Velvet Assassin is a stealth game developed by Replay Studios and released in April 2009 for PC and XBOX 360.It follows female British spy Violette Summer (based on real life secret agentViolette Szabo) during WWII. The game begins with Violette comatose in the hospital bed of a small village in France, where the player relives her past missions through France, Germany and Poland via flashbacks leading up to the point where she was hospitalized. Every so often you are shown glimpses of the present, where two doctors at her bedside are shown arguing whether to keep her on life support, kill her to save her from being tortured if she is discovered, or give her over to the Schutzstaffel to save the village from torture.The game is known for its dark, unnerving atmosphere and portrayal of one of history's darkest periods.The game contains examples of:
Bullet Time: Using morphine stops time momentarily allowing you to kill one alerted guard. This is an effect caused by the drugs in Violette's system back in the present day, as when she wakes up and leaves the hospital, you are no longer able to use morphine.
Crate Expectations: C'mon, would it be a third-person action game without some crate-pushing?
Cyanide Pill: One set of missions revolves around delivering one to a captured agent.
Downer Ending: The Nazis eventually find out where Violette is being kept, and storm the hospital just as she wakes up from her coma. She manages to sneak her way out and in to the village, where she sees Nazi soldiers razing buildings and shooting civilians. They are all eventually rounded up inside a church, where despite her efforts to save them (taking down several waves of soldiers in armed combat), she is unable to free them and collapses as the Nazis burn down the church. Adding insult to injury, her last assassination target, Kamm, is shown to be still alive and leading the assault. The last we see of Violette during the credits is her on a small cliff in her hospital gown, overlooking a seemingly abandoned German plane.
Doomed by Canon: The real-life spy she is based on had a similar fate.
Dressing as the Enemy: You can change into an SS outfit on some missions and try to sneak by the guards instead of fighting them, but Conspicuously Selective Perception rears its ugly head as your enemies will attack you for doing anything other than walking slowly from 30 yards away. Possibly justified, though, as a sexy new female soldier is going to raise some curiousity, especially in Nazi Germany.
Framing Device: The missions play out as the memories of a comatose Violette.
Gas Mask Mooks: Justified in that the guards with masks are working in areas filled with deadly fumes. Violette can kill them by simply slipping their mask off from behind.
Groin Attack: One of the many possible assassination animations.
The Guards Must Be Crazy: Artificial Stupidity abounds, from guards failing to hear their buddy getting butchered from five feet away to not checking inside an obvious hiding spot like the game's many wardrobes. If you do get caught, you can simply go through a door to a previous area and wait for them to give up and reset back to their old patrol routes.
Hide Your Children: Averted; as the game involves the atrocities of the Holocaust, it shows dead children lying in the streets or hanging from the gallows.
How We Got Here: Most of the story takes place in the past, eventually leading up to the moment when the heroine is hospitalized where we first see her at the start of the game.
Mata Hari: Surprisingly averted; Violette never uses her considerable feminine wiles on her missions, preferring the more direct method of stabbing Nazis through the skull. Even the dimwitted guards in this game can't be fooled into thinking that a well-armed British woman snuck onto their turf just to look for a good time.
Notice This: Objects have a sparkling white marker to make them visible at a distance.
No Swastikas: There are no Swastikas present despite the enemies being Nazis, this is because Replay Studios is a German company where it is currently prohibited to include the symbol in video games.
Scare Chord: One of these slowly builds each time you stalk an enemy from behind, growing in noise right until you get within killing range and unload on a guard. The game throws in the Red Filter of Doom for good measure.
Sniping Mission: The sniper rifle is a fairly common weapon later in the game, but some areas are designed so that you have no choice but to take it out.
Third-Person Seductress: Considering the grim setting, though, it's not dialed up very high.
Unusable Enemy Equipment: And considering the historical context, there's no way for the game to use any of the traditional Stealth-Based Gamehand waves that more modern or futuristic titles can employ. Of course, mowing through an atmospheric stealth game with an ample supply of machine gun rounds kind of defeats both the purpose and the challenge of the game, so chalk it up as an Acceptable Break from Reality. Still, this trope hits the fan on the second-to-last mission, when Violette desperately needs to secure some firearms but never thinks to just take some off of the dozens of guards she just spent the last hour painstakingly hunting down with her knife. (Never mind the Fridge Logic of her somehow knowing there's a full weapon locker on the other end of the stage.)
) during WWII. The game begins with Violette comatose in the hospital bed of a small village in France, where the player relives her past missions through France, Germany and Poland via flashbacks leading up to the point where she was hospitalized. Every so often you are shown glimpses of the present, where two doctors at her bedside are shown arguing whether to keep her on life support, kill her to save her from being tortured if she is discovered, or give her over to the Schutzstaffel to save the village from torture.The game is known for its dark, unnerving atmosphere and portrayal of one of history's darkest periods.
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