Insomniac's Venom Game Following One Storyline Could Feel…

Summary

Insomniac's Venom game is likely happening after information about the game leaked, focusing on the character's anti-hero persona.
The studio must be cautious not to retread ground from Spider-Man 2 by incorporating symbiote enemies from the Life Foundation.
The narrative could include past Venom comic foes like Pyre or xenophages to avoid symbiote villain repetition.

After the disastrous Insomniac leaks from late last year, a Venom game spinning off from Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 is all but confirmed. Based on the leaks, the currently unannounced title seems to be taking cues from the character’s turn as an anti-hero. Though Venom has been a popular character in gaming since his inception, Insomniac’s half-sequel would be the wicked webslinger’s first solo outing in the medium.

Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 already covered a lot of ground with its symbiote stories, introducing Venom himself and teasing the arrival of Carnage and the symbiote god Knull. In recent years, these characters have become more entwined in Venom’s own mythos rather than Spider-Man’s, so it makes sense that the studio would try and save them for a Venom-centric game. But in its eagerness to include elements from Venom’s own solo comics, Insomniac needs to be careful to avoid retreading ground it already covered in its previous game.

The Venom Game Needs to Be Careful About Featuring The Life Foundation

How Insomniac Can Incorporate the Lethal Protector Comic Into Its Game

According to leaked information, the working title for the Venom solo game is Venom: Lethal Protector, which has been the title of several of the character’s standalone comics over the years. The most famous of these comics is the 1993 six-issue miniseries written by Venom co-creator David Michelinie and illustrated by Mark Bagley and Ron Lim. This marked the character’s first solo outing as an anti-hero and served as the inspiration for the 2018 movie starring Tom Hardy. The series also introduced the sinister Life Foundation and its symbiote enforcers as major antagonists for the character.

It seems like a wonderful basis for the character’s first solo game, but there’s one huge problem: Insomniac has effectively already had the Life Foundation symbiotes in Marvel’s Spider-Man 2. Scream was a major boss fight in the game, but the various other symbiote enemies in the game take inspiration from the other four Life Foundation symbiotes; Phage, Riot, Agony, and Lasher. If Insomniac is dedicated to taking cues from Michelinie's iconic miniseries, it has to be very careful to avoid retreading familiar ground.

The Life Foundation Doesn't Need to Be the Only Antagonist in the Venom Game

Technically, the other four Life Foundation symbiotes have not officially appeared as named characters in Insomniac’s canon and can still be incorporated. But changing them to make them sufficiently different from their spiritual counterparts in Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 will be challenging without just changing the core of the characters outright. Perhaps instead of all the symbiotes appearing, it's just Riot and Lasher as one-off boss encounters. But maybe the Venom game doesn’t need these characters at all.

With Carnage and Knull already being shoo-ins for the game’s story, it’s hard to argue that the narrative needs even more symbiote villains for Venom to fight. The Life Foundation operates perfectly well as a shady corporation even without alien enforcers. Venom can fight and evade human Life Foundation operatives armed with sonic and flame-based weaponry as they try to capture him for experimentation. They can even be led by The Jury, who also debuted in the pages of Lethal Protector. The Jury is a group of high-tech super soldiers who band together to avenge their friend after Venom kills him escaping from prison.

Despite taking its name from the Lethal Protector miniseries, there are other Venom stories the game can and should pull new, unique enemies from to avoid repetition with symbiote enemies. Venom has had multiple antagonists all to himself over the years, including Pyre, a tragically mutated journalist with fire-based powers. Even the most recent trailer for Venom: The Last Dance seems to feature a xenophage, an alien species that hunts and eats symbiotes and their hosts. Even a character like Jack O’Lantern from the Rick Remender run of the comics could be a cool addition. This glider-riding villain can even serve as an ominous foreshadowing of Norman Osborn’s inevitable Green Goblin transformation in Marvel’s Spider-Man 3.

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