![]() ![]() This is overtly spelled out in audio logs throughout the game. To compensate, CREO begins recruiting the disabled, particularly those without families. Being a greedy, uncaring corporation, they need both test subjects and expendable workers because coming into contact with hazardous materials is going to kill or maim people. It’s revealed through the course of the game that CREO is working on a nano machine swarm that is supposed to save the human race from the effects of climate change. It’s that being disabled is still integral to the plot of The Surge. As David Christopher Bell once said, “There’s blind, and then there’s Daredevil blind.” So what makes Warren better than, say, Rad Spencer from Bionic Commando with his super-powered prosthesis? That pretty much negates the fact that he is disabled from a practical sense. On the one hand he is kind of the walking (pun intended) avatar of the Disability Superpower trope because the exo-rig lets him move without the wheelchair and even makes him a gifted warrior. ![]() How you count Warren is somewhat debatable. I’ve pointed out before how there are almost no playable disabled protagonists in video games, though there is a really good recent example of Cassie Thornton from Perception. I'm not sure why the only good video I could find of this scene is in German. After fighting through the game courtesy of the exo-rig, the last shot is of him once again crawling toward his wheelchair. In a brilliant scene at the beginning, we meet him as he rides a train to his new job at CREO, but once we’re given control it turns out that he’s in a wheelchair. The few times he comes across as a dick are motivated by the understandable stress of waking up in a factory full of cyborg monsters trying to kill him. In a medium filled to the brim with grizzled men with tragic pasts looking for righteous violence, Warren is surprisingly easy-going and considerate. The hero is Warren, who would be a pretty generic white male protagonist except for two things. The Surge is a Dark Souls-esque title set in the near future as opposed to a fantasy realm. Let’s start with the latter because it actually leads directly to the former. The Surge 2 improves on the original in many ways, but its new storyline loses its predecessor’s razor-sharp critique of corporate greed and cruelty as well as one of the very, very few disabled protagonists available in video games. Spoilers ahead for The Surge and its sequel.
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