Like a lot of crime stories, Samson: A Tyndalston Story is about desperation, but it’s the first game about jacking cars, punching gangsters, and stealing money that I’ve ever seen really turn that desperation into a gameplay loop.
Developer Liquid Swords’ dark and dingy third-person action game puts you in the title role as a low-level thug and expert wheelman who is way down on his luck. As is often a trope in stories like this, the protagonist owes a lot of money to bad people. Samson smartly grabs the trope of a crook trying to dig himself out of the hole with more bad decisions by turning it into the underlying structure of its gameplay–you work off your debt by doing crime, raising the stakes on a series of open-world quests about beating people up, robbing folks, and escaping the cops. Fail to pay what you owe, and things start to spiral.
After about three hours with Samson, I find it intriguing, but frustrating. While the premise is a cool one, it means doing lots of open-world tasks to earn money, many of which get repetitive quickly and start to feel like busywork. And while the narrative might eventually redeem a premise that has you doing a lot of the same crime stuff over and over, I hit a soft-lock in the first two hours that kept me from advancing the story and soured me on a lot of the experience.
It’s interesting to see how Samson: A Tyndalston Story approaches crime narratives with a unique perspective. The themes of desperation can really add depth to the gaming experience. Hopefully, any technical issues get addressed to enhance overall enjoyment!