It’s like that scene at the end of Night of the Living Dead where, having successfully fought off zombies for an entire night, the lead character is shot in the head by a passing cop. You might be walking through a clump of trees trying to get to an outhouse that you hope will contain some ammo or a motorcycle helmet and, poof, you’re gone. You’re often killed by someone you never see. After a year of horrific news reports from the pulverised streets of Aleppo, PUBG reverberates with quiet horror.Īnd that’s the thing: PUBG is a horror game really.
We can only guess what’s happened to them. The abandoned houses are filled with the detritus of real life – television sets, laptops, sofas – but all the civilians are gone. But in PUBG, the fighting takes place in a large, naturalistic location. Of course, there have been every-player-for-themselves online shooting games for years, but titles such as Doom and Call of Duty are structured to function like sports they take place in purpose-built arenas of militarised action, and everything feels artificial. ‘Shooting optimism in the face’ … PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds. All nuance is gone – it’s all rage and death now. In that game, if you met another human, there was always the possibility that you could team up and create an ad-hoc community – there was a tinge of optimism, of basic human decency. It’s interesting that developer Brendan Greene based the game on another modification of Arma called DayZ, a zombie survival game where dozens of players roam an eastern bloc country attempting not to get eaten by monsters. It is utterly nihilistic, confrontational and psychopathic. To be honest, you couldn’t get a game more redolent of its time in history than PUBG.
Why spend time in a place where dozens of anonymous people wish violent deaths on you? Ask any woman on Twitter For most of the time you’re alone, wondering if the office block you’re currently approaching will be the one where someone pulls an AK-47 on you from behind a wardrobe. Whatever you’ve got, fights are nasty, brutish and short. If you can’t find guns, you might have to fend people off with a machete or your fists. To crank up the tension, useful items are randomly placed around the map in hundreds of deserted buildings, so for long periods of each round, you’re just running nervously through streets and rural locations, desperately looting homes and garages, looking out for other humans.
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