The Surge: An old-school Souls-like

After finishing up Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 a while back, I experienced an inexplicable urge to play a game in the style of Dark Souls, ideally one that was already in my backlog. And that’s how I wound up sinking 30 hours into The Surge, an action RPG from 2017.

The game received so-so reviews at the time, the knock being that it didn’t do much with the Dark Souls formula beyond transporting it to an industrial sci-fi setting. I quickly lost interest during my first crack at it some years ago, but was always intrigued by the setup: Your character, in a wheelchair, takes a job with a megacorp in exchange for a cybernetic exoskeleton, all while a slick spokesman preaches from TV screens about the virtues of a company that provides everything. Then some event turns most of the other cyborgs into crazed killing machines, and you’re stuck figuring out how why.

I can see the argument for The Surge being a lesser version of Dark Souls, but I also appreciated it as a throwback to the mid-2010s, when the series was still singular and not yet an entire genre. Playing it felt a lot like playing those early Souls games, before everyone figured out how to smooth out the rough spots.

Let’s start with the difficulty: The Surge is about as indifferent to your progress as the original Demon’s Souls, where you’d spend hours hitting the same walls with nothing to show for it but lived experience. In the game’s second area alone, I must’ve died at least a few dozen times at the hands of basic enemies, until I took it upon myself to look up some combat strategies online. (The slide attack is a life-saver; I’m not sure the game ever explained it.)

Given the time sink, I was relieved to learn that The Surge is fairly compact, with only six main areas and five major bosses between them. Instead of sprawling out, the game seemed to delight in looping its levels back upon themselves. The shortcut system is so extensive that each area has but a single med bay for restoring health and cashing inexperience points. Later Souls games got away from this convention in favor of frictionless fast travel, and some sense of place was lost as a result. I loved this element of The Surge, even if the areas themselves lean too heavily on the same types of industrial corridors.

Eventually the difficulty becomes less pronounced, as you get into the game’s groove and seize upon some repeatable strategies. (In my case, that was to ply myself with enough stamina and armor to hide behind the block button while waiting to counterattack.) From an action standpoint, I was ready to be done with The Surge before it was done with me.

What kept me going, though, was the vibe. The Surge is as bleak and oppressive as any From Software creation, but with a tinge of cynicism aimed at the megacorp that designates itself as the world’s savior. The parallels to today’s tech giants are clear, especially in the preening of the aforementioned spokesman, Don Hackett, whose motion capture guy must’ve spent hours learning tech CEO mannerisms. The resemblance between his video broadcasts and a Tim Cook or Sundar Pichai keynote is at times uncanny.

The “techlash” was only just getting underway when The Surge arrived in 2017, so the commentary was prescient for its time and feels fresh even now. After promising to fix the world’s problems with technology, The Surge‘s Creo corporation winds up making things much worse. There’s some grim satisfaction in seeing its executives get their comeuppance at the hands of their creations.

Not that it’s any comfort to The Surge‘s characters. Through found audio notes, environmental cues, and the occasional direct encounter, the game has a haunting way of weaving various personal plotlines into the story. Seeing them through to their tragic ends is one of the The Surge‘s high marks.

As a tech journalist I naturally gravitated toward the story of Hackett, whose subtle stutters and stammers in the game’s later videocasts hint at a growing discomfort with playing the company shill. We eventually learn that he was once an award-winning journalist, who switched over to corporate PR to better provide for his family. This tends to work out handsomely for the PR people I know in real life; not so much for Hackett.

For me, all of this helps elevate The Surge into that rare category of “flawed video game with heart.” The combat can be a bit janky at times, the environments start blending together, and the strategy of drawing out one enemy at a time for a fair fight can become a chore.

And yet, I kept coming back, crawling through its corridors for every last plot point, eagerly seeing the game through to its final battle, and generally enjoying a kind of Souls-like that they just don’t make anymore.