Ubik (PlayStation) Playthrough
141A playthrough of Cryo Interactive's 2000 license-based action-adventure game for the Sony PlayStation, Ubik.
As an adaptation of Philip K. Dick's 1969 novel, Cryo's Ubik is a story-driven, point-and-click squad shooter that seems to want to serve as a cautionary tale in how it depicts the future as a dystopian sci-fi hellscape ruled by corporate oligarchs.
The game is a PAL-exclusive port of a 1998 Windows game, and it has the reputation of being one of the worst PlayStation games ever made. I was drawn to it by sheer morbid curiosity - many of you know what a glutton for punishment I can be - and I came away impressed. Since I've neither read the novel nor played the PC game, I can't speak to how it compares, but Ubik for the PlayStation is quite possibly the worst game I've ever played. There are games that I like less than Ubik, certainly, but I don't think I've ever known another to so thoroughly screw up the execution on every single level.
The plot is full of holes, and by the end, I had no real grasp on why things were happening. What's up with the handyman? Why must I run around starting up the engines on a zepplin that's already in the air? Why does the hotel hallway keep filling up with zombies? Why is Jory made out of electricity but I'm not? What is Ubik, and if it's so damned important, why does it just sit uselessly in my inventory? It's all funny in an unhinged, madcap sort of way, but the plot is so disjointed that I can't help but think there's a lot of important stuff Cryo left out.
The design of the world doesn't provide any continuity, either. The game uses prerendered backgrounds like FF7 and RE, but there's no sense of connection or shared perspective between them, and the interface is a mess. It's incredibly disorienting when the camera angles change, and the compass and map are rarely useful. What's worse is the way the game usually freezes to load whenever you hit an invisible screen transition boundary. These pauses can last anywhere from five to thirty seconds each, and there are moments where you'll be hit with two-to-three minutes worth of loading between multiple camera cuts while trying to cross a single room. They make the already frustrating chore of navigation so much harder to bear, and they were bad enough to make me think that the game had outright crashed on several occasions, so here you go, Ubik: 🫴🏆 You beat Willy Beamish for Sega CD on that front, fair and square.
There are plenty more things I could harp on, but I wouldn't want to rob you of the magic that comes from seeing firsthand how everything collapses in on itself.
Weirdly enough, I don't hate Ubik. Well, I mean, I do. Because it sucks. It's soooo bad. But I don't, like, hate it hate it, you know? It tried to do something interesting and different, and I found that appealing. But it also seems like it was made by people who lacked the talent, time, and money to create a fully functional game, let alone one that could do justice to the source material. I found that somewhat less appealing.
One thing is for sure: at the end of the day, Ubik turned out to be quite a memorable experience.
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