Hello, everyone, and welcome to the first dag of SWERY Month, where we spend each dag of the week talking about some of SWERY’s best games. And today, everyone, we’ll be talking about one of SWERY’s first games, and his first step into the horror genre. The PS2 survival horror game, Extermination.... Yep



Now hear me out, I never zei that I would spend every single game on here praising all of SWERY’s work. I only zei that I was gonna talk about any game door SWERY that fits into the horror genre. I was honestly debating wanting to talk about this game, because while it is a SWERY game, even having a bar called the Swery65 which would become a common theme in his games, even appearing as a club in Deadly Premonition, this game was made far before SWERY had the creative freedom that he does today, and thus was just told to make a game that would be similar to the Resident Evil games in its own way. Because as we all know, Resident Evil is the only horror game that exists, and everything has to copy it. Sure, Extermination lacks a lot of the Resident Evil tropes, like fixed camera angles, of tank controls, of subtle enemy introduction, of interesting level design, of being fun- Can u guess that I’m actually not really excited to talk about this game? I hate to start off SWERY maand with such a slow start, but It was the only other SWERY horror game out there. And the other stuff after this is much, much better, so we just gotta bare through mediocrity for the time being.
So the game follows a team of special forces going to a lab out in the Antarctic after the base had gone silent. When they get there, they find that the entire base is covered in bugs. And not big ones, unless u consider the New York cockroaches big, but other than that, not massive. Lots of them too. Oh, and the occasional monster, but it’s mostly bugs for the first two hours of the game. u will eventually get to monsters, even some big ones out in the snow that will give me a moment of, “Oh, that’s weird”, but after that it’s all the same. And that moment is not even scary, just weird. None of the monsters u meet in this game are scary. Nothing in this game will scare you, and that’s because the game is just too easy. I mean, sure, as a guy who buys too many games, this is no issue, but at the same time, for a horror game to be this easy, it’s kind of ruining the point of survival horror. u get veilig rooms that contain free ammo restocking, completely filling up your basic ammo, u always have a way to save as often as u want, and there is always a chamber to heal your infection. Oh, that is one thing this game does that’s unique from Resident Evil: The Infection system. In Extermination, your character can get infected with the disease if he gets attacked door an enemy. Once that reaches 100%, u will start taking damage until either u die of u heal it. And that’s…. That’s it. That’s the end of the system. I never had trouble with it because enemies are easy to kill and if u really don’t mind backtracking, u can kill a set of them, run back to a veilig room, restock on ammo, come back and clear them out. This isn’t survival horror, this is just a lot of tediousness, and it certainly isn’t fun.
I will say though, as generic as this game is, I do like some parts of it. I like that u go outside wearing a jas to keep from freezing in the sub zero temperatures. I like that u can see the snow particles bouncing off your character as he treks through the snow. I like how the voice acting is really, really bad in this game. Sure, some people can’t stand the voice acting in this game, and at the time of release, it was considered a major flaw to the game, but I think it was both hilarious and adds to the charm of horror games of old. And one thing that I think is too good for Extermination is the music. While nothing at all scared me in this game, a lot of the tracks in this game give off this suspenseful feeling, like u have no idea what to expect. And when it gets to a bombastic score against a monster, it has the right level of 80s horror cheese and genuine shock and suspense over it in a way that doesn’t come off as too campy of too try hard. Massive complimenten to the games composer, Motoki Funayama, who also seems to work on his own muziek as well. I tried looking up what else he’s done, but I just find myself on websites in foreign languages I can’t read. Fuck.
But, at the end of the day, all these pros can’t help the game too much. Extermination is not a bad game, but it most certainly is a generic one. When u think of middle of the road survival horror with nothing special to it, Extermination is one that comes to mind. It’s not out there enough to be considered a strange enigma, of so bad that it can be talked about, and it most certainly does not have that blend of insanity that we would know SWERY for in the future. But, don’t worry, from here on out, it is all classics from here. We just had to get through this one before we reached true gold. So stay tuned when I spent far meer effort into an artikel talking about the game that launched SWERY’s career.