Being of Scandinavian descent myself–specifically Danish–I’m always caught by surprise when I see Norse mythology hit the pop culture circuit.  Throw out a Loki or an Odin or a badly overused Thor or even a Yggdrasil or some such and you’ve got my attention.

Which is one of the biggest reasons that I was interested in finally getting my hands on a copy of Too Human, the game that shows you that it’s true–any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.  Here, “Norse gods” are just cybernetically enhanced humans getting a kind of carefully regulated technology from the Aesir Corporation.  One such “god”, Baldur, has received the mission of protecting the human race from the encroaching machine armies of fellow “god” Loki.

There’s an interesting dichotomy at work here–the “gods” use machine parts to give them new abilities and thus become more machinelike with each new enhancement, but Loki’s machine armies harvest human blood and limbs and graft them onto their own superstructures, in an effort to become more human.   It’s as though the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence, and neither man nor machine wants to stay that way for long.

The part that’ll really kill you about Too Human is that it spent fully TEN YEARS in development hell, starting life as a four-disc adventure game for the original Playstation.  Yes, I mean Playstation ONE.  So what you’re seeing here is the result of ten years’ worth of work and refinement.
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