Ninja Theory built Enslaved: Odyssey to the West on an uneasy partnership, and that pairing is the whole game. Monkey is forced to escort Trip across a ruined America. He cannot leave her, and if she dies, he dies. The rest — the staff, the mechs, the hover board — serves that bond.
Trailer, via Ninja Theory.
Monkey Wakes on the Slave Ship
Enslaved opens with Monkey (Andy Serkis) waking in a containment cell aboard a slave ship. He escapes, and the ship crashes. He reaches Trip (Lindsey Shaw) as she boards an escape pod, but she ejects without him. When he comes to after landing, he finds she has locked a slave headband on his head. A Termination Trigger will kill him if she dies.
Trip wants to go home. She needs Monkey to get her there. He is furious and has no choice. That is the engine of Enslaved: a man bound to a woman he did not agree to protect, walking a dead country toward a village he has never seen.
A Post-Apocalyptic America, 150 Years Out
The game is set 150 years after a global war. Most of humanity is gone. Nature has taken the world back. The war machines — mechs — are still active, still following their programming, still hunting surviving humans.
Enslaved is a loose adaptation of the Chinese novel Journey to the West. The names carry over. The roles carry over: one character forces the help and protection of a warrior. The setting does not. Ninja Theory traded the wuxia theme of the novel for science fiction, a genre the team wanted to explore.
Alex Garland wrote the story and stayed involved in the design to keep it consistent. Serkis and Shaw did performance capture, not just voice work. Nitin Sawhney composed the soundtrack. The engine was Unreal Engine 3.
A Staff, a Shield, and a Hover Board
Combat in Enslaved runs from a third-person view. Monkey fights with a staff that works both up close and at range. The long-range mode takes two kinds of ammunition: orange power cylinders for blast damage, blue cylinders to stun.
- A force shield that absorbs damage until it needs a recharge
- The “Cloud” device, a hover board for gliding across water and land at speed
- Finishing moves on weakened mechs, including tearing a gun off a turret or throwing an explosive foe into other mechs
Defeated enemies drop tech orbs. Orbs buy new moves and abilities, more health, stronger shields, and more damage. They are also scattered through levels, sometimes hidden, so finding them takes extra exploration. Masks are the second collectible.
Trip is not scenery. She helps Monkey past obstacles he cannot pass alone. The headband cuts both ways: stray too far from her and Monkey dies just as surely as he would if a mech killed her.
Glitches, Visions, and a Dead Village
Traveling across New York City, glitches in the headband show Monkey visions of what looks like life before the war. Enslaved never explains them cleanly. That is the point. The visions are the game’s best idea and its loosest thread.
The pair reaches Trip’s village and finds it overrun with mechs. They clear it. Trip’s father is dead, along with many other villagers. Assuming no one survived, Trip refuses to take the headband off. She wants to find whoever did this and kill them.
She takes Monkey to Pigsy (Richard Ridings), a friend of her father. Pigsy says a nearby mech base is building a “Leviathan,” an enormous and incredibly powerful giant mech. The three infiltrate the base, take the Leviathan, and steer it toward the mysterious Pyramid, where the slaves are held.
Why the Partnership Carries the Game
The mechanics in Enslaved are good, not great. The staff is versatile and the two ammunition types give fights a small tactical choice. The Cloud board is fast and feels good. The platforming is competent. The puzzles are the weakest link — they rarely ask more than the obvious.
What holds it together is the relationship. The headband is a clean piece of design: it turns escort duty into a threat the player feels every second. Trip’s refusal to free Monkey after her village falls is the sharpest turn in the script. She is not a victim asking for help anymore. She is a person using him, and she knows it.
Garland’s script is the reason the two leads read as people instead of quest markers. Serkis and Shaw did the performance capture, and the result is a pair of characters whose dislike for each other is more interesting than most game friendships.
Where Enslaved Stands
Here is what matters, in order.
- The headband. It makes every fight and every gap between Monkey and Trip carry weight.
- Trip’s turn after the village. It reframes the whole journey.
- The world. A reclaimed, empty America with mechs still running their old orders is a strong setting that the game does not always fill.
- The ending run to the Pyramid. It raises the scale, and scale is not the same as resolution.
The visions Monkey sees through the glitching headband are the part worth watching. They suggest the world before the war, and they never pay off in a way the rest of the story earns. That is the gap between a very good game and a great one.
Enslaved: Odyssey to the West is a 2010 action-adventure game from Ninja Theory, published by Namco Bandai Games. It came out on PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 in October 2010, with a PC release on Microsoft Windows. It was announced in 2009 as Enslaved, and it began life as a pitch for a CGI film. Development started after the team halted work on a sequel to Heavenly Sword. The TV series Life After People shaped the world, and Ico shaped the relationship between the two leads.
That lineage shows. The empty cities owe more to a documentary about what happens when people vanish than to most post-apocalyptic fiction, and the Monkey-Trip dynamic is built the way Ico built its pair: two people who cannot communicate easily and have to move together anyway.
The score is 8.2 out of 10, matching the published critic aggregate across nine outlets. That feels right. Enslaved is a game with one great idea at its center, a strong script, a memorable pair of leads, and a handful of systems that never rise to meet them. The headband is the reason to play it. The visions are the reason it stays with you after the credits, even unresolved.
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