"Undetected," a new indie stealth game from Mexican developer Antonio Freire (opens in new tab), but above the scene where the protagonist, Tenoch Khan, sneaks through the jungle to a deployment point, a pencil-pushing, nonsense general soon mission ...I knew from the start of the briefing that this game and I were on the same page. Not even 30 seconds had passed before proper nouns like "Raptorix Unit" and "Perpetual Energy Station" were thrown around.

This is a good point. I don't even want to know what Raptrix means. Sounds cool. Give me that minimal context. Someone needs help in a heavily fortified apartment complex, and I'm the only one who can do the job.

However, Undetected's Metal Gear Solid-inspired setting (not to be confused with last year's MGS parody game UnMetal (open in new tab)) is actually worth a listen: to fight corporate control by the Mexican-American coalition in 2063, "radical I had to watch it twice before I realized that the general was actually briefing the bad guys about me, a former Corp spy who defected to the "radical" organization. Tenoch Khan is not a military dog, but a man who would have Solid Snake kill him.

The first few levels of Undetected continue to betray what one would expect from the faithful Metal Gear Solid. For one thing, the "no kill" switch is always on. The silenced pistol is less a gun than a launcher, a tool of distraction like a Thief.

The default ammunition is rubber bullets, which are useless against guards but great for turning off light switches. Sponge bullets can take out guards, but you have to hit them twice, and I found them a total of four times. I have yet to find goo bullets. The inventory screen promises that you can dazzle the guards long enough to slip past them. It's basically just a smoke bomb, but it literally looks like a can full of farts (or maybe something worse). I respect the potentially controversial decision to stay non-lethal. Guns are the easy solution to almost every problem in most stealth games.

And I sneeked it the MGS1 way. That is, you can basically run past them as long as you don't pass through the lookout's line of sight. Instead of a minimap, Khan can use his robo eyes to scout ahead and zoom out his view so much that the entire screen becomes a map. While I like the cool cyberspace-like effects, I sometimes found it difficult to spot guards through the foliage. I think it's wise to ditch the traditional map, which has too much feedback. The problem is that there is not enough feedback in Undetected. Khan is basically invisible when he is in the shadows (you know he is functioning when his arms are glowing), but I have already been killed several times because I was standing in a completely dark place and it did not count as dark.

It will be interesting to discover which elements of MGS Undetected are valued and which are completely subverted; Undetected incorporates old "MGS" mechanics (as "MGS" should), but I would happily override them with modern conveniences I would happily overwrite them with modern conveniences. For example, a crouch button would be cool, as would a tiered alert status that gives you room to jump into the shadows when a guard spots you. Some things don't seem to change. At first I focused on ghosting through the room as the tutorial suggests, but eventually I found that, just like in MGS1, dodge-rolling straight into an unaware guard was a quick and easy way to knock them out and cheese through the encounters.

I'll give it some more time to see how "Undetected" turns out. Right now I'm hoping for more story. Having finally arrived at the facility where the majority of the game is supposed to take place, I'm keeping my fingers crossed that the bug-themed war criminals will soon attempt to impede my progress.