The best-selling steam shooter Ready or Not is a dystopian SWAT sim

Ready or Not is a tactical horror game in which you crawl through sprawling mazes of American decay looking for violent suspects in the midst of crouching onlookers. steam currently loves itbut after spending a couple of hours on it I can’t say I do. At best, it’s an admirably engaging puzzle game punctuated by twitching shootouts, but it’s also a violent political fantasy with no capacity for self-inquiry.

Developed by Void Interactive from New Zealand, Ready or Not puts you in the role of American law enforcement agencies tasked with “bringing order into the chaos” of a failed state torn apart by economic stratification and crime. Your tools for pacification include assault rifles, shotguns, submachine guns, and of course an endless supply of military-grade cable ties.

Used in poor neighborhoods, car dealerships, and gas stations, your job is to methodically break through maze-sized levels and clear them until all the bad guys are in custody or dead. If you fail to execute every encounter according to the correct betting rules, you will be penalized with failed grades at the end of each level, like a bad score in Dance dance revolution.

Even before it exploded on Steam Ready or Not has sparked controversy, and lost its editor after one of its developers apparently re-committed to adding a school shooting level. The game’s Discord players envisioned what gear they would use to hunt down the shooter in this potential scenario. Finally, Void Interactive weighed in to calm everyone down it would be careful with such traumatic content, but after playing through a handful of the game’s existing cards, I’m doubtful.

Ready or Not is more of a MouseTrap game than a round call of Duty. You spend more time looking for traps on doors than spraying and praying, leaving a trail of chem lights to mark where you’ve already been. At some point you will meet NPCs who do not surrender, but instead draw weapons and deal with the superhuman rage of one matrix Agent. Hence the fear and trepidation with which you and the rest of your team, botched AI companions when you play alone, or other players when you are online, find your way through meth labs and beleaguered hotels for “affordable housing”.

It’s an incredibly atmospheric combo, partly aided by detailed sound cues and the eerie ambient drumming of the electronic soundtrack, handled with the care of a toddler running with scissors. Ready or Not‘s realism is effective enough to be disturbing, but too shallow not to lapse into a farce, or worse, Blue Lives Matter Cosplay with fascist overtones and alt-right dog whistles.

An Easter egg in the game’s starting area consists of a discarded “red pill” box in a trash can with the words “Noggin Joggers” on the side which some consider to be. have interpreted 4chan-speak for the N-word (Void Interactive did not immediately respond to a request for comment to clarify its intended meaning). Elsewhere there is a box of vitamin D food supplements for “Bonor Health” from “Whore Foods” on a table next to spare ammunition, while another box of vitamins refers to the Pepe meme. There’s also the now infamous “Anal Staircase” sign from one of the game’s old trailers that is part of an upcoming sex club level.

Casual viewers have only a few recorded lines to bark at for the moment, including, “My mother has a Mexican maid, you may know her.” There is already a “Mute Cringey voice lines”Mod to remove it, although Void Interactive has announced it will be replaced in a later update. Then there is the law-and-order ideology that frames the rest of the game. America is on the brink. Crime is at an all time high. It can’t be fixed, just muffled. The game trains you to fear everyone you meet, not as a comment but as a wish-fulfillment, and seemingly unaware of the nation’s recent accounts with an epidemic of police murders.

Amid these confusing tone shifts, ranging from teenage to overtly racist, there are incredibly dark moments, like encountering a child in their pink bedroom writhing in pain. “Wounded civilian cleared and prepared for evacuation,” says your SWAT officer in his RoboCop voice. Whether because Ready or Not remains an incredibly barebones Early Access game, or because Void Interactive lacks the sophistication, the whole thing feels blatant and exploitative.

That didn’t stop Ready or Die from receiving a barrage of positive user reviews praising the game on Steam. Some doubtless because they are the seeds of a faithful follower of the old Clap Games, and with it a return to the slow, tactical, claustrophobic shootout that even games like Rainbow Six Siege have mostly given up. Others probably because of the way it drapes the gameplay into the worship of strong cops (there aren’t any female police in the game yet) and provides a neat and orderly way to counter one system of violence against another.

This fantasy doesn’t come cheap in real life or on Steam, however. Ready or NotThe beta is currently priced at $ 40, while a special Supporter’s Edition costs twice as much. It is impossible to make a final judgment on a game that appears unfinished, but as of now it has not evolved into the kind I would trust to tackle the simulation of a school massacre.