Unrecord was announced around a year ago now, but recently revealed footage has finally gotten everyone talking about it. The game, shot from the angle of a bodycam, where you play as a cop hunting down criminals, has been praised for its visuals, leading to heavy discussion over whether the clip is made up of impressive graphics or is simply FMV footage with a HUD over the top of it. I can understand why people are drawn to that question, but it isn’t the one we should be asking.
The question that should come to mind is ‘what is this game trying to say?’. I know ‘everything is political, actually’ is not always a popular viewpoint, and I sympathise. I didn’t watch the Nintendo Indie Showcase and think ‘hmmm what does Mineko's Night Market stand for?’, because it doesn’t present itself as overtly political.
But Unrecord not only has you play as a cop killing bad guys, a highly politicised premise, it also uses bodycam footage as a framing device, which multiplies the politics ten-fold. It’s bizarre that this is being ignored because the game looks good - and I don’t even mean good as in fun to play, with fairly standard waist high barriers in a shooting arena.
The graphics certainly are impressive. I think we’re being sold a little by the opening shot, which seems extremely real, depicting the outside of a warehouse. Once the protagonist is in motion, the inside of the building seems more like polished graphics, and the surroundings are fairly barren in a way that allows for what remains to shine. Much of the footage is dark, hiding all sins, while the metallic surfaces look a little off, too shiny or flat, while the lines on everything are too straight and uniform, not messy like the real world.
But you can only fudge so much. I’m not 100 percent sure there’s no FMV used, and that’s quite the feat. I still don’t like the way a lot of games media has uncritically held this up as simply an impressive looking thing. If we truly view games as art, and want them to be respected or taken seriously on the level of other forms of art, we can’t just be impressed by the shiny packaging.
Unrecord might be labelled an overnight success. As I already said, this wasn’t actually its debut, but so few people paid attention until now that it might as well have been. There are only three people listed on the website, yet here it is not only with a compelling trailer that is so impressive people are questioning the graphics, but a shiny new Discord, TikTok, and Twitter account dropping with the footage, along with a polished website complete with FAQ page.
If this is a ‘lone developer takes on the world’ success story (and after last time, let’s not speculate that it’s secretly a Kojima project), having footage that looks so good this early, along with all the trimmings, may be signs of a studio stretched too thin.
That FAQ doesn’t answer two of the most frequently asked questions, however. The question that has appeared the most is ‘yoooooo dude wtf is this real bro?’, which might be translated as ‘is this made in Unreal Engine 5 or FMV footage?’, which seems a strange one to not answer when the Unreal logo is on the website and looking closely, it does seem like rendered graphics over recorded footage. I’d think you’d want to brag about that. The second question is why make this game at all, why not only have us play as a cop but also shoot it from an angle we only ever see in highly political news stories?
Instead, the questions stick to the game itself, telling us this is a narrative detective FPS, combining Ready or Not with Firewatch. Other questions tell us that there are plot twists, there’s no multiplayer, motion sickness mode is being developed, the game won’t be ready this year, and that it’s possible to join the team. No attempt is made to address the game’s framing whatsoever.
If you wanted to give the hand the benefit of the doubt, you might suggest the angle makes a deliberate point. The victims’ faces are blurred, and combined with the realism and the bodycam shots, that makes it a grisly watch. Perhaps we’re supposed to feel on edge about it, supposed to question the institution of the police. Maybe Unrecord is Spec Ops: The (Thin Blue) Line.
However, I doubt it. Nothing on the website suggests this, and the footage seems to glorify the hero in question. Given that we only see bodycam footage when a police officer has wildly overstepped the mark with extreme force or excessive violence, this attempt to reclaim the angle as something cool and exciting is extremely troubling. Added to that, without interrogation of the institution, blurring faces only dehumanises the cop’s targets even further.
The problem is most video game characters are cops at heart. They believe they are in the right and act with that authority, always. They believe that might makes right, and the narrative around them justifies this view. We joke about how many people Nathan Drake kills for just being low level grunt guards who get in his way, but most games constantly throw lethal combat at you and teach you that it’s okay to kill when you’re the good guy. Unrecord goes a step further, giving you not only a cop’s mentality, but literally framing the cop’s actions as heroic.
Unrecord looks impressive, and gaming is a technical industry where technological prowess is to be celebrated. But games are also art, and we’re all supposed to agree. Remember how The Game Awards got more viewers than the Oscars, so that means we win, right? If you really believe that, your questions about Unrecord should go deeper than just the visuals.