videogameblog

'Snatcher' is the second game written and directed by Hideo Kojima, released in 1988. It's abundantly clear that Kojima has been copying movies he likes and making them into video games virtually his entire career, since this game is just a conceptual clone of Bladerunner. Is this plagarism at this point? I'm not sure. You play as Gillian Seed (Deckard), a Junker (Blade Runner) who's hunting down the titular 'Snatchers' (replicants) - mysterious hostile robots that are killing and replacing people in society. However, outside of the clear conceptual influence, Snatcher definitely has it's own identity, seperate to Bladerunner. Tonally, Snatcher is alot more lighthearted? Gillian Seed is a total loser. For some reason you can smell (?) and flirt with every woman character extensively, only for them to awkwardly brush you off at each advance. Seed and his wife both have amnesia and she wants nothing to do with him, so everytime he calls her it feels like he's just bothering her. It's a pretty funny (and probably unintentional) subversion of the noir detective archetype. Kojima just really likes making the protagonist of his games a loser and a sex pest I guess. It's also very self-aware and self-referential, sometimes too much. They're always talking about Konami and Metal Gear (a small Metal Gear follows you around for literally the entire game, like your buddy cop), which contributes to the unseriousness of the tone quite a bit. They talk directly to the player alot too, which is cool in moments when they tell you to turn up your TV to hear something, not so cool when Gillian is just like "I'm trying to make things more interesting for the folks playing the game!!". I think Kojima figured this out eventually since the only serious fourth-wall breaking in Metal Gear Solid is the Psycho Mantis stuff, which is similar to telling the player to turn up their TV. Even though the tone can feel pretty goofy, there's still some pretty tense moments. The first sequence has you slowly advancing through an abandoned factory searching for a missing junker agent, only to find him decapitated. You slowly progress through the factory by walking through, examining and listening for hostiles on your way. There's a few other stand-out sequences, but this was probably my favorite. Apparently Kojima wanted to coat the game disc in some kind of blood-smelling residue that would melt after about an hour of playing (which would align with when you find the decapitated body) and make your room smell like blood? Definitely one of his stranger ideas.

The narrative is pretty enjoyable most of the time. Things advance at a nice pace, it feels like you're unravelling a mystery. It kinda plays itself most of the time, and some of the plot beats are a little weird. At one point you scan the contents of someone's stomach to find out they've been eating buffalo meat? And there happens to be only one place in the city that sells buffalo meat? Theres a few more outlandish ones but it's usually fine. I thought the narrative was pretty simple for a Kojima game, but then it unfortunately ends with a 30-minute-long cutscene of the antagonist explaining every plot point to you and it's extremely convoluted. The cast of characters is surprisingly wide, but most of them are pretty forgettable. The standouts for me were the informant, Napoleon and the Metal Gear Mk2 that follows you around the entire game. I only like those two because they have funny voices though. The representation of women in this is unsurprisingly horrible, it did release in 1988 after all. There's quite a wide cast of female characters but all they do is talk about Gillian and how thankful they are for him protecting them. The game also ends with them all swooning over him even though he's been pathetically begging them all to go on a date with them the entire game? There's also some weird stereotypical stuff in here, usually about Chinese people for some reason. There's alot of the signature Kojima explain-how-everything-works style of writing present but I much prefer the way it's presented here over how it's done in Metal Gear Solid. Instead of constantly interupting the flow of gameplay to randomly explain something about a species of bird to the player over a codec call, snatcher has a massive database of information at junker HQ called 'Jordan'. If you want to know anything about the politics of this world, the way your gun works or how much the receptionist weighs, you can check it at your own pace. I felt more inclined to learn about the world this way too, since I was the one choosing to seek out the information. You can also learn information when exploring the city using the 'investigate' prompt, which gives you detailed information about whatever you're investigating (unless it's a woman, then Gillian just attempts to sexually assault them). I wouldn't be surprised at all to learn that all of Kojima's nerdisms are tucked away in an optional space because he didn't yet have full creative control over the project; this was his second game ever after all.

Gameplay-wise Snatcher is fine. It's a visual novel most of the time, presenting the player with a list of options they can choose from in each environment. There's a pretty expansive list of options most of the time, allowing you to look at and inspect pretty much everything in the room. When it comes to the actual 'investigative' gameplay, it usually boils down to looking at and investigating everything in the room multiple times until you hit the correct trigger. Reminded me of Ace Attorney's investigative segments. Thankfully, there's never really a tonne of leads presented to you at once, so it's not easy to lose track of what you're doing. This kind of linearity benefits the game really well, and I only had to check a walkthrough twice. Most of the 'puzzles' are easy to understand, except for a few (i'm talking about that dumb ass Oleen hospital puzzle). I never really found 'playing' the game boring. The only other avenue of gameplay present is these rudimentary shooting minigames you have to do sometimes. It's just a grid of 9 squares that you select and shoot using the D-pad, but it's surprisingly fun. They also manage to squeeze alot of gameplay variation out of such a simple system, they switch things up a couple times. The music and sound design (excluding the voice acting) is excellent for the time, I was really surprised. The artwork is also always stunning, the composition on some of the shots were pretty ahead of the times. From cityscapes to character portraits, everything in Snatcher looks amazing. It's probably one of my favorite looking pixel-art games ever.

Overall, I enjoyed Snatcher quite a bit. It's interesting to see how many concepts present here made it into the MGS franchise, both narratively and gameplay wise. I'm gonna be playing 'Policenauts' next, which i'm assuming is pretty similar to this. Cyberpunk noir is probably one of my favorite genres aesthetically so i'm not sure if i'll personally prefer it but I guess i'll see. If I had to compare it to anything, i'd say it reminded me most of 'Norco', which is a game I think about almost daily. Check that out too if you haven't. Snatcher is definitely worth playing if you like Kojima games, the detective or cyberpunk genre, or Blade Runner.