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It’s not that easy to pigeon hole a game like El Shaddai Ascension of the Metatron; it’s definitely different, it’s artistic and you might even say a bit pretentious. So me being a smart arse, pretentious douchebag who once wrote a Bioshock review using the term a ‘haunting lullaby that squeezes the soul’ for a video store magazine, you would think I’d be all over El Shaddai like a post modern artist on a free pastry buffet.

Batman makes a cameo to remind you that you'd rather be playing Arkham City

But au contraire El Shaddai bored me to tears and after the first few hours I struggled to play any further. Simply put, the game, for all its artiness, doesn’t engage you, and no matter how gorgeous the aesthetic or esoteric the subject, art that fails to engage is still bad art.

The pseudo biblical basis for El Shaddai (which is another Hebrew name for God) is the Book of Enoch. While technically a biblical text the Book of Enoch is ignored by almost every Judaic based faith group (Christian, Jewish etc.) because, like other troublesome Gnostic gospels, it tends to contradict a lot of what’s been taken as established in the old and new testaments. In fact the only group that takes the Book of Enoch as canon, despite the fact it’s older than most other gospels, is the Orthodox Ethiopian Church.  The text is oddly popular with Japanese game developers, parts of it used as the basis for the mythology in Bayonetta; this is largely because the Book of Enoch is full of lots of good myth stuff, warring angels and things like that. If you've ever played a game or seen a movie about angels duking it out and cool christian myth stuff like that, it was likely cribbed from some of the book of Enoch.

So many peering eyes, like a potato

You play as the aforementioned Enoch, a priest tasked with battling a group of angels who have descended to earth and become figures of worship to humanity. You have to first reach and then battle your way through the tower of Babel. All the while being helped by earth’s heavenly protector, Lucifel, who inexplicably looks like the vampire from Twilight and talks on his cell phone with god whenever he appears as your mid level save point.

While you can punch and kick to fight enemies you’re soon equipped with a weapon of heaven called an Arch; a glowing sword type weapon for standard hack slash combat. As the game progresses you unlock a few other odd heavenly weapons with different focuses such as defence or quick ranged attack, each of the weapons is more effective against particular enemies than others but to swap between weapons you have disarm an enemy who has the weapon you want and take it from them. Another interesting mechanic has weapons becoming ‘corrupt’, and changing colour from blue and white to red and black the more enemies you kill which requires you to purify them every once in a while. Combat is superficially simple with a single attack button, but you develop combos by charging up attacks strikes, juggling enemies with aerial attacks and pausing between attacks. The longer you take between attacks the more damage you can do.

Occasionally the game switches to a 2D platformer which keeps things a teeny bit more interesting

Gameplay quickly devolves into running, fighting, running some more, jumping, running and fighting again. There’s not much else to it. Things get very repetitive very quickly and the games rhythm is all over the place with plenty of long empty minutes of almost no activity. A few lever pulls here and there and the game is mostly a tour through the developers feverish acid induced vision of a world.

This is the biggest draw of El Shaddai the game fuses sight and sound in a magical fashion. When you first approach the Tower of Babel across a strange glass platform, oddly shaped buildings flickering with light below you and fireworks exploding the in the sky, it looks quite stunning. Then on the periphery of your hearing you pick up the strange singing of the people below, a tribal chanting, somewhere between a hymn and a drum circle. These visual and audible sensations always feel entirely unique, otherworldly even, and taken on face value the sights and sounds of El Shaddai are very impressive. But do they contribute to the gameplay? Do they form the world around you? Do they work in symphony with the actions you’re carrying out?

Nope.

Beautiful, but needleslly awkward jumping section, there are a few of these

Nickelback could be playing in the background for all the impact it has on the game. While the artwork and sound are both amazing and appealing they serve no purpose. El Shaddai is like a rock wrapped in a Van Gogh painting as a birthday present.

And now I need to rant about art.

El Shaddai is another good argument for games as an art form, because ‘art’ doesn’t necessarily mean ‘good’, there’s a lot of crap art out there and subjectively for me, El Shaddai is crap art. There’s no fixed definition of art (screw you dictionary.com), but my layman opinion would be that to classify as art an individual creation needs only to engage me to be of good quality. Van Gogh’s painting The Starry Night engages me, Beethovens Moonlight Sonata engages me, Batman comics for the most part engage me. I’ve seen art that I detested, but it still engaged me, the relationship to the audience doesn’t have to be positive. Art is also subjective, you may enjoy something I don’t, my intelligent and far better educated wife thinks Starry Night is over rated rubbish and Moonlight Sonata is simplistic and boring.

Yes the ancient monk Enoch is wearing Levi's and no I don't know why

You might enjoy El Shaddai a lot more than I did, but to me the repetitive gameplay and the disjointed rhythm cast up a wall between me and the game. To that end I felt nothing, the game bored me and at what I believe was the halfway mark I wasn’t interested in playing anymore. Similar games that focused on combining conventional gameplay with sensory and emotional experience like Okami, Shadow of the Colossus and Flower had me glued to my television for days.

It’s easy to get sucked into El Shaddai solely on the basis of its looks. But it doesn’t take very long to get tired of it.