Remit: Kernel (2015 video game)
Remit: Kernel was a third-person shooter video game on PC, WhyBox 720, and PayStation 4. The game was published in 2015 by Camden Games, a Themiclesian entertainment company, under the Remit franchise, and developed between 2009 and 2015 by Refraction Studio, with assistance from Attic Games, its parent company. Visual assets were subcontracted to numerous other operations, and music was composed by S. C. Gore and performed by the Radio Symphonic Orchestra of Themiclesia. The plot was written collaboratively by the Remit Committee, a division of Camden Games.
The game is set in 2067, when most advanced states have implemented augmentations to their soldiers to increase their effectiveness. The plot of the game revolves around the recovery and protection of computer code (the eponymous "kernel") necessary for augmentations in Themiclesian soldiers, from an unidentified enemy country. In-game, the player assumes the role of an unaugmented soldier and must play against augmented enemies, as Themiclesia's code base and the augmented soldiers that rely upon it have been compromised. The game includes ground, aerial, and space combat, and the player may play the game as an individual or control a group of CPU-controlled soldiers at the same time.
The game contains sudden departures from the plotline due to allies' unpredictable actions, attributed to the compromised "kernel", which range from neutral to highly dangerous. These are classified into three tiers of difficulty and can be adjusted to a fixed number per game or occur at random. The player is encouraged to develop feelings for the augmented soldiers, even though he may need to kill them at some point in the future; however, killing allies to stave off negative bursts makes them unavailable and results first in poor morale then increased "entropy", which can lead to suicide, delusion, panic, and game over. Per the tradition of the Remit franchise, the character is given a five-year holiday upon reaching the good ending, implying that the game developers will provide a sequel five years later.
Plot
Gameplay modes
When the player initializes his profile, the game modes available are "single player" and "single player plus". Both options contain the game's full content, but the latter gives the player a group of allies to control; however, they also present additional challenges, as their code bases are "compromised". In order to achieve the good and canonical ending, the player must complete single player under twelve hours and die fewer than ten times. The player is able to access "free play", "multiplayer", and "tournament" modes after achieving the good ending. "Free play" allows the player to re-play areas already cleared from a menu, "multiplayer" permits several players on the same LAN to play as part of one team, and in "tournament" mode one can play as Themclesia or the enemy faction, use any level as an arena, and play against other players over the Internet.
Reception
Remit: Kernel was positively received by a majority circles.
It ranks highly for its innovative, dynamic, and emotive plotline, sensitive and intuitive combat system, and appropriate graphics and music. The game manages to remain challenging despite providing much freedom of movement and versatility in the arsenal.
— Electronics, Nov. 2015
Your allies are neither useless nor perfectly reliable. The game wants you to feel they are humans with their own interests, desires, impulses, and faults. Then it forces you to kill them when the time comes. It is not feasible to complete this game without killing at least a few allies.
— Psychedelia, 2016
Kernel's futurity is mainly graphical, and most human interactions are firmly rooted in what a modern person expects. Technologically, you cannot burn down walls with your plasma weapon, and there are no mind-reading devices to make plain what the enemy are thinking. It has not badly abused the license of future technology and society to impose feelings or rationalizations foreign to its audience, and that is outstanding. It is a strong sequel to the Remit franchise.
— Video Game Quarterly, No. 181 (Winter 2015)
Criticism mostly centred on two aspects of the game, mechanical difficulty and UI design.
There is no hiding Kernel is a demanding game. It hammers you with long stages with insufficient save points, enemies that fire with unerring accuracy, large maps with many variables, and allies of limited usefulness. There are areas where you are expected to die a few times before identifying a correct route and the strategy that matches it. You cannot beat the game thinking only on the fly; you must make provision for the last moment as well as the first and finish the stage in a way that feels, above all, rewarding. Being an unaugmented soldier facing augmented ones, you do not expect to win every fight. The programmers were conservative on second chances, alternate routs, and reaction time; in their place, you have unlimited lives and continues, and neither death nor game over resets progress. This is a good gesture but takes the player out of the game world, which the remastered edition would do well to correct. I should not be surprised if many players will not be able to see the good ending without resorting to codes.
— Digital World, Dec. 2015
There is a very obvious and obstinate flaw in Kernel, and that is the UI. It looks like a beehive and responds like one too. Menus pop up all over the place upon a single keystroke or mouse-over, and the options are organized in a way not at all intuitive to the new player. There is a certain logic to them after playing the game for some hours, but not without deliberate study. It seems the only way to change the UI is through the command-line terminal, which sets us back to the 80s in a game that is supposed to be in 2067; there is nothing more immersion-breaking than reprogramming the game in the middle of an intense firefight. The UI squats on the landscape that must have taken a fortune to create.
— Gaming on PC, September 2015
Quotes
- "Don't kill him! That was not his choice!"
- "You are a real monster; you just killed someone who a bullet for you in cold blood!"
- "Sorry, it seems we have to carry on without you."—When the protagonist suffers from excessive "mental entropy" and is killed by CPU allies.
Trivia
- Kernel was teased in an April fool's day demo called 1867.
- The protagonist is noted in passing as part of the 5th Special Operations Group, a fictional unit introduced by the Remit Committee in 1997.
- The Themiclesian Marines, featured in the demo, are a cameo in the finished game. A marine is shown in Base A leaving his plasma rifle on a table to make a cup of coffee, and then he leaves for "shooting practice" with only the coffee. The player can pick up the rifle but cannot equip it because his fingerprint does not unlock it.
- The enemy state is left unidentified at all times, leading to speculation what it really represents. Attic Games, which executed the substantive development, said that the writer left it intentionally ambiguous, as Remit was a video game, not a policy paper. The enemy country only needs to provide adequate challenge and not represent an actual country.