WAR IS HELL. HELL IS FUN: An analysis of anti-war themes in ‘ULTRAKILL’

How can a first-person shooter game have an anti-war message?

War and violence are bad — a sentiment that is generally recognized as being true on some level by just about every philosophical tradition and moral system on the planet. From Jesus to the Buddha, Confucius to John Stuart Mill, the golden rule is the general rule: Violence goes against treating others as you want to be treated, and so while humans can often justify instances of violence through self-defense or as an occasional necessity to stop a greater evil, very rarely will anyone say that violence is, on the whole, a positive moral good in and of itself.

A lot of video games are violent, first-person shooters first among them. As someone who generally thinks of himself as a pacifist, I am not particularly bothered by this — shooting something in a video game is not the same as shooting someone in real life, nor does it make you more violent. However, the fact that violence in video games is not real does not mean that questions pertaining to violence cannot be thoughtfully explored through video games. Many games do this on a very basic level by crafting a story about some kind of evil enemy you must fight against that justifies your campaign; others accept that it’s just a game and don’t bother addressing it at all. (I don’t remember being prompted by Doomspire Brickbattle to consider the morality of blowing up the yellow tower with a rocket launcher). But what happens when you want your violent video game to be anti-war?

This problem has a name: ludonarrative dissonance. The term is essentially a fancy phrase for what happens when the narrative and thematic elements of a video game clash with the mechanics and general feel of a game. This problem is especially present within games that have violent gameplay while seeking to convey an anti-war message. The source of the problem seems evident, too: Video games are generally supposed to be fun, so how can you tell the player that war is hell, when hell is so much fun to be in? 

Some games like Spec Ops: The Line solve this problem by making hell not so fun at all. The gameplay is serviceable but nothing over the top — certainly not enough to make up for the omnipresent dread of your actions and the war you’re in. This is certainly effective, but it almost transforms the game from a type of art whose enjoyment comes primarily in playing the game into an entirely different kind of experience: one that I don’t have any particular desire to pick up again any time soon, despite how good it was. This is not the only way, however.

ULTRAKILL is a fast-paced first-person shooter game that is produced by an indie company and is still under development. It is also an absolutely sublime playing experience that has become quite possibly one of my favorite video games of all time — and certainly my favorite first-person shooter. Set in a world very loosely based on Dante’s “Inferno” where mankind is dead, hell is full and blood is fuel, you play as a robot called V1, a machine that requires blood to survive, which in game means hitting various souls of the damned, angels and other robots in order to heal. It is insanely fun.

The combat system in ULTRAKILL is addictive. Integral to everything you do is the style meter, reminiscent of games like Bayonetta and Devil May Cry 5 that reward you for switching weapons, taking out enemies in creative ways and generally being stylish. The game gives you many tools with which to achieve this: punchable shotgun bullets, a rocket launcher whose rockets you can ride and coins you can throw and then shoot to utterly break the game in ways that would genuinely take too long to describe here. 

One of the core conceits of the game is the fact that you never level up — not even a single time. You never gain more health or new abilities from some skill tree; you simply pick up new weapons as the game goes on and get better at using them. While you likely won’t achieve a perfect score for each level as you play for the first time, half the fun is in replaying to see how much better you’ve gotten since you began. The skill ceiling is practically infinite and so is its replayability. Alongside and despite this, it also has one of the most moving anti-war messages I’ve ever encountered in a video game. The game expertly shows how literally hellish war can be, and above all how pointless it often is, through its portrayal of the shattered dreams of an undead humanity and their robot creations which continue to fight a centuries-long war long after there’s anything left worth fighting about. 

While the gameplay is insanely fun, the story of V1’s descent into hell is utterly worthy of the name. In the world of ULTRAKILL, humanity is extinct — dead after centuries of endless war and the invasion of the surface world by the nigh-omnipotent and malevolent spirit of hell itself. The dead husks of humanity tried to make as much as they possibly could have out of their afterlife, but they were continuously crushed by a despotic heaven long abandoned by God and tormented by hell itself. You and every other machine created during humanity’s catastrophic final war are powered by blood, and in the absence of your creators, you delve into the depths of hell to find their husks, wiping out entire planes of existence just to survive a little longer in an endless war without reason: a war which continues even after every living thing which once fought in it has long since passed away.

It is an incredibly moving story. When I first finished the currently completed levels of the game I was amazed at the piece of art I had just spent the last few days playing. And then I looked at my average ranking of D, wondered if I could do better and hopped right back into this endless war in hell to prove I could.

There are more anti-war messages that can be discovered as you replay and perfect the game, most notably two immensely powerful secret bosses who each have their own tragic tales of war and suffering as they make doomed attempts to improve the lives of their subjects. And yet not once in my quest to P-rank did this hellish war have the hellishness needed to make me want to step away. Neither, strangely, has the fact that I just keep going back in for more style points detracted from my conscious appreciation of those themes. Why?

Part of it is due to just how overwhelmingly doomed the world of ULTRAKILL is. Hell is the most powerful force left in this universe, and compared to literal hell, the unstoppable winding down of the universe through unspeakably violent entropy might seem like a sweet release. In any case, V1, and all other machines for that matter, do not have any choice in what they do. They must endlessly carve their way forward through hell or else they too will die, and we see in every single death screen that V1 very much DOES NOT WANT TO DIE. This lack of real in-universe agency is a key way ULTRAKILL is different from other anti-war games, which often focus on the agency of the player and make the character, and by extension, the player, question why they’re committing acts of violence at all. In ULTRAKILL this choice is epistemically absent. As such, why not enjoy it?

Just because you have no in-universe choice on whether or not to participate in endless war does not mean that the hellishness of that war is not effectively driven home. The game strikes a weird balance between managing to be subtle with its themes while simultaneously bashing you over the head with them. While you’d have to suppress every curious urge in your body to ignore them completely, you could theoretically get through the game without gaining a massive understanding of the lore which does so much to drive home its message. At the same time, every time you die, you see V1 desperately saying it does not want to die. As you descend through hell, the visual signs of devastation are increasingly impossible to miss, going from a mostly tranquil limbo that you and your fellow machines destroy to an eternal trench warfare battlefield on the violence layer. You can dig deeper into the lore or simply exist in the world, but you will undoubtedly take in something about the nature of war and conflict.

All of this has led me to wonder: Is ludonarrative dissonance — the aforementioned conflict between the narrative of a story and its gameplay — even necessarily a problem? It definitely can be — the themes of a game can absolutely be undermined by the mechanics incentivizing you to behave and see things in a different way. But in cases like this where the world is doomed and the messaging is thoughtfully layered throughout the game, sometimes it just isn’t an issue. You can have a game where shooting is really fun, and where the idea that war is hell is conveyed beautifully and movingly. Maybe ludonarrative dissonance is a skill issue, at least some of the time. The end product is a different type of anti-war art from the type of games that seek to make you reconsider why you’re even playing them, but it works all the same. War is hell, and hell is full.

Daily Arts Contributor Glenn Hedin can be reached at heglenn@umich.edu.

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