Pulp serial-inspired adventure game promises to be a ripping ride

MUMMIES, magic amulets, stiff upper lips and a quirky cast of heroes straight out of yesteryear — the upcoming Strange Brigade adventure game has it all.

THERE was a time until not all that long ago when Britain had the largest and most impressive Empire in the world.

One of the many legacies that Empire has left us is the ripping yarn — also known as a boys’ own adventure — which was a genre of story popular from the 1880s to 1960s in which heroic men (and sometimes women, but not as often) went off into exotic parts of said Empire and did heroic, adventurous things like wrestling with tigers, thwarting a villainous enemy or fending off hordes of displeased natives with a Martini-Henry rifle and an upper lip so stiff you could do your ironing on it.

Despite being somewhat dated nowadays, many of the stories in the broader genre — such as the Biggles series by Captain WE Johns, the various Allan Quatermain stories by H Rider Haggard, and even Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes adventures — are great adventure stories that are still popular today and precisely the sort of thing that would make a good computer game.

Despite the genre enjoying considerable cinematic success, there haven’t been all that many games that capitalise on it — so the team at British-based developer Rebellion are fixing that with their upcoming game Strange Brigade, which releases on PC, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One on August 28.

The game features four mysterious characters from across the British Empire who have formed a team entitled the Strange Brigade, who undertake special missions in what might generally be considered the blank parts of contemporary maps.

Strange Brigade is set in a fantasy version of North Africa.

Rebellion are well known for their excellent Sniper Elite games, set during WWII, and the switch to a ripping yarn is something the developer is clearly well equipped for.

Lead designer Steve Bristow said the easiest way to describe the game was “an action adventure game inspired by pulp adventure stories and serialised cinema matinees from the inter-war years”.

While the pulp adventure yarns and period cinema serials took themselves rather seriously, Mr Bristow said the Strange Brigade team had decided to have a bit of fun with things instead.

“It’s got a tongue-in-cheek humour and pokes a bit of well-meant fun at the slightly hysterical tone of our source material. It certainly doesn’t take itself too seriously and there’s a blend of intense combat, exploration and puzzle solving that I think people are going to like,” he said.

“Our owners, Jason and Chris Kingsley, have a real enthusiasm for those classic adventures of heroic explorers and tales of derring-do in mysterious far-off lands.

“We had a book called something like the ‘Tales of Thrilling Adventure’, which had a picture of a tiger mauling a Bugatti (classic sports car) being driven at breakneck speed through a jungle by some muscular dude in a ripped white shirt. That became a motif for the design; is this feature “Tiger-on-a-Bugatti” enough?”

The adventure-fiction storyline is packed with action.

I had a hands-on with the game at E3 2017 and again later in Seattle with the Xbox One X launch and from what I played, those elements — along with the spot-on ribbing of the source material — were definitely there and the game has been comfortably on my “shut up and take my money” list ever since.

Strange Brigade is set in a fantasy version of North Africa and Mr Bristow said although the development team had referenced some historical material, it wasn’t being set up as “anything other than the kind of thrilling and mysterious backdrop for an adventure of the type you’d read about in an H Rider Haggard book”.

“Most of our research was based on those explorer-hero fictions because we enjoy the charm of it and we wanted to do something upbeat and fun,” he said.

The gameplay I have experienced so far had a strong Ancient Egyptian theme, with mummies, amulets, undead warriors and other such appropriate things, and the story for Strange Brigade has been written by Gordon Rennie, the highly regarded writer for the comic 2000AD.

“His work has really pushed the quality of the game up,” Mr Bristow said.

“One of my favourite parts of the project has been the production of a book of short stories called The True History of the Strange Brigade, written by Cassandra Khaw, Gaie Sebold, Tauriq Moosa, Guy Adams and an old chum and colleague of mine, Jonathan L. Howard.

“They’ve taken our characters from the game and written these incredible stories for them and it was really exciting and humbling to read. It fed back into the game itself and really shaped how we thought about them, brought them to life and, in a sense, created a sense of responsibility for us to live up to their work.”

Mr Bristow said doing something which deliberate set out to be lighthearted was always rewarding and the adventure-fiction nature of Strange Brigade’s setting let the developers do a lot of fairly out-there things that wouldn’t be appropriate in a more realistic game like Sniper Elite.

“We’ve had a lot of fun creating the amulet attacks, coming up with a pretty wide range of different and spectacular ways to disassemble or otherwise upset the enemy hordes. The response we’ve had from players at the various shows we’ve taken Strange Brigade to has been really encouraging and, in particular, the range of different things about the game they’ve responded to; some like the gunplay, others the environments or the puzzle,” he said.

“Listening to people argue about which character is the best makes me smile too — we’d have done something wrong if everyone agreed.”

Strange Brigade is being released for PC, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One on August 28.

Originally published as Pulp serial-inspired adventure game promises to be a ripping ride