I love stories about bad men who are also good boys. Or at least as good as their circumstances allow them to be. They’re typically men looking for redemption, just maybe not the kind you immediately think of. For getaway driver Samson McCray, that means saving his sister. After a job in St. Louis goes horribly wrong, Samson takes the fall.
The crew he joined up with was going to kill him until his sister Oonaugh intervened. Pay back what was lost, with interest, and Samson gets to keep breathing. Oonaugh is collateral, trapped in St. Louis, until he does. And if he can’t, they’ll both pay the price. So it’s back to Tyndalston, the city that made Samson who he is. Back to the old crew, the old life.
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Every day, he has to pay back a certain amount. If he doesn’t, things get harder. The St. Louis crew sends men tocollect. And eventually, well… Bring us the girl and wipe away the debt, begins Bioshock Infinite. Samson’s conceit is simpler, more directed: bring us the debt, or we’ll wipe out the girl.
Samson forces us to reckon with what happens when a job goes wrong.
There aren’t a lot of true-blue crime stories in video games. Grand Theft Auto, sure. But it’s a satire at its core, even if its narrative would often be better if it wasn’t. Mafia is about the mob.
There are a few stories about the small-timers, the petty guys, the guys looking to break out of bad situations. It’s easy to model a lot of your missions after a bank job. It’s harder to build a game around what happens after a job goes wrong.
Think about Roy Scheider’s Jackie Scanlon in Sorcerer. Samson ain’t that, not quite. But you can see the parallels. If Grand Theft Auto owes a debt of its own to the sprawling ambition of Heat, Samson is more like Collateral. Intimate, raw, drawn down into the details of a life or two, where the best you can hope for is to be left standing when the curtain falls.
Deliverance is offered to Samson in the form of saving a single life.
Tyndalston isn’t a place you want to be. It’s dirty inside and out. Works like “f***” and “b****” are graffittied to the sides of buildings. Large chunks of the city are abandoned or taken over by gangs. It’s got the kind of sick that seeps inside you, and you can see how it made Samson who he is.
Find a landmark, and he’ll tell you how it relates to him: how he left Catholicism, how his father was a drunk who beat his children, the kind of trouble they got into to get away from him. Tyndalston is baked into who Samson is, for better or worse. He isn’t looking to leave his life to find some kind of atonement.
His deliverance will be saving the one person who believed in him, who stuck her neck out to clean up his mess and keep him alive, who calls him at the dump of an apartment an old friend’s set him up in to make sure everything’s okay, swap stories, reminisce.
Debt looms large over the story as Samson takes on new jobs.
Samson’s story missions revolve around what’s going on with his old crew in Tyndalston. But the story, and what kept me going, was clearing that debt, a day at a time.
That means jobs: beating guys up, tailing others, stealing merchandise, street races, taking a wounded guy to the hospital, or disposing of a hot ride, whatever. If it pays, Samson’s there.
He only has so much time during the day, and he has to manage what he owes with how much time he can spend on each job versus what that job pays. Easier work is less risky, but it pays less. And that debt hangs over you every day. Miss too many payments, and it’s lights out for Samson and Oonaugh both.
Art shouldn’t be easy.
And losing money’s easy. You get knocked out, whatever cash you were carrying is gone. You can retry a mission you fail, but it’ll cost you more of your limited time. Damage to Samson’s sports car costs money to repair. Nitrous costs money to refill. Everything is designed to take something from you, to make your day-to-day harder.
Sure, you could steal a car off the street (but, crucially, not when someone’s already in it), but it won’t be as tough as Samson’s, or as fast, or come with nos. You won’t have to pay for it if you damage it while running someone off the road during a mission, but it’ll cost you in other ways.
I could, I suppose, complain about the technical issues or repetitive missions or the main plot or the finicky, imprecise hand-to-hand combat. Friction. A dirty word in today’s video game, as though art should be smooth and seamless and only ever make us feel good. But the best crime dramas are about cost.
Nobody walks away unscathed, if they walk away at all. This isn’t always supposed to be fun. And if I lose my day’s savings because a guy sneaks up behind me and cold clocks me with a lead pipe before I can pop my painkillers? Well, that’s on me.
Nobody said going home was going to be easy, that it would feel good, that the gun pointed at your head was just there for show. Maybe it should be harsh, being a small-time crook in debt to bad men. Maybe it should be frustrating.
Maybe form is function. Maybe the dirtiness of it – the adrenaline shots to make me stronger, the painkillers to keep me upright, the bloody knuckles and the apartment that should be condemned, the violence that pervades every aspect of Samson’s daily life, the idea that the best outcome is that you and Oonaugh get to keep going – is part of the appeal.
Art should challenge you – it isn’t always meant to be an escape.
Maybe I’m here because, like when I queue up The Departed or Collateral or Uncut Gems or The Wire again, I don’t want to feel good.
I find joy in the small things: screaming down a street at night, Samson’s V8 roaring in my ears; walking out of a brawl with enough health to stay standing; taking down all the cars of a rival gang just before mine gives out; smashing sandwich signs and finding combat magazines and having enough spare cash to fix my car at the end of a hard day; of crashing when I’m out of time to spend on jobs.
Of knowing that today, I paid my dues and kept a little extra for tomorrow. In letting a guy who wronged my boys and me walk away, one of the few choices I’m allowed. That I never pick up a gun.
I won’t make Samson a good person; I won’t save Tyndalston from the rot at its heart. Their stories are written. But I can pay off my debt. I can save Oonaugh. I can survive until another sunrise. Sometimes, here is all you get.
Samson is available now on PC, Xbox Series X|S, and PlayStation 5.
