Snatcher

Written by Tom Clare in Mega-CD Game Reviews, Wednesday 3 September, 2008

Released: 1993
Developer: Konami
Genre: Graphic Adventure
Platform: Mega-CD
Region: US

As well as proving to be a thoroughly engrossing and enjoyable gaming experience, Konami’s Snatcher was also something of a victory for its oft-maligned Mega-CD hardware. It makes use of areas strongest to the system; the extra storage space of the CD is used to enhance the games water-tight presentation – high-quality music, plenty of voiced dialogue and lots of great animated cut-scenes combine to gift the game a cinematic quality otherwise unachievable on a Mega-Drive.

Released in 1994 as a reworking of a Sony MSX2 title, Snatcher is the brain-child of Metal Gear Solid creator Hideo Kojima and so, as is to be expected, it relies a fair bit on storytelling. A self-proclaimed ‘cyberpunk adventure’, Snatcher’s simplistic interface make it less “point ‘n’ click” and more “interactive comic”, though it is filled with a veritable trove of hidden delights, innovations and, for its time, a remarkably gritty narrative.

Set in 2046 in an area of Japan known as Neo-Kobe, you play as Gillian Seed (a man, to avoid future confusion), who has recently lost his memory and yet somehow been assigned to work as part of a secretive five-person team known as JUNKERs. Their aim is to rid the world of BIOROID ‘Snatchers’ who kidnap people and replace them with mechanical doubles that on the surface appear no different to humans. Thus, as something of a futuristic detective story, it has more than a little in common with BladeRunner. And just as in Ridley Scott’s dystopian classic, Snatcher is defined by the remarkably bleak tone of its narrative, completely at odds with other games of its time. However, it deserves more credit still for how effectively it brings across its characters, a bunch you’ll care about more than the vast majority of RPG heroes despite having only known them for a fraction of the time.

Rather than moving a cursor around a static background, you are given a list of options (such as ‘Look’ and ‘Investigate’ linked to various people/objects) which, provided you go through them all, are most likely to guarantee your progression. Fortunately, there’s a bit more to Snatcher than this.

Gillian is accompanied by a small robot called Metal Gear (ho-hum) who, as well as coming up with useful bits of information and allowing you to save your progress, also acts as a videophone not dissimilar to the CODEC seen in Metal Gear Solid. It’s a lot of fun in itself and genuinely useful – whether you are calling up Gillian’s former partner Jamie in order to shed a little more light on the central characters lives; trying to organise a meeting with some shady informant in order to make progress with investigations, or even phoning up the hilarious LoveLine for some dodgy innuendo, it’s all immaculately scripted. Sometimes finding the numbers is a task in itself; one important one turns up on a rotating billboard. It is somehow heartening that, even back in the mid-nineties, Kojima was still busy sneaking ‘real-world’ references into his games; the Metal Gear Mk. II robot and a club called ‘Outer Heaven’ will be the two most obvious to fans, though you also get to meet a troupe of people masquerading as Konami characters at a party which is a good laugh; and Kojima and a good deal of the games creators can be accessed using JUNKER’s database computer.

The sound is very good, if technically a touch frail on occasions. Some of the voicing has a hint of fuzziness to it, whilst many of the tunes sound more suited to a Mega-Drive, perhaps as a legacy of the games earlier appearance on the MSX2. That said, the English voicing is mostly of a good standard and the translation fares very well, and it’s clear that whilst the original plot remains in tact, there has been genuine effort to inject some western humour into proceedings. In one very Kojima-esque moment, Metal Gear asks you to increase the volume so you can hear the faint ticking of a bomb – shortly afterwards it detonates in a monumental explosion, Gillian complains his ears are ringing only to be told its because you forgot to turn the volume down! The background music is highly atmospheric; some excellent racy numbers are matched by the dread-instilling tension-builders and both serve the gameplay really well.

Visually, it’s great. The animated cut-scenes are bold and impressive, and special mention must go to the (at the time) rare attempt at accurate lip-synching for the spoken parts. Elsewhere, the characters look tremendous and the backgrounds are lovely; packed with little details such as lights flickering in the cityscape, water dripping, billboards rotating through a cycle and so on.

Snatcher keeps you on your toes with the odd shooting section, even if they are few and far between. The screen is split into nine sections – one for each of the four standard directions; four more for the diagonals and also the centre. Again, Konami have taken a simple idea and developed it nicely (even making it compatible with a lightgun); standard shoot outs see you combating various small enemies who appear in just one segment of the screen each but as you move further into the game, the rules change. Snatcher’s themselves often hide off screen and then reappear at different angles, giving you a short period in which to evaluate what segment there weak point is positioned in. Gillian also has to be mindful of shooting the odd hostage and in one particularly clever instance, assess where his assailant is standing by sighting them in a mirror. One frantic fight near the end aside, these bits don’t offer too much of a challenge, but make for a welcome change in the cadence of the action.

Snatcher delivers some great, logical puzzles to get the old grey matter working. Via JUNKER HQs computer system, Gillian can not only look up information on his colleagues, but can, through the gathering of evidence, narrow down suspect lists and subsequently gain arrest warrants. Perhaps the only poorly-devised teaser in the entire game is one that has you piecing together an ‘artistic impression’ of a suspect from one woman’s rather vague recollections, making things unnecessarily sketchy and frustrating.

You’ll need around eight and a half hours to complete the game, meaning Snatcher has legs. It’s also perfectly conceivable that, even in knowing the outcome of the story, players will want to tackle it again as there are so many little things to find that may have been overlooked on a first run through. Those who balk at the idea of titles integrating ‘game’ and ‘film’ may remain unconvinced, but even by Kojima’s standards, it’s a great yarn and represents one of very few games of this type to feel truly at home on a console.

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