The Farm 51 built a shooter that punishes you for shooting. Get Even, released on 23 June 2017 for PlayStation 4, PC and Xbox One, hands you a gun and then tells you that using it will tear the world apart. That tension sits at the center of the whole thing, and it is the reason the game lingers after the credits.
You play as Cole Black, a mercenary who wakes in an abandoned asylum with a device strapped to his head and no memory of how he got there. A shadowy figure called Red speaks to him through television screens and explains the device: the Pandora, also called Savant, an experimental technology built to record and play back human memory for analysis. Red wants Black to walk back through the circumstances of a kidnapping. Black remembers only one thing — a teenage girl, a chair, a bomb.
Get Even is a first-person psychological thriller that folds shooter, puzzle and adventure games into one. It is not a clean fit for any of those labels, and that is both its ambition and its problem.
Trailer, via The Farm 51.
The Pandora Headset and the Girl with the Bomb
The game opens outside an abandoned building with Black repeating a single thought: save the girl. He fights his way inside, finds the girl tied to a chair with a bomb strapped to her chest, and fails to defuse it before it explodes. He wakes in the asylum. The bomb is the anchor of the entire story, and Get Even returns to it the way a tongue returns to a broken tooth.
Red claims Black had something to do with the kidnapping. Black cannot argue, because he cannot remember. So he agrees to the treatment, and the treatment is the game.
The structure is a loop. Black moves through the asylum, enters a memory that Red wants reconstructed, plays through it as a level, and returns to the asylum to push deeper. Each pass adds a piece. The memories are not presented as flashbacks you watch — they are spaces you inhabit, and the line between the memory and the present gets thinner as you go.
Cole Black, Red and the Inmates of the Asylum
The asylum is not empty. Black meets other inmates on his way through, and they are not all hostile. Some are friendly. Many of them call him the “Puppet Master” and make references to Alice in Wonderland, which tells you something about how the game sees him: a man being moved around a board by someone else’s hand.
Red is a voice and a presence on screens. The game never lets Black — or the player — get a clean look at who is running the treatment or why. That withholding is deliberate. It is also the source of most of the game’s unease.
The supporting cast matters more than the shooter mechanics do. Black pieces the story together by examining his own memories and others that Red provides. He was hired by a man named Robert Ramsey to infiltrate ADS, a weapons contractor, and steal a prototype called the CornerGun. Ramsey then patented the CornerGun as his own, nearly bankrupting ADS and humiliating its CEO, Roger Howard. Ramsey rewarded Black with a job as head of security at his own company.
Then there is Jasper Prado, an Irish mercenary killed under suspicious circumstances around the same time as the kidnapping. Jasper was hired by Rose Atkins, Ramsey’s research assistant. The name surfaces in Black’s memory and pulls a thread that the game keeps tugging.
A Smartphone with Five Apps and a Gun You Should Not Use
Black carries a smartphone with five apps, and they carry the work the game does not hand to a conventional display. A scanner analyzes specific objects for evidence. A map handles navigation and enemy tracking. Thermal vision spots heat signatures. A phone and messaging app carries conversations with other characters. An ultraviolet light picks up trace evidence like fingerprints and blood.
Notes, photographs and audio recordings sit scattered through every level. They get stored in an evidence room you can reach at set points during or between levels. Collecting them is optional, but gathering 100% of a level’s evidence unlocks a code that opens specific doors. That is a smart piece of design: the reward for paying attention is more of the thing you were paying attention to.
Combat works like most first-person shooters, with one twist. The game discourages it. Killing people threatens the stability of the memory and can break it down completely. Black has a small arsenal — pistols and assault weapons among them — but the game treats every kill as damage to the reconstruction.
Your preference for stealth or aggression also decides which ending you get. That is the cleanest expression of what Get Even is doing. It is a shooter that keeps score against you.
Manchester, a Delay and a June Release
Get Even was originally scheduled for release on 26 May 2017. After the Manchester Arena bombing, The Farm 51 and Bandai Namco pushed it to 23 June 2017. Nine years on, the game’s release history is still the first thing many people know about it.
Here is the running order of how the game reached players:
| Date | Event |
|---|---|
| 26 May 2017 | Original scheduled release date |
| 2017 | Manchester Arena bombing |
| 23 June 2017 | Delayed release date on PC, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One |
| 2017 | Publisher: Bandai Namco Entertainment; Developer: The Farm 51 |
The delay was the right call and it cost the game its window. A psychological thriller about a bomb strapped to a teenage girl arriving in the same season as a bombing at a concert would have been read as exploitation whether it deserved that reading or not. Moving the date was not cowardice. It was the only defensible option.
The CornerGun, ADS and the Story Under the Story
The plot does not stay in the asylum. It reaches into corporate theft, a stolen weapon prototype and a broken company. Ramsey takes the CornerGun, patents it, and leaves ADS and Roger Howard humiliated and nearly out of business. Black is the man who made that possible, and the treatment is slowly making him remember it.
That is a more interesting story than the game’s marketing suggested. Get Even was sold as a memory-bending thriller, and it is one, but the spine underneath is a fairly cold story about what mercenaries do for money and what the people who hire them do with the results. Jasper Prado’s death and Rose Atkins’ role in hiring him sit at the edge of that story, and the game lets you find them rather than handing them over.
The Alice in Wonderland references and the “Puppet Master” name are the game telling you what it is. Black is not the protagonist of his own life. He is a piece being moved. The question the treatment is built to answer is who has been moving him, and whether he ever had a choice.
What Get Even Gets Right and Where It Stumbles
The evidence system is the best thing in Get Even. It turns curiosity into a mechanic and gives the player a reason to slow down in a genre that usually rewards speed. The thermal vision and UV light are not decoration — they are how you read a room, and the game trusts you to use them.
The combat is the weak point. Discouraging violence is a real idea, but the shooting that remains is ordinary, and the game’s own rules make every firefight feel like a mistake you are being graded on. When the mechanic you built the genre around is the one you tell players to avoid, the parts you did not build as carefully start to show.
The asylum loop also wears thin. Returning to the same corridors between memories creates rhythm, then repetition. The story carries you through the middle stretch, not the level design.
What holds it together is the bomb. Get Even never lets you forget the girl in the chair, and it never lets you fix her. That failure is the point. A game that let you defuse the bomb would be a different, lesser game.
Get Even is a first-person shooter that would rather you put the gun down, wrapped around a memory machine that may be lying to you. It does not fully solve the contradiction at its center, and its combat never matches its ideas. But the ideas are worth the friction. The Farm 51 made a thriller about a man who cannot trust his own recollection, and then made the player share that doubt through the controls. That is harder than it sounds, and it works more often than it does not.
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