{"id":913,"date":"2010-09-16T23:29:06","date_gmt":"2010-09-17T04:29:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/?p=913"},"modified":"2016-11-26T01:57:08","modified_gmt":"2016-11-26T09:57:08","slug":"killer-7","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/archives\/913","title":{"rendered":"Killer 7"},"content":{"rendered":"

Killer 7<\/em> is a new acquisition for me. I had become interested in it after seeing others praise it — particularly Ben “Yahtzee” Croshaw, of Zero Punctuation<\/a> fame, who’s repeatedly mentioned it as one of his favorite games, right up there with Silent Hill 2<\/em>. And now that I’ve dipped a toe into it, I think I see why. This is a shooter designed for the jaded gamer, the sort who’s tired of games that are still basically trying to be better versions of Doom<\/em>.<\/p>\n

First of all, it’s stylish. It’s basically cel-shaded, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen a game with cel-shading that defines objects through negative space like this game does (in the cutscenes, at least): you’ll have a sort of striated gradient background, and then shadows of doorways and windows placed on top of that. Games like Braid<\/em> and Okami<\/em> are described as looking like paintings, which basically means visible brush strokes. That’s not the case here, but it still looks quite a lot like a painting — specifically, a cheap modernist painting that you might see in a dentist’s waiting room. Although there, it would probably leave out the zombie-like human bombs strolling in your direction and laughing like hyenas.<\/p>\n

Secondly, it’s bizarre. It is, in tvtropes lingo, a Weird Japanese Thing. This is a game where you don’t get a lot of explanation, and what explanation you do get comes from a guy in a red gimp suit, suspended from the ceiling. This is a game where any place you’ve died is marked with a chalk outline and a bloodstained paper bag that twitches occasionally. This is a game where it’s purposefully unclear whether you’re playing a team or an individual: the members of Killer 7 are all distinct, but they’re referred to as “personas”, and sometimes seem to physically replace each other. There’s an undercurrent of insanity here.<\/p>\n

The feel reminds me strongly of some of the weirder games by Cactus<\/a>, particularly Mondo Agency<\/em>. You’re fighting monsters, that much is clear, but everything else is made uncomfortably off-kilter. The very first thing you have to to in the game, before the tutorial where you learn the controls, is kill someone without knowing why. You’re just given a silhouette, a laser sight, and the text “Target 00: Angel”. You shoot, because it’s the only thing you can do, and the game skips ahead to “Assignment 33”. I have an uneasy feeling that I’m going to find out what that was about later in the game, and it won’t be pleasant.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Killer 7 is a new acquisition for me. I had become interested in it after seeing others praise it — particularly Ben “Yahtzee” Croshaw, of Zero Punctuation fame, who’s repeatedly mentioned it as one of his favorite games, right up there with Silent Hill 2. And now that I’ve dipped a toe into it, I […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[407],"class_list":["post-913","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-shooter","tag-killer-7"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/913","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=913"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/913\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4641,"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/913\/revisions\/4641"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=913"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=913"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=913"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}