameplay
benefit. It's a bit of a pity, because as I've mentioned earlier, the
weapon abilities are fairly well balanced in this game, and you'll find
different effective uses for different weapons, rather than just
sticking to one type of weapon the entire time. When it comes to muskets, probably the best solution is to seek out the strongest of the fast firearm reloading charms in the game and wear it while fighting with a musket. By doing this, you'll greatly speed up the reloading of your musket and the effectiveness of its use against fast and particularly strong adversaries.
As for a pacing-and-combat criticism to round things off, I felt that
the final boss battle (as such) goes on forever and is a little too
hard. You're fighting wave after wave of enemies, and even if you never
miss, keep moving constantly, and have the best upgraded weapons and
charms/amulets, you're still going to have a very hard time staying
alive at all, nevermind succeeding. I know it's the final battle of the
game and so on, but the devs really overdid it, IMHO. There's a sudden
jump in difficulty compared to the entire preceding game and it takes
you a lot of effort to stay alive until you reach the end of the final
wave of enemies. Of course, each wave gets gradually more powerful and
dangerous, so it's a real pain in the behind to withstand the challenge.
Personally, one of the viable tactics I figured out was not just
constantly moving and fighting, but also running uphill, hiding behind a
tree
trunk and then dispatching several lower-tier enemies once they came
close. To that end, I used the melee attack far more frequently than
before, defeating even five to six enemies in a row by furiously
spamming the melee attack. Granted, you'll also need good shooting
skills to win this fight. The native shortbows and the pistol seem to be
the most useful for this fight, and you can also use the crossbow a few
times to pick off any stray enemies attacking from a different
direction. Time is of the essence though, as you'll be reloading the pistol and crossbow a lot. Picking up already shot arrows is also crucial to winning the fight, as you won't have time to go back replenish your ammunition.
After you win the fight, don't hesitate to save immediately, if you
don't want to go through the whole ordeal again (a rather pointless
ordeal, since there's very little story left after the battle and it's
really easy to conclude from that point on). I had to repeat the final
boss battle near-endlessly to win at all, which is really annoying when
all I want to do is get the game and story over with. It was also
immersion-breaking, even for the finale's spooky environment, because
after a while, you just consider the whole thing to be a chore, and not
even remotely atmospheric. I think they could have designed this part of
the finale better.
This fight is actually the penultimate one in the whole game. There's a little bit of story left after that, with one more NPC conversation at a preceding location, and then a brief ambush by more ordinary enemies. The final battle, which is short, fun, non-frustrating, unlike the previous one. You'll also find the musket more useful here than in the penultimate fight. After you win the final battle, you need to revisit the final location (now somewhat altered, after your liberating actions) and the story draws to a close. However, despite the seeming twist at the very end, once the credits conclude, you'll find yourself back on the beach where you started off, and can now freely roam around the entire game world, now fully unlocked. (In one of the later locations, you'll also be able to meet with one of the storyline's NPCs again and exchange a few words.)
The game's named Betrayer, and though I won't spoil how the
storyline unfolds, and what role the few NPCs you can interact with play
in the story, suffice to say, betrayal is a major theme in the story.
Not just the individual colonists causing a cascade of infighting and
suspicion due to betraying each other, or betraying their promises to
the natives, and so on and so forth, but the player might grow a bit
worried whether one of the few NPCs they could have a proper
conversation with won't betray them. Will the NPC betray the player ?
Maybe.
I felt the ending, though a rather decent resolution, didn't answer some
of the deeper questions posed by the horror elements of the storyline.
It also includes a twist that feels rather tacked-on, as if adding it
there just for a twist, rather than it entirely making sense.
I won't spoil more. I think that what the game sets to achieve - immerse
you in the paranoid feeling of being an out-of-your-depth marooned
settler, facing mysterious events and hostile adversaries in a
wilderness unknown to your culture - it achieves rather well.
I found it nice that several of the locations are based on real ones from North American colonial history, such as Fort Henry in Virginia (one of the first locations you'll visit over the course of the game).
As a bonus, here's a 2014 interview with one of the game's devs, back when the game was first published.
----
All in all, I think the game might have used a bit more polish in a few
places and aspects, but it's a fairly original and creative game. It
does feel like a determined experimental game, experimental genre
hybrid, and it has some great ideas, but there are a few minor flaws in
the execution. More polish and less minor inconsistencies in the
presentation (and maybe multiple story endings), and it would be an
undisputed classic.
I'd like to thank GOG.com that, after the game was unavailable on Steam
and other digital marketplaces for a few years (it's never been
published on physical media), they acquired the rights to publish it and
even offered it for free. It might be the newest and largest freeware
game they have on offer. So, if you're wondering about trying the game,
like I did for about a decade, but had to put it off, because it
couldn't be purchased anywhere, you can now find it easily and don't
even have to pay a penny. I have to say, by preserving a game like this,
GOG.com is really putting paid to their mission statement of not just
selling classic games and making money, but also preserving older game
titles as cultural artefacts for the future, even games they don't get
any financial returns from. Well done, GOG.com.
Betrayer's hardly a perfect game. In fact, I think it's a bit
uneven precisely because it tries to do something more experimental with
intertwining several genres, in a historical setting, and with a spooky
storyline on top of that, but I admire the devs at Blackpowder Games
for that experimentation. It's precisely the sort of experimenting I
like seeing in games, even if the end result obviously isn't flawless.
It's certainly a memorable game, and I've had a fair bit of fun with it
during the past week. Though not a very long game, it can last you a
fair few days if you play it in sessions over several days, with breaks
in between, and try to explore everything.
What I found to be the most practical arrangement of key bindings in the game, was as follows:
W, A, S, D - forwards, left, right, backwards movement
Q - toggle walk/run
X - toggle crouch
Z - temporary crouch (hold down key)
E - melee attack
F - use / interact with
H - use healing dose (from waterskin)
G - throw tomahawk
B - throw explosive (bomb/grenade)
R - reload weapon
M - map
N - notes
I - inventory
L - listening mechanic (audio premonition)
O - overview of clues found (notes)
P - overview of people met (notes)
K - overview of investigations (notes)
These are obviously just recommendations. You can reconfigure the key bindings whichever way you find the most practical to your playthrough.
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Because I like to also provide the opinions of other people on games I review, I'll share a few reviews for this game as well. Here's DWTerminator's review from March 2016 and Dyer's review from June 2014.
They're both comprehensive reviews, though please beware of spoilers.
GManLives also did a good review on Betrayer
back in 2014 (though I think he mistook the crossbow reloading
animation for it using a spanner - I haven't noticed anything like that, so the crossbow is likely
meant to be hand-spanned only).
Here's another fine (and fairly funny) review of the game from 2021, by a fellow from the Pacific Northwest.
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Next time, if I finish it, I might review something of domestic
provenance, and with a lot more humour. That's right, I'll be returning
to playing the Slovak game Felvidék, and eventually reviewing it. ;-)
----
You can also read the Slovak translation of this review here:
Betrayer (recenzia)
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