#645: The Last Case of Benedict Fox
Ambitious Metroidvania tries to be too many things at once
Initial release: April 27, 2023
Platform: PC, XBox One, XBox Series X/S
Developer: Plot Twist
There’s certain subgenres of video game that, due to their popularity, have spawned an ever-increasing circle of imitators, each bringing their own foibles and “fresh ideas” to ever-diminishing returns, developed by ambitious teams chasing that sweet, sweet indie darling cash. Your roguelikes — goddamned everywhere now. Your deckbuilders — make it stop. Your Soulslikes — do we really need so many? And, of course, your Metroidvanias, a genre with one of the worst names in the industry, up there with the confusing “action RPG” (which could mean anything but for some reason only refers to Diablo 2 clones) or “boomer shooter” (arrrgh.) And don’t get me wrong, there’s nothing bad about wanting to make one of these things. But as developers increasingly try to jam different genres together in hopes of making something original, sometimes you get a game that is just so all over the place that you have to wonder, wouldn’t it have been better if the developers had just picked a genre and stuck with it? And on that note, let’s talk about The Last Case of Benedict Fox.
Let’s get one thing clear right off the bat: The Last Case of Benedict Fox is truly gorgeous. It’s definitely one of the best-looking Metroidvania games I’ve ever seen, both in the “real world” of 1920s Boston and the surreal “Limbo” that most of the game takes place in. The latter is a bizarre garden of delights, made up of two separate sprawling mazes of psycho-emotional imagery and slowly rotting memories. It’s variously surreal, beautiful, and decaying. If it had been in some other game I think I would have found it fantastic; as it was, I was mostly just disappointed that there wasn’t more 1920s Boston.
There’s a reason you’re in Limbo, though; you are Benedict Fox, a private detective with an unnamed demon companion living in his head. Benedict is digging into his own shady past looking for his estranged father, who seems to have some connections with both a sinister secret society called the First Circle and their ideological opponents, Ordo Ira Dei, a seemingly government-run organization dedicated to the regulation and control of anything supernatural. The game opens with Benedict breaking into an Organization office to grab a thick file on himself; after a brief tutorial explaining the basic controls, he’s off to the house of the man he believes is his father, only to find him dead in the cellar, and his wife dead in the backyard. “Limbo” in this case is a twisted psychic dimension of the remains of these two people’s memories, populated by bizarre creatures and regions often reflect the emotions around certain memories. The most unpleasant memories reside in passages so dark that you cannot enter without a flashlight, lest you be torn apart by the darkness itself.
What separates Benedict Fox from its competitors in the overcrowded Metroidvania/“search action” genre is the heavy presence of adventure game elements. From puzzles to solve and items to collect and NPCs to talk to, there is a mystery here, though you’re not expected to do any of the actual thinking in regards to that. No, your job as the player is to do the legwork of tracking down the dozens of items that have some sort of importance to either of the two victims, gradually filling in the gaps in Benedict’s expanding investigation map which you can see — and scroll around! — in the loading screen.
Aside from the prerequisite running and jumping around and gradually unlocking new abilities to open up more of the world, you’ll also be dealing with the various “demons” that live in Limbo, and this is a big part of where the game falls down. Combat is, in a word, unrewarding. It’s just not fun. While the Companion gives you cool abilities like being able to tentacle-grab enemies and yeet them across the screen, combat just lacks oomph, with the parry timing being difficult to get down and the enemy variety being pretty limited.
Unlocking new abilities relies on two currencies. The first, Bits ‘n Pieces, comes from finding and examining items; you use these fragments of memories to upgrade your tools and weapons. The other, Ink, is earned through killing enemies, though each enemy in the game only gives up a single offering of Ink, and upon dying, you drop the Ink and must retrieve it without dying again, a design decision I genuinely do not understand for this kind of game. If you can get to one of the Anchors — basically portals that connect Limbo with the real world and refill all your tools and health when you approach — you’ll save your Ink and you won’t lose it the next time you die, so there’s that. Ink is used to purchase tattoos to unlock more abilities for your Companion, starting from the really necessary ones like being able to triple jump to optional combat-based ones that mostly seem to be some variation on grabbing enemies from a distance.
Progressing through the game requires not just unlocking new abilities but also solving puzzles. While the difficulty options allow you to just skip puzzles as needed, I question why they would even put the puzzles in at all if you’re going to let people skip them. It’s a good example of how this game seems to be unsure of its identity — it clearly wants to be a Metroidvania, but it also wants to have adventure game elements, and it quite frankly isn’t very good at either of them.
And therein lies the deeper issue with the game. Nevermind the crap combat, nevermind the fact the crap performance (especially if you’re on XBox, and even after multiple patches, culminating in a “Definitive Edition” that seems to be Plot Twist’s final touches, performance is still shaky) — I just can’t help but think, this would have been better as a full-fledged adventure game. The story is frustrating as we’re just kinda thrown in with little explanation, with a lot of it making me wonder if there was some sort of prequel or prologue that I was missing.
There’s a lot to like about Benedict Fox. I would have liked to have seen more interaction between Benedict and his largely-unseen Companion. I really like the character designs, at once sharp and comic-booky yet still possessed of emotion, of dynamism. The house itself is beautiful; I could stand in the library and listen to jazz on the radio forever. Limbo, for all its surreality, is a strange and beautiful place, with a lot of variation in themes (I particularly liked the surprise of walking down a corridor only for an entire section of the map to start moving, as it’s part of an elaborate clockwork system.) The puzzles were mostly not too difficult, just enough challenge to make me feel smart. But ultimately I think the game is a failure of too much ambition, Plot Twist reaching too far.
-june❤
