14 DAY TRIAL // Namco Bandai and Ninja Theory announced back in August, during GamesCom, that they would be working together on a mysterious project. The project, in all its mystery, still received a release date scheduled for 2010. The cat finally came out of the bag today, when Namco Bandai officially announced the game. Ninja Theory's Enslaved comes out on the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 and, so far, is still expected to hit the shelves next year.
The game proves to be a collection of reunions, as the bits and pieces that come together to form it have an intertwining past. Ninja Theory and Andy Serkis have collaborated in the past, while Heavenly Sword was made. Serkis performed the role of the sinister King Bohan and was greatly praised by the game's community. Those who haven't played Heavenly Sword are still bound to be familiar with the actor, as he is the one that brought Gollum to life in Peter Jackson's adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings. In Enslaved, Serkis will direct and portray Monkey.
Among the people involved in the game is also club DJ and music producer Nitin Sawhney, who is responsible for the game's soundtrack and who crossed paths with Ninja Theory in the past when he also took care of the music score. Other known productions of his are found in the movie The Namesake but also in the popular TV series House M.D. The game's script is cowritten by Alex Garland, author of the Halo Movie that, in the end, never came to life and is still sitting under Microsoft project pile.
Enslaved follows the story of Monkey and Trip, two slaves in a postapocalyptic America. Captured and enslaves by bandits, they manage to escape and find themselves working together. The circumstances of their predicament are not the ones that force the two to cooperate. The engineering wiz Trip hacks a slave collar and the warrior-built buff, Monkey, must now protect the woman, as their lives are now bound together. In the end it seems that Monkey didn't escape slavery after all, just exchanged leashes.