ANNO: Mutationem

We gotta love strange, wacky games. ANNO: Mutationem doesn’t seem like that at first, with its overly serious plot and protagonist pointing to a by-the-numbers cyberpunk adventure. But nothing could be further from the truth. ANNO: Mutationem is bonkers, ANNO: Mutationem is bizarre; it’s just shy about it.

We play as Ann Flores, who suffers from Entanglelitis, a strange disease that makes her go berserk from time to time and not remember her violent actions. This is great from a gameplay perspective, as it allows us to take on a much powerful form during combat, but for Ann’s personal life, you can understand why it’s a problem. One day, her brother Ryan – who lost an eye in one of her episodes but never stopped loving Ann, great dude – went looking for a cure and disappeared. But before she can start searching for him, some unsavory people come to their bar and house, unaware that when Ann is not being a mediocre bartender (my bad, really, I failed at the minigame), she’s a special agent very handy with a beam sword. Ann is also “a big baseball fan and loves to practice Ikebana when she’s got the time.” She dispatches them in seconds.

The first thing that stands out in ANNO: Mutationem is its graphic style, which blends 2D pixel art with 3D backgrounds to great effect (still images don’t do it justice, though; it really shines in motion, when we get to sense the depth of each scenery). And it certainly helps that Ann’s city is a richly realized world. We can see giant billboards and neon signs and screens polluting the streets, angry cops everywhere, people with strange mechanical augments being treated as outcasts – one homeless man has mechanical spider arms –  and just by exploring her neighborhood, we can come across a concert in a back alley, a man being accosted by a cop for assaulting a woman (which is too unrealistic, real cops wouldn’t care less – or blame the woman), and even some cats dropping glass bottles into passersby for no specific reason (now we’re talking).

Ann’s search for her brother leads her to this city’s even more dangerous underbelly, forcing her to deal with slimy mob bosses, solve strange crimes, and even discover a hidden city in the underground tunnels, populated by the sick and dying – for in her world, a stranger crater spread a dangerous virus that mechanizes people’s bodies and make them gradually lose their mind. Her city is sick and trying to sweep the rot under the rug.

But don’t be fooled by ANNO: Mutationem’s somber atmosphere and restrained, unremarkable soundtrack, for this is one weird-ass videogame. The main storyline, for example, may begin as your typical futuristic noir investigation, dealing with corruption and technology, but out of nowhere, we’ll be bombarded with some disturbing Christian imagery, and while we’re still recovering from that, plunged into a more deranged version of Stranger Things. And the transition between genres is not smooth and subtle as one would hope, but stark and shocking – some characters, like Ann’s boss, are basically even forgotten in the process.

But it’s the little moments that are truly disquietingly strange. While we’re exploring that underground city, for example, we get interrupted by a cutscene where a scientist speaks with a menacing, heavily post-processed Bane voice. His head is shaped like a monkey’s. We get to meet him more times, but learn very little about him. Later on, we come across a man living in the sewers who reveres Ann and calls her “boss”. His head is shaped like a sewer lid. We never see him again. The game’s main vendor is Jos van Corn, a member of the Corn & Corn family business, who sells us corn juice. His head is shaped like a corn cob. He’s capable of photosynthesis, and the antagonists fear him and avoid his corn juice like the plague. We see him everywhere – even in the most dangerous and secluded of places. There’s a Santa Claus scene that must be seen to be believed. Santa’s head is shaped like you would expect, but it’s still a bit strange because he wears sunglasses.

And here’s the oddest thing of all: ANNO: Mutationem plays everything with a straight face, never acknowledging the absurd nature of the shit it’s throwing at us. The tone remains somber; the soundtrack remains understated. Characters never stop taking events seriously, including Santa Claus’s arrival. Even the dialogue is always too straightforward and matter-of-factly, lacking the energy and color one would expect of these situations. Bob, the cynic, calls the writing here drab, but his twin brother and archnemesis, Kevin, is much more kind. He says it weirdly adds to ANNO:Mutationem’s charm. After all, this is a game where we talk to people by pressing R instead of A – and a video game can’t get weirder than that.

Let’s take the first sidequest as another example. Ann leaves her apartment and discovers that her neighbor, Bonnie Parker, has been murdered – strangled to death, and then hung up in her living room. The suspect is her landlord – never trust the bastards – Jonathan Armstrong, who was having problems with her regarding payment. He was last seen going down in the building’s elevator – where he vanished without a trace after the 6^th floor. So, we go there and find a conspicuous door with some candles on the front. We look through the peephole and see that this apartment looks a lot like Bonnie’s, with just one odd, but striking difference. From this point on, the quest derails into madness, as it begins to deal with the occult, supernatural pocket dimensions, and an obscure puzzle involving elevators where moon-logic reigns as supreme as a Medieval monarch anointed by God – and these are narrative and gameplay elements that will never appear again in any other quest. But if you’re anything like Kevin, the kind, you’ll find this to be endearing. After all, no one can accuse ANNO: Mutationem of being formulaic or generic and still sleep well at night, unencumbered by similarly dishonest thoughts.

However, not even Kevin can refute the accusation that ANNO: Mutationem is littered with lots of unnecessary stuff. Especially gameplay-wise. Before venturing into a biological lab area, for example, we find a vendor who allows us to craft new weapons and another vendor who sells… the parts necessary to craft them. Why, then, not just have one vendor sell the complete weapons? It would have saved us time and the developers, money: win-win for everyone involved.

Crafting here can often be funny, too, in the way that we almost never have the materials required to properly engage with the activity – and that is after collecting all kinds of junk from trash cans, chests, and the like. It basically feels like a gag: we discover that we can craft a new weapon when we meet the vendor, but we’ll have more luck getting a thousand views on this website than acquiring the necessary materials.

In their andromorphic, metaphorical heart, ANNO: Mutationem probably believes that, to be loved, it must have lots of systems and mechanics and stuff, so it allows us to dismantle items, forge chips to equip on our secondary weapons to increase their stats by 5%, and spend two different types of points on skill trees. But we would have loved it anyway. Maybe even more, because without a clear, purposeful design, this all feels like stuff: things that are there, and that’s all we can say about them.

Even though we can explore fully 3D environments, when it’s time for Ann to chew bubblegum and kick ass, the game becomes a side-scroller action game, where, all out of bubblegum, we can use light and heavy attacks, ranged attacks, and a generous parry to totally annihilate our enemies. They have a shield bar protecting their health one, and when we manage to deplete it, we can use a special move that deals lots of damage – their health bar also becomes vulnerable while their shield recharges, but usually this finisher is more than enough to dispatch them. And since ANNO: Mutationem likes to have stuff, our weapons have things such as “Penetration” stats, which allow them to bypass the shield and do a small amount of damage directly to the health bar, and they can even deal different types of elemental damage as well. And we can increase them by 5% with chips! Yay for stuff!

But the combat system works well enough, even if the animations are not as fast and slick as one would want. There’s a clunkiness to Ann’s movements and attacks, but as Kevin, the kind, likes to say, this just adds to the game’s charm. It’s all weird, anyway. And Kevin is so kind that he even forgives the writing for being littered with mistakes, such as grammatical errors and missing words in sentences. In our first quote, for example, we had to correct the text, because it actually says that Ann is “a big baseball fan and loves to practice Ikebana when she time.”

ANNO: Mutationem is overstuffed with stuff, structurally messy, and clunky most of the time. But it’s also bonkers, it’s also bizarre. Full of imagination. Full of strangely shaped heads. So, just like Kevin, the kind, we more than forgive it; we utterly admire it.

August 20, 2025.