Anyone remember the video 🦂game Wet? A weird series of events I won’t get into caused me to remember the game today, and as I looked it up to confirm it really did exist and was not j🌞ust a fever dream, I discovered that Wet’s (European) birthday was today. It was fate - I had to write about it. It’s not a particularly special birthday; the game is turning 12, the same age as the boys who were clearly its target audience, despite it being rated M. But it’s a birthday nonetheless, and the gods of destiny have decided that I must tell you all about it.
Let’s start with the trailer - one of the coolest trailers ever created. And by coolest, I don’t mean it actually was cool, I mean it was clearly desperately trying to be cool. It begins with our protagonist Rubi Malone in a bathtub. Inside a disused aeroplane. Surrounded by guns and whiskey and other very cool things. She has tattoos. She’s cool, this girl. We then see her running through a hallway, shooting faceless baddies in front of her, beside her🃏, and behind her. She goes into a knee slide, shoots another assailant, and then seamlessly, she’s sliding down a ladder. Yes, still on her knees. Her calves are wrapped around the back of the ladder as she slips down it, still shooting.
One backflip later, sh🍰e’s running on the wall with a scimitar drawn, leaping off and 🌟plunging it into someone’s chest. She runs up someone’s face, kicks them into the wall, backlips again, and keeps on shooting until suddenly, she’s back in the bathtub. She reaches for a beer from her ice cooler - that’s two cool things! - and it reveals she has a human heart sat on ice with her tall frosty ones. The tagline appears - “Get WET”. And be honest, by now, you already want to.
Did it live up to this trailer? I mean… that dep🍷ends entirely on how you define such a thing. Much like the trailer, it desperately tried to be cool in every conceivable way, but unlike the trailer - which is the greatest video game trailer ever produced - it was not a masterpiece worthy of remembering. I still remember it, 12 years on, but it is entirely by virtue of fate that I recalled it and felt compelled to write about it.
The reason for this is because the game starred Eliza Dusku, of Buffy th🐈e Vampire Slayer, as Rubi. All these years I had thoug🐼ht the star was in fact Elisha Cuthbert, of 24 fame, and it was through rectifying this mistake that I came to remember Wet. This sums up my feelings for the game - I have a lot of affection for it, but I only kinda sorta remember it. I’m sure most of you reading have probably had a similar experience.
The actual gameplay, though it did not allow you to knee slide upside down on ladders, was fantastic, taking the fluid traversal of the good Prince of Persia games and the graphic blood splatter of the bad ones. Unfortunately, this wasn’t matched by the🅰 level design. Wet was clearly pitched on the idea of ‘what if Tarantino made a video game’, but quickly turned into ‘you know that huge battle in Kill Bill? Every sin🍨gle level should just be that. Over and over and over again.’
It was a short experience - seven hours would see you beat it, and less than double that to s⛎oak up every wet little secret - but it still managed to feel repetitive and drawn out. For a game with slick movement, frenetic action, and blood and guts galore, it’s impressive that it managed to make its best features seem boring in just🎃 seven hours.
Still, it's Wet's birthday. Let's not be mean. The trailer was incredible, and playing it in bursts meant you could enjoy the best it had to offer, without getting derailed by the worst - which was the same as the best, but just far too much of it. It's not on Game Pass, but even if it was, I'm not sure I'd recommend it. I certainly wouldn't recommend picking up the disk version, which - owing to the lack of a digital option - is still north of a tenner.
Wet needed to be experienced at the time. It was revealed in the same year as the movies Wanted, Jumper, and The Spirit. Were they great movies? Absolutely, I'll fight anyone who says otherwise. Would I tell anyone to go and watch them now? Absolutely not, I'll fight anyone who tries. Wet needed to be experienced in that weird window in the late '00s when we didn't really know what our pop culture identity was, we just knew girls were hot and violence was cool. Happy birthday Wet, you were pretty okay.