The best-looking game of all time. Every frame a painting but a goddamn video game. Sitting there in awe of that art style for 13 hours. Making Killer7 on rails was a stroke of genius because it let the devs go crazy with cinematic camera angles. Honestly, all it really needed was those visuals to win me over, but everything else is amazing too. Grasshopper did the whole "no, your choices actually don't matter" thing years before anyone else, and accomplished it better by incorporating it into every aspect of their game design, but that's also far from the only thing they were trying to say.
Like all Kill The Past titles, Killer7 is a dense text with an overwhelming amount of stuff going on in its narrative, abnormal game design, and extreme dedication to creating a specific atmosphere over anything else. It's uncomfortable from start to finish, from the creepy enemy designs and sound effects to the disturbing subject matter to the uncertainty of what's truly going on behind the scenes. It's not really horror and is funny more often than it is scary, but it certainly made me feel uneasy in a more effective way than most games.
I'm still trying to process a lot of what happened in the absolutely bonkers story, but holy hell is it good. Suda51's take on US/Japan relations is bizarrely apt and the mystery of the titular Killer7 never stops being interesting. I wanted to read people's theories regarding certain things I was unsure about, and upon a quick Google search discovered that a book explaining a lot of this stuff in detail apparently released alongside the game. I think this takes a lot of the fun away from developing my own interpretations, so I will be ignoring it much like the similar Drakenier side material, and instead proceed to spend the next year theory-crafting and thinking about how utterly brilliant Killer7's surreal storytelling was.
Like all Kill The Past titles, Killer7 is a dense text with an overwhelming amount of stuff going on in its narrative, abnormal game design, and extreme dedication to creating a specific atmosphere over anything else. It's uncomfortable from start to finish, from the creepy enemy designs and sound effects to the disturbing subject matter to the uncertainty of what's truly going on behind the scenes. It's not really horror and is funny more often than it is scary, but it certainly made me feel uneasy in a more effective way than most games.
I'm still trying to process a lot of what happened in the absolutely bonkers story, but holy hell is it good. Suda51's take on US/Japan relations is bizarrely apt and the mystery of the titular Killer7 never stops being interesting. I wanted to read people's theories regarding certain things I was unsure about, and upon a quick Google search discovered that a book explaining a lot of this stuff in detail apparently released alongside the game. I think this takes a lot of the fun away from developing my own interpretations, so I will be ignoring it much like the similar Drakenier side material, and instead proceed to spend the next year theory-crafting and thinking about how utterly brilliant Killer7's surreal storytelling was.