The game’s movement controls are simple enough to learn quickly, allowing for creative, nearly instinctive decision-making about ad hoc paths to take across the heights of skyscraper roofs, the shutters of houses and the power lines crisscrossing between buildings. (Case in point, Aiden embodies aspects of both factions’ philosophies in his mission he demonstrates that the Peacekeeper’s military discipline, which is necessary to successfully clear buildings of zombies, can coexist with the Bazaar’s espousal of personal freedoms, such as, say, taking breaks from work to try to find your long-lost sister or help strangers with their problems.)įortunately, between dialogue-heavy scenes, the plot falls away far enough to make more room for what “Stay Human” is actually good at: creating a massive urban jungle gym for players to swing, climb, paraglide and sprint across. Throughout all of this, “Stay Human” luxuriates in the bleakness of its setting and its inability to imagine any compromise between world views that aren’t, as the game shows in glimpses, entirely opposed. The eternal goal of “finding Aiden’s sister” is a moldy breadcrumb trail that twists from one sidetracking side plot to another before remembering to take precedence again at the game’s climax. It settles into an overly familiar shape formed by the exploration of long-forgotten secret labs, errand-running between factions and predictable interpersonal betrayals. The potential of this story evaporates as it moves along, though.
Instead of allowing players to take in the scene before them and allowing a sense of place to develop, they’re encouraged to assess locations with the robotic outlook of a Roomba, combing every new room for glowing items. The dialogue is dreadful, stiffly voiced and peppered with awkwardly placed curses, and the cramped setting provides few opportunities to showcase the excellent parkour movement mechanics of “Stay Human.” To properly pick clean an environment, you have to trigger Aiden’s “survivor sense” by pressing down on the right thumbstick, which drenches the screen in halogen-bright waves to mark locations of useful loot. Aiden and a colleague scavenge through an empty house, skeletons draped like decorative throws on couches next to dusty artifacts from the days before everything went wrong. “Stay Human” opens by stumbling through a long scene of characters in apocalyptic rags dreaming of the day they can retire from their work as wasteland couriers. These issues are clear from the beginning.
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