"We were thinking about what game we wanted to do next, and we knew we wanted it to have strong characters and strong relationships," says Ninja Theory's Nina Christiansen of where Enslaved was born. "And we remembered Monkey: Journey to the West which we watched as a TV series in the 70s; [aka] Monkey Magic, and I'd read the book and our creative director had read the book and you know, the story is great; it's really, really rich - the world is complex yet cohesive; logical even though it's fantastical and the characters are great - they're relationships and the dynamics of their relationships are just awesome, and it's mischievous and fun and so we thought that would be a good place to source our inspiration."



If you're unaware, Ninja Theory were responsible for Heavenly Sword - a launch title for the PS3 that borrowed heavily from God of War, but stood out through great characterisation. It helped that the game's cut-scenes and dialogue were directed by Andy Serkis (he played Golem in Peter Jackon's Lord of the Rings trilogy), who also played a starring role as the lead bad guy. Thankfully he's back for the team's new project as well.

"But we wanted to stay grounded," she continues. "So we decided to set it in a post-apocalyptic world. Instead of magic, we have technology and instead of demons we have robots."

At first glance you could be forgiven for thinking Enslaved is anything but post-apocalyptic. It's by far one of the most colourful games I've seen, with not even a tinge of grey in sight. There's no immediate deserts either, in fact your stomping ground (or at least, the stomping ground we currently know of), is a tattered and torn New York city; a sprawling metropolis overrun by nature, now devoid of human life due to some catastrophic event.

"There's no reason a post-apocalyptic world should be grey or brown," Nina explains of the game's setting, colour and tone. "If you think about what would really happen, nature would come back and reclaim it, and it should be lush and beautiful. And we really liked the juxtaposition of this beautiful, lush environment that's deadly. So we envisaged after swine flu had wiped us out and climate change had flooded our cities and wars had broken out there'd be the rise of mechanised warfare and people would start to become irrelevant and the machines would still be there, and all they know is fighting and killing."



What's interesting is that Nina tells me there's essentially no human opposition in your journey, it's all robots.

"They're kind of like landmines," she says. "They're there, and they're horrific but if you don't interact with them, nothing happens."

Getting some hands-on time with Enslaved, I can tell you the game is quite responsive, and given the male protagonist is modelled off the Monkey god in their source material; you can bet he's nimble, strong and quick. To this end, Enslaved also offers something unique to the post-apocalyptic landscape - vertical gameplay.

Monkey can climb various objects, but it's not like Assassin's Creed - most of the game is directed and linear in its vertical progression, but equally satisfying as a result. I also learnt very early on in the game there are hard-fail situations that present themselves, despite everything being more directed. In this sense, the game is a little bit like Uncharted and inFamous. It does, however, differentiate itself in the combat department, which was one of the team's strengths with Heavenly Sword, and again, it's a very satisfying element to the overall gameplay tool-set on offer here.



Monkey has a staff he can use, and a light and heavy attack. You string combos together using these, and certain enemies will require you to utilise your different attacks in varying order, so it's not just a button-mashing affair. And naturally, as you progress through the game you'll acquire new abilities, weapons and even modes of transport (he has a device he can ride, similar to Monkey's magic cloud).

"As you progress through [the game], you encounter scenarios that are pretty dangerous," Nina tells me of the game's enemies and impediments. "And what you have to do is work out how you're going to get through it. So you can wail in there with your melee fighting and so on; that's a choice, but it starts to become very, very dangerous to do that because as you progress through you'll start to encounter different enemy-types and it can become quite complex when, you know, you've got an enemy who is shielded mixed in with an enemy who is extremely aggressive and another enemy who has a ranged attack, so you need to know how to deal with that."

It's a good thing then that, despite having his 'cloud', 'staff' and Monkey-like abilities, our protagonist also has Trip, his female sidekick who he's intrinsically linked to through a headband. What's cool about the headband as well is that it also acts as a contextual HUD; offering a narrative-specific reason for having information on-screen and in your periphery.

"There are some parts of the game where she [Trip] isn't with you," Nina explains of the Trip and Monkey relationship. "But for the majority of the game she is there, and actually when she's not with you, it's quite scary. Because she is helpful and we put a lot of effort into making her a character you want to have around. She really enhances your experience."



The other really amazing thing about these characters beyond a gameplay perspective is that they have an incredible on-screen relationship that is very, very human in its portrayal. It's an element not too many games do very well yet, but it was arguably the strongest part of Heavenly Sword, so it's great to see such strong characters back for Enslaved.

"She should never get in your way," Nina responds when I ask what sort of levels of interaction we can expect from Trip's AI. "She should always be helpful, and she should always be smart. She'll never just run into the line of fire or anything like that and she'll operate intelligently, and if she's under threat, she'll try and escape - though she does have a last line of defence with an EMP so she can temporarily stun the enemy so you can get in there and save her and take care of them. But yeah, she should absolutely never be annoying; she should always be super helpful."

She also has red hair, which is fast becoming the Ninja Theory staple. But two games in, and they've definitely set themselves a benchmark in how they tell a story and present characters, it's by far their strongest element, which is something Nina definitely agrees with.

"The story is pretty deep," she tells me. "We had Alex Garland who wrote The Beach and 28 Days Later and Sunshine come in and write for us. So the story is a good, proper story with some really nice twists in it. Yeah, quite a cool ending I think."

It also helps having someone like Serkis directing your virtual players.



"It is crucially important," explains Nina of keeping their characters as human and accessible as possible. "And I think having a writer of Alex Garland's calibre helps us enormously with that because, you know, dialogue 'blah, blah, blah', you listen to it and maybe you listen properly, and maybe you don't but when you look at someone who really feels something, it reads so much more. So Alex was really good at minimalist dialogue with maximum impact and so we took that the whole way through. And then having actors of Andy's calibre means we're getting a performance that is very real. And I can attest to that, because I was on-set for part of the shoot and for some reason I'd stepped out, but when I came back in and sat down, I looked up and saw Lindsey, who's the actress who plays Trip, and I thought 'My God what's happened?' because she was so upset and you know, part of my job is to make sure everyone's happy and okay and so I got up to go over to her and they yelled "action", so she was just getting in character - the performance is very, very real."

Unfortunately my time with the game was pretty short, and Nina told me that the game was just about to open up for me when I had to stop playing, but at this point I'm pretty much sold. There's a lot of talent involved in the game, and while it's not nearly up to visual scratch in comparison to Heavenly Sword (they dumped their old engine and just worked off Unreal for Enslaved), the characters are immediately magnetic and powerful, while the source material as a whole (and having Alex Garland on board) is really an amazing place to draw from, and has itself been retold in many successful forms because of its basic foundations.

They created a whole robot ecology as well as a fully realised decimated and overgrown New York for the game, which so far looks to work directly in its favour, and the small time I had with combat and clambering vertically was intuitive and satisfying. I'm just hoping the game doesn't hold your hand too much and that we get to see Pigsy and Sandy (actually, you do come across Pigsy, no word on Sandy yet).

Enslaved is due to release next month on PS3 and Xbox 360 (no plans for PC Nina tells me), and you can check out more from it on our locally hosted game page.