Backlog Game 004: Wolfenstein The New Order
Main image source: www.amazon.fr
In my opinion, so much of the charm and nostalgia of gaming up until around the mid-90’s came from how dispersed the culture was.
If you wanted cheat codes (or fatalities, as many of us impressionable young gamers did back then), you had to hope that some magazine put out a guide that you could pester your parents for.
More often than not though, you were left to your own devices, so you would cross your fingers that your buddy on the playground knew someone (who knew someone…) and in turn themself knew those juicy codes and was willing to scribble them on a piece of notebook paper for your later study.
Sometimes this hearsay and rumor mongering was utter bullshit (like someone who swore they knew someone…who knew someone…who owned a NEO GEO AES), but other times it actually turned out to be true; I can personally remember getting the blood code for Mortal Kombat on the Genesis via someone in my Tae Kwon Do class, as well as an alternate color code for the original Street Fighter II game on Super NES from the same source.
The rumors and codes you received were totally dependent on the hyper-local circle of friends you had, but what I find interesting is that this dispersion still had to do with quite a monolithic gaming culture: while everyone was perhaps getting different information, it all focused on a small handful of games, Mortal Kombat being one of the bigger ones I remember.
Another game in that small handful of titles that seemingly everyone discussed was Wolfenstein 3D.
While the series goes back farther than that seminal title, the move to 3D was revolutionary, even if I personally didn’t realize the technical context at the time.
However, I do remember conversations to the effect of:
“Dude, have you played this new game, called Wolfenstein? You get to have guns and stuff, and you kill Nazis that are robots, it’s totally awesome!!!!”
Now, I doubt any one of us knew what the “Axis powers” were, but we had caught on that Nazis were bad, and at that age, playing pretend-soldiers and pretend-shooting each other with sticks (yep, different times back then) was pretty standard, so it was almost a given that we would be drawn to Wolfenstein 3D.
I played it whenever I found a friend with the game installed on their family computer, and…
That was it for me.
Wolfenstein 3D was such an important game, but in hindsight, childhood experiences seem smaller than they did at the time. From my recollection of my gaming habits, it seemed that almost as soon as it came out, other games followed suit and I gravitated to those, along with all the other big hitter games from other genres released around that time.
It took me basically 30 years (woooowwww) to come back to the Wolfenstein Universe, and boy am I glad I did.
Return to Wolfenstein, but not just the castle this time
From what I’ve researched, credible historians will tell you that for several reasons (fighting on several fronts, the sheer manpower of the Soviet army, the industrial might of the United States, among others), Germany never could really hope to win the war, and yet…
I occasionally see maps of all the territory Germany held at the peak of its expansion and think to myself:
“Really though?…Because it seems to me that the Nazis were way closer to winning than I’m comfortable with”.
And once you have that thought in mind, you can’t help but think how different life today would be if not for the brave actions of so many willing to look pure evil in the face, then run headfirst into it.
Thankfully, the good men and women won, and we can rely on works of fiction to indulge some our most macabre “what if” thoughts.
During my time in gaming wilderness, I greatly enjoyed bingeing Amazon’s “The Man In the High Castle”.
Once I finished that I knew that some time in the future I’d also get to the reboot of the Wolfenstein series, which up until then I’d only heard about in passing but highly intrigued me with its similar premise (I know there were other Wolfenstein games before The New Order, but the story of this game specifically is what drew me to it rather than starting farther back in the chronology).
In quite a break from the title I finished before, after a three decade-long hiatus I again became gaming’s most badass-ly named protagonist, BJ Blazkowicz, and I’m glad I did, because despite now being about 10 years old…
“Wolfenstein: The New Order” is still phenomenal.
A world carefully crafted for you to destroy
I imagine that much of the difficulty in creating these alt-history scenarios involving Nazis is that you want to show that, in this alternate timeline, they progressed to be supremely powerful, but you don’t want people thinking for a second that this “upside” (for instance, “The Man In the High Castle” featured rocket airplanes, that’s nominally quite cool) is in any way worth the carnage and evil that it took to achieve it.
The talented team at Machinegames crafted a game that does a great job at creating a vast and expansive world, where no details were spared (check out all the faux-propaganda posters and newspaper clippings throughout the game for proof); I don’t want to spoil anything if you haven’t played the game, but for the first time ever while playing a game, some of the levels made me physically uncomfortable, knowing full well that as bad as they were portrayed, the real settings on which they were based were far, far, far worse.
As with any game world, the areas in Wolfenstein: The New Order are inhabited by characters, and these are some of the best (worst?…) characters I have ever come across in a game, perhaps even any game.
Granted, I’m still working through a huge backlog of titles, so the context against which I’m judging Wolfenstein: The New Order is incomplete, but for the first time ever, I found myself genuinely feeling for some characters, and actively hating others.
Let’s start with BJ Blazkowicz. He started out his videogame life as a stereotype, and he has no business being anything other than a gun-toting meathead.
Not so in this game: he has a heart, he lives through awful things, and at the end of the game, I just wanted him to be able to be happy at some point (hopefully that’s the case at the end of the sequel I haven’t yet played, but I’m not optimistic).
The rest of his crew is equally endearing, and I can’t think of any moment in the game where I thought a particular scene was cheesy, or over the top. You feel for every one of these characters, and even though they and the world they inhabit are completely fictional, you want them to be ok.
Now the bad people…
Fuck this guy (Image source: wolfenstein.fandom.com)
Holy shit.
These people are evil.
General Deathsead and Engel are the most atrocious beings I’ve ever come across in a game.
They commit disgusting, vile acts (seriously, the game gets very violent, especially towards the end) and all I wanted to do, and still want to do, is give everything they gave right back to them, and then some.
That’s how well-done the characters are in this game!
Fuck her too (Image source: wolfenstein.fandom.com).
One last thing: I appreciate that the developers didn’t provide any nuance to these characters.
On one hand, it might have been interesting to get glimpses of the lives they had before turning super-evil, to show how even “good” people can change, but at this point in their existence, they are irredeemable, so BJ should be free to administer whatever punishment he deems appropriate to them and their lackeys.
Before I booted up the game for the first time, I thought I was just going to be in for some fun action; I had no idea the emotional rollercoaster I was about to board.
It was uncomfortable, but I suppose that in storytelling, that’s a form of compliment, so well done Machinegames!
Quick thoughts on gameplay before wrapping up
As much as Wolfenstein: The New Order nails its story and world-building, the gameplay isn’t perfect. My main complaints:
I definitely had issues with constanly having to hit “square” to pick up items, I’m glad that was apparently changed in the sequel.
Some of the enemy AI isn’t great, though I’ll admit that worked to my advantage when I was trying to get through a particularly tough level and a couple of them just happened to get hung up on a wall or something similar.
I did appreciate the challenge the game presented though. I played the game on “I Am Deatch Incarnate” difficulty and it took me a little less than two hours per chapter to beat the whole game; I definitely had to work to get through every section, but I never felt like any particular challenge was impossible.
If you couldn’t tell, despite these hangups, this game made a deep mark on me. If you like first-person shooters, or just enjoy a well-told story, this is the game for you (but do not, under any circumstances, play this around children or people who are sensitive to this type of material).
Bring on Wolfenstein: The New Colossus, and bring on Engel.