14 DAY TRIAL // I'm sitting in the dark in corridor. It's the sort of space you can only find in a video game because it's far too small to serve any actual purpose for normal humans going about their daily business and far too big to solely be used to help air flow through a building.
I'm on a Russian island called Katorga-12, which is a funny name to give to an island because it implies there are at least 11 others sharing the Katorga moniker, which leads one to believe that the word actually means something (in Russian, it refers to a type of touch judicial punishment from the time of the Czars that is constructed around hard work and cold places). And I'm starring directly at an old tape recorder listening to a man with an accent describing what seems to be a small apocalypse that's happening around him.
Normally, I'd be pretty annoyed by the fact that the game is forcing me to stay put while delivering narrative to me. BioShock did something similar, but it worked because you could move around and take out some Splicers as you were listening to the beautiful debates between Andrew Ryan and Sophia Lamb.
In Singularity, you have to stay still and, on my machine, at least, facing the tape recorder because the sound is otherwise pretty distorted. I am saddened by the fact that I have to choose between listening and advancing in the game but, strangely, the lack of in-game action forces a sort of introspection linked to the words delivered by the old man.
Raven should have done more to play up the tragedy of what happened on Katorga-12 and more to show the exact evil nature of the Communist regime in Soviet Russia. Instead, they chose a more neutral tone, focusing on the terror of the singularity itself and on the gun play. More on those in future diaries.
This is a game diary. A full review of Singularity is also available on Softpedia.