O tempora is a series of retrospective posts where I play games from ages before to see if they stood the test of time.
I’ve replayed The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay, in its PC “Developer’s Cut” release, back in 2004-2005 quite a few times. At the time and to this day, this game felt like an experience unlike anything else. Being an action adventure with stealth, quests, FPS, multiple solutions to problems, constantly changing situations it wasn’t quite an “immersive sim”, yet it wasn’t just a simple action adventure either. And I’d say that ever since then, the only other game that attempted to be something as varied and unique was The Darkness, a game also from Starbreeze Studios released 3 years after EfBB. A lot of the members from this team later went to form MachineGames that started with something more unique, the game being Wolfenstein: The New Order, but even that title has never been quite as varied as EfBB and all of their follow ups have been more and more primitive and generic.
The game was a critical success, remains to this day an example of how good tie-in games can be (this title was released to coincide with The Chronicles of Riddick movie) and in 2009 an extended version/sequel was released – Assault on Dark Athena. This new release contained almost the entirety of Escape from Butcher Bay content, but now on the updated engine and with some tweaks and rebalancing, and an expansion-sequel campaign that was about 2/3 the size of the original game. It wasn’t received as warmly, later had several strange attempts at digital release, including the DRM-Free GOG version which I’ve bought back in the day and replayed right now, but now it remains completely unavailable for purchase digitally. And since I’ve not played this game ever since 2009, I was curious to see just how much my opinion on it might change today.
Read more“O tempora: The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay and Assault on Dark Athena”
