Samson Has One Thing That GTA Doesn’t: Consequences

Cards on the table: Samson is glitchy. It’s janky. You’re as likely to fail a mission from getting stuck on some decorative bin bags as you are from being beaten to death. These are all issues that can be fixed, but only with the kind of rigorous update schedule that beleaguered developer Liquid Swords is unlikely to be able to pull off. So, in its current state at least, it’s difficult to recommend.

I’m gonna do that annoying thing now that people in my line of work love doing: I’m going to contradict everything I just said with a big but. As in, “however”, not my ass.

But (there it is), Samson offers such an interesting and unique take on the open world crime caper that it does warrant some consideration as a low-cost stopover on this last stretch of highway to the open world crime caper we all wish we were playing already. In short, Samson’s got a touch of roguelike about it. A roguelite, maybe. Diet Rogue, if you will. It’s “rogue-ish”. For a game that looks, in trailers, like your mum knitted you a copy of GTA 4 instead of getting one from the shops, it scarcely qualifies as a GTA clone at all.

For a start, it’s not a power fantasy, eschewing the traditional petty criminal rags-to-underworld-kingpin-riches story for the oppressive conceit of insurmountable debt. Following a botched job in another city, protagonist Samson McCray is saddled with $100,000 to pay off via odd jobs. Strict daily targets must be adhered to or the bailiffs are sent round to give you a kicking. Fail to raise cash quickly enough and you pay in blood: your sister is being held hostage by the St. Louis shellsuit mafia as collateral. And has apparently also been roped into doing their bookkeeping.

Every day you wake up with six action points and a list of available jobs that pay a fixed amount of cash. Action points are the currency of time, and with a finite amount of time to make the daily quota, each job must be considered according to its risk. If, for example, you bite off a bit more than you can chew and end up getting your head kicked in on a shakedown job, you’ll wake up in a clinic having been relieved of all your takings for the day: a devastating setback in comparison to the GTA equivalent, where the financial consequences of emergency healthcare are so negligible it calls into question that series’ credentials as a satire of the American condition.

Motoring, the quintessential symptom of the American condition and Grand Theft Auto’s most carefree pastime, ceases to be a pure jolly in Samson’s world. If you take one of the various driving jobs, you may end up spending half of your fee on car repairs. Yes, some basic vehicle management is required of you here. Not enough for this to qualify as some sort of dreary petrolhead sim, but enough to make you less cavalier about pranging the motor than you would be in other open world driving games.

Your relationship with Samson’s car really sets his story apart from that of GTA 4’s Niko Bellic, to whom vehicles are about as disposable as printer cartridges or chewing gum. For all the trappings of poverty on display in Rockstar’s worlds, very little of it matters. Samson knows, as much of the audience does, how it feels to scrimp and save to keep a single vehicle running.

And it is a gorgeous vehicle. The sort of ridiculously macho American muscle car that feels iconic even if you’ve never seen it before. A barely tamed animal of a thing with a throaty growl and a nitrous booster that somehow gets off the line slower than a Kia Picanto and corners like a pub. it's the exact sort of classic car that would be kept and adored by a guy who can't actually afford a classic car.

Samson’s ace in the hole is that it has consequences. The constant looming threat of losing an entire day’s progress has a real physiological effect on you. It’s easy for a snowball effect to take hold on the debt if you have a particularly bad run. Lose all your cash on the last job of the day, end up in arrears, get battered by the debt collectors, head out compromised having used your last jar of painkillers. Unable to use your sherman tank of a car in driving challenges because the repair bill is already an entire afternoon’s work. It feels like a deliberate commentary on how crippling debt begats more crippling debt: a barely tweaked satire of the world on the other side of the screen, where the player is statistically of a cohort whose entire adult existence has been spent forced to chainsmoke financial crises. The cosmic joke that it is bloody expensive to be poor.

It’s a grim game born of grim circumstances. A vision of crumbling decay from a studio languishing at the pointy end of an industry in existential decline. Samson’s unique, weirdly compelling structure wasn’t the original plan. In fact, it was supposed to be something more traditionally associated with open-world cities teeming with jackable wheels and whackable jackoffs – an action RPG. Or, an action game with RPG elements. An RPG-lite, ish. Ugh, curse these rigid boxes.

In a recent interview with PC Gamer, Liquid Swords founder Christopher Sundberg lamented that this abrupt pivot from a straight up GTA clone to a tightly focused rogue-like-lite-ish with no guns and a relatively tiny city came from sheer economic necessity. In the post-covid slump, publishers shut off the money hose, and projects like Samson found themselves parched. In a wretched turn of events, half of the Liquid Swords team got laid off, leaving a much smaller crew to turn what they had into some kind of sellable game. In his words: “We laid off half the team. And those were our friends, and that hurt.”

The game that survives in all likelihood isn’t as good or as polished as the game that might have been, especially considering the founder’s track record at Avalanche Studios. But I’m willing to bet that it’s a far more memorable proposition, for better or worse. Anecdotally, it is prompting some marvellous reactions. It has given my colleague Matt Purslow the gift of being the closest thing we've ever gotten to a video game version of the Ryan Gosling getaway driving movie Drive, thanks to the inspired police evasion mechanic of being able to slip into a dark alley and switch off the car (which, the more he's played, does appear to be a marvellous bug and not an intended feature). In a group chat with Rock Paper Shotgun’s esteemed Mark Warren, the Samson experience is compared to what it must feel like to be a minor character in GTA 4, an observation so good that it’s annoying and he’s lucky I’m not stealing it.

For me, it evokes a golden age of daft, experimental GTA clones, where there was this 10-15 year period of shocking innovation as every publisher scrabbled to stake a claim on the genre like every mid-sized western nation calling bagsies on ever thinner slices of Antarctica. We had everything from Red Faction Guerrilla to Mad Max, from The Simpson’s Hit & Run to Sleeping Dogs and even Lego City Undercover. Its closest and most recent analog is probably last year’s The Precinct, the GTA-esque police procedural that is also rogue-adjacent and made by a very small team.

To be clear, Samson isn’t as good as any of those, even if it does share some of its creative DNA with Mad Max and its stablemate, Just Cause. But Liquid Swords has stumbled into the same kind of interesting genre twist that defines those titles, where in the absence of anything approaching the resources to mount a serious challenge to Grand Theft Auto’s intricate hyper-realism and Hollywood bombast, they focused on making an alternative proposition. These games thrive on doing things that GTA simply wouldn’t ever do: be it destructible environments, a setting like Hong Kong, or Springfield, or a colonised Mars in the far future, or car combat that plays like a brawler on wheels.

Samson’s unique modifier is its rogue adjacent structure, the framework upon which rests a debt management meta-game that drives the whole experience. Boiled down to one word, Samson’s ace in the hole is that it has consequences. Real stakes, where the constant looming threat of losing an entire day’s progress has a real physiological effect on you that you rarely get from a criminal power fantasy where within 40 seconds of losing a fight with the LSPD you end up back on the street with a full health bar and a bazooka still inexplicably in your pocket.

If you want to keep any weapons handy in Samson, by the way, you’ve got to keep them in the trunk.

To be clear, I'm not saying GTA 7 should be a roguelike. I'm definitely not suggesting that a trendsetting behemoth like Rockstar North needs to copy anyone's homework. What Samson does do, though, is provide examples of how deeply felt consequences for failure can connect the player to its world in an authentic way that the naughty boy fantasy playground of Grand Theft Auto, even when it was doing riffs on The Wire back in 2008, rarely achieves. Like a balding set of tires, Rockstar often leaves a lot of friction to be desired. Even when it was doing a 60-hour epic about a guy dying of tuberculosis, the complications were only seen in the narrative, not felt in the bones of the thing.

As a card carrying Flawed Game Enjoyer, I find Samson deeply fascinating. Within this broken mess, there are bold ideas that would make for an interesting twist if deployed in a better, more resourced project. And you can certainly marvel at the gumption it must have taken just to get this thing over the finish line in Today’s Economic Environment. But for all the ways it can be admired, Samson remains impossible to recommend: the end result is like going to Hooters for wings. It’s cheap, it’s stupid, and you’d be embarrassed to tell your friends about it. And there are plenty of other places to get wings. Like Vin Diesel's Wheelman.

Jim Trinca is a Video Producer at IGN, and when he isn't fawning over Assassin's Creed, he can be found watching Star Trek and eating stuff. Follow him on @jimtrinca.bsky.social, and check out The Trinca Perspective playlist over on IGN's YouTube channel!