The new trend of body-cam shooters is as impressive as it is scary, Peter thinks. This is only partly due to the horror elements.
Game announcements are increasingly taking place between doors these days. Livestream? So conservative! YouTube trailers? Laaa boring! Press release? The day before yesterday!
In the TikTok age all it takes is a short video and a few lines of text on Twitter and the news of one”s own game spreads like wildfire, eating its way through Reddit forums, reel recommendations, Facebook posts and finally news sites.
Anyway, if the game in question does anything special. Recently, two such titles have caught my attention.
They are first-person perspective games that try something new, look very fancy – and scare me a lot. But only one of them is actually a horror game. How does that fit together?
Next-Generation-Fish-Eye
It all started with this tweet from October 2022, written by a French indie developer previously unknown to me:?
These are scenes that leave me with mixed feelings:
- On the one hand, what is shown looks extremely realistic and graphically appealing despite the low resolution Alexandre Spindler uses the Unreal Engine 5 for his unnamed first-person shooter. He takes a hyper-realistic approach to the visuals. Dirty corners of an abandoned prefabricated building and greasy window panes look immensely authentic, while the dazzling daylight thanks to the overlight effect and the relative darkness of the interiors form a fascinating contrast. Fine shadows and cracked concrete textures create the impression of an interactive painting in which every brushstroke is trimmed for realism.
- On the other hand, Alexandre Spindler uses a fisheye effect for the camera, which adds to the authenticity and at the same time gives me a sinking feeling in my stomach. Because this creates the impression of a field of vision that is convex at the edges, making the video look like it was shot by a body camera, like the ones police officers now wear in many states around the world, so-called body cams.
The images look almost too realistic to me, the shooting from the first-person perspective could just as well be from an actual police operation – or footage from the Ukraine war, where soldiers wear body cams in combat. In fact (you can find just such footage on Twitter in the replies to the video).
Updated pic.twitter.com/CTpaqj6mv2
– Self-Aware 🔺 (@F1sT) October 15, 2022
This makes me think: If games in the future increasingly rely on this perspective and this level of detail becomes the new standard – will we eventually still be able to distinguish video games from reality? Already, Arma 3 footage is regularly misused as war propaganda, much to the chagrin of developer Bohemia Interactive.
There is a danger that video recordings from body-cam shooters will find similarly disgusting applications. In the past, assassins have filmed themselves killing innocent people with firearms and streamed it live on Twitch.
The footage on Twitter reminds me of such tragedies and it scares me. Maybe the gaming industry shouldn”t open this barrel in the first place?
Found footage as a game
But well, maybe a real game will never come of Alexandre Spindler”s design. Maybe Call of Duty and Battlefield will stick with the usual rectangular first-person perspective.
Much less problematic in terms of unforeseen consequences (keyword: fake news) is the use of the body cam in horror games. There, the fisheye effect scares me for a completely different reason. Exhibit A:
For eight months, two indie developers and friends worked on Paranormal Tales before finding a publisher, Digital Cybercherries, to help them develop it in November 2022. Paranormal Tales (which happens to be abbreviated PT) also relies on the Unreal Engine 5 and even in this trailer, a closer look reveals countless details like peeling wallpaper. Great!
Less nice: The whole thing is a horror game, so for me it”s problematic from the start. I played Dead Space and Alien: Isolation during the day in the editorial office, because otherwise I would have had to have a change of pants ready in the dark. Speaking from experience, I was once persuaded to play Outlast in the dark for a very silly video and immediately regretted it.
The first-person perspective gives me an urgency in scary games that is clearly too much for me. That”s why I was never able to play through Resident Evil 7, for example, despite a great affinity for the series, because the jumpscare shock effects literally jumped in my face. Especially not in VR, because with virtual reality glasses in front of your head, there”s really no way out; the fisheye technology simulates this feeling very well, without the need for an expensive headset.
This is how realistic the Unreal Engine 5 is
Famous scenes from graphics demos and alpha versions of video games created with the Unreal Engine 5 keep popping up. Using the example of an extremely detailed replica of a Japanese railway station, we explain the tricks developers use for this.
In addition, GlobalESportNews recently spoke with Epic Studios about the innovations of the (Unreal Engine 5.1). What came out of that was a comprehensive article on what the new iteration of the widely used technology means for us gamers:
With the added immersion of the body cam, Paranormal Tales now ticks off all the items on my “NOPE!” list. I”m sure: I won”t play this game for the rest of my life, revolutionary new camera perspective or fancy Unreal graphics.
How do you see it? Do you find the two projects presented here and the technology behind them interesting? Can you understand my fears or do you think they are exaggerated? Or do you have other reasons for not wanting body-cam games, for example because playing them makes you sick? Write me your opinion in the comments!
