Pax Corpus

I'm a little late this time, sorry for that. I use this forum to present obscure games which are mostly worth playing. Today's game is worth playing, although not for the right reasons. It is obscure, though, very obscure for the right reasons.

Front cover of the game

Pax Corpus, created in 1997 by Cryo interactive entertainment, was meant as the first game adaptation of the Aeon Flux franchise. For reasons I haven't researched, it didn't have the Aeon flux name on it and therefore became just some mimic. The main selling point of the game were the ladies in the game, which all wear way too few clothes. It's all over the box art and for as far as I played the game, they haven't even put a male character in it. It's just too bad that the creators forgot 2 things:
1 - In 1997 Lara Croft was the best 3D rendered female character in western adventure games
2 - It's a game, not a dry hump porn movie

Something went terribly wrong with the game. The creators put as many scantily clad women in the game as they could, only to find out that the hardware wasn't powerful enough to render female curves. There was that and the creators were, quite frankly, terrible at drawing women. It's like the artist only knew the concept of 'women' as if they only read about it in a book the other day. All models look like robots with no female features. Even if they were robots, they would be robots with no cognitive vision (read: stupid) and a spine that is locked in one shape and one shape only: a straight plank. The breasts of the protagonist look worse than Lara Croft's first pyramid-shaped chest and her bottom barely passes the sexy test, but only because of some shades in the texture

You pass the sexy test... almost.

I haven't played this game much. At first I got killed by the first door of the first level. This was fun the first time, annoying at the second and a complete waste of time at the third attempt. It was only recently that I started it up again to show a friend what I thought was one of the worst games of all time. This time I got past the lethal door, only to find myself killed by a boss-person a couple of doors later. I really had no idea how to get past this 'boss', since she had a box to shelter behind and I didn't. Maybe in a couple of months I try again ;).

I might be flaming this game for being utterly bad, but I still suggest you play it, especially if you are not a native English speaker and even more if you're Dutch. Cryo made sure that everywhere it was released, it would be translated, including the voice-overs, by some (cheap) company while not giving the user the option to switch to English. Here in the Netherlands we only make new voice-overs for kids-movies, while everything above the 12 year recommendation just gets subtitles. This means that in the Netherlands Pax Corpus, recommended for ages 15 and up, got a voice over by people who are primarily experienced in kids cartoons.

You might get a partner later on, but I haven't
reached that point (yet).

Together with the fact that this 'action' game has clunky controls and choppy animations at best, the result is a game where a disabled lady in leather fights stupid robots while sounding like an 8 year old. There is a story behind it, but I gave up on that story already at 1 minute into the intro movie. The whole game is an experience that will make you question what the creators were thinking. They did it wrong in such a way, however, that it makes you curious to what will go wrong next. If you have the possibility to play it with a friend and you'll need a laugh, take up Pax Corpus, you won't regret it.