Achilles: Legends Untold had the right idea. Developed by Dark Point Games, it followed Achilles through some of his famed adventures, and a few imagined ones too. Achilles makes sense as a computer game protagonist. You want to be him. His prowess with the blade ports pretty directly into an action-RPG. And he’s got that downside that makes for an interesting negative to manage. How am I going to hide that ankle from a giant scorpion?
On the flip-side, if you were to ask us which character from Greek myth would make the worst video game protagonist, we’d have picked Sisyphus. He was the founder of Corinth who got shackled to a rock, and was forced to push it up a hill for all eternity. He’s no hero. Pushing a rock for eternity sounds like the opposite of fun. There are absolutely no upsides to playing as Sisyphus.
Heavy Burden lets you play as, you may have guessed, Sisyphus. It immediately casts aside the stuff that might have been interesting – the founding of a city, the tyranny, the lies – and skips straight to the rock-pushing stuff. Sisyphus has been cursed by the gods, and he’s got a giant brick to lug up a mountain.
To give Heavy Burden credit, it’s got some artistic ambitions. The test it uses is Albert Camus’ philosophical treatise ‘The Myth of Sisyphus’. That essay used Sisyphus to explore the nature of self-reflection, adversity and when to fight or give up. And that comes through in the gameplay of Heavy Burden. Not only are we given little text snatches from the essay, but the myth of Sisyphus is nudged into alternate directions. He takes different paths, is confronted with his past, and loops through different levels rather than the same mountain. This is more of a philosophy lesson than a true Sisyphus retelling.
It’s an experience that you would have to pay us cold, hard cash to experience again. We’ve played worse games this year, but – by golly – this is the one that tested our patience the most. We really did feel like we were getting a Sisyphian punishment of our own.
Let’s tick off all the reasons you should avoid Heavy Burden like a plague. Even without a brick in our hands, Heavy Burden would have been a mess. There’s a reason that first-person games don’t often do platforming, and you’d only need to play this game to understand why. Knowing where your feet are in relation to the platform is a guessing game, and longer, precise jumps become a little bit of trial and error. Some first-person games get round this by letting you look down at your feet while you jump, so you can at least judge when you’re best leaping. But no, Heavy Burden is having none of that. Look down and you’re jumping down.
But of course you’re doing this with a sodding breezeblock in your hands. Ask a gamer what the worst kinds of missions are in games, and nine out of ten times they will say ‘escort missions’. Heavy Burden is an escort game, and what you’re escorting is a rock.
On the default setting of Heavy Burden, if you drop the rock into a chasm or, more likely, fall into a chasm while holding the rock, then you are returned to Chapter Four of Nine. That’s right: should you fail to make a single jump, you are reset to the chapter where you first gained the rock. It’s to ‘preserve the originality of Heavy Burden’, says the menu. Which is a fine way of saying that it’s something that no other game would be foolish enough to do. You can see why developers Whale Rock Games are attempting it – it’s very Sisyphian to have to return to the start – but it’s the most anti-fun mechanic we’ve encountered all year.
You can change the setting, praise be. It took us four or five deaths to discover that we could, notching it down to ‘Story Mode’. Please, please, please: we would advise you to do the same. There is absolutely zero benefit to leaving it on. If you had to pay us cold hard cash to play Heavy Burden, you’d have to quadruple that number to play it on this default mode.
Even then, there are still countless issues with a game-long escort mission where the escort has to be carried. For one, the rock is massive. Carrying it blots out the game screen like a stony eclipse. You can’t see where you’re going. The only solution is to drop it to the floor and try to carry it in such a way that only half the screen is obscured. We got used to picking it up from the lowest side, so that it covered the top half of the screen.
You’ll need to keep it high, as the block is a physical item that can trip you up and block you from making jumps. Suddenly, it makes Heavy Burden feel like a platformer where you’re carrying a dead body, constantly shifting it so that you’re not undermined at the wrong moment.
To ensure that you’re, without a doubt, 100% frustrated, Heavy Burden then chucks in a stamina system. If you hold the rock for too long, you start rocking wearily backwards and forwards, making it likely that you will fall off. So, you have to drop the rock down, regardless of whether the path is thin or rocks are slamming down in front of you. Then you’re trying to juggle it into a position where it’s not obscuring your view again, and start all over.
Remove all these flaws and there still wouldn’t be a good game remaining. We had a little chuckle at a ‘Put headphones on for the best experience’ notification, as Heavy Burden has some of the worst audio we’ve heard for a while. It’s just not edited properly: audio snippets get cut off prematurely, and there are pops and glitches in the soundtrack that clearly shouldn’t be there. We had a game-long bug where the player’s heartbeat was always playing. Headphones on indeed.
Heavy Burden should have been saved by its message, or at least its story. But it’s a broken mosaic, a series of snippets cut out from Camus’s prose and rearranged in an order that doesn’t make much sense. Replicating the words and themes of Sisyphus and Camus isn’t enough to be poignant. It needs to match the gameplay more than it does here, and leave the player feeling something. Mostly we were just narked about our stone companion. It’s like the evil-twin of Portal’s Companion Cube.
We implore you: read the myth of Sisyphus or snuggle up with the works of Camus instead. Heavy Burden is no way to brush up on either. It’s a mashup of some of the things we hate most in games – escort missions, first-person platforming and cruel failure states – with a half-hearted gesture towards philosophy.
Praise Zeus that we only had to push this rock up the mountain once.
