Wolfenstein has good praxis folks. You kill Nazis and that's always good. I'm a fan of the series based on that alone. But my fandom has increased based off this Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus trailer from the Bethesda Press Conference at E3 2017, which is easily one of the most surreal game trailers this writer has ever seen.
Let me try to break it down: It opens with a throwback video about a young girl named Peggy, who rescues a man under a car after getting groceries for her mother by calling her giant dog robot over to help get the man out from under the car. Also she's German, and the video's audio is straight from the fifties, along with the title cards, the video quality doing its best to represent that as well. It becomes clear suddenly that we're watching a TV channel in an alternate world, the Nazi infested Wolfenstein one.
We see that the TV that is playing these channels and commercials and game shows like "German or Else!" is in an abandoned hospital where our American protagonist William wakes from his slumber. The whole time Brenda Lee's Danka Schoen plays in the background. Less gracefully we're whipped into a small city after some light table setting of the stakes at hand, where there are Klan members walking the streets in broad daylight mingling with SS soldiers. We move into a first person perspective in a diner in the town, where a Nazi soldier does his best Christoph Waltz and asks us to show our papers while drinking from a strawberry milkshake.
Then we're whipped into a battle field where William is trying to contact a resistance group who seem more like Mystery Men than Black Ops. Bullets are flying while people are sitting at desks having conversations, it's completely wild. William has a really cool helmet and some dope knives. The trailer gets back on the rails once we're in resistance bunker, moving from there toward the gameplay footage, Danka Schoen back in remastered and boppier. A pregnant woman stabs the shit out of a nazi.
I know this sounds like I'm doing a wild "and then" recounting, but basically this whole thing is edited to give you a sense of the world and tone of this whacky game by seamlessly dropping us into these discreet examples of its world. It's really brilliant and surreal.
The game looks like it'll have the dual wielding and gory, over the top combat of the previous games. But the kind of wicked comedy and characters I'm seeing here are getting me rather pumped. Excited for this to come out on October 27th of this year.
