This review/discussion of the popular Playstation 2 game. I really enjoyed playing The Getaway despite its limitiations. The Buzzcut review likens the game to the platypus “both The Getaway and the platypus will remain cousins of the half-done hybrid, glorious in their jammed-together natures and doomed to the eternal status of curiosity.” The reviewer echoes Espen Aarseth’s concerns on narrative/interactive crossover works. As Aarseth wrote in Aporia and Epiphany in Doom and The Speaking Clock: The Temporality of Ergodic Art “? there seems to be a limit to the usefulness of these modal crossovers, in that an audience will want the work to perform as either one or the other, and their own role to be either that of the player or observer.” (Aarseth, 1999).
In my experience the game was much more engaging than many others which attempt such a crossover. In particular I find the similar Enter The Matrix to be almost unplayable. In some parts of the game your entire ‘mission’ seems to be to walk from one side of the screen to the other before waiting for the next room to load. The game asks you to be the player in some situations where a cutscene would suffice.
With other extremely popular and well designed games such as Grand Theft Auto: Vice City exploring this territory it looks like the slightly awkward platypus is becoming a successful genre in itself.
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