2026
By: Alexander Holmes
The Surge is somewhat of an infamous game for being one of the first non-FromSoftware games to join the genre of Soulslike action.
It suffers from a few problems that keep it from being seen as a good Soulslike. But i hope to convince you that The Surge did quite a lot to make it a great Mecha action game.
Now I already gave my justification for why exosuits should be seen as part of the mecha genre back in my Wing of Darkness video. That kind of exosuit could definitely be categorized under the super robots corner of sci-fi, whereas The Surge is far more grounded, real, and industrial.
The Cutting system allows players to pursue new gear for their rig by observing their opponents suits and choosing a limb to sever. You can mix and match the rigs parts, and there's even a chip system like in Nier: Automata for choosing your passive skills and stat improvements. The speed and dynamics of dodge and running attacks, from a mecha lens, change an action game criticized for having unbalanced move-set pacing to an action game dictated by the Rule of Cool.
The boss fights are true standouts. Though frustrating at first if you are expecting the Rhythm Game of the Souls genre. Combat is not dictated by timing invincibility frames against attack animations, The Surge instead has you breaking apart a machine to reveal its weak points. Then bashing at its core components to finish it off.
Identifying how to break the machine's legs, knocking it off balance during a certain movement, or getting it to fire missiles back at itself. You aren't beating an enemy to death. You are deconstructing a mech, in combat!
A boss fight design ethos more similar to Horizon Zero Dawn than Dark Souls.
Within this massive desert complex, you will find yourself involuntarily thrust into a world of corporate conflicts, the stakes of which put all of humanity and the world itself at risk.
I find it notable that the tram line which begins the journey is called Rousseau Station. I believe it's a reference to Jean Jacques Rousseau, the philosopher whose most famous statement regarding Social Contract Theory is that enforcement of the law is equivalent to forcing people to fulfill our collective will as a society. Or, as he puts it, [you will be forced to be free.]
Out of context, that same force can be engineered in social microcosm of a corporation, as the forced compliance of its workers. The Social Contract becomes complying with the will of the rich and powerful.
As a result, the very first narrative moment of the game is the player moving forward to discover that our main character, Warren, is in a wheelchair. Warren is fed a stream of narratives that the CREO Exo-Rig, and all of its invasive implants, are fixing the failures of his human body. But after receiving the Exo-Rig our body is deemed useless and tossed into a junk pile. A particularly callous position when you begin to think of ethics in the philosophy of disability. Does a wheelchair make you any less worthy of life?
Nobody's perfect. If you start looking, it won't be hard to discount anybody, or everybody. It is a perspective that mirrors the philosophy of Accelerationism, portrayed by CREO's CEO and board of directors.
Accelerationism is a philosophy that believes humanity is doomed, but a technological paradigm shift will usher us, into a cataclysm, and out again. To a new and perfect world. That perfects the imperfect human species. To that end, CREO has two competing Edens they want to create. Project ReSolve and Project Utopia. Between Elon Musk claiming to colonize Mars within our lifetimes, or PayPal & Palantir cofounder Peter Thiel believing his AI company will bring about the biblical rapture. The horrors of CREO's project ReSolve and project Utopia read less as comically evil parody than they do as simple representation. Tech Billionaires cowardly supporting policies that will harm people, with the confidence that they will never face the consequences of their decisions.
Whether it be a single worker whose disability earned him the label of disposable, or the entire human race deemed disposable for a boardroom's fantasy of saving the world. Everyone parroting the rhetoric that these technologies are our duty, fate, and destiny wrapped into one. Forgetting that one always has a choice.
As the sadly strummed Western song in the Operations saferoom sings,
‘i was always as free as i wanted to be
But i was just too scared to see
Who i could be’
It's your job now to uncover what Project ReSolve and Project Utopia are really doing. Decide if they will continue, or if you will fight to stop it.
So tell me kiddo, now that you know who's behind the CREO Exo-Rig, are you ready to get in the robot?
Thanks for watching
Take care of each other
And Stay True