Bedlam: The Game by Christopher Brookmyre
Top Critic Average
Critics Recommend
Critic Reviews for Bedlam: The Game by Christopher Brookmyre
An ambitious and fascinating wander through gaming's history, but one that can't replicate the addictive gameplay of the forefathers it documents.
It's repetitive in its continuous swarms of enemies, challenging in the constant flurry of bullets headed your way and ends up sapping most of the potential fun out of itself. Bedlam may suit your needs if all you need is a trip down FPS memory lane, but you're better off seeking any number of similar titles which actually offer compelling gameplay.
A faux-retro shooter with an irreverent sense of humour, Bedlam is hard to recommend as anything other than a curio, despite its popular source material.
Bedlam: The Game isn't particularly well made, nor much fun to play, but it is interesting. I've played far better games that I'll remember less.
The difficulty is never so punishing that you feel like you can't improve, and playthroughs can be short enough that you are never too far from just restarting a run fresh in order to succeed where previously you failed. The lore is shallow yet entertaining and battles infrequently unfair, but I keep finding myself wanting to play just one more run to see if I can perform better than last time on my way towards utopia.
I genuinely did have some great laughs, and there are worse ways to kill an afternoon, but ironically Bedlam falls prey to many of the same issues of the games it apes.
In the end Bedlam has an interesting premise at its core and dialogue that will amuse for a while, but it gets same-y very quickly in each environment. Perhaps if the game started more quickly and had you hopping genres a little earlier in the game, it wouldn't outstay its welcome quite so quickly. As it is, it can only really be recommended if the genre-hopping idea has you weak at the knees.
Bedlam is undeniably an enjoyable kick for those who grew up in the '80s and '90s, surely drawing from personal experiences with the games it's emulating. The eccentricities found in Brookmyre's writing may work to alienate those merely passing through, but for those drawn in by the familiarity of its charming block graphics it'll simply be an added bonus. If you're still missing the days of dial-up LAN games of Quake then this is well worth a look, but if you have no idea what that first sentence meant, well you're probably better off giving it a miss altogether.
