Archive for the 'Shooter' Category


Bioshock: Dawdling

So, we’re coming up to the two-week mark, and I’m still not making much progress in Bioshock. Mainly, it must be admitted, because of my self-imposed restrictions on use of vita-chambers. I play for a while, I get killed in a way that I’m unwilling to just let slide, I find myself also unwilling to replay very much, I stop playing for a while. Sometimes I do so with the attitude that I’m taking a little break, and will shortly get back into the game with a fresh attitude, but then wind up not getting back to it for a couple of days after all.

So I’m considering modifying my restrictions so I can save more often, but you know something? This isn’t a race. Even with this year’s self-imposed schedule, there’s no reason to rush through things. If I take months to get through this game, and finish a dozen others during that time, that’s fine. I look forward to that — not having a self-imposed schedule any more, just playing whatever I feel like, when I feel like it. Not pretending that I have a duty here.

But pretend duties can be enjoyable, or we wouldn’t have games that give us missions. Anyway, I’m giving this game until weekend’s end before I go on to 2008.

Bioshock: Photography

Just a short session last night, and with little progress to show for it. So let’s talk about the next significant mechanic the game brings forth. (It dribbles them out one by one.) At a certain point in the third level, you obtain a “research camera”. Progress in the plot is in fact contingent on finding it, so the designers clearly felt that finding it at that stage was important.

Despite not being capable of doing damage, the camera occupies a weapon slot. It treats film as a kind of ammo — one of the few types I’m not maxed out on at the moment. This is because you pretty much want to take a picture of every single enemy in the game, as well as certain machines. Doing so gives you research points toward the thing depicted, which are sort of like experience points: they fill up a progress meter until you “level up” and gain some benefit, with increasing numbers of points required for each level. The peculiar thing is, the research points are specific to the thing photographed. You’re leveling up for each monster type in parallel. So, although the camera is reminiscent of Pokemon Snap and, more particularly, Beyond Good and Evil (with which it shares the challenge of trying to photograph things while they’re attacking you), it also feels a bit like the way you level up specific Jobs with “Ability Points” in Final Fantasy V. This is just one way that the game is at least as much CRPG as FPS.

The number of points you get for taking a picture depends on its quality, which is evaluated and assigned a letter grade in a special picture-grading screen while the action in the world hangs frozen. (If your first picture of a subject is good enough, it can be enough to get you to the next research level all by itself.) Picture quality mainly seems to be determined by how close you are to the subject and how centered it is. The evaluation will often indicate bonus attributes, such as “Action shot” and “Multiple subjects”, although it’s not clear to me if these are things that affect the letter grade or additional modifiers on top of it. “Multiple subjects” is an interesting one, because, in a limited way, it lets you get credit for photographing the same subject more than once, which is otherwise impossible — attempts at taking multiple pictures of the same thing don’t even consume film, an unrealistic touch but a gentle one. There are occasions when the “multiple subject” tag has taken me completely by surprise, because I thought the thing I was photographic was alone. Sometimes it was; sometimes the other subjects were already dead. And yes, corpses can be photographed, but they give only a fraction of the points that a live subject does. The designers really wanted to make sure that the photography that’s rewarded is the risky kind. Even the “action shot” bonus seems to mean taking a picture of something at the moment it makes an attack.

And what do you get for your research? The most common benefit seems to be a combat bonus against the subject’s type, which is probably worth having, but kind of boring. If that were all you got, I’d probably still try to photograph stuff, but only in the way that I go for items that give a score bonus in an arcade-type game: as a little extra challenge that I don’t think about very much and pass by if it looks too difficult. But certain subject types, at certain levels, give you other things, such as gene tonics (passive buffs). You have a limited number of slots for gene tonics, but having more types means having more options. This is enough to trigger the “gotta catch ’em all” response in me, and for a while now, I’ve basically let no enemy go unresearched.

Bioshock: Eve and Adam

If I’m going to be throwing around words like “plasmid”, I suppose I should explain them. Fortunately, this is easy to do, because most of the terminology peculiar to this game is just a veneer over a CRPG-style magic system: plasmids are spells, gene tonics are passive buffs, Eve is mana and Eve hypos are mana potions. For those last two, the game even helps you out by coloring the eve hypos blue, and representing your current Eve level by a blue bar right alongside your health bar. (Something to research: where did this color convention come from? The idea that mana is blue is strong enough today that it would seem very strange if a game represented it with, say, a yellow bar.)

The one thing that doesn’t have an obvious counterpart is Adam. Adam is the name for the currency you use to buy plasmids, gene tonics, and other upgrades (such as increases in the number of slots you have available for plasmids and gene tonics) from the “Gatherer’s Garden” vending machines found throughout the game. The in-fiction explanation is that it’s the artificial stem cells that you need to bind genetic modifications to yourself, or some similar malarkey. I suppose you could say it’s equivalent to experience points or skill points or something like that, but that doesn’t take into account the unique matter of where it comes from. Adam has one source: the Little Sisters.

The Little Sisters are young girls living in symbiosis with a kind of sea slug. Or actually “symbiosis” might not be the right word. The word “parasite” gets used a lot in this game, in Ryan’s propaganda broadcasts, to describe his enemies, which is to say, most people. I’m sure that the confusion here is intentional: at some point you’ll find a log or two about the slugs, and then hear something about “The parasite” and, because of where your head is at, take a moment to register the fact that it’s being figurative. But I’m not sure that even this is the right word. The whole system is artificial, created by a third party, apparently to maximize Adam production. It’s symbiosis when two organisms interact in a way that benefits them both, and parasitism when one gains at the other’s expense. What is it when both organisms are the worse for their interaction?

Anyway, the Little Sisters produce Adam, and apparently also go around harvesting it from corpses, of which there are plenty scattered around due to the general collapse of civilization. Each Little Sister is accompanied by a hulking bodyguard in a diving suit: a Big Daddy. This is necessary because everyone wants Adam. If you can defeat a Big Daddy, you get a choice of what to do with the terrified Little Sister — a choice, moreover, with its own UI, with special buttons devoted to it specifically. First, you can harvest the slug, collecting all of its Adam and killing the girl in the process — destroying her, in fact; not even a corpse remains. The mini-cutscene on selecting this option leaves it unclear just what happens to her, fading the scene to black before it gets too gruesome. Perhaps she’s reduced entirely to Adam, clothes and all. The other option is to use a special plasmid (delivered to you in a cutscene) to “rescue” or “exorcize” the girl, which apparently makes her stop being a Little Sister, or at least makes her eyes stop glowing. She then thanks you and scampers away into the ductwork. This option also gives you Adam, but only half as much as you get from murdering her.

Now, the game puts a lot of effort into pitching this as a moral decision. There’s even an advisor on each side, contacting you via radio and making arguments like little cartoon angel and devil figures on your shoulders. On the devil’s side, you have the man who calls himself Atlas: your first contact in Rapture and apparently some kind of rebel leader. He’s given me good advice and gotten me through the earlier perils, which makes him highly suspicious in a game that shares writing credits with System Shock 2, but at least he claims plausible selfish motivations: he says he wants you to help him rescue his wife and daughters. To that end, he wants you to be as powerful as possible, which means getting as much Adam as you can, even though this sort of rampant abuse of genetic modification is what drove the population of Rapture insane. The hypocrisy of his position, of rescuing innocent little girls by killing other innocent little girls, is so obvious that he has to really push the idea that the Little Sisters are monsters, unworthy of consideration — something that would be more convincing if Dr. Tenenbaum hadn’t provided a way to restore them. Tenenbaum is the angel figure here: it was her research that led to the creation of the Little Sisters, so she feels responsibility toward them. (I suppose this makes her a traitor to Andrew Ryan’s philosophy, in which feeling any sense of responsibility to others is interpreted as being enslaved by parasites.) Tenenbaum promises rewards for following “the path of righteousness”, and I’ve already begun to reap them: special gifts left for me, including plasmids that aren’t available for purchase from the Gatherer’s Gardens. Atlas insists that Tenenbaum is playing me for a sap, but unless he tells me just what ulterior motives Tenenbaum has that I’m not aware of, it comes off as just so much hot air.

I’ve seen this approach criticized as working against the moral dimension of the decision — that the whole thing is set up to make it sound at first like sparing the Little Sisters involves self-sacrifice, in the form of giving up potential power, but then it turns around and gives you material benefits to make up for it. Now, I don’t agree that morally correct behavior always has to be the less convenient option. In real life, doing the wrong thing often requires greater sacrifice than doing the right thing — holding a grudge, for example, can be an enormous expense of emotional effort and limit on enjoyment of life. But it’s true that the choice here is basically one of Star Wars morality. You’ve got a light path and a dark path, and it’s obvious which is which. The dark path gives you a quicker route to power, but the light path is probably more powerful in the long run. And really, rather than pose any moral dilemmas, the game seems to be set up to make the player prefer the morally correct choice. Under this interpretation, the real purpose of the repeated decision is not to give the player a choice of values, but to prompt the player to reaffirm, in a meaningful and gameplay-affecting way, the correct values. To repudiate the dehumanization of the Little Sisters and, by extension, the whole system that produced them.

Bioshock: Stupid?

Coincidentally, there was some discussion of Bioshock at my workplace the other day. (Steam had put it on sale for Halloween.) One person insisted that it was “stupid”, and others rushed to defend it. I tried to argue on the stupid side, just to balance things out a little, and to that end adapted some of what I said in my last post — essentially, that it’s sensationalistic, and the line between sensationalism and stupidity is so fine that I’m not even sure it’s there. In addition, Objectivism is a basically stupid philosophy, by which I mean that adhering to it necessarily involves forgetting or ignoring a lot of what you know about humanity, and often seems to also involve other sorts of idiocy like pretending that you can derive practical information from a tautology like “A is A”. This is the sort of stupid that you can’t even argue against intelligently; just taking it seriously enough to engage it lowers the level of discourse. Bioshock certainly engages it, but perhaps not seriously enough to be affected. The chief argument it employs is “O NO YOU ARE BEING ATTACKED BY MONSTER PEOPLE”, which is kind of dismissive. Or perhaps just kind of stupid.

But this isn’t what the accuser in this discussion meant. He wasn’t thinking about the style or the theme, but about the gameplay. This is a game that imposes no penalty for dying, which, to him, meant there was no motivation for playing skillfully or learning new techniques. His knock-down argument was that he claimed he had beaten the game on the Hard difficulty setting using no weapon or plasmid other than the wrench that you get early on as your default melee weapon. It didn’t make a difference, he said, because enemies don’t heal when you respawn, so you can just whittle them down to nothing no matter how often they kill you. Thus, the game is stupid.

Now, I have my doubts about the veracity of his claims. I myself took a few wrench-swings at Dr. Steiner, the game’s first boss-like enemy, and I could have sworn that he was back at full health by the time I got back from the vita-chamber. Perhaps there was a health dispenser I failed to notice. Regardless, everyone present, including myself, felt that he was approaching the game wrong. I recognize that everyone’s different, and that not everyone who plays games plays them for the same reasons, or derives the same sorts of satisfaction from them. No game will appeal to everyone. But even bearing this in mind, it seemed like his poor experience of the game was his own doing, the result of a willful refusal to appreciate its merits.

It was argued that Bioshock is about the setting and story rather than about the challenge, and as far as that goes, I can’t disagree. A colleague of mine once said about Quake that it wasn’t really a game about shooting, but rather, a game about 3D environments. The shooting was just there to give you something to do in those environments. You can say the same about most first-person shooters, to varying degrees. Some are more about action, some are more about place. Bioshock is very much about place. But this isn’t a very satisfying excuse. If you’re going to fill your decaying underwater city with combat set-pieces, surely you can at least provide interesting combat mechanics?

But that’s where the argument for stupid breaks down. The game does provide interesting mechanics; my colleague just refused to use them, and the game never forced the issue. Again, people enjoy different things, and the game recognizes this by allowing you to take different approaches. If you enjoy sticking with the wrench, killing things by degrees and dying a lot, it gives you that option. If you don’t enjoy playing it that way, why do it? The fact that the game lets you respawn without resetting the game state doesn’t mean you have to take advantage of it.

I’m reminded of my experience with Final Fantasy 8. This is a game that gives you access to powerful summoning spells from near the very beginning, and lets you cast them at a much lower cost than in other Final Fantasy games. Thus, for most of the game, you can pretty much just do a summon at the beginning of every combat to win them all trivially. A lot of people did this, and consequently decided that the game was stupid. So when I played, I made a point of not doing it that way. As a result, I probably had a more satisfying experience than most players.

So, this all got me thinking. I had already been doing more dying than I liked in Bioshock. Even if it’s without consequence, it’s a kind of failure. So I’m replaying from the beginning, trying to avoid dying entirely, or at least minimize it. To support this, I’m dialing the difficulty down from Hard to Normal. The game recommends Normal if you’ve played shooters before and Hard if you’ve played a lot of shooters before, and so, although I don’t consider myself skilled by multiplayer standards, I figured I qualified for Hard just on the basis of long experience. But that was without my new handicap. Restarting also gives me the luxury of making decisions differently, and in particular, choosing different plasmids. The first time through, when I had the opportunity to purchase the Rage plasmid, which makes enemies attack each other, I instead purchased a couple of others that would make normal gameplay easier (for example, one of them was simply armor against physical damage). That might have been important under Hard, but at this point I think the better way to play this game is to choose things that make the game interesting instead of things that make it easy.

Bioshock

On to 2007. There’s a lot of choice material on the Stack for this year: Mass Effect, Aquaria, STALKER, Space Giraffe. Was this an unusually good year for games? Maybe, but then, this is also where we catch up to the start of this blog, and therefore the point at which I stopped playing new games so much. Still, this wasn’t a hard choice. Apart from the contents of the Orange Box, which are all off the Stack already, the one game here that’s had the largest impact on gamer culture, or at least on the sort of blogs I read, is definitely Bioshock. I’ve been trying to avoid spoilers on this game for the last three years, but it’s simply been in the air, used as an example of moral choice in games here, as a basis for humorous photoshops there.

Humility is the morality of the slave.So, I know a certain amount going in, but not everything. I knew to expect triumphalism gone awry, a wondrous and phantasmagorical underwater city laid waste by the deadly combination of genetic engineering and rampant Objectivism. I knew about the Little Sisters and the Big Daddies, and the choice they represent. And I knew to expect architecture and statuary in a sort of exaggerated art deco style, things like less-human versions of the famous statue of Atlas at Rockerfeller Center. (One of the first things you see in the entrance to Rapture is a huge bronze bust of Andrew Ryan, the city’s spooneristic founder, with unfortunate underlighting that makes him look like he’s sneering at you.) But I wasn’t expecting the contents of these halls to be quite so lurid. It’s like an EC horror comic in here, full of comical grotesquery: the enemies that ramble insanely about their lying bitch girlfriends as they swing lead pipes at you, the way your hand swells up like a balloon when you inject yourself with your first plasmid, the mad-scientist ravings and injury-to-the-eye-motif diagrams of a plastic surgeon who considers himself above conventional morality. All juxtaposed with soaring monuments drenched with seawater, while somewhere in the background a radio plays a gentle swing number, or maybe an inspirational recording of Andrew Ryan making a nasty and self-congratulatory little speech. It’s a glorious mess of potent imagery.

Other first impressions: It reminds me a lot of the Half-Life games. Not in content, in presentation. Like Half-Life, this is a game that keeps you in the FPS even when it wants to do a cutscene, putting staged events in places you’re likely to look. I recall some talk about how certain elements in System Shock 2, such as the “ghost” visions, were attempts at imitating Half-Life‘s techniques. They’re imitated much better here, and also more blatantly. The initial views of Rapture from the window of a bathysphere remind me a lot of the initial tram ride to Black Mesa, and the title of the first level, “Welcome to Rapture”, reminds me a lot of Half-Life 2‘s “Welcome to City 17”. Even that bust of Ryan puts me in mind of the large monitor showing Dr. Breen at the train station, a personal introduction to a remote adversary.

Killer 7: Revelations

Killer 7 is predicated in part on the same premise as Alan Moore’s From Hell: that serial murderers develop supernatural powers. Some of the Killer 7 personas have particular specialties, like Invisibility or Force Jump. But there are also powers they all share: they can all see the Heaven Smiles, which are invisible to ordinary humans, and they can all talk to ghosts. There are a few dead people who keep showing up repeatedly, like Travis, the “killer who got killed”. Most of the level bosses show up in levels after you kill them, too. Although they were your mortal enemies in life, they’re uniformly docile and helpful in afterlife, holding no grudge against you, which is a lot creepier than the alternative. Their combativeness was part of what made them human, even when they were thoroughly inhuman. Losing it, they seem… well, less alive. But I suppose that reducing people to things is what a hired assassin is all about. Even just contemplating the act requires dehumanizing the target.

There are a few hints dropped in the game that the Killer 7 themselves are ghosts as well, which would explain why they can’t be killed permanently. Garcian Smith, the Cleaner, is the only one who seems to have a normal existence. It’s Garcian who embarks on all the missions. Between times, we see him in his squalid little trailer home, eating pizza and enduring the shrieks and howls from wheelchair-bound Harman, who’s confined to his room and tormented by the maid. Everyone else seems to live inside the television. Garcian is the only one who has any contact with the outside world, and the only one who can’t transform into a different persona at will: every mission begins with him arriving at the site and then being replaced automatically when he passes by a security camera. He’s the only one who can really die. In short, he’s the only one who seems real.

Now, I had commented in my first post that the whole game seemed like a madman’s hallucinations. I stopped thinking about it that way after a while, because the game kept giving me more details about this strange world, and details work against doubt. One of the bosses has a long personal history with Dan Smith, and when you confront him in Dan’s persona, the game is temporarily all about Dan. This goes a long way toward convincing the player that Dan is real. You have to at least pretend that he’s real in order to follow the story. Suspension of disbelief. But the climactic mission, titled “Smile”, breaks this.

The first hint about what’s about to happen is the moon. Each mission uses a picture of the moon as a loading screen, enlarged and tinted in different bright colors. In Smile, it’s displayed for the first time in its natural grey. It’s a subtle thing, but somehow its meaning was clear: this is the mission where you come to see things as they really are. And so it was. I won’t go into detail about the final revelations, but the ending really calls into question just how much of the game actually happened. There are some recovered memories, some of which are clearly echoed in events that you earlier witnessed in cutscenes. There’s a point where you wind up back in Garcian’s trailer and Harman’s cries of agony are replaced by the sounds of machinery outside and the groaning of pipes. This is a sort of story that I think of as particularly Japanese (and even a little Buddhist): the anamnesis plot, the falling away of illusions and recovery of true self-knowledge, as seen in the likes of Silent Hill 2 and more than one Final Fantasy. It can be a very effective technique, provided the authors set it up well enough in advance, which this game certainly does.

But then the game then backtracks on this somewhat. A short final level, a sort of interactive epilogue, brings back the Heaven Smile, which otherwise disappeared from the scene without a trace when Garcian started learning the truth. A shorter, non-interactive epilogue shows Harman Smith and Kun Lan continuing their battle 100 years in the future, as if nothing had happened. You really have to read this game metaphorically sometimes, because reading it literally just doesn’t always work.

Plus, there’s just a wealth of metaphor to find. I haven’t even gotten into the political allegory. For example, one of the major plot elements is a conspiracy to control American presidential elections, with the Department of Education behind it all, because so many of the nation’s polling places are located in schools. This makes no sense if taken literally, but when you think about it, the educational establishment is very much involved in swaying elections by indoctrinating the next generation of voters. One reading of the whole game is that it’s really all about relations between Japan and America since WWII, with clues ranging from the blatant (I mean, come on, Trevor Pearlharbor?) to the less obvious (one character mentions a plan that has been in motion “for 65 years”. The game is set in 2010.) Actually, it’s not even a very speculative reading: a brewing conflict between the two nations is pretty much the literal overplot. The epilogue level has you explicitly choose sides, although your choice doesn’t seem to make a difference 100 years in the future. I mentioned before that you have to shoot at a person’s silhouette in order to enter the first mission. It turned out to be the silhouette of that mission’s end boss, and in fact the same thing is done in all subsequent missions. In the epilogue, you have to shoot at a silhouette of a flag. Because it’s just a silhouette, you can’t tell what nation it shows.

There’s a great deal of analysis of the story at GameFAQs. I can’t say I agree with all of it; much of it seems to take it for granted that everything we see in the game is supposed to be really happening, and I think the game itself discredits this notion pretty thoroughly. And ultimately, the game wants to confuse you. You can analyze it all you want, but if at the end of the day you’re not confused, you’re missing the point.

Killer 7: The Handsome Men

In my last post, I compared Killer 7 to Grant Morrison’s The Filth. This comparison is even more apt than I suspected at the time. One minor plot thread in The Filth concerns a bridging of realities, between the “real” world and a simplistic superhero comic. This comic is written so that people with the right equipment can delve into it, temporarily becoming characters in its pages, chiefly to exploit it by bringing the advanced technology depicted in its pages back to the real world with them. On one occasion, a fictional superhero managed to follow them out, causing no end of trouble. This breaking-through into reality of fictional characters, and superheroes in particular, is really a recurring motif in Morrison’s comics, starting with Animal Man. It’s the whole premise of Flex Mentallo.

The relevance to Killer 7: One mission is all about a Sentai team called the Handsome Men. They’re not all men, and with their Power-Rangers-like headgear, we have no reason to believe they’re handsome, but I think we can take this as part of the gag. We first see them on — where else? — television, where they’re presented as just part of an anime show, a second point where the Japanese voice acting goes undubbed. This is interrupted by a news bulletin about an assassination performed by people dressed as the Handsome Men. Shortly afterward, we’re told that the entire incident was depicted in detail in a yet-to-be-published Handsome Men comic book: the artist, Trevor Pearlharbor, is either predicting events, or causing them, summoning the Handsome Men into existence.

When you find Trevor, he’s sure that you won’t be able to kill him, because he’s just drawn a comic in which the Handsome Men stop you. He fails to take into account the mad scientist factor, the tendency of human creations to seek freedom by killing their creators. It’s done accidentally here, but if breaking script isn’t freedom, what is? (Shades of Metal Gear Solid 2 here…) So it’s a little ironic that this is the lead-in to a completely scripted fight. The two teams arrange a showdown in the middle of Times Square, a series of one-on-one duels in which each Killer 7 persona faces off against an identically-armed Handsome Man. (Ridiculously, this even means that Harman Smith’s opponent has to sit in a wheelchair to make things completely even.) Some of the duels are rigged to let you win, some to make you lose. I personally didn’t notice what was going on until the very last duel, which makes you adapt your behavior slightly before it hands you your rigged victory. So I spent most of the challenge thinking that my efforts were making a difference, when they really didn’t. Which is game design in a nutshell, isn’t it?

The game further draws the player’s attention to the artificiality of what just happened, and piles on the confusion, by ending the mission with a fake retro credits sequence in the style of earlier Capcom games. Which, I suppose, signifies victory for team Killer 7. Up to that point, the cutscenes in this mission were all anime-style, even the ones showing things like Garcian talking to his contact, which in all the other missions was handled in-engine. Anime is the Handsome Men’s territory, so a sudden assertion of videogameness returns things to Killer 7 turf. At any rate, it’s a delightful bit of player-teasing, on par with the ending to Monkey Island 2.

This isn’t the only extended bit of self-reference or genre critique in the game so far. An earlier mission started with a cutscene shown through the bad guy’s eyes, as he charged through a series of hallways with a pistol, efficiently murdering any innocent bystanders he came across with precise headshots. In other words, his acts of random violence were presented like a first-person shooter. I’m sure I could find other examples if I started looking for them, but the Handsome Men mission is the first time that it’s been the main theme, or at least the first time it’s been really obvious about it.

Killer 7: The Grotesque

I don’t mean to imply that everything about Killer 7 is unusual. When I first booted it up, my reaction was “Oh, how very Capcom”. The style of the main menu, the brief textual warning about violence and “mature subject matter”, the way that it responded to my initial button press with the sound of one of the monsters (silly-sounding laughter, in this case), all reminded me of Resident Evil and similar titles. And within the game itself, the map display reminds me a lot of the level schematics normally seen in survival horror games and nowhere else.

Is Killer 7 a survival horror, then? Hardly. For one thing, you never run out of ammo. Also, survival is really pretty easy; with the exception of Garcian Smith, all of the player characters can be resurrected infinitely. But it is horror to the extent that it shows you horrible things. This is a grotesque world, where grotesque things happen. One of the boss fights is against a pair of elderly Japanese businessmen whose heads have already been blown half off, who attack by coughing pieces of brain at you. (It’s so easy to see metaphors in that.) Another of the bosses is a philanthropist who funds orphanages. First you find out that they’re killing the orphans to sell their organs, then you find out they only use the males this way, reserving the female orphans for the boss’s personal use. And even then, your guesses about how he uses them are likely to not go far enough. After you kill him, you get a glimpse of the closets where he keeps their bodies hung up like marionettes.

I’m probably making the game sound relentlessly grim. It’s not. It has a sense of humor. It’s mostly a very dark humor, but it makes some forays into wacked-out absurdist humor, which works mostly by inserting incongruous wackiness and exaggeration into the middle of the grotesquery. The most extreme example of this that I’ve seen is when you’re attacked in a parking lot by a woman in an animegao mask and schoolgirl uniform, who’s introduced with a (deliberately) clumsy approximation of a Magical Girl transformation. (This is the one place where the spoken words are still in Japanese, even in the English version.) It’s the kind of humor that produces more stunned disbelief than laughter.

I keep changing my mind about what other works this game reminds me of — which is a reasonable reaction, because it keeps abruptly changing its feel, the better to catch you off guard. At the moment, it reminds me a lot of some of Grant Morrison’s comics, particularly The Filth. There, as here, we have a series of episodes, mostly organized around a series of loathsome bad guys (each symbolizing something wrong with the world), who the heroes kill, all the while casting severe doubt about the organization behind them. One critic said about The Filth that “There’s a sense that there’s a whole other graphic novel composed of scenes cut out of this one.” That could be said about Killer 7 as well. Heck, it starts at Mission 34.

Killer 7: What is Weird?

What makes a game weird?

Killer 7 has weird stuff going on in it, to be sure. But so do a lot of games. Is an assassin who transforms into someone else every time he passes in front of a video camera any stranger than a plumber who kills evil turtles by jumping on them? Isn’t it weird for a hero to periodically take breaks to smash every crate in the vicinity? If Killer 7 is noticeably strange, it’s because the designers chose to make its strangeness noticeable. I think I can identify some of the techniques they used to accomplish this.

First, the very notion of weirdness only exists in contrast to an expected normality. Smashing crates is normal enough in certain genres of game to not produce this contrast, and the likes of the Mario games exist in their own cartoon space, disconnected enough from reality that it defines its own norms. Killer 7 juxtaposes its internal madness with more conventional material — I won’t say “realistic”, because it’s not, but stuff adhering to genre norms. I’ve already described the contrast between the gameplay and an anime-styled cutscene, but it starts much earlier than that. The first two members of your team that you get a chance to see look like they stepped out of a crime movie: a cool, seen-it-all professional, a brassy, confident hitman. (The characters are communicated largely through body language, something the game excels in.) The initial cutscene, for all its stylization, supports this with its images of Garcian Smith clandestinely receiving a package from his contact. Having established this much context, then, the game proceeds to get weird.

Secondly, weirdness is uncomfortable. It teases the parts of the mind that try to fit things into familiar patterns. So I posit that increasing the sense of mental discomfort can increase the sense of the weird. This is a point I’m not entirely convinced of, but discomfort of various sorts is certainly something Killer 7 exploits, for whatever reason. There’s moral discomfort: one of the recurring NPCs is the ghost of Travis, the first person the player character killed, who makes things worse by being helpful even in death, your one consistent source of good information. Travis also casts doubt on your goals, informing you in the second mission how the man you’re trying to kill is the only thing preventing the world government from annihilating Japan. There’s bodily discomfort: a rather oogy cutscene at the beginning of mission 2 shows Harman Smith, an old man in a wheelchair, being slapped around by his maid, for reasons I have yet to see explained, except for some slight implication that it’s part of her duties. There’s discomfort at the gradually dawning realization that the Killer 7, which looked so cool in the beginning, is composed mostly of freaks and lunatics — and that they may be the best hope for their fallen world.

Thirdly, relating to the above, it seems weirder if you don’t understand what’s going on. Call it the David Lynch principle. Of course, in order for this to be effective, you have to know that you don’t understand what’s going on. Killer 7 cultivates this knowledge, giving you repeated motifs like the whole TV thing, or a particular severed head that keeps showing up in different places, as clear symbols of stuff that’s clearly important that you don’t understand yet. That maid that I mentioned: She shows up in Harman’s room, which is strangely accessible through doors in each level. Sometimes she’s in uniform, in which case she’ll save the game for you on request (using the television in the room, natch). Sometimes she’s in her street clothes, in which case she won’t help you at all. In that cutscene I mentioned, where she’s beating Harman up, she’s in street clothes at first, but instantly changes to the maid’s uniform when Garcian Smith turns out the lights. This seemed like a revelation: Aha! A consistent pattern! This applies to all the instances of Harman’s Room: she’s in uniform only if the room is dark! I understand now! Except that actually I don’t understand at all. The moment of revelation just throws the incomprehensible nonsense into relief.

All of the above applies even more strongly in Silent Hill 2. No wonder they’re both on Yahtzee’s list.

Killer 7: Guesses and Interpretations

Between the first two missions, there’s a longish expository cutscene that introduces us to the global context in which the mission you just completed takes place. It’s strikingly different in style to the rest of the game. It’s a lot rounder and safer-looking, with a sunny watercolor palette, wide camera angles, and figures drawn in a conventional realistic-cartoony anime style, with a vague patina of age, as if we’re watching Saturday morning television from a few decades ago. (For all I know, they may have actually pieced this scene together from clips of old cartoons rather than making it from scratch. Either way, the sense that we’re watching television is presumably deliberate, given all the television imagery in the rest of the game.) The game proper looks more like Mignola than Miyazaki: stark, angular, shapes defined by shadows rather than outlines. When an out-and-out big-eyed anime girl shows up at the end of the first mission, it’s a shocking contrast. When an entire cutscene has a similar contrast in style, I find myself asking what happened. My first guess is that it’s a matter of perspective. We’ve been seeing the world through the disturbed and unreliable eyes of the Killer 7, and this is our first glimpse at how things seem to everyone else.

What we’re told is basically just a reiteration of stuff in the manual, but it seems more meaningful now, with the visuals to back it up. We’re told about how the world united into a new order in 1998, built improbable ocean-spanning highways, and banned missiles. We’re told how a terrorist group, referred to in the cutscene only as “the smiling faces”, disrupted a high-profile UN ceremony, and how assassins working in secret were the only possible weapon against this new threat. We’re shown a couple more salient details: a more conventional assassination by someone who might be Harman Smith, a view of the UN ceremony cut short by a suicide bombing.

So, there’s our connection to the monsters in the game: they’re suicide bombers too. They fight you by charging at you and exploding. But they’re also a far cry from the politically-motivated terrorists fighting against the implied hegemony in the cutscene. They’re distorted and demonic of visage, with bumpy, reptilian-looking skin (from the biologically-generated explosives underneath, we’re told), capable of surviving the loss of an arm or a head without much difficulty, and motivated solely by madness: they were all innocent bystanders until they were transformed by the divine power of Kun Lan’s “god hand”. How did we get here from there?

There is every possibility, at this point, that these creatures are purely symbolic, a madman’s nightmare of his enemies. Which is not to say that they’re necessarily just hallucinations. It’s still early in the game, and a lot remains unaddressed, but a lot of what goes on in the missions seems kind of shamanic, a matter of passing ordeals in the spirit-world in order to have effects in the mundane world. Particularly the business in mission 1 of the threshold guardian, keeper of the “Vinculum Gate” which leads “to another world”. (He’s imagined as something like the bouncer at a club, which strikes me as another dreamlike touch, conflating two similar roles.) Once you satisfy him, you go through the gate, through an area with loud dance music playing, fight a boss, and then loop around and go back into a place that looks pretty much like where you’ve already been, except that this time you’re allowed to use the elevator to the end-of-mission encounter. Taking a trip through the astral plane to reach reality, perhaps? It’s kind of like how some of the normal-world-to-dark-world transitions in the original Silent Hill worked, except that here, the dark world is the one you start in.

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