Clash Artifacts of Chaos is a spin-off/ prequel of the Zeno Clash saga, set in the same surreal and insane primitive world. However, this time the game is not a first-person brawler but a third-person martial-arts-based Souls-like, full of unique and bizarre mechanics. The twisted and colorful world is a pleasure to explore, a place enriched with unmovable rules, violent rituals, and a set of weird and unique characters. The world extends from cold mountains to mosquitoes-infested swamps, always offering something new to discover. But in all this madness, what for me truly shined are the Travelling Players and its actors.
The Travelling Players is a group of aggressive bandits living in the mountains, busy raiding villages and brainwashing people to join their ranks. If till here is nothing new, I forgot to mention that the Travelling Players are obsessed with following a sort of holy script, a fore-sighting spectacle in which they can never go out of character. The actors/bandits are constantly acting following the divine script, avoiding any form of individuality, finding their place in a predetermined role and embracing a fixed routine.
Worth to specify that the Travelling Players are also extremely creepy-looking in their appearance and fighting mechanics. They are usually dressed as hooded figures somehow resembling scarecrows, with body and face completely hidden. This is probably due to the necessity for the actors to hide any individuality and peculiarity, becoming only generic pawns following the Play. Interestingly, Travelling Players can also appear in other parts of the world where fixed battles previously occurred, replacing the fight with an unexpected new battle. There are three different types of Travelling Players: a normal one, an obese one, and a sort of bird-like creature. All the enemies have extremely weird and bizarre fighting styles, with unexpected moves. The most normal-looking actor is a martial-art expert, surprising the player with acrobatic moves and weird kicks, moving almost as if he has very few bones in his body. Moreover, he can use tricky colorful petards to unexpectedly attack the player. The fat actor is quicker than he looks, able to fold his body into deadly jumps and rolls. He will literally try to smash the player using his body in any possible way. The bird-like actor is the most disturbing of the trio, with only a long beak going out from the hood. This actor moves weirdly, and he can surprise the player with deadly grasps and long-range attacks, using the beak as the main weapon.
The Travelling Players’ main hideout is at the top of a cold mountain. The base resembles a Greek theater, with an amphitheater as main social location, including ritual battles, and mysterious carvings decorating the rock. For example, the tragedian and comedian masks from Greek theater, or modified version of them, are carved at the main entrance. Other Greek-inspired giant heads are sculpted all around the hideout, resembling philosophers and ancient statues, in a way, to provide credibility to the actors and their unquestionable play. More subtle and creepy environmental details hide around the base, including creepy masks with sparkling eyes located into semi-collapsed corridors.
The boss of the Travelling Players is, of course, called the Director. The creature is completely dressed in a complex suite, behaving like a sort of Messiah that comprehends the future. He is the one writing the Play, providing the scripts to all the Players, fixing them in his own narrative. The Players do everything the Director writes for them, since they believe in his diving figure. However, the Director is mainly a fraud, tricking the enemies by falling inside his narrative-plan, and, as result, appearing to the masses as a prophetic figure. The Director wears an sumptuous orange costume that looks almost with bird-like features. According to the official artbook, the Director wears this extravagant outfit to differentiate even more from his actors, which instead appears as generic and peculiarity-less scarecrows. Because the Director is the star of the Travelling Players, and he knows it. During the battle, the Director tricks the opponents into drinking poison from an ancient artifacts, thus already incapacitating their powers. Moreover, the Director will not fight alone but together with his actors, and he will keep the distance while mining the amphitheater with colorful smoking bombs.
The Travelling Players are a brilliant piece of storytelling and world-building, fitting perfectly into Zeno Clash’s world, but also striking going outside of it, resonating with more complex social and philosophical concepts. In fact, they are indeed bloodthirsty bandits but also inhabitants of a chaotic world, which prefer to renounce any responsibility and decision-power in front of a holy script. Whichever brutality committed is not their fault, because they are only playing a role assigned by a higher being. They don’t need to think or question their own actions, because the Play will do it for them. Do you see any similarity with our society?
But if the struggle against the social-moral compass could be too much of a stretch, the Travelling Players show other interesting traits. For example, there are many references on how the Travelling Players combine theater and live role-playing game in their narrative, achieving an amazing extrapolation for breaking the fourth wall. Sometimes, actors will forget their own script, asking advice to the others and breaking their own narrative. But the insane detail is that the Travelling Players are indeed NPCs inside a videogame that love to be scripted NPCs, somehow celebrating their digital existence. Because if you think at it, the mind-twist of characters inside a fictional world that want to exist as scripted beings, but are in fact scripted NPCs inside a videogame, is a brilliant piece of meta-gaming.
Clash Artifacts of Chaos is a beautifully crafted souls-like set in an insane and colorful world, where the Travelling Players are the cherry on top this extravagant setting, playing with standard gaming rules and breaking the fourth wall in an unexpected way. And all this without losing their creepiness as scarecrows-like bandits fighting with bizarre and alien styles.
Surreal and Creepy 