BioShock Wolfenstein: The New and Infinite Order

Wolfenstein: The New Order is a game at the mercy of its story. Depending on how you take this statement, you’ll either enjoy the game immensely, or else find the experience to feel oddly disjointed and lacking in prolonged action sequences. Thankfully, I found my time with Wolfenstein to be memorable, largely because of how progressive it feels as a Hollywood experience.

In an early level of Wolfenstein, the player is forced to engage with an NPC in order to progress the game’s story. The screen shifts from the game’s first-person perspective to a view of protagonist Captain William Blazkowicz (or as he’s known around the local brothel, Captain “B.J.”). Given voice, he speaks with passion. Strange, I thought, this cutscene almost looks like a movie. The characters seemed to emote and their lines flowed organically as human beings often do when they engage in conversation (how many games have you played where the lines delivered felt stilted and unlike anything people actually say in real life?).

More curious, the NPCs in the background weren’t stuttering in place, and their faces weren’t blank and inexpressive. It was at this moment, some twenty minutes into the game, when I learned that Wolfenstein would be married to its world and characters, and that developer Machinegames’ aim of entertaining the single-player consumer had paid off. For better or for worse, this was a game with an enormous attention toward providing players with a cinematic experience.  

As an intrepid RPG enthusiast, the fact that Wolfenstein takes itself seriously enough to craft a world worth investing time into is a clear win in my books; a check mark in my proverbial book so large that all men who stare at it would feel inadequate and shamed by its phallic beauty. What this means for the average gamer is that each of the game’s levels (with the exception of one terribly out of place early one) is crafted with the game’s story in mind.

The amount of detail oozing from its porous contextualization is overwhelming at times. Every section of the game spoon feeds you (mostly through newspaper snippets, but also through NPC banter) more and more about its futurism: How the Nazis were able to vanquish the Soviets through internal revolt, how China and Japan fell and how their countries were divided into smaller self-governing nations, what concentration camps would become following the initial genocides, etc. Its grandiosity is moving in all the ways that Fringe, Blade Runner, Neuromancer and other sci fi greats manage to excite our minds with thoughts of the future (or in this case, the past that never happened but could have).

In short, Wolfenstein is a game that wins specifically because it succeeds as a cinematic experience and because its developers treat the game’s world and lore with the care that one would expect from Nazi moon bases. In other words, it doesn’t undermine the threat that the Nazis posed to the Allied forces, nor does it point its finger by asking you to stare pensively outside a window while it rains. For every moment spent gawking at a small band of enemies helping one another after a scripted explosion causes great damage to their ranks, the player is met with a smaller battle between a man wanting desperately to spend a sunny afternoon with the woman he loves. The story is used to great effect because it’s made personal; relatable; honest.  And it’s a pretty decent shooter.