God of War (2018)

“Everything is different, boy. Try not to dwell on it.”

God of War represents a radical shift in the classic franchise, which used to live and die by the quality of its many jaw-dropping set-pieces – the reason why its more modest portable outings never stood a chance with their limited budget and scope. Now, with this sequel/reboot, the whole approach has been revamped, resulting in a game that is much more concerned with the depth of its characters and their troubled relationships than with the scale of their many battles. If God of War as a series used to be about outward spectacle, this game revolves around inner conflict. And it’s all the better for it.

The first minutes of God of War already mark the stark change in direction. We see Kratos cutting down a tree with three powerful swings and noticing that the straps that cover his right arm are loose: he takes a deep breath to compose himself and starts to fix the straps, which are concealing the scars beneath – now a symbol of his violent past. It’s a surprising character moment – unlike anything seen in the previous games – that is made even more poignant by the next revelation that the chopped tree will serve to light a pyre for his recently passed wife.

Cinematography has become a crucial part of the experience here, and not only because the game is a long continuous shot that is rarely broken (except by the player, when opening the menu). Take the scene where Kratos’ son, Atreus, watches him arriving home, for example: the Greek warrior is framed as a towering figure by the door, covered in deep shadows. He looks imposing in his son’s eyes but also menacing and dangerous. Kratos’ presence frightens Atreus and it’s the lighting in the scene that communicates that, establishing how their relationship is an uneasy one, to say the least.

And Atreus has every reason to fear his father, even without knowing about his past deeds. Kratos, after all, is expectedly harsh and indifferent in the role. He’s the type of father who acts like a ruthless boss, demanding results instead of excuses, looking for achievements but expecting disappointment, the one who typically disregards their child’s psychological wellbeing until it’s too late. “Do not be sorry. Be better,” Kratos tells his son in the beginning. And a few minutes earlier there’s this great exchange, which reveals the core of their dynamic:

Atreus: “What we are hunting?”

Kratos: “You are hunting deer.”

Atreus: “Which way?”

Kratos: “In the direction of deer.”

This exchange may be brief and funny but there’s a lot to unpack here. Atreus asks for direction twice, looking for guidance, but Kratos is unwilling to offer help. First, he distances himself from his son, replacing “we” with “you” to underline how the task of hunting is Atreus’ alone – Kratos is there only to observe and, more importantly, to judge. He wants to test his son, to see if Atreus can fend for himself. This is why he doesn’t even point the way: he’s that kind of father who likes to turn neglect into a lesson, believing that to help is not to teach, as one learns only by failure and pain.

The fact that was Atreus’ mother who taught him to hunt also separates the boy further from his father to the point that if Atreus didn’t call him so, we would even suspect Kratos was just a friend of the family. And we are reminded of this enormous gap between father and son each time Kratos calls Atreus in the game, for he favors the generic term “boy” instead of the more personal “son”.

It’s no wonder that Atreus’ internal conflict is about frustration and dealing with a repressed tendency to violence. At first, he seems to be the polar opposite of his dad. Atreus has a gentle soul. One of the first enemy entries has him praising the beauty of wolves and hoping his dad wouldn’t read his words, thinking he would be disappointed in him, finding him soft. But when they defeat a Troll – the game’s first boss – Atreus loses control and starts to stab the creature’s body repeatedly in an alarming display of rage that seems to startle even Kratos, the God of War. Afterward, he excuses his unhinged behavior by claiming that the troll was evil and even writes, “I’m glad we killed him.” Atreus’ narrative arc will revolve around this tension between his morality and his anger and the potential danger of the former starting to justify the latter.

There’s a lot of banter between them outside cutscenes that also help develop their relationship. After fights, for example, where Atreus will help his father by stunning enemies with arrows, he may ask, “How was that,” seeking a compliment, but Kratos will answer curtly something like “Adequate” or “You are improving.” Atreus is constantly looking for approval but Kratos is that father figure that is impossible to please, which traps the son into the Sisyphean task of trying to. And, a bit later in the game, Atreus will start to answer an annoying “Whatever,” each time we command him to shoot a crystal or take an item from the ground, showing how mad he is at his father.

The story builds up to a confrontation between both characters, since Kratos is keeping his nature hidden from Atreus. Characters will often advise the God of War to tell the truth to his son, warning him that the longer he keeps Atreus in the dark, the more betrayed the kid will feel when he discovers. But the problem is that Kratos has trapped himself: he has spent most of his life teaching his son to never put faith in the gods – saying that they are backstabbing, self-serving bastards – so to tell Atreus that he himself is a god is to risk losing the child forever. The irony of teaching his son to never trust in the gods doesn’t escape Kratos; it paralyzes him, leaving him no choice but to keep pretending to be just a very powerful warrior.

There are some sidequests that develop this theme, supporting Kratos’ worldview, painting gods as these cruel, heartless beings. One revolves around a vengeful spirit who asks them both to destroy the statue of Thor that his late mother had built. The spirit tells them Thor visited the woman often but ended up killing her in “a drunken rage,” so the statue’s existence has become an affront to her memory. But if some gods, like Thor and Odin, are framed as bastards (“Ruthless? Barbaric? Heartless? That’s Odin,” one character tells Atreus), other ones, such as Freya, are shown to be fair and kind.

Kratos himself often surprises us. When Atreus is unable to finish off the deer he was hunting, scared of the act of killing, instead of lashing out at him and making Atreus feel weak, Kratos gently holds his hands and guides them to make the kill. He keeps telling Atreus to close his heart and not feel anything for others, for empathy will get him killed, but when his son finally starts to heed his words, Kratos gets worried and even a bit disturbed by his son’s actions.

He is still a brute, there’s no doubt about that, and when pushed he can become a monster, but Kratos’ rage is more subdued now and he can even act like a civilized being from time to time. When they are hunting a boar, for instance, and they discover that it is not wild but belongs to someone, Kratos helps to save the creature. This Kratos goes to a garden to collect a flower to help an animal, not expecting any reward for his act. The previous Kratos would have just killed the boar and put the garden to the torch if its owner decided to complain. And there’s an ambiguity to this transformation: is he helping to save the boar because he can’t act like a deranged maniac next to his son or because he really is learning to be better?

The game’s plot also reflects this great change in the series. Kratos’ goal is not to brutally murder the whole Nordic pantheon but to simply deliver his wife’s ashes to the tallest peak in the realm, fulfilling her last wish. In other words, the climax is not a gigantic boss fight but a poignant moment between father and son, who are dealing with grief each in their own way.

But luckily, this doesn’t mean the game neglects its many set pieces. When they are about to leave for the mountain, for example, Kratos and Atreus are visited by a stranger who arrives with more than hostile intentions. The encounter is a memorable one because God of War still excels at passing a sense of scale. During the fight, when Kratos breaks a huge stone monument and throws it at the Stranger, it’s not just the ground that shakes, but nearby hills also shatter and break, making rocks fall down in the background. When Kratos punches the Stranger, he goes flying through many trees, making splinters scatter everywhere, and when we deflect his attacks, there’s a brilliant zoom-in and slow-motion effect that heightens the impact of the action.

Combat follows the same principle of previous games, based on mixing light and strong attacks, but the flow and rhythm of the fights has also been completely modified. Here, the combat is much more personal: the camera is closer to Kratos, so we’re usually focusing on one enemy at a time, and the individual blows have more impact – the strong attack usually ends with a unique animation of Kratos brutally amputating an enemy, for example.

His signature weapon, the blades of chaos, has been swapped with a special axe, which has a much more limited reach as well – everything in the game favors a closer, more personal approach to the action. We can even forego the axe and choose to fight only with Kratos’ fists, which stun enemies easier, leaving them open to a finisher. The axe can also be thrown at enemies and called back, as if it were a boomerang – an ability that is put to great use in simple puzzles throughout the game, as the axe has “ice properties” that freeze devices in place.

Speaking of puzzles, there are some special chests called Nornir that require us to find and destroy three seals whose symbols are displayed on them. But these seals are usually very tiny and in hard-to-spot places, so this is basically the modern equivalent of pixel hunting. There are more interesting variations of these chests, however, such as the one that requires us to hit all the seals in a small timeframe, requiring us to position ourselves carefully and be quick with the axe, or the one that conceals in the environment the right order we must hit the seals in, requiring us to pay just a bit of attention to it.

There are some lite RPG elements in the game as well, such as equipment with better stats, and builds based on the perks some pieces of armor grant, but they’re something the player is encouraged to worry about just very late in the game and only if they’re playing in harder difficulties or dealing with the late-game optional challenges.

Surprisingly, however, God of War’s general structure is more akin to a Metroidvania. Kratos journeys through a mostly interconnected world, passing through doors, gates, and chests that he can’t access yet. But after acquiring the necessary power or gear (usually for Atreus), we can go back to these places to be rewarded with new upgrades and powers – and luckily, the game gently pushes us back to some of these previous areas through the course of the story, making backtracking a natural part of progression, instead of busywork. It’s only a pity, then, that the fast-travel system remains limited for a good while, since this discourages exploration until almost the middle-point of the game.

The God of War series had been stagnant since its second installment, limiting itself to increasing the stakes, the scale, and the violence of its many set pieces. With God of War, however, it has gained not only an exciting new direction but also depth, focusing on its great cast of characters and their strained relationships.

August 05, 2024.