Picture this. Gaudi’s breathtaking Barcelona Cathedral, the Sagrada Familia. Exquisite carvings cover every surface, depicting creatures beyond comprehension. The baking sun streams through rainbow-hued stained glass, suffusing everything with shimmering colour. But there’s no Mass being held. No blessing, priest or sacrament. There’s some incense burning, but its perfume is the acridity of hallucinogens rather than salvation.
On the floor of the nave, where an altar should stand, is a wrestling ring. The ropes are spun gold, the mat is woven from Dalis, the turnbuckles are jewel-encrusted gargoyles. In the centre stands a six-foot mouse – four flapping breasts loosely held by a leather harness – and a horrifying bird-man, munching on the eyes of a violently coloured pheasant. In the midst of all this beauty and elegance, the two begin to fight. Screaming, they kick, punch, elbow and knee each other with incredible violence, viciously and unrelentingly.
This is Zeno Clash.
Now that your hyperbole filters are fully engaged, let’s skip back to the basics.
Zeno Clash is a PC only, independently produced first person brawler. Released on Steam and Direct 2 Drive yesterday, it’s a product of Chilean developer ACE Team. It’s beautiful, brutal and, in many ways, brilliant.
It’s been on my horizon, dressed in a big, colourful ‘watch-me’ hat, for some time now, alternately dancing like a loon and kicking me in the chest. As anyone who’s been following the game will tell you, it looks incredibly distinctive. Created using the relatively long-in-the-tooth Source engine, Zeno Clash swerves away from the spectre of visual realism, straight into the oncoming traffic of fever-dream imagery: Hieronymous Bosch, Neil Gaiman and the Muppets which live in David Cronenberg’s head.
Environments are lushly crafted and massively colourful, while enemies range from the queasily quasi-familiar to the outright sexually grotesque. Ghat’s hermaphroditic ‘parent’ FatherMother, a key character, is a ten foot-tall half-chicken with a dirty mac full of babies and shadow.
For every image that disturbs, however, there’s one which takes your breath away with its beauty. The open vista of the purple desert sky, peppered by planets and the curmudgeonly heads of four storey high giraffe-beasts, plays host to an excellent boss battle, familiar to those who’ve played the preview. The town of Halstedom, which you escape from at the start of the game, is a hodge-podge of vibrant architectural styles, Star Wars markets and eerie Gothic towers.