At the Sony State of Play showcase today unwitting viewers were subjected to one of the goriest videogame trailers I’ve ever seen, and I was around to witness the Hatred panic. In the trailer for Ill, a new survival horror game coming in 2027, and published by the company responsible for Atomic Heart, I saw:
1 eye socket scooped out with a knife1 skull shot at close range, causing a skull explosion1 skull stomped underfoot, causing a skull explosion1 zombie baby’s skull punched and crushed1 neck slashed1 neck repeatedly stabbed1 head severed because it is held to a wall with a knife and the rest of the body just falls off it1 leg shot off1 door kickedA naked man who wants to kill you
All this takes place in what looks like some vile hospital. The Ill Steam page describes the setting as a “huge research fort” where some “mysterious source of evil” has generated “horrific Aberrations”. In other words, that zombie baby isn’t a real human zombie baby, it’s an Aberration, so I guess it’s totally defensible to smash its face to bits.
Ill is developed by Team Clout, which boasts film industry talent who have worked on Longlegs, V/H/S/Beyond and It: Welcome to Derry, as well as the Until Dawn film adaptation. The trailer’s perverse focus on bone-crushing slaughter is probably meant to demonstrate Team Clout’s “advanced physics interactions” and “advanced dismemberment system”. It’s the kind of thing horror studios have been parading for decades, the last most notable recent example being The Callisto Protocol.
I guess from a graphics tech perspective some of the scenes are technically impressive, but the environment—messed up underground lab—is about as bog standard as they come for first-person survival horror, not to mention third-person survival horror, and first-person shooters, and third-person shooters, and sci-fi RPGs etcetera. We’ll find out some time in 2027 whether Team Clout has anything better to offer than zoomed-in ultragore.
