The most mediocre games I’ve reviewed since starting at TheGamer have, to a fault, starred Hollywood actors. This is on my mind once again as Bandai Namco prepares to launchUnknown 9: Awakening, which stars The Witcher’s Anya Chalotra as its main character.Our review was largely positive, but descriptions I’ve read in previews of it feeling “double-A” or “like a 360 game” haven’t done much to change my mind.
The Money It Takes To Hire Stars Would Be Better Spent On Other Parts Of The Game
“What aboutDeath Stranding?” you might ask. We’ll get to that. But first, I want to run down three games I covered in under two years, that all rely on star power to make up for deficiencies in quality. In December 2022, I reviewedThe Callisto Protocol, which starred Transformers' Josh Duhamel and The Boys' Karen Fukuhara. It was extremely mediocre, with a greater emphasis on its unengaging story than on making gameplay more complicated than running down a hall and smashing aliens with a pipe. The celebrity actors felt like an attempt to make something,anything,about the game stand out.
Callisto also starred Sam Witwer but, after playing Deacon inDays Gone, the Battlestar Galactica actor has a little more gaming credibility.
Last year’sImmortals of Aveumwas a similar case. Darren Barnet, the game’s lead, is well-known for playing the love interest in Netflix’s Never Have I Ever series. But I still found it to be about as uninteresting as The Callisto Protocol.
And, though I liked it more than the others, this year’sAlone in the Darkbrought in Stranger Things' David Harbour and Killing Eve’s Jodie Comer to play the two leads. Like clockwork, it received mixed-to-negative reviews and sold poorly, resulting indeveloper Pieces Interactive shutting down. All of these games feel like they’re bringing in celebrity actors to help them stand out, and all of them failed because players care much, much more about the quality of the gameplay and narrative than they do about the CVs of the voice actors.
Death Stranding Is The Exception That Proves The Rule
If gaming is a star-driven medium, the stars are the creative directors. If you know that Neil Druckmann or Tim Schafer or Sam Lake directed a game, you instantly have an idea of what it will look like and feel like to play, what narrative and thematic territory it may explore. Which brings us back to the Death Stranding exception. Hideo Kojima’s inaugural strand game, and its upcoming sequel, boast a ton of Hollywood stars, like Norman Reedus, Léa Seydoux, Margaret Qualley, and Mads Mikkelson. But I’d argue that Kojima games star celebrities for a completely different reason from the games I’ve outlined above.
Alone in the Dark was always going to have a hard time getting much attention. Though the series is widely acknowledged as one of the originators of the survival horror genre, it has never had the consistency or name recognition of later adopters like Resident Evil and Silent Hill. Given how cataclysmically bad the reception was for the last two games — the Metacritic for Alone in the Dark (2008) ranged from 39 on Wii to 69 on PS3, and the 2015 multiplayer outing Alone in the Dark: Illumination received a catastrophic 19 — the series needed some obvious hook to bring players in this time around, and Pieces and/or publisher THQ Nordic settled on stunt casting.
Kojima stunt casts, too, but for a more personal reason. He’s always been obsessed with Hollywood movies, and has said that he originally wanted to work in film before settling for a job in the games industry. Despite his cinematic ambitions, he still became one of gaming’s most acclaimed auteurs and an industry player influential enough to attract top-shelf acting talent. He doesn’t do this so that his games will sell — they sold well before he had the clout to pull it off — he does it because he loves movies and wants to hang out with movie stars (as evidenced by the fact that he also hangs out with a ton of famous people who never end up in his games).
I imagine that, in games like in film, it’s easier to secure financing with a well-known name attached. But that investment doesn’t seem to be paying off. The games with stunt casting that succeed — like Death Stranding, Cyberpunk 2077, and the Star Wars Jedi games — would have done just fine without their Hollywood stars. Alone in the Dark and Immortals of Aveum could have been drastically improved by using that cash to hire more developers and fewer celebrities.
