Stealth Inc: A Clone in the Dark, otherwise known as Stealth Bastard is a puzzle game cleverly disguised as a stealth platformer, developed and published by Curve Studios. From its onset, the game puts forward a fairly original aesthetic with notable and cute but appropriately minute nods to properties like Splinter Cell, Despicable Me, Spy vs. Spy, Metal Gear Solid, and Portal. From the latter of these it borrows heavily: the levels are all framed as tests, and any narrative content that gets put forward is done so by means of an unseen narrator that provides advice, helpful criticism, and ridicule with just a hint of genuine condescension and contempt, veiled with courtesy and genuine help. I’ll admit that part of me wants to slam Stealth Inc for what seems like ripping off Portal, but the execution of the narrator as text that cleverly and unobtrusively appears and disappears on cue works in tandem with the clever balance of advice and scorn to create a sufficiently original setup.
Hiding in Plain Sight
The player is put forward as a clone, or more accurately a long, long series of identical clones that share the same pallid complexion and multicolored glowing goggles. In this guise, you’ll go from level to level flipping switches, arranging blocks, tripping motion sensors and avoiding turrets, saw-blades, death by crushing, death lasers, robots with death lasers, flying robots with death lasers, and gigantic, seemingly omnipresent and omniscient turret robots with death lasers. All of these will not hesitate to kill you for the slightest mistake.
Stealth Inc’s gameplay consists mostly of the aforementioned elements, but these elements rely heavily on what may be the most brilliant, effective and comprehensible lighting system. Lights come in at specific angles that are very clear and easy to understand, and light itself, or at least how visible or invisible it makes the player, figures importantly into the gameplay. Here, there were two design decisions that I specifically appreciated.
The first is that the player’s visibility or invisibility is always indicated clearly, both by the colors of the player’s goggles and by unobtrusive, similarly colored text at the bottom of the screen. With such a strong emphasis on the use of light and darkness as a game mechanic, it’s wonderfully convenient that your visibility or lack thereof is clear during every single moment of gameplay.
The second and related matter that I appreciated is that the “not visible” status, when the player is cloaked in darkness, genuinely means not visible. So long as the player is not visible, the most intimidating, terrifying death-laser-wielding robot in the game really cannot see the player. This may seem like something of a given, but when so many other games make detection so easy, this is refreshing. I can’t think of anything that I’ve hated more than times playing games like Skyrim or Far Cry 3 when I was concealed by 18 trees, darkness, and all the special, sneaky, stealthy abilities in the world could not save me from being detected by a blind, deaf enemy 18 miles away. Good job, Curve Studios, I appreciate it when “hidden” really means hidden and not “precariously placed in such a way that as long as you don’t twitch your left pinky you may have a chance at possibly remaining hidden”. But I digress.
My biggest impression from Stealth Inc is the game’s difficulty, which is simultaneously its best and its worst aspect. There is one way to solve more or less every puzzle in this game. Curve has foreseen every single shortcut that you think you may have found, and they have closed them off with a quick death and a respawn until you do what they want you to do. At times, this difficulty is so blindingly infuriating that it seems wise to buy some insurance for your TV, lest it experience a sudden, devastating invasion of molded plastic and joysticks, but the solution is always there, and as is the case in all good puzzle games, figuring it out is always either a matter of seeing things the right way or just getting the execution right. And make no mistake, you will get the execution right, or you will die trying, again and again and again.
It’s refreshing in that sense to play a game that’s so unforgiving. The narrator may provide the occasional piece of helpful advice, but this is not a game to hold your hand and lead you along, because Stealth Inc realizes, it seems, that overcoming the difficult challenges it presents is half the fun of playing a game.
Similarly, it’s refreshing to play a game that’s so unapologetically linear. In a market crowded by games like Far Cry 3, Skyrim, Deus Ex: Human Revolution, Grand Theft Auto and many, many more where half of the game’s emphasis is on giving the player 18 ways to solve 1 problem that wasn’t too difficult to begin with, it’s nice to see that Stealth Inc is unabashed in presenting 1 difficult problem that can only be solved 1 way.
But...
That being said, at times the difficulty does seem to be unreasonable. There are some puzzles where what you need to do is clear, but actually managing to do it is half impossible, and the difficulty can be a bit uneven at times. Some levels may take as long as 10 minutes from sheer difficulty, and they may be followed by a level that can easily be finished in a minute or two.
Normally, this is where I’d talk about a game’s story and how it worked into the game as a whole, but unfortunately there’s not really a narrative to talk about here. There’s a setup, you’re a clone in a testing facility, and the narrator does provide some banter and some character to the setting, along with a few 2-paragraph company memos that serve as the only reward for completing a series of levels, but there’s not a narrative.
I want to be clear here: I’m not saying that every game has to be A Song of Ice and Fire, but given the punishing, unforgiving difficulty of the game, it would’ve been nice if there was some semblance of motivation in the gameplay, some story to entice you through the more preposterously unforgiving segments. That’s not too much to ask, and the absence of any such motivation a serious detriment to Stealth Inc.
Two more issues come in tandem, the visual presentation and the sound design. Neither of these are outright bad, I’ve already discussed the merits of the visual design, how it cleverly borrows from multiple sources to craft a distinct vision of itself. However, after something like 20 levels, the sameness of the visual palette becomes boring. As the gameplay becomes more advanced, adding mechanics and features and challenges, it seems like the visuals just kind of sit there, and you end up staring at the same groupings of black panels with silver, green and purple backgrounds.
Similarly, the sound design is boring. As I said before, it’s not outright bad, but the tracks that serve as a background are boring to start with, and since there aren’t that many of them, they get even more boring a few hours into the game.
Finally, I feel I need to address just how close Stealth Inc comes to ripping off Portal. Let’s just list a couple of features the games have in common, for emphasis.
- a silent protagonist with a distinctive appearance
- a bleak, empty setting
- which is framed as a series of tests
- a sly, vaguely stoic but humorous and condescending narrator
- with a distinct knowledge of the puzzles
- who comments on your progress
- sarcastically praising you
- and making fun of your failures
- a pinkish block which comes close to being a character, the design of which remains distinctive and consistent throughout the game, which you must utilize in gameplay, which comes to be something of a companion throughout the game.
Again, I wouldn't accuse Stealth Inc of quite ripping off Portal, but it comes dangerously close to doing just that, and it’s telling that (gameplay aside) you could almost say that Stealth Inc has more in common with Portal than Portal 2 does. Not saying it’s bad, after all Portal was fantastic, but there are certainly no points for originality here.
The Verdict: Thumbs Up
I’ll be frank, there’s a lot of me that distinctly wants to dislike this game. I don’t think it’s really a stealth game, for all of its trappings, and I think the boring sound design, repetitive aesthetic, lack of a narrative and mimicry of Portal are very real and very serious detriments to the game. Similarly, at times the difficulty does seem genuinely unreasonable, and some moments are so preposterously infuriating that I was ready to delete the game entirely.
Nonetheless, there’s a lot to love here, and the things that Stealth Inc gets right, it knocks out of the park. There were times when I was playing this that I was reminded of Ocarina of Time, and it’s been quite a long time since I've had that feeling. So much of the good here runs contrary to trends in modern gaming in the best way possible, and however frustrating it may be to play this game, it’s still refreshing to do so.
In the end, I feel like this game is so close to being great, and a few simple changes could’ve made it so. Maybe if it took a cue from the SNES era it so clearly loves and had something like levels in an arboretum, and aquarium, a forge and a freezer, just to provide some visual variety, and a story to go with it, I could go all the way here, but for now I’ll say that this is just plain good, and if it’s the kind of thing you tend to like, give it a try.
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