This game built to look like you’re peering through a body cam strapped to a person in a dilapidated building got me all sorts of fucked up.
The video shows a short clip of first-person footage from a game in development by artist Alexandre S, who goes by @esankiy on Twitter. The game that esankiy is working on doesn’t appear to have a title, but their Twitter bio lists them as an artist at a French studio called DRAMA. The demo was created in Unreal Engine and has a very Soviet Bloc feel to it, as though the main character is creeping through an abandoned city like Pripyat or similar.
I’ve embedded the in-development video for you below. Fair warning, if you’re prone to motion sickness, you may feel a tickle.
I’m working on a body cam style game#unrealengine #gamedev #indiedev pic.twitter.com/AK5kXeAyP2
— Alexandre S. (@esankiy) October 12, 2022
It’s very convincing! There are numerous comments below the video from people who thought they were watching real body cam footage for a moment. Character movement is erratic and the character’s weapon is held higher up in the frame than you typically see in a first-person shooter, to suggest the camera is chest-mounted. The screen is made blurry and artifacted by filters and effects to give it the feel of compressed footage recorded or streamed on a portable camera.
It’s an interesting experiment to be sure. I don’t know if I’d want to commit to a full 12-hour campaign in a game that looked and played like this — I think it might make me feel a bit ill after a while. There’s also plenty of sensitivity questions to be asked, considering body cam footage is now linked pretty squarely in the public consciousness with footage of police deploying overwhelming and sometimes deadly force on minorities. Though it doesn’t seem as if esankiy’s game is trying to evoke that specific imagery, the mind finds its way there all the same. Obviously there’s no story or setting information here, and it seems little more than a tech demo. If it were spun into a larger game, I wonder if it would have anything it wanted to say about violent body cam footage and the way it has become so readily consumable online.
I watch with interest (while glancing away from the screen every so often to keep from feeling crook).
Leave a Reply