The GILTY List 2021
Killer is Dead
By Yahoo Silverman
What is more teriffying,
everyone staring at you...
or no one seeing you at all?
PREFACE
Every so I often I’ll have this fear of never finding happiness or my place in this world until I’m moments away from leaving it wash over me. This fear has caused me to become more people than I have fingers, toes, or contacts in my phone. If I knew you and you were happy, then I liked what you liked because I wanted to be the image you portrayed. I didn’t want to be weird; I didn’t want niche hobbies and I didn’t want to take medicine every morning. I just wanted to be a normal person, I wanted to be happy all the time. Something I would later learn only existed in pictures.
At the end of 2019 I moved back to my hometown. I wanted to start over, go back to college, make new friends, be someone else. Then Covid happened. I knew, and still know, very few people here. Everyone got old and normal and post happy pictures online of the families they made. If you asked me if I were jealous, I’d spit out some on the fly remark along the lines of “why would I want some Multi-Level-Marketing crying baby marriage counseling second mortgage having life?”. I’d try to sell my situation as ideal, as if we were walking a showroom floor, and depending on my mood that day I may convince you to leave in a pre-owned 4 door sedan that runs on anxiety, regret, and envy disguised as humor. So, kind of like a Tesla.
Covid was and still is a tragedy, but it was and sometimes still is a good enough excuse to separate. To not try to make new friends. To not leave the house. To hardly exist. At first it was uncomfortable, but then it became easy. For the first time in my adult life, I wasn’t chasing some relationship because I was afraid to be alone. I didn’t have someone around me to become. I didn’t have their interests. I wasn’t and could me them because there was no them to be I was becoming me, and as it turns out I have interests of my own.
As I write this, I’m starting to see it’s coming off as more of a Dexter “serial killer origin story” than a game discussion (if you read my Last of Us Part II piece then you know that I do not care for “structure” or “brevity” or in some cases “correct spelling”, which I fixed so chill out) so let me cut to the chase here; I had to find things that made me happy, whether others thought they were lame or weird or objectively cruddy or whatever unapproving adjective(s) one may choose, although eventually you learn that most people really don’t care what you like. I felt comfortable being me and liking what I liked. Corny high school drama anime? Yes, please. Five-hour reviews on Deus Ex and Thief (shoutout to my homie Nth from Nth Reviews) I’m in. Weird and kind of broken games? Absolutely, and none were weirder or more kind of broken than Killer Is Dead.
"Does not work"
-- Steam user with 33.2 hours played
If you have read my previous entry on the previous GILTY list entry, then you know what to expect. The GILTY list is not a place for game reviews or in-depth critiques. The GILTY list is where I talk about what sold me on a game and what qualifies its position on a list written by an unqualified individual. Killer is Dead is a game that you either loved, hated, or (the most likely of the three) did not play.
The story and writing of Killer is Dead makes the plot of the Metal Gear series seem straight forward and sensical (Kojima GILTY reference #3), the cringey “stare at her boobs while she isn’t looking” minigame was as dated and sexist when the game launched in 2013 as it is now, the technical issues will have PC players consider browsing forums and editing .ini files to be the first real level of the game, and the true villain of Killer is Dead is the user unfriendly camera that will try it’s darndest to get you killed, possibly irl.
I came across this game in the Steam library my brother and I share. He has a lot of strange games that his “friends send him”, including Deep Space Waifu hence the sarcastic quotes, so when he said he wasn’t familiar with Killer is Dead I had assumed a “friend” had sent it to him (although he does have 53 minutes of play time logged which is 4 more minutes of logged playtime than he has for Deep Space Waifu). I had scrolled by it several times over the past year or so and each time I thought “the art style is cool”, then kept scrolling. Late one summers evening, I don’t actually talk like this, I had scrolled by it again. I once again observed what we will from here on out refer to as the “tilted monitor art style” and thought “the art style is cool” and at this point I was longing for some new game to successfully disappear into, so knowing nothing about Killer is Dead, Goichi Suda, or Grasshopper Manufacturer I installed and started it up. Then I closed the game, browsed forums, found the appropriate line in the appropriate .ini file I needed to edit to get rid of the 30fps cap, but then I booted up the game. Then I realized that doubling the frame limit from 30 to 60 would have a negative effect on the games quick time events so I closed the game once again, browsed forums, found the appropriate line in the appropriate .ini file I needed to edit, then I booted up the game…again.
"Art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life"
-- Pablo Picasso (who is not on TikTok)
It goes without saying that video games, the engines they’re built on and the platforms they’re played on have advanced significantly over the last decade plus. I can remember more than ten years ago seeing an NBA 2K commercial that showed Shaq standing at the free throw line…sweating. The big sell was the sweat itself pouring out of Kazaam as he stood at the free throw line where statistically he was extremely unlikely to make what knowledgeable basketball fans refer to as a “free throw”. Realism, and more specifically, realistic graphics were quickly becoming the bottom line of what “gamers” would consider to be “good graphics”. In the AAA sphere “good graphics” sell games. If your console isn’t hot to the touch or its fan isn’t loud enough to wake the neighbors, then those must not be “good graphics”.
Not too long ago I stumbled across a YouTube video from a few years back and in it they mentioned that they did not like Dishonored’s art style because it wasn’t “realistic”, this is a sentiment that is not hard to come by. Expectations of how a game should strive to look can blur the lines between graphics and an art style/direction. An uncanny valley life like Zelda game could cause the makers of Ambien and other sleep medications to double their companies value overnight as terrified gamers in the U.S. humbly plead with their insurance companies to cover at least SOME of the prescription and doctors visit costs. They will likely say “no, a predisposition to mental anguish caused by a life like Link is a pre-existing condition” then they would probably ask you to text them a pic of you crying for their executive to hang on their refrigeration, or maybe use as their Christmas card.
As much as I enjoy the realistic graphics and visuals of Uncharted, Read Dead Redemption 2, The Last of Us Part II, or the Assassins Creed series, I enjoy the not so realistic visuals of the Dishonored, Cuphead, Nier Automota, and yes Killer is Dead just as much. I know my taste and opinion here is not unique and there is a decent percentage of gamers who don’t consider realistic graphics to be the standard for what constitutes as “good”. However, after playing Killer is Dead and that sending me spiraling into learning about and experiencing more and more of Suda 51 work and Grasshopper Manufacturers titles my eyes were opened to how the art style and direction of a game can be as important as the games story itself.
Killer is Dead’s story is weird, which we will get into, and I do not see it working without that “tilted monitor” style. This game does not try to fix the weird or the non-sensical, heck it barely tries to fix the broken. It embraces the weird and thrives in the nonsense. Goichi Suda has a history of making niche titles like Killer7 and No More Heroes, and at no point can I see him saying “maybe that’s too weird” or however it is pronounced in Japanese. In his titles, including Killer is Dead, the art style is as much a part of the experience than the crazy story or the hack-n-slash combat.
"Starve a cold,
feed a fever"
-- Not how the saying goes
If you have ever fallen asleep with a fever above 100 degrees Fahrenheit (or however many Kilometers per-hour that is in the rest of the world) then you’re already familiar with the vibes that this story will give off. Now, Killer is Dead is just your run-of-mill story of a fella and his government funded weapon arm taking contracts to kill moon monsters and hunt down the former government agent present day moon king while taking on lobster ladies and tiger riding Yakuza bosses. We see it all the time.
To explain the story would be like trying to recall and explain a dream. At no point are you confident that you’re making any sense or that the person on the receiving end wants you to continue. Honestly, that is how I always feel, including right now. Second thought, maybe I shouldn’t finish building the comment section below these posts, at least then I can say “I felt it unnecessary” rather than “I didn’t make the time to learn how to fully utilize PHP and MySQL databases”.
Unlike the last post I submitted for the GILTY list, Killer is Dead is not a game with bar raising brutally realistic gameplay built around a solid narrative with visuals that push your consoles GPU into its own feverish state, oh no, Killer is Dead contains frustrating, challenging, sometimes broken but often unexplainably addictive gameplay with a story that does not make dollars or sense, yet somehow keeps your attention in large part thanks to visuals that are as unique as the oddball story itself.
I was once told I was good looking, just not in a traditional way. While that centrist malarky is meaningless to me, I can honestly say that Killer is Dead is a good game, just not in a traditional sense.
Closing arguments
What sold me on the game was the overall experience. The game screams “I made what I wanted to make”, although Goichi Suda has gone on to say that it was the publisher that forced that stupid sexist minigame, but as far as compromising a vision goes…we’ve seen much worse.
According to the Steam achievement I received upon finishing the game only 8.9% of players finished all episodes of the game on normal, that factually less than 10%. Upon finishing the game, I went ahead and outright purchased it for three reasons 1.) I loved the experience 2.) I wanted those achievements to be tied to my profile 3.) it was like 5 bucks during the Thanksgiving Steam sale.
If you can stomach a fair amount of jank, appreciate fearless creativity, and enjoy hack-n-slash games, then pick up Killer is Dead. Or don’t, I don’t receive any kickback, but that could change…Goichi Suda and/or whoever runs Deep Silver, I am open to becoming a paid shill.
