Ultrakill manages this very well.

V1 has no reason to fight other than having been made to fight and fuel itself with blood. How do you make a player emphasize with such a character—barely a character at all, "a mere object", a weapon? Turns out, what you do is design a combat system so batshit insane that it makes the player feel like it is them who is fueled with blood and programmed to kill.

The 'war without reason' trope is certainly found in villains, but has anyone else implemented it in a protagonist? Not just the motivation that is here (or at least implied) only to serve as window dressing and is practically irrelevant (see: most retro FPS), but the deliberate absence of it?


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in reply to @FutureVoid's post:

That's a hard question and I'm coming up short. Prototype and Carrion establish clear motivations and end goals for their monstrous protagonists, and don't evoke an attempt at the same kind of reaction of empathizing with nihilism that Ultrakill does.

On the other end, the original F.E.A.R. and its spiritual successor Trepang2 do the depersonalization well. The protagonists in both are deemphasized and put the players in their shoes through intense first-person gameplay, the story happens around them but they barely influence those events beyond when those events get in the way of their rote purpose1. I would say they both fall short though because in both cases the protagonist is present because of someone else's deliberate decision, dampening the "war without reason" aspect because the reason still exists with a degree of removal.


  1. The optional missions in Trepang2's campaign can be an argument against this, but it still feels less like proactive decisions from the protagonist and more that other characters know that their violence will conform to the nature of any given mission in the same way that liquid takes the shape of whatever container it is poured into.

I can certainly see why it is such an uncommon thing in games. In fact, I'd say it might be because there aren't many stories in games as hopeless and nihilistic as the plot of Ultrakill.

The latter examples made me think of Spec Ops: The Line. Walker looks for a justification of his actions (that is later revealed to be a sign of his sanity deteriorating), but iirc his motivation remains unclear, which is important because it translates into a question for the player, "So why exactly are you playing as a soldier?" This isn't quite the same as what I was asking myself about, for sure, and I can't say I have the competence to discuss this game, but it is the closest example I can think of.