You can have all the firepower in the world, but that won’t save you if you’re ill-prepared to use it. Underscoring the ambient invocation of fear are the very real and ever-present gameplay threats.
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However, the level design makes these usually safe spaces feel unsafe. The settings tend towards the kinds of places that make up the everyday fabric of towns and cities: houses and hotels, a car dealership and a gas station. Like with some of the best in the genre, the horror potential in Ready or Not stems from transgressing the boundaries of normal. These kinds of design cues are deeply embedded in the horror genre, raising echoes of Resident Evil, Perception, or Until Dawn. Compounding that, the levels tend to be dark and tight in their design, rife with locked doors and blind corners. You don’t know how many enemies are present or the layout of the labyrinthine urban settings. Once you choose a location from the city map, you’re dropped in with a significant tactical disadvantage. The player’s motivation is to conquer the game’s old-school level challenge approach. However, for what Ready or Not wants to be, that’s enough – at least to start with. Beyond this vague promise that you’re bringing order to a lawless place, there’s no diegetic reason to dive in. You’re a SWAT officer taking down criminals in a city with a sky-rocketing crime rate – and those criminals aren’t afraid to meet force with force. Ready or Not has something that looks vaguely like a narrative impetus if you squint hard enough. When you finally step away, it’s with a sigh of relief and a tingling sense that what you’ve just played points to uncomfortable truths. The more you play, the more the sense of wrongness creeps up on you and settles in. It’s claustrophobic, tense, and unintentionally subversive. VOID Interactive’s much anticipated and now controversial debut looks like a shooter but feels more like a horror experience. In its presentation of power and powerlessness, Ready or Not is terrifying.