Reviews
[Review] ‘Maneater’ is a Shallow But Entertainingly Gory Shark RPG
The Jaws theme is renowned for how much it does with so little. Driven by two notes, repeated at a hastening pace, John Williams’ famous theme suggests the slow approach and frenzied attack of a stalking shark. The legendary composer creates dread, anxiety, fear. Two notes.
The minimalism that defines Maneater is not nearly as compelling. The open-world RPG, out today, casts players as the hungry and homicidal fish in question. It’s a novel take on a familiar formula and there’s a lot here to like. But, to borrow a metaphor from another generation’s blockbuster, it feels like too little butter scraped over too much bread. Even accounting for the hundreds of limbs you’ll sever with razor-sharp teeth, it feels like something’s missing.
Maneater has attracted plenty of games media attention on the strength of its unique premise. What if you were the killer shark terrorizing a beach? What if your presence ensured that it wasn’t safe to go back in the water? What if you were the reason they were gonna need a bigger boat? And, Maneater does a pretty great job of making this fantasy a reality.
Swimming is simple and intuitive, and I never got tired of breaching the water’s surface for a front flip and cannonball splash. Maneater makes your mouth the gun — with distinct, bite-y lunges bound to each trigger — and the resulting actions feel, appropriately, like a speeding bullet finding its mark. These actions feel best when you are the predator, stalking your prey. Less so when your target can fight back. Combat — both with other carnivorous sea creatures and with human hunters — consist mostly of lunges and the camera often struggles to keep up. I don’t think I lost any battles because of this, but I consistently needed to take a moment to reposition my viewpoint.
Those problems aside, Maneater’s brand of marine melee mostly works. As you grow from (ahem) a baby shark into a massive monster, you can take breaks from the main quest to chew through a hierarchy of named hunters. To draw them out, you’ll need to cause mayhem, GTA-style, chomping innocent beachgoers and splintering waves of the hunter’s stooges. Thrash long enough and the hunter will make an appearance.
The resulting battles are easy at first because, as it turns out, no human is much of a match for a bull shark’s mouth full of knives. After a lengthy bout turning the water red, I was surprised how simple it was to leap into the air, lunge at the hunter, and X them off the bracket. As your infamy increases, hunters will come prepared with better defenses, which make these fights harder and more rewarding. Though, given that there are only 10 named hunters, I do wish that each battle was more unique. That said, one of the coolest things about these fights is that you get to decide where they take place. Losing repeatedly in the open ocean? Take the fight inland. The honeycombed tunnels beneath one of the game’s Venice-like port towns proved much more friendly for sharky stealth than the expansive gulf.
Hunter battles are a highpoint among the activities on offer here. Elsewhere, Maneater suffers from its campaign’s lack of focus. There is a story — our shark is on a quest to avenge her mother’s death and take down the hook-handed Cajun reality star fisherman who murdered her — and the little that is here is pretty good. The problem is, there are no story missions. Instead, you’ll complete a checklist of bog-standard open-world quests — kill 10 turtles, eat 10 humans, sink a hunter’s boat — until the game decides it’s time to dole out a bit of narrative. As many games do, Maneater treats cutscenes as a reward. But, I’ve rarely seen a reward so disconnected from the process of earning it.
What Maneater lacks in story or structure it makes up for in the simple joy of Chris Parnell’s presence. The comic actor, of Rick and Morty and “Lazy Sunday” fame, serves as narrator, dishing out real shark facts and fictional behavioral details on the “Florida Man” archetypes who hunt her. Some of these border on low-hanging fruit classism, but generally Parnell’s running commentary punches up, skewering the wealthy who demand beachfront property and the land developers who ensure they get it, habitat be damned. The folks at TripWire have loaded the map with interesting details and dioramas to find, and I enjoyed knowing that Parnell would always have something to say about whatever I found.
And Maneater’s setting ensures that the process of exploration is consistently rewarding. The world’s coasts, creeks, and canals are populated by real-world creatures that are often a thrill to encounter. As your shark gains mass and levels, aquatic lifeforms that once seemed fearsome become fodder. I loved returning to early areas and tearing the alligators that harassed my baby self into scaly ribbons. Though, the game’s gore does become slightly less palatable here. While years of violent games have numbed me to the sight of a virtual mutilated human corpse, seeing the bloody stump where an orca’s dorsal fin used to be made me feel bad.
Still, this highlights what makes Maneater unique and, more generally, is how it manages to find the fun despite its structural issues. You may have played a million open-world games. You may be sick-and-tired of checklist design. You may have been sick-and-tired of it for a decade. But, Maneater is just different enough, and just funny enough, and just gory enough, that for a while, you may manage to forget that it’s otherwise beached in the shallows.
Maneater review code for PC provided by the publisher.
Maneater is out now on PS4, Xbox One, and PC via the Epic Games Store.
Reviews
“AHS: Delicate” Review – “Little Gold Man” Mixes Oscar Fever & Baby Fever into the Perfect Product
‘AHS: Delicate’ enters early labor with a fun, frenzied episode that finds the perfect tone and goes for broke as its water breaks.
“I’ll figure it out. Women always do.”
American Horror Story is no stranger to remixing real-life history with ludicrous, heightened Murphy-isms, whether it’s AHS: 1984’s incorporation of Richard Ramirez, AHS: Cult’s use of Valerie Solanas, or AHS: Coven’s prominent role for the Axeman of New Orleans. Accordingly, it’s very much par for the course for AHS: Delicate to riff on other pop culture touchstones and infinitely warp them to its wicked whims. That being said, it takes real guts to do a postmodern feminist version of Rosemary’s Baby and then actually put Mia Farrow – while she’s filming Rosemary’s Baby, no less – into the narrative. This is the type of gonzo bullshit that I want out of American Horror Story! Sharon Tate even shows up for a minute because why the hell not? Make no mistake, this is completely absurd, but the right kind of campy absurdity that’s consistently been in American Horror Story’s wheelhouse since its inception. It’s a wild introduction that sets up an Oscar-centric AHS: Delicate episode for success. “Little Gold Man” is a chaotic episode that’s worth its weight in gold and starts to bring this contentious season home.
It’d be one thing if “Little Gold Man” just featured a brief detour to 1967 so that this season of pregnancy horror could cross off Rosemary’s Baby from its checklist. AHS: Delicate gets more ambitious with its revisionist history and goes so far as to say that Mia Farrow and Anna Victoria Alcott are similarly plagued. “Little Gold Man” intentionally gives Frank Sinatra dialogue that’s basically verbatim from Dex Harding Sr., which indicates that this demonic curse has been ruffling Hollywood’s feathers for the better part of a century. Anna Victoria Alcott’s Oscar-nominated feature film, The Auteur, is evidently no different than Rosemary’s Baby. It’s merely Satanic forces’ latest attempt to cultivate the “perfect product.” “Little Gold Man” even implies that the only reason that Mia Farrow didn’t go on to make waves at the 1969 Academy Awards and ends up with her twisted lot in life is because she couldn’t properly commit to Siobhan’s scheme, unlike Anna.
This is easily one of American Horror Story’s more ridiculous cold opens, but there’s a lot of love for the horror genre and Hollywood that pumps through its veins. If Hollywood needs to be a part of AHS: Delicate’s story then this is actually the perfect connective tissue. On that note, Claire DeJean plays Sharon Tate in “Little Gold Man” and does fine work with the brief scene. However, it would have been a nice, subtle nod of continuity if AHS: Delicate brought back Rachel Roberts who previously portrayed Tate in AHS: Cult. “Little Gold Man” still makes its point and to echo a famous line from Jennifer Lynch’s father’s television masterpiece: “It is happening again.”
“Little Gold Man” is rich in sequences where Anna just rides the waves of success and enjoys her blossoming fame. She feels empowered and begins to finally take control of her life, rather than let it push her around and get under her skin like a gestating fetus. Anna’s success coincides with a colossal exposition dump from Tavi Gevinson’s Cora, a character who’s been absent for so long that we were all seemingly meant to forget that she was ever someone who was supposed to be significant. Cora has apparently been the one pulling many of Anna’s strings all along as she goes Single White Female, rather than Anna having a case of Repulsion. It’s an explanation that oddly works and feeds into the episode’s more general message of dreams becoming nightmares. Cora continuing to stay aligned with Dr. Hill because she has student loans is also somehow, tragically the perfect explanation for her abhorrent behavior. It’s not the most outlandish series of events in an episode that also briefly gives Anna alligator legs and makes Emma Roberts and Kim Kardashian kiss.
“Little Gold Man” often feels like it hits the fast-forward button as it delivers more answers, much in the same vein as last week’s “Ava Hestia.” These episodes are two sides of the same coin and it’s surely no coincidence that they’re both directed by Jennifer Lynch. This season has benefitted from being entirely written by Halley Feiffer – a first for the series – but it’s unfortunate that Lynch couldn’t direct every episode of AHS: Delicate instead of just four out of nine entries. That’s not to say that a version of this season that was unilaterally directed by Lynch would have been without its issues. However, it’s likely that there’d be a better sense of synergy across the season with fewer redundancies. She’s responsible for the best episodes of AHS: Delicate and it’s a disappointment that she won’t be the one who closes the season out in next week’s finale.
To this point, “Little Gold Man” utilizes immaculate pacing that helps this episode breeze by. Anna’s Oscar nomination and the awards ceremony are in the same episode, whereas it feels like “Part 1” of the season would have spaced these events out over four or five episodes. This frenzied tempo works in “Little Gold Man’s” favor as AHS: Delicate speed-runs to its finish instead of getting lost in laborious plotting and unnecessary storytelling. This is how the entire season should have been. Although it’s also worth pointing out that this is by far the shortest episode of American Horror Story to date at only 34 minutes. It’s a shame that the season’s strongest entries have also been the ones with the least amount of content. There could have been a whole other act to “Little Gold Man,” or at the least, a substantially longer cold open that got more out of its Mia Farrow mayhem.
“Little Gold Man” is an American Horror Story episode that does everything right, but is still forced to contend with three-quarters of a subpar season. “Part 2” of AHS: Delicate actually helps the season’s first five episodes shine brighter in retrospect and this will definitely be a season that benefits from one long binge that doesn’t have a six-month break in the middle. Unfortunately, anyone who’s already watched it once will likely not feel compelled to experience these labor pains a second time over. With one episode to go and Anna’s potential demon offspring ready to greet the world, AHS: Delicate is poised to deliver one hell of a finale.
Although, to paraphrase Frank Sinatra, “How do you expect to be a good conclusion if this is what you’re chasing?”
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