This bizarre, yet enticing title promised me a bald space marine-ish hero, retro-gaming nods, and the voices of Will Arnett and the legend- [wait for it] -dary Neil Patrick Harris. While the box art was nothing to write home about, the premise sounded interesting enough, and hey, it was less than $20, how bad could it be?

Strangely enough, I was hooked on the game's initial moments of brilliance! The game's story follows a video game action star that rose to digital fame and fell the clearance bin with one bad kart racing title. Now back in action for the first time in years, Eat Lead tells a twisted story of what one very fictional character will do to regain the spotlight. The blatant and unapologetic use of clichés and tropes got maybe laughs from me. Sure, it featured predictable settings, the standard set of weapons featured in any third person action game, and level design that can only charitably described as adequate, but something drew me in.

I found myself returning the game. I wasn't having fun in the traditional sense since the action was dull and, sadly, Arnett and Harris' involvement didn't help the bland story and dialog. No, what kept me playing was the game's knack for shifting settings, missions, and character types, as formulaic as there were, at the pace of a couch potato looking for something better on TV. It was possible to shift from a western shootout, to a generic strip bar, to a World War 2 themed Russia, to a Bond villain's secret layer. These jumps where sudden and seemingly schizophrenic with absolutely no rhyme or reason to them beyond an NPC character telling me that "someone hacked into the game."

Over time I became convinced that this title was something special. It didn't have a story to tell, as much as it had something to say about how games are made in the past and in the present, but hopefully not in the future. It was clearly mocking everything lazy developer cliché and challenging them to do better with it's message. To me, it was the kind of post-modern narrative that I typically eat up religiously when presented to me by auteurs like Suda 51 or Hideo Kojima, but something was off here.

But unlike their games, whose gameplay ranges from "ok" to "fantastic," Eat Lead was painfully average. So painfully average that you couldn't tell if the title's better visuals were a joke or if the creator was attempting to impress. Unfortunately, this is when the house of cards fell down on me. Maybe this "artist statement" was the game designer in my head trying to excuse poor craftsmanship. Maybe this game is just bad, but is actually unaware of just how bad it is.

Playing the game quickly became a chore that wasn't providing me any answers. It ridicule the forgettable nature of too many action titles while suffering from (or embracing?) the same flaws. The game wouldn't explain the strictly linear nature of the plot. It didn't take the time to acknowledge its own contrivances, and as a result with extended play became an unfocused mashup of everything it was supposedly laughing at. It is because of this that I won't be returning the game. Its concept may hold something dazzling behind it, but its gameplay is laborious and leaves me even more conflicted about whether I love it or loath it than when I saw Where the Wild Things Are this past weekend.

Heed my warning, dear readers. Not all games can be classified as "good" or "bad," worth your time or rubbish, "7" or a 10. Some games exist between these polar spaces beyond another dimension - a dimension of gameplay, a dimension of light, a dimension of control. These games move into terrain of shadow and substance, of objects and concepts. These are the games of... The Clearance Zone.