I adore the premise of DoubleWe: you’re given a randomised appearance, dumped in a cramped sci-fi shithole full of dodgy-looking NPCs, and forced to find kill your identical clone before he can emerge from the crowd and shank you first. There’s a demo for Steam Next Fest, and it’s provoked in me some of the most pulse-quickening paranoia since the days of DayZ.
ID’ing the clone is, despite the ruffian density, usually the easy part. You have a mirror on you at all times, and the Evil You typically prefers to bide their time and blend in instead of rushing straight for the kill, so you have a few moments to memorise your doppelganger. Still, that window is better spent scrounging up a flimsy knife or one-shot pistol from weapon stashes. Rather than wrapping you in a comfort blanket of justifiable self-defence violence, however, arming yourself only serves to up the tension further.
Opening the stashes is agonisingly slow – my very first death came when the clone took advantage of my apparent difficulties with operating a briefcase – and the weapons themselves force you into close-range, all-or-nothing confrontations with an opponent who’s far less likely to miss their swing. Add in the general unease of how readily the clustered NPCs will stop to stare at you, plus the knowledge that DoubleWe’s roguelite structure means failure will send you back to the start of a chapter, and each round becomes a deliciously mistrustful slice of shortform suspense. Even taking the time to stalk your own stalker at the beginning doesn’t help much, as stopping to grab a weapon is more than enough time for them to melt back into the throng, or to lurk behind the corners of a chokepoint. I ain’t walking though that doorway, man. The other me might be in there.
That’s just the earliest encounters, too. After a few successful slayings, any hopes of settling down into more relaxed clone deathmatches are dashed by devious raisings of the stakes. First, officers are introduced to baton you senseless if they see you gearing up an attack, forcing you to either strike more swiftly or coax your pursuer into a quieter corner. Then, an anonymous assassin is dispatched to actively hunt you from the start, laying on even more pressure (and, if you decide to fight back, depleting your weapon uses) while forcing you to scan every single one of these blockheaded creeps for a telltale blade. I remain both intrigued and perturbed by the more overtly horror-flavoured antagonist variants that the final game will feature, including clones that explode into raging, Resident Evil 4-style meat yuccas, though such monstrosities would be in keeping with DoubleWe’s taste for escalating threats.
I only rarely enjoy being scared in games, but I do crave a more sustained, eerie flavour of tension – it’s what made creeping through Chernogorsk, praying its snipers were watching elsewhere, such an electric thrill. DoubleWe manages to recreate and intensify that feeling in compact, minute-and-a-half bursts, and I’d dearly like to string myself out on more of them.
function appendFacebookPixels() {
if (window.facebookPixelsDone) return;
!function(f,b,e,v,n,t,s)
{if(f.fbq)return;n=f.fbq=function(){n.callMethod?
n.callMethod.apply(n,arguments):n.queue.push(arguments)};
if(!f._fbq)f._fbq=n;n.push=n;n.loaded=!0;n.version=’2.0′;
n.queue=[];t=b.createElement(e);t.async=!0;
t.src=v;s=b.getElementsByTagName(e)[0];
s.parentNode.insertBefore(t,s)}(window, document,’script’,
‘https://connect.facebook.net/en_US/fbevents.js’);
fbq(‘init’, ‘700623604017080’);
fbq(‘track’, ‘PageView’);
window.facebookPixelsDone = true;
window.dispatchEvent(new Event(‘BrockmanFacebookPixelsEnabled’));
}
window.addEventListener(‘BrockmanTargetingCookiesAllowed’, appendFacebookPixels);