Shadow Complex

Donald Mustard — the affable, passionate creative director at Chair Entertainment (Advent Rising, Undertow) — makes no attempt to conceal the primary influence on his studio’s next project, Shadow Complex. “I LOVE Super Metroid,” he gushes. “I wanted to make a grownup version of G.I. Joe. I love the idea of a hightech bad guy versus a low-tech good guy.”

Boiling it down, Mustard wants to make “a totally next-gen side-scroller.”

Based on the extensive demo we saw of Complex — a game set in the same universe as renowned sci-fi author Orson Scott Card’s Empire novel — he’s well on his way to doing just that, and to upping the high-water mark for Xbox Live Arcade titles in the process.

The story begins earnestly enough. While Jason and his girlfriend, Claire, are hiking in the forests of northeastern Washington state, Claire mysteriously vanishes. Jason quickly begins searching for her, waving his flashlight around and shouting her name. Suddenly, he stumbles across her backpack, stuffed with climbing gear.

Following the warming trail, Jason comes across a mysterious base of operations hidden within the remote forest. He slips inside and continues his hunt for Claire, but instead discovers an organization bent on sparking civil war in the U.S. Their goal: take over the politically fractured country and, in their mind, save the world from itself.

In the ultimate “wrong place, wrong time” scenario, Jason and Claire breaches the faction’s turf on the exact day the group plans to launch its attack. Consequently, the innocent couple are marked as intrusive spies attempting to foil the organization’s plans.

The entire story is told through high-quality cutscenes, with fully voiced dialogue — something you just don’t find in XBLA games. In fact, the high level of presentation and polish probably would’ve fooled us into thinking we were seeing a full-fledged, $60 retail product if we hadn’t already known it was a downloadable Arcade game. None of this is lost on Mustard — he claims that Microsoft has supported Chair and the game’s development since the project’s earliest days, aiding them wherever possible. Microsoft’s goal? To ensure that Shadow Complex grows into a title that can be touted as a “nextgen Live Arcade game.”

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