Well, pleasant dreamers, I once again find myself at the end of a stirring Kojima game, staring down the end of an interminably long cut-scene, and one of the master’s first, to boot. Once again, it’s been a gripping narrative, despite some of the cloying story devices, plot holes, last-minute love triangles and other assorted narrative missteps. Moreover, while I’ve griped here and there about how the game has more or less failed in terms of providing gameplay that is at once satisfying, innovative and expressive, I find myself rather pleasantly surprised at the end with a few mechanical twists and turns that actually offer tantalizing glimpses of the same kind of playful design Kojima would later infuse, with much richer detail, in the MGS series. Still, at the end of the day, Snatcher isn’t really a game, just in the same way that it isn’t really “cyberpunk,” either. What it is, on both counts, may wind up being one of the most surprising revelations about Kojima’s work, in general.

Snatcher isn’t futuristic or ahead-of-its-time, in aesthetic, gameplay or narrative style, but stubbornly old-fashioned.

Now, to a certain extent, this makes sense, because one of the primary themes of the game’s story is that of longing for the past– nostalgia. Nearly everyone in Neo-Kobe of the not-too-distant-future seems to wish it were still the 20th century– some for the trendiness of 80’s and 90’s pop-icons, some for the desire to live in a world free of global plagues and Snatcher-scares, and some just because they want to remember where they come from in the first place. The protagonists of Snatcher, Gillian and Jamie Seed, are amnesiacs struggling to recover their lost memories while trying to make new lives for themselves in the future. From that angle, it kind-of makes sense that the world they inhabit seems clearly cribbed from cult sci-fi and anime of the 1980’s– Kojima’s environments and characters here are every bit a pastiche of Blade Runner, Dune, The Terminator and Akira as those in Metal Gear are of Rambo, Die-Hard, Escape from New York and James Bond flicks. Even the game’s mechanics, which force the player to repeat the same options and actions again and again, almost create their own sets of memories to relive. In other words, gameplay is experienced from Gillian’s point-of-view, with confusion set in for the player precisely where our amnesiac-detective hero is bound to go through it himself. In that sense, the abundance of an old-fashioned feel works precisely towards the game’s advantage.

My problem with it, though, remains, because Snatcher is a game pretending to be two things which it isn’t. First of all– it isn’t cyberpunk.

See, Snatcher‘s got a self-proclaimed reputation for being a “cyberpunk adventure,” and if one was to only look at the game’s aesthetic content they wouldn’t be far off. Neo-Kobe does look a lot like Blade Runner‘s Los Angeles circa 2019, right down to the flaming chimneys of the intro, mixed in with a healthy dose of Akira‘s Neo-Tokyo for good measure. Altogether, it doesn’t feel out of keeping with the kinds of worlds written about by William Gibson, whose novel Neuromancer signaled the birth of the cyberpunk literary movement, or Phillip K. Dick, whose seminal works like A Scanner Darkly and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? both stand in stark contrast and anticipation of the likes of guys like Gibson. As a game taking place on a computer, the game can give you the express feeling of experiencing the hacker/cyberpunk lifestyle for brief, thrilling moments, even when ported to the Sega-CD, as one makes progress and solves mysteries through keystrokes and cycling through menus rather than manipulating avatars via a gamepad. Looking up info on the cyberspace of Junker HQ’s “Jordan” mainframe or simply pressing the “Home” button to access a forbidden file on a computer (if only the Genesis had a keyboard), a large part of Snatcher‘s appeal is that one plays a game about “cyberpunk” characters in the same way those “cyberpunk” characters would move about their lives, at the behest of computers.

The problem, of course, is that the game’s story, itself, is about as far from “cyberpunk” as could be imagined.

To make a point, let’s run down the story of Snatcher, once more, with a rousing SPOILER ALERT for any poor souls hoping to one day play the game and wish to experience it unsullied: In the future, half the world’s population has been wiped out by “The Catastrophe,” a super-virulent plague that mankind has only just recently become immune to. As civilization once again thrives in the aftermath, a mysterious race of cyborgs emerges, known as “Snatchers,” which take possession of a living person’s life by abducting them, killing them, peeling off their skin and then posing as them on the surface. Hoping to put a stop to their deadly ways, the “JUNKER” special police-force is formed to investigate the Snatchers and eliminate them on a point-by-point basis. As rookie Junker Gillian Seed teams up with veteran bounty hunter Random Hajile, hot on the trail of a Snatcher conspiracy, it is discovered that the robots originate from a plot hatched by the Soviet Union in the latter days of the 20th century, when they hoped to conquer the world by replacing Western leaders with their own bio-mechanical puppets. END SPOILERS.

Now, whenever people talk about this plot, everyone always points out the similarities it shares with Blade Runner, comparing the Snatchers to Nexus-6 Replicants, or The Terminator, with the human-posturing T-800 Skynet Exoskeletons. In the latter case the comparisons aren’t far off, but in the former they’re wildly incorrect, largely in the difference of where our sympathy lies. See, the Replicants of Blade Runner are eventually the ones that the audience winds up feeling for– I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone who’s watched that film and cheered when Harrison Ford guns them down, one-by-one– whereas the Snatchers of Snatcher are purely monstrous threats. They aren’t sensitive, child-like creatures trying to fight and stay alive, but instead are parasitic, savage beasts that murder innocent civilians in the night, steal their identity and work covertly within society to commit mass genocide and replace human beings as the dominant species on the planet. This doesn’t sound anything remotely like Blade Runner, in my opinion, but it does sound like something else, doesn’t it?

This is why Snatchers isn’t “cyberpunk,” despite its futuristic megalopolis setting– it’s too busy being another piece of paranoid Cold War science-fiction. While the game’s aesthetics sure look like Ridley Scott’s film, the plot owes much more to Don Siegel’s, which stood as a metaphor either for the threat of Communist infiltration or as a satire of McCarthyist propaganda. Standing as a piece of 1980 gaming, it’s hard not to notice the prominence of the “Kremlin” as the site for the belabored denouement, not only as a tie-in to the days of spy-fi where the big bad Soviet Union was always the ultimate source of evil, but also as a bizarre reference to Tetris. Kojima’s both outgrown the use of the USSR as an obligatory villainous presence and learned to use it with far greater subtlety and credibility in his later MGS games, which also happened to fulfill his promise of “cyberpunk” gaming to far greater success than does Snatcher, where antagonists hail from corporations, the military, the US government and shadowy secret-societies bent on controlling thought by censoring the Internet. Here, Kojima cops out to the standard sci-fi threat of foreign invaders, and in the end doesn’t even bother to disguise the geo-political construct they always stood for in the first place.

The closing curtain of Snatcher might as well be an iron one, as once again Russia becomes a malevolent entity threatening the sanctity of Western civilization.

Perhaps the unique spot Japan occupied throughout those years, literally caught between a East and West besides standing as the only country ever to bear the scars of the same kind of nuclear warfare that would erupt if either side pushed the button, provides a better context for this viewpoint, but that still doesn’t change the fact that it would’ve pretty much been outdated even in the Glasnost era of the 80’s. In any case, the Cold War plot doesn’t match up with the Info-War trappings, and if it does serve a purpose for us it is to highlight the contrasting attitudes within Kojima’s own mindset. Snatcher might reveal some of its creator’s more naive, unsophisticated obsessions, but it’s interesting to watch them grow considerably more artful and more cultivated as the years and titles have gone by. Even by his next game, Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake, he shows himself much more capable of weaving an outlandish plot with credible, real-world consequences such as worldwide energy crises, civil wars and rogue nuclear states that looks forward to the in-depth, sometimes anally retentive verisimilitude of the MGS series. If it took Kojima until those titles to get the art of game design that right, it shouldn’t surprise anyone, even those obsessed by his adventure games, and here’s why:

Snatcher, unlike Metal Gear, is not a game.

What is it? It’s a game’s skeleton. Snatcher shows us the structure of an excellent game, the design for stimulating activities, but only makes it just playable enough to get the general idea. It’s an interactive design doc, and playing through it feels pretty much the same as reading an annotated Star Wars screenplay illustrated by production paintings and storyboards. Just in the same way that a Snatcher itself looks human, but isn’t, Snatcher bears the trappings of a game without succeeding as a game itself, primarily because it lacks risk. Like I said last time, all it would need to succeed as an adventure title would be the same kind of time-limit that the Carmen San Diego series used before it, forcing the player to race through each decision tree or risk losing and having to start over from scratch. However, I’m not confident that Kojima was or is all that interested in making adventure games to begin with, at least not for their own sake as games themselves. While he’s molded his games to incorporate adventure-like elements throughout his career (I’m almost convinced now that his “Check the Instruction Manual/Game Box For Clues” shenanigans comes from Broderbund packing the U.S. Almanac with copies of Carmen San Diego), the focus of Snatcher itself isn’t so much in the decisions the player makes themselves, but rather the presentations of story that those decisions trigger.

Here, one can see the beginning of his infamous use of cut-scenes, rather than gameplay, to drive the player along. Unfortunately, one doesn’t even have the continual momentum provided by Metal Gear‘s hide-and-seek mechanics in this game, which only challenges the player with occasional bouts of writer’s block and shooting galleries to break the tedium of what is mostly an experience of standing in as an eye-witness, rather than an active participant. Still, this does not mean that Kojima’s left entirely without any tricks up his sleeve, which I was almost afraid he might’ve been by the end of this game. Instead, thankfully, I wound up being caught by what might stand as a classic example of the gameplay dramatization of a twist-ending, backed up by a refreshing dose of foreshadowing.

See, early in the game, Gillian is introduced a practice range at Junker HQ, where rookie cops are meant to hone their skills with the blaster. What it amounts to is the equivalent of one of those old NES-era shooting gallery games, with the player having to quickly distinguish between good targets and bad targets– Snatchers and innocent civilians. Now, even though I could clearly recognize almost exactly where this sequence was coming from, I couldn’t help but be struck by how well it fit into the narrative of the game, challenging gamers to seek out the cyborgs posing as ordinary humans without harming the ordinary humans you’re sworn to protect. From that point, I firmly expected there’d be a point in the game where you’d have to pull out your gun and quickly fire at the Snatchers, while not accidentally hitting any average citizens of Neo-Kobe, and while at certain points the game came close, it never quite stood up to what I’d assumed would be the best usage of this gameplay element.

Instead of having to seek out crowds of people for the one person with glowing eyes or torn skin revealing cyborg internals, for example, most of the time your only targets were the Snatchers or spider-bots themselves, which basically turned the shooting portions into a game of Whack-a-Mole. The nearest it ever came, early on, was having to carefully fire at Snatchers around a tied-up damsel in distress, which isn’t that challenging considering she always stays in the same place. What could’ve been a careful game of detection and split-second reaction merely stood as a series of split-second reaction, which proved especially unnerving during certain portions of the game, considering I was playing something built for a light-gun or a gamepad, rather than the keyboard.

Things became more interesting, however, towards the end, when I realized how one could replicate both experiences– the MSX/PC and Sega-CD controls– based solely on how I played through the shooting gallery segments. See, before I was going through these bits by aiming first and shooting second, which is pretty much how you learn to do it in the practice sessions. While this is fine when you’re just training your skills at Junker HQ, it becomes increasingly dangerous as you face enemies that can fire back at you, making it especially risky to waste time aiming while all the baddies are already putting you at the unhealthy end of a firing squad. I can’t tell you how many lives I lost in hallways like this one until it hit me– I was playing an MSX/PC game with controls redone for the Sega-CD emulated on a PC, which meant I was playing it wrong in any number of ways. In the first place, I decided to check how you were supposed to play the shooting portions in the MSX/PC versions, which turned out to be a great deal simpler– holding “Shift” and aiming/firing at the same time with the number pad to fire in nine directions. Not only was this something that would’ve cut down on the time I was wasting in firefights, but it was also a method of play I could replicate closely by adopting a method learned in the second place, which was asking myself how I would’ve played through these sections on a console with a game-pad in my hand.

The answer? Pressing the “Fire” button as rapidly and manically as possible, while pointing the cross-hair in the right direction to keep bad guys away. Pulling the trigger before aiming. Shooting first and asking questions later. When I approached the game’s shooting galleries like this, I found that they resembled the torture sequences from the MGS games, where Kojima forced players to rapidly press buttons in order to resist death and refuse submission to the enemy, the consequences of which meant death for Snake’s love interest. Here, at the very end, a moment very much like this popped up which wound up incorporating the game of detection-and-reaction I’d anticipated before while at the same time coming up with a disastrously haunting consequence for the “shoot first” policy.

Here’s what happens– after blasting your way through the last wave of Snatcher attacks, one last door in their Soviet-themed secret base opens up , revealing one last shadowy figure standing in the way. If you’ve been adopting the “Fire first, aim and check target second” method vital to survival throughout the game, you’ll simply shoot this figure quickly, without so much as a second thought. But if you do that, of course, you’ll only discover that the person waiting in the shadows was…

…Jamie Seed, Gillian’s fellow amnesiac wife and the obligatory love-interest of the game! Now, this impressed me, because it was the first time in the game, or any adventure game I’ve played, come to think of it, where the player’s actions deliberately brought about a bad ending, instead of merely failing to react in the right way. This was a clear fork in the road built with the game’s combat, preparing the player for nothing but shoot-em-up encounters while keeping the practice-range foreshadowing carefully waiting in the wings. If Snatcher deserves its reputation as crucial part of Kojima’s oeuvre then this is the moment which earns it, even more than the cutesy “Find a House!” puzzle, as it fully incorporates an expressive moment in mechanics, structured around that most fundamental aspect of game design– the trap. In essence, it’s very much the same as Big Boss’ betrayal in Metal Gear, feeding the player sabotage orders over the radio, or the seeming hopelessness of Metal Gear 2’s makeshift flamethrower puzzle or MGS3‘s face-off with The Sorrow, as it does its best to trick the player using fundamental tools of gameplay itself, rather than merely placing ordinary obstacles or enemies in their path. What’s more, after you’ve seen the repercussions of shooting first and asking questions later in the game’s narrative, this statement is effectively backed up by the game itself, as it’s followed by the predictable…

…except something’s different this time. You can’t continue. Sure, you can probably restart the game from a saved file (though I can’t vouch for that, as the emulator’s save state is tricky at best), but if you haven’t saved up to that point, good luck. This is a pretty nice demonstration of an idea Kojima’s wanted to incorporate into his games for a long time now, which is the continue-less game (to read more on that, check out this review by Tim Rogers on MGS3.) As a potential “bad ending,” it stands as quite a bit more affecting than does the possible death of Meryl in MGS, partly because in Snatcher, the game doesn’t continue. The last obstacle isn’t a grand political challenge, but a personal one, the one you should’ve learned to tackle right at the beginning, learning to tell a Snatcher from an ordinary person. In that regard, the game leaves its most important lesson for last, making it a great game of lesson-learning. After you know not to blindly shoot when innocent people could be standing in the way to become collateral damage, you genuinely feel as though you’ve earned the ending of becoming a full-fledged Junker. Snatcher may only amount to an interactive design doc, but damned if those moments at which it’s most interactive don’t just about outshine half of the games I wasted my time on in younger days. If only Kojima could finally build more elements of danger and risk, like this one does, then it wouldn’t just be a mere cult-classic anymore, but a masterpiece.

In the end, Snatcher is where Kojima learned a lot of his lessons in storytelling, and it’s a pretty good thing he took his time here to get it as right as he could, time and technology considering. One finds themselves watching a bit more than they’d like and not actually playing anywhere near enough, but the story’s actually worth watching, for an adventure game you play just about all you can stand and by the time he got to telling a story as big as this again he’d pretty much figured out how to pace both the narrative and gameplay, as well. I recommend this as a title fundamental to anyone hoping to understand more of how Kojima’s aesthetic, narrative and mechanical obsessions work, and to anyone else looking for a decent couple of weeks worth of emulated 80’s/90’s nostalgia. It’s bound to interest fans of cyberpunk and Cold War science fiction alike, and anyone aching to hear Konami music from before the age of fully recorded orchestras is in for a muzak-lover’s treat. The Sega-CD rom/iso files and a compatible emulator are easy enough to find, but anything else, like the uncensored CD-ROMantic version, will likely be a bit trickier. Besides, if you don’t get the Sega-CD version, you’ll miss out on seeing Metal Gear Mk.II turned into this:

I can only hope that in the original this was an MSX or a PC of some sort. Otherwise, let’s tip our hats to fellows like Jeremy Blaustein for a classically Kojimian gaming reference like this and call it a night. When next we meet I’ll finally make good on my Psychonauts promise, and maybe let open another one of my one-time rants, as well. Until then, pleasant dreamers, sleep well and enjoy a serving of buffalo meat on the house.