Revisiting Riddick, Quietly Sneaking Up Behind You With A Shiv
Riddick is just tired of suffering for trying to do the right thing, though he does the right thing anyway. Over and over, through pain and blood.
And that’s why we love him.
And that’s all part of the reason why The Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena (a remastering of Escape From Butcher Bay coupled with the new Dark Athena campaign) deserves its place on every gamer’s shelf.
The original Butcher Bay was a standout title for the old Xbox that combined the violence of a first person shooter with the intelligence of an adventure game. It wasn’t just a cheap movie tie-in – which always suck; it was a smart prequel to the film Pitch Black (the developers, in fact, took one throwaway line from that movie to build this experience upon) that explains a hell of a lot about why our anti-hero is so angry and just where he got his awesome eyeshine (his ability to see in the dark).
The plot, in short, is this: You’re the meanest mutha in the universe. You’ve been captured by a mercenary named William Johns (who you’ll see a lot of through the games as they lead you into the film Pitch Black). You’re facing death inside the walls of a super prison.
Of course, being the meanest mutha in the universe, he doesn’t like this prospect at all.
Solution?
Escape.
Assault on Dark Athena picks up as Butcher Bay ends. Riddick & Johns’ ship is towed into the crustacean-like, city-sized mercenary vehicle Dark Athena (a name, probably, alluding to the anti-individuals and anti-intellectuals who make up the DA’s ruling populace).
The ship itself is a little like the Nostromo from the first Alien film: it’s the definition of the word industrial. Shortly after, you’re introduced to the female antagonist of the game: Gail Revas, captain of the colossal Athena.
After making your way on board, you meet a little girl named Lynn who, like you, is crawling through the ship’s duct system. The difference is that she’s hiding from the monsters. You are hunting them. She adds some much-needed emotional weight to the game and gives Riddick an additional reason to ground these goons into paste.
The monsters this time around aren’t humans in the Butcher Bay penal system. They’re former-humans whose bodies are being harvested by the mercenaries for use as trigger-happy drones.
Riddick is smart. He doesn’t have the patience to deal with people who do nothing but march towards inevitability. Or towards boredom. Or towards what’s expected. Or towards conformity. To paraphrase a line from Daniel Tosh, who my girlfriend Zoey introduced me to: Riddick stopped smoking pot because he’s not in the 7th grade and has things to do. Riddick moves forward endlessly, through torment and trauma. He never stops. And it’s not just about him – it’s about the motion and the idea. Call it a militant idealism; militant intellectualism – in a sense, it is that he has nothing to learn from these people.
In each episode of Riddick, the outside world is trying to force our anti-hero into a certain mold. Butcher Bay: be a good prisoner. Dark Athena: be a good drone. Pitch Black: be a good guy, help us survivors even though we hate you and accept that you’re a bad guy. Dark Fury: be a pet, amuse your owner. Chronicles of Riddick: conform.
Riddick’s response, every single time, is a resounding ‘F yourself, I’m gonna do something else.’
That, of course, is when the trouble starts.
But what fun would anything be without some trouble?
Final Grade: A