Code Violet begins and ends with quotes by the renowned painter and inventor Leonardo da Vinci.
That feels appropriate — not because this game will be remembered for time immemorial like the Mona Lisa, but because, much like one of Da Vinci’s early flying machine sketches, the game is ambitious but never actually gets off the ground.
Set long in the future in a facility at the far reaches of space, Code Violet’s titular heroine is rudely awoken when her friend is unceremoniously eaten by a velociraptor. Hate it when that happens.
Unfortunately, Violet has the rotten luck of waking from her slumber in nought but her underwear, and what would you know, her clothes are at the other end of the facility.
This raises questions. It means she must have taken her clothes off the night before at one end of the facility, then walked the corridors in her smalls, being gawped at by the janitors, gone to sleep, and then in the morning would repeat her semi-nude pilgrimage back to grab her trousers before going for a bowl of Frosties.
That doesn’t make much sense. But we don’t have time to ponder such things. Velociraptors are famously impatient creatures, and before they finish their hors d’oeuvre and come back for the main course, Violet must escape, trousers or no.
So she crouches down, and sneaks out of the room to look for trousers and weapons and maybe an explanation as to who put dinosaurs in space and her on the menu. And she does it all while the camera gets up close and personal with her rump. Oh dear.
The space dinosaur narrative is deeply silly, but the voice acting and storytelling are presented with deadly seriousness. It’s like if you put Christian Bale into the 1960s Batman TV show and told him to just do the voice. Tonally, it’s weird, but that honestly makes it pretty funny in parts.
The laughter stops once you start playing the game, though. Literally the first thing that happened to us once we had control of Violet was a glitch that got us killed.
We were told to run away from two hungry raptors only for the controller to become totally unresponsive, while the dinosaurs ran around in circles like idiots before nibbling us to death seemingly more through luck than actual judgement.
Once you get your hands on some weapons things don’t get much better. The third-person shooting is limp, with guns feeling weightless.
Shotguns should boom, but firing one in Code Violet feels like when you bite the end of the paper off a McDonald’s straw and blow through it so the wrapping flies off. Less of a boom, and more of a wildly unsatisfying thwip.
Hit boxes seem erratic, and visual feedback is largely non-existent. It’s often unclear if you’re actually hitting your target or not until the dinosaur you’re shooting at unconvincingly keels over.
Similarly, when Violet is attacked, she doesn’t respond in a way that really says, “Hey, a dinosaur is eating me.” She just kinda stands there while a dinosaur bashes into her with its mouth open.
Helpfully, Violet has a little armband on that displays her current health, and so even if she’s no-selling the attacks from her dino-foes, when the number starts dropping you at least know you’re dying.
None of this is helped by the camera, which we’re pretty sure in some jurisdictions would be considered a hate crime.
Violet met her demise on more than one occasion while we stared at an extreme close-up of her back because the camera is utterly unprepared to deal with confined spaces, which is problematic in a game that mostly takes place in narrow corridors.
There’s not much in the way of guidance either, with no quest-log or anything. Characters tell you to go places, and then you go there. Sometimes doors are locked and you’ll need to find a keycard, which means wandering from room to room scouring the floors until you find one.
Occasionally, there’ll be a basic puzzle to solve, such as shining a black light on something to find a code or copying button prompts to open a door. It’s all pretty standard stuff.
Enemy variety is similarly unremarkable. Velociraptors are the dinosaurs you’ll go up against most, but there’s a couple of bigger ones too.
There’s also some of those little tiddler dinosaurs that chomped Peter Stormare in The Lost World: Jurassic Park. And then there’s some of those frilly, spitty dinosaurs like the one that chomped Newman from Seinfeld in the original Jurassic Park. Spoilers for a couple of thirty-year-old movies there.
Real Jurassic Park fans will undoubtedly know that the dilophosaurus — the one with the frills that spits blinding venom — didn’t actually have either of those traits in real life, and both were fabricated for the book and the movie.
That means either Code Violet is a stealth Jurassic Park sequel, or the devs based their research into dinosaurs on Steven Spielberg’s 1993 blockbuster. We’re probably putting too much thought into this.
Another thing people seem destined to spend too much time thinking about is the vast number of saucy costumes you can dress Violet up in for absolutely no reason.
You can dress her up like a 1950s pin-up in a low cut shirt, a sexy secretary in a low cut shirt, and other such costumes, usually in a low cut shirt. Sometimes there are bum cheeks on display.
None of these should be considered practical attire for battling a horde of hungry dinosaurs, and they only add to the aforementioned tonal confusion Code Violet suffers from, since Violet as a character isn’t remotely fun. She’s dour, and sour-faced, and so she ends up looking like someone who just found out their hamster has died while they’re at Comic Con.
In a pivotal moment in the story, Violet bawls at the death of a comrade. The comrade was killed by a space dinosaur, incidentally. And as the tears stream down her face, and the voice actor puts their all into each wail, the camera pans back to reveal Violet is dressed like a sexy cowgirl complete with arse-less chaps.
Actually, it really is quite funny. Maybe you can head-canon that Violet is running a cosplay themed Onlyfans in space and it’ll make a little more sense. Whatever. The horny outfits are there if you want them and can be ignored if you don’t.
Anyway, all that said, Code Violet does look pretty good in parts. Animations are weird, but some of the sights once you get outside are quite lovely, and Violet has cool looking hair. It’s a shame you spend 90% of the game in samey corridors with barely any lighting.
Another thing Code Violet has going for it is brevity. It’s roughly six hours long. And we actually got pretty lost at the beginning so it might be shorter for non-morons. At ten or twelve hours this would be a slog. At six? It’s still a bit of a slog, actually. But less so.
