Super-realistic revenge shooter Better Than Dead has just been announced, along with an intensely violent trailer. The brutal game, in which you play as a Chinese woman who has escaped from slavery and is now exacting revenge on the photo-realistic streets of Hong Kong, is all depicted as if from bodycam footage. And—wow—even the trailer is tough viewing. It looks amazing and terrifyingly real, and I suspect this could become gaming’s next big controversy.
With each new graphical generation over the last 30 years, the FPS genre transformed from the cartoonish arcade styles of Doom to the ultra-realistic visceral depictions of, well, Doom. Along the way, as fidelity improved, the FPS always courted controversy, with mainstream attention grabbed on the advent of games like 1999’s Kingpin: Life of Crime, 2000’s Soldier of Fortune, and any number of Calls of Duty. However, the genre has been so damned impressive-looking for so long now, it feels like the corners have rubbed down on the reactions. Attempts at moral panics have more recently focused on subject matter over looks, as we’ve all become inured to hyper-realistically shooting the kneecaps off our enemies. But I wonder whether Better Than Dead might trigger a new wave of concern.
As a games critic who’s been around for the entire evolution of the genre, I think I’m pretty acclimatized to the whole shebang, and have read enough well-researched studies over the years to know that there’s never been a proven significant link between video-game violence and real-world violence. Which is my needlessly pompous way of saying: I love a good violent game! Gib me up any time. So it really took me back when I had such a visceral reaction to the trailer for Better Than Dead. It’s not because of the gun violence, or the blood splatters, or even that the protagonist’s targets are often running in fear (although it was that a bit); it’s that it’s all depicted as the most extraordinarily realistic bodycam footage.
Real-world violence is something I go out of my way to avoid seeing, and when bodycam footage is released of police brutality and unlawful killings, I’ll desperately try to avoid seeing it. Like most people, I’m very able to separate fantasy and reality, and can enjoy blowing the brains out of perfectly rendered aliens at the same time as being horrified by seeing a living human in pain. But when video game brutality is depicted in such a specific format, complete with the curving of the fish-eye lens and those grainy textures typical of low-grade video recordings, that line for me is incredibly blurred.
As a result, the footage of Better Than Dead incessantly swam down the uncanny valley, at times looking completely photo-realistic, and others clearly being video game graphics. What disturbed me more than anything else was not the blood from gunshots—that was cartoonish if anything—but the walls. I know that sounds silly, but there’s something about how utterly lifelike they were, the way the surface textures speckled with artifacts just like when you see real bodycam footage. They become the most incredibly convincing aspect of the trailer, selling the perspective such that everything else feels so much more real.
The slightly silly perspective from which FPS games have always been viewed gives off the feeling that you’re a head with a gun jutting out just below your chin. Yes, some let you look down and see your feet, but it’s always felt far more like you’re playing a floating camera than a person. But a bodycam—that makes sense of the whole format. That is a floating camera, and suddenly the genre is given a pragmatic reality that I’ve found incredibly jarring.
Then, added to this view, is the fisheye lens and faux-low-grade footage. It’s really interesting how incredibly effective this is every time the game shows something set outside, and how bizarrely crap it appears when indoors. That’s largely due to how awful the textures are in the office interior where a weird amount of the footage is set—those drink bottles and monitors look like something from the early 2000s, so jarringly different from the moments when it cuts to exterior action and then, good god, it looks like real life. The pixelating of faces, however, works both indoors and out, because oh my goodness that’s chilling. It all adds to the sense of this being genuine footage, recovered and edited.
Of course, were this idea being used for a game about, I dunno, saving people from danger, it would offer that same down-to-earth naturalism, but perhaps not be quite so disturbing. Better Than Dead is a game about a young woman who has escaped from cruel slavery exacting her murderous revenge on every single person involved—and from the footage, presumably everyone else nearby as well. According to the press release announcing the game, “In Better Than Dead, you’re not just surviving—you’re retaliating. Once held captive and humiliated on film by those who broke her, the protagonist now turns the camera on them. One by one, they’ll fall. Every mission is a ruthless, high-stakes raid through the underbelly of Hong Kong. No remorse. No hesitation. Only vengeance.”
The game cites “gritty Hong Kong action cinema of the ’80s and ’90s” as its inspiration, although it’s hard not to think of Park Chan-wook’s Vengeance Trilogy when it comes to people released from unfair captivity and seeking brutal revenge on their captors. And those films didn’t exactly land without their share of controversy.
Now, there’s a decent chance the game will be no good. This is being published by one-time PC gaming powerhouse MicroProse, the biggest surprise there being that MicroProse is still a thing. (In fact, I looked it up and it seems to be back in the hands of at least one of the original early-’80s founders.) Even more strange is that behind Better Than Dead is a solo developer who has previously only released a super-cute vertical FPS called (somehow) Forza Polpo!, and a demo for a chibi cartoon-like non-violent platformer called Mountain Boy. This is, er, something of a shift.
But of course, it’s not whether a game’s good or not that riles the pearl-clutching press who love to pretend to be horrified that games are training your kids for their next high school shooting. And yes, when this is eventually released (there’s no date yet), it could come and go with no one noticing—these things often do. But what remains so interesting to me, as an inoculated player of violent games for 40 years, is how it made me sit back in shock. I can’t think of a trailer that’s done that in years, perhaps even not since Soldier of Fortune‘s deeply unpleasant depictions of violence 25 years ago seemed to shock the whole games industry into backing off and focusing on excitement instead of brutality for a good few years after.
