I Feel Like Chicken Tonight

Chicken Police - Paint it RED! is a compelling game, comprising a short, introductory tutorial and four chapters. I've just finished Chapter One. Unlike Steam, Prime Gaming doesn't keep a tally of how long you've been playing but with a session last night, another this morning and a third this afternoon, I guess my time on ride-along with the Rooster Cops adds up to three or four hours at least.

If the game reminds me of anything other than the many anthropomorphic, noiresque point&clicks I've played before, it's probably Disco Elysium. The similarity isn't so much in the gameplay, the visuals or the writing as it is in the atmosphere. There's a seedy, down-at-heel, fin de siecle feel to the world, which comes freighted with a wealth of - mostly unexplained - history and politics. You get the perpetual sense that there's a fully-developed world behind the stagey sets, a world of which you're seeing the merest sliver.

Even more so than with Disco Elysium, which does have an actual novel somewhere in its development history, I'd love to read some fiction set in the Wilderness, the world of the Chicken Police. Someone's taken a deal of trouble to sketch out the problems inherant in a society of animals, the racial/species tensions, predator/prey interactions and the dificulties of understanding that must arise so inevitably between sentient beings as different from another as cats and cockroaches.

Like Disco Elysium, the product of Za/Um, an Estonian studio, Chicken Police also stems from Eastern Europe, the studio behind the game, The Wild Gentlemen, being based in Hungary. According to one source, the studio was originally named King Fox, which would certainly tie-in with the political structure of Clawville, the city-state where the action takes place, ruled as it is by Hector III, an actual fox king.

Excellent voice acting by an experienced cast of native English-speakers does a great deal to smooth the edges of what frequently comes across as a somewhat arch translation. I noticed this in Disco Elysium at times although I think it's more obvious in Chicken Police. 

Far from getting in the way, the very slightly off-kilter nuances of the text serve to heighten the otherness of this strange world, populated by creatures who refer to themselves as "animals" but who present as human beings with animal heads. Theeir hands strike me as peculiarly disturbing. 

Humans themselves are known only as mythical creatures, often portrayed as angels. I imagine there's subtext.

Dialog loops from pragmatic, prosaic and cliched to highly abstracted. Numerous conversations disappear unexpectedly down eliptical culs-de-sac, wherein the meaning becomes occluded or altogether lost. Similarly, the many cultural references, pop and not-so-pop, are doled out like workhouse dumplings, to be taken and digested - or not - as they come. Don't expect any gravy to help them slip down easily.

Surrounded by the richness of the metatext, the noir narrative itself tends to fade into the foreground. As Chris Lawn says, in what seems to me to be a very fair review of the game at Player2.net.au, "A detective noir story is cool but is such a small slice of what could be." 

Like Chris, I too would love to learn more about Predation, the Meat War and the divide between the Royalists and the Separatists. I want to delve more deeply into the systemic racism of Clawville, expressed in its most extreme and virulent form by the trade in larvae, whereby the children of impoverished insect mothers trapped in the barred ghetto of The Hive, end up on the plates of rich diners in upper-class restaurants. 

Shocking though that is, perhaps the frequent, casual racist comments of Marty, one of the two protagonists and a serving police officer, represent a more insidious malaise. His unthinking, denigratory wisecracks suggest a level of intolerance within the justice system that must go bone-deep.

If the narrative is evenly distributed across all four chapters, many more hours of revelations lie ahead. At times it's an unpleasant journey but, as I said at the start, it's a compelling one. 

Next stop The Sweltering Nile. a high-class brothel, run by a crocodile. 

Let's hope it doesn't all end in tears.