splatter (2022), developed by rat king collective, is an epileptic seizure generator in the form of a first person shooter. taking its game design from the revival era indie shooters, but set aesthetically in the hyperactive and multiversal present, it is precision tuned by internet natives to be offensive and psychedelic to the eyes. it sketches a very squelchy and human take on satirical cyberpunk corporate dystopias, imagining guns as hand signs, hormone levels as hud elements, and flesh itself as fungible and posthuman.
once your eyes adjust to the hundreds of content warnings and the bright searing colours and the awkward flappy waddling of the movement and gunplay, this game starts to ooze smart design and at times it felt like poetry to me. i don't know why i'm impressed by a fourteen weapon arsenal where each is equipped with an appropriate four letter name, a small but visually distinct work of cd art, and interesting strengths and weaknesses both alone and when paired with other weapons, but i don't think it's weird that i'm impressed.
it played a little gamey1 on standard settings, in a way that i found very exciting and fun, because i know i'm bad at shooters and i don't mind getting skill-checked sometimes. most of splatter's 16 "sessions" (levels) required at least a couple tries to learn the layout and objectives before yielding a completion on the standard difficulty, and some needed many more than a couple. the "mastery" par score was often achievable with a little practice too. but you can always tune the difficulty settings down or up as needed if you're having trouble or you're actually good at shooters.
completing or mastering levels is the main way of unlocking aesthetic customization options, which consist of skin palettes and tattoo-like textures and manicure options. it was surprisingly expressive and i immediately developed strong options about what looks good and what i'd wear. to me it also demonstrated a sort of self-confidence and generosity, like the game knew both that it was worth playing, and that playing it was worth rewarding.
the comparison
and while we're talking about aesthetics, i guess now is as good a time as any to address the comparison to cruelty squad (2021). splatter, for its part, nods to cruelty squad in a couple of places, most noticably in the game over quip "if you had a divine light it would be severed right now". i think they are mostly unrelated. certainly, splatter benefits from having been released in a world that has already begun digesting cruelty squad's dense and aggressive visuals; but even though they both follow in the grand tradition2 of difficulty by aesthetic obfuscation, they really have distinct vibes going on, and they are separated even further by their gameplay differences.
actually let me elaborate on that vibe point a little before i move on. with cruelty squad the graphics felt sort of grotesque: eye searing colours and awful fonts and uncomfortable interface and dinky soundfonts as a sort of fundamental hostility to the senses. but in splatter, it's less ugly than it is simply weird or offbeat: the colours sear the eyes, but it feels more like a matter of course3. and the music slaps in a way that cruelty squad has to try a lot harder to match, because it has to complement its specific hell on earth, which is crushingly oppressive and depressing, while splatter is free to simply be eclectic bangers for overstimulated gamers because its less serious tone lets it flit from concept to concept with the ease of a party game or a tumblr blog.
anyway, gameplay. like cruelty squad, splatter gives you room for up to two weapons at a time, but that's where they diverge. whereas with cruelty squad your weapons are a loadout that you can tune on the level select to explore levels in different ways, in splatter the sessions are more focused score attacks, opportunities to kill and rest woven into a series of timed or untimed tasks, that use weapons as rewards or parts of the narrative, opting start you off every level with only your trusty pistol BLUE. i'd love to analyze the arsenal with something like innuendo studios' rubric, but it's not quite applicable in that form because the spectrum of combat encounters is dynamic in time and strategic and positional in space4. for now i'll say, you get to know the weapons as you play, and with the hints in the "database"5 it's not too hard to feel out the pros and cons of each weapon once you spend some quality time with them. some of the combinations prove themselves to have a lot of character: the rhythm of STOP & NOIR, the flow of VOLT & SPEW, the frenetic devastation of GAZE & FIST.
if you've perused the screenshots6 above, then you'll see that the recharging ammo bars for your two weapons are called estrogen and testosterone. this pretty well sets the tone of what splatter does with identity and self-expression: where cruelty squad drops you into a definitely male protagonist in a dead world where everyone is apathetic about gender because they can get ammo glands installed, it puts you on a blank slate in a constantly mutating hallucination and pushes all the sliders up to max, the good and the bad and the horribly ugly, and even invites you to inhabit this world by giving you cosmetic self-expression instead of cruelty squad's loadout's mechanical self-expression. it's a very posthuman and cyberpunk and dare-i-say optimistic way to approach identity, especially gender identity. if you wanna change who you are, all you have to do is go get your nails done and retexture your skin. maybe put on a ring accessory. the hormone levels are just for gameplay purposes.
an embarrassing story
splatter is organized into a tutorial, followed by sixteen sessions, each monitored by one of four cryptic administrators. you spend a session with each one, and then you cycle through them again three more times. they are a curious cast of internet-brained characters, vaingloriously committed to their personality affects as they narrate your sessions, updating pages on some quaint little social media in the "database"5 with every session completion. my natural reaction is not to play along, but to view them as adversarial relationships.
these sessions are not a cakewalk, either. i mean, it's not totally clear, but they might diegetically be torture? and i will be the first to admit i can't aim that good—in overwatch i had gold sr, which is 29th to 61st %ile of ranked players—but i think this game is legitimately tough in the latter half, even on standard difficulty, and it's not just my boomer hands. it's weird on purpose and overstimulating and janky. it knows it's tough. most of the crypto freak's sessions are thinly veiled torture dungeons that he seems to be getting off to emotionally. session 12, the special boy, uses the ceiling of its main fight chamber as the thumbnail for the session, because that's usually the last thing you see as you die. my point is, i was primed to try very hard to overcome this final challenge according to its own rules.
i played session 16, "garcin estelle inez and me", a hundred and thirty (130) times before i realized it was unbeatable. i didn't catch the sartre reference7 i guess. session 16 is a set of eight or so small arenas, through which you teleport in a random order, as you get equipped with random weapons, and fight randomized onslaughts of increasing numbers of enemies under a one-minute time limit. i assumed, naively, this was some kind of final task gauntlet, where you prove your mastery of the game to some intensity, and then you are granted a reward, a release. i did this because the level started with a message meant to hype me up, and the level progress ui element seemed to be reacting to me killing the correct number of enemies, and there was a steam achievement for completing session 16.
i was, of course, wrong. session 16 is unbeatable. it's the obligatory infinite mode that every remotely arcadey game has to come with, but for splatter that's also how it ends: in a desperate struggle to optimize every inch of yourself, for a reward that everyone is promising but which never comes, no matter how many points you get or people you kill.
it is a non-ending. you are denied the closure of beating session 16 but never the implication that it is next to play. there is an achievement unlockable only by beating session 16, so the only way to get it in practice is to cheat it in with a memory editor.8 to continue progressing in the game's narrative is to keep playing out session 16, forever. just keep pushing through an unending sequence of acceleratingly violent vignettes, where you kill until you are killed, before you retry/respawn and 20 goto 10.
certainly this ending-unending duality pairs well with an anticapitalist reading. it perfectly ensconces the inherent contradiction of capitalism in its dual nature, like it was born to synthesize for a juicy dialectic. splatter has spent a lot of its time meditating on internet era capitalism, from the sardonic character studies of its administrators—the manic crypto bro, the spiritual wellness guru–slash–social media influencer—to the allusions to views and content as precious but mercurial but-grippingly9 algorithmically generatable commodities, so it's certainly up for the task of a capitalist critique. i, for my part, used performance enhancing drugs (sativa) while playing so i'm legally prohibited from being taken seriously, but if someone out there with a patreon and a personal brand is cooking up a youtube essay, it'll probably be a banger.
you should maybe play this game. if you've never played a first person shooter in your life, you'll probably have a pretty rough go of it, unfortunately. turning on hp regen in the level difficulty mods is a very effective handicap, but if i'm going to be honest, i think if you're not dying you're not playing it right. but if you have clicked heads before and you like a little bite, i think splatter is an excellent challenge that is worth every penny and every minute.
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you know how gamey meat has a certain bitterness to it, that can nonetheless be acquired by enthusiasts or accommodated in dishes by chefs? this is like that, but for video games.
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difficulty by aesthetic obfuscation is a tradition i have been a student of since i played super hexagon for the first time, but which long predates10 us all and will never ever die.
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that's not to say splatter isn't constantly messing with you. whenever you complete an objective you get an obnoxious vibration noise and the game hits you with a datamosh visual effect that usually achieved by skipping intra-coded frames (the "keyframes") of a video. whenever you take damage, splatter soaks the game in a deep-fried filter, proportional in strength to your damage taken, until you heal up. and that's just the interface; there are a lot of "oh fuck you" narrative beats in the sessions that hit even harder. even the bright colourful blood searingh the walls and floor is a consequence of the idea that enemies are constantly changing colour, so it's that much harder to track individual enemies (for focusing down) when they spawn in large numbers. you can debate whether or not each of these are clever or useful, but they are all components whose absence makes the game easier to see and therefore to read in the thick of play.
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the key to playing splatter is space management, understanding where enemies are and how to get to safety. your weapons inform what kind of aggression you can dish out, which you then have to decide where to deploy from moment to moment in order to accomplish your objective. so there is a constant conversation between you and the session about what combat encounters you are in, and are about to be in. i think a more fun exercise than the rubric would be a qualitative assessment of each pair of weapons that splatter lets you wield simultaneously.
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the database is basically an extras menu, containing all the social media updates from the admins thus far, a codex of discovered weapons, and a high scores menu. it's not critically important, but the codex has some good gameplay tips that reveal a bit about the weapons' design, and i mention this thing at least twice in this chost and i don't want to explain it at any of those points. so it's footnote number five11 now.
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it should not be left understated how poorly screenshots capture what it's like to look at this game. everything is alive. the enemies are always changing colours, the walls are shaking and being covered in blood, all your guns look and recoil like they're fake, even your aiming reticle spins and swoops in response to what you're doing.
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garcin, estelle, and inez are three of the characters from jean-paul sartre's 1944 play "huis clos" – no exit. it's about being trapped in a waiting room, possibly forever, and is the source of the famous quote "l'enfer, c'est les autres" – hell is other people.
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a previous version of this chost said that there was a cosmetic for beating session 16, which is false. this also means the all cosmetics achievement can be obtained without beating session 16, so there's really only the one achievement for not beating it. the all cosmetics achievement ("You Might Have To Wait For A Steam Sale To Get This One") requires you to shell out 68 CAD plus applicable taxes for a set of four games on steam that are probably worth playing, so this is actually kind of a neat way to get gamers to check out some more games imo.
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the gripping hand, but for but(t)s. hey while you're here, bonus content: i love it when there's like, language to talk about the second of a thing, and then there's a fucked up way to talk about the third thing of the same kind. like "on one hand"–"on the other hand"–"on the gripping hand". or today–tomorrow–overmorrow. (to your next question: the day before yesterday is ereyesterday.) once–twice–thrice used to be good one, but people know about thrice now, and four doesn't have a cool adverbial form, so it's not so hot anymore. if you know of any, please comment them below so i can learn of them.
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predation in the sense of hunting. i should be able to see all hitboxes in all games, whenever i want, and it's criminal that i can't. scrub mentality 4 life
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technically it's footnote number 6 in my markdown source. i love/hate how footnotes work in markdown, they are treated merely as text identifiers to be automatically numbered. my issue is, i know what i want the numbers to be and what order i would like to present the footnotes, and i will do the work of making sure they are ordered correctly, but i would like to type that in with markdown syntax instead of having to have an intermediate template generation step to chosting. and i would definitely not like to turn my brain on long enough to make the copypastably simple bits of html to be my official footnote code, because i did webdev a decade ago and it was overwhelming enough back then. my brain demons are definitely involved to some degree.