Backtracking is a blogging project that I’m embarking on in 2024 in which I will play one game from each year since I was born. My goal is to engage with games I’ve never played and divert some of my attention away from new releases and towards older titles. I hope to cross off some major backlog items, learn more about the influences and intertexts that informed the games I grew up with, and practice my analytical skills. I’m using US release dates as the relevant year for my selections.
Why I Chose This Game
Well, I'll be honest: it wasn’t my first choice. Instead, it was a fallback I turned to after dragging my feet for too long. At one point I was choosing between Metal Gear Solid 3 or Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, but either of these would have been meant sampling from a big game series that I don’t have meaningful prior experience with. So instead I let convenience and familiarity win out and I joined our pal Richard B. Riddick for a good old-fashioned prison break.
The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay was developed by Swedish developer Starbreeze Studios and released shortly before the Chronicles of Riddick film, serving as a prequel to the series as a whole. It's fundamentally a first person shooter, but with gestures towards RPG and immersive sim design. One clear reason to choose Escape from Butcher Bay was that I knew it was relatively short, and even though I’ve thus far been glad to challenge myself to play slightly longer titles, I was too daunted by the other options I'd considered for 2004.
I vaguely recall Escape from Butcher Bay being in the canon of “dad games” alongside Tomb Raider and Max Payne, but I can’t remember actually seeing him play it. If memory serves, I once asked him about it and he said it was “pretty good”, or some such tempered (but sincere) praise. Moreover, my dad likes the Riddick movies and other sci-fi action films of their ilk. Personally, I have a similar fondness for Pitch Black (the first in the series) and a limited interest in the rest, but with Escape from Butcher Bay being a prequel, I figured it was worth my curiosity.
What I Thought
Escape from Butcher Bay is a game full of glimmers. It’s got plenty of untapped potential wrapped into a compelling but ultimately clumsy package, undoubtedly rushed to completion by its proximity to the release of The Chronicles of Riddick (the film). Its level design is intricate, but only occasionally makes any use of its interconnected spaces. Its stealth design builds on a notion of using light and darkness to gain an advantage, but rarely builds interesting spaces around this concept. The edgy action sci-fi storytelling is limited both by its prequel status and its unwillingness to make any narrative maneuvers within that broader context, mostly just alluding to Riddick’s own Mandalorian-esque backstory.
These kinds of dualities are not uncommon for FPS titles of this era, many of which were reasonably- marketed commercial products of humbler scope. It’s fun to revisit a time when the difference in scale between tentpole action games and random PS2 oddballs was not so towering. Having been mostly curious about how and where it pointed its ambitions, the experience didn’t disappoint. But the gaps between those ambitions and their execution were undoubtedly felt.
I played through Escape from Butcher Bay on “Normal” difficulty, wary of the possibility of getting stuck partway through with no recourse (difficulty can’t be changed partway through, I don’t think). I found it to be very inconsistent with its challenge, while still being comically generous with its resources whenever there were heavy gunfight sequences. Ultimately, it’s probably best that I set the difficulty where I did.
To the game’s credit, it does pointedly take your guns away on several occasions as a way to reset the power curve. It feels as if the developers were aware that the gunplay was not all that thrilling or unique; rather than investing in depth with weapon systems, they lean into the narrative pacing of the triumphs and setbacks of Riddick’s escape attempts. The push and pull between gaining and losing your arsenal creates a much more pronounced effect than the Campbellian “belly of the whale” trope that video game stories like to lean on, in which a brief sequence of disempowerment precedes a return to full strength before the finale. Instead, Riddick spends nontrivial portions of the game with nothing but his bare hands, a shiv, or a tranquilizer gun, and those segments are generally made stronger by their limitations.
The stealth systems make a clever pitch for using darkness, a space where Riddick’s alien superpowers let him see clearly when his opponents cannot, but enemy behaviors are often touchy or frustrating or simply leave no room for stealthy approaches. The “eyeshine” ability that Riddick can deploy is similar to the military shooter trope of night vision goggles, but it sticks to its world-building: it’s a heightened sensitivity to light, meaning that if you keep it on when you’re in a brightly-lit space, the entire screen blooms into white light. I enjoyed how conflicts would fall apart if I failed to use it deliberately, but I was constantly wishing I could make better use of it to be the terrifying hunter that Riddick is portrayed to be.
Butcher Bay as a setting is a grungy sci-fi take on a supermax prison, rendered with an attention to light and shadow that stands out among contemporaries. The labyrinthine nature of the facility makes the whole adventure enjoyably disorienting and keeps the place feeling enormous and incalculably complex. The final sequences shake things up, showing off drastically different parts of the facility and providing a more cinematic conclusion. The soundtrack, by Gustaf Grefberg, is both somewhat generic and strangely catchy, with a focal string melody in its action-oriented tracks that I can only describe as “swashbuckling”. It’s an odd fit if you take it seriously, but it’s well-suited to the sheer camp of the storytelling.
The prison’s grimy halls are full of various weirdos, with key roles voiced by screen actors giving clumsy, hammy video game performances (complete with Vin Diesel’s gravelly monotone reprising Riddick). Given the era of the game’s release, I was a bit surprised by the racial diversity of characters, suggested by their character models and accents. But I’m hesitant to give it too much credit when the entire cast consists of a grab-bag of inmate archetypes and a couple of variations on the “sadistic prison warden” trope. The one and only woman is a disembodied female voice who explains Riddick’s alien superpowers to him; that’s the kind of writing we’re dealing with here. The most unexpected bit of nuance I found was the presence of Muslim prisoners—or an approximation thereof—who can be found praying in the prison yard on painted patches of concrete that vaguely resemble prayer rugs.
The highlight of the story, funnily enough, is the comical recurrence of William J. Johns (a.k.a. “Johns”), the put-upon mercenary who repeatedly attempting to collect a fair reward for capturing and recapturing Riddick, all the while enduring Riddick’s… well, ridicule. The homoerotic tension between these two is probably unintentional but undeniably present, and easily the most endearing thing about the entire story (a shame how it all goes down in Pitch Black).
All told, the game’s brief length makes it easier to swallow. It’s not an especially memorable game by 2025’s standards, but I can see why it had its defenders. Its clear why Butcher Bay’s ambitious systems, technological vision, and gleeful action movie violence mark its developers (specifically, key talent that spun off to launch MachineGames) as strong candidates to build the Wolfenstein reboot that released a decade later.
Reflections
My choice for 2003, Billy Hatcher, was a game that I had wanted to play at the time but missed out on because of console exclusivity. Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay is a different kind of missed title, one I might have played on release if I had been particularly keen to do so, but was outside my typical focus at that age.
Growing up, I was kind of a square. I wasn’t drawn to games and movies with mature content the way some other kids often were in ways that made them feel grown up or rebellious. I watched cartoons and played cartoony games well into middle and high school, and I rarely thought much of it. Ultimately, some of the most violent or objectionable games I played were casual hand-me-downs from my dad who had a fondness for that style of heightened action, and it was more incidental than motivated (I wasn’t just going to ignore entire video games that fell into my lap).
I realize there’s nothing wrong with liking what you like, but I do often wonder if my taste, or even social groups, would have changed if I’d pursued more “grown up” things sooner. In high school I fed my transgressive impulse with metal music while my other media interests remained tame. Escape from Butcher Bay is much more edgy and childish than it is truly “mature”, but it’s an interesting glimpse into a different direction that my childhood tastes could have gone if I had aligned more closely with my dad’s taste. I probably have a greater appreciation for it now, in all its cool guy stupidity. Maybe that comes with getting older and revisiting media that my parents enjoy.