Hírek
I AM RIPPER tears out its place as the Great British Thriller
F
Francisco Dominguez
Pete Bottomley, studio head at the Manchester-based studio, explains he wants his team to reverse a trend towards horror thrillers outside rare exceptions like Quantic Dream’s Heavy Rain. “We just want to make a great British thriller game,” he says. “It's things we enjoy, whether it's true crime podcasts, the documentaries you can find on Netflix, or BBC dramas.”
Their protagonist Samantha Harlow is a forensic detective, and she and her partner are tasked with the gruesome duty of tracing the blood-soaked steps of a serial killer slaughtering their way through a 1980s port town in northwest England. This is a dark, rain-drenched place, marked by a pervasive sense of pain and hopelessness after its industries were gutted by sweeping government policies that locals still resent to this day.
Besides the detective, you’ll also inhabit several other playable characters throughout the game, including Dolores, an unfortunate early victim. Bottomley says in her case, players may play as her for five minutes or as long as an hour—her fatal run-in with the Ripper is a highly reactive sequence, an example of the game’s branching decision points that produce numerous scenarios that impact later events.
Changing perspectives like this is an important tool that gives players a deep psychological understanding of each character, a crucial element for an effective thriller. The genre’s greatest strength has always been how it manifests its victim’s fears and unveils the murderer’s twisted mindset. Psycho’s Norman Bates and Silence of the Lambs’ Hannibal Lector would be half as menacing if their victims' anxious fears weren’t plain for all to see, or if their own twisted desires weren't so plausible, convincing, and—in a certain sinister light—even understandable.
“Playing the game through different eyes is really compelling to us,” says Bottomley, before giving a terrifying example shown in the trailer to confound players: a character trapped in a Perspex coffin fighting to operate a lever that might help to escape, struggling for air as it fills with water and begins to sink beneath a lake. “Who am I, where am I, what is going on?”
The studio’s always emphasized engaging gameplay, and that talent comes to the fore in Samantha’s gruesome but necessary forensic activities. “We love the idea of just being able to go in and collect forensics in a really tactile, gameplay-driven way,” he says. After finding Dolores’ butchered body in a snowy forest, Detective Harlow demonstrates these mechanics by cutting the wires sewn through a victim’s lips with scissors before retrieving a cassette tape the killer left lodged in their mouth. Animated in horrifyingly convincing detail, the somber realism makes it feel even worse than Mouthwashing’s grotesque gut-rearranging sequence.
If this seems graphic and disturbing to you, you didn’t grow up on a diet of British crime dramas. Bottomley enjoys the long-running show Silent Witness and its cast of forensic experts with a matter-of-fact attitude to their macabre occupation. He sees similarities to his game, and feels many players can stomach playing out autopsies that are a long way from Surgeon Simulator 2’s cartoonish operations.
“They'll have these morgue scenes where they're literally drilling open the scalp, lifting things out of someone's nose and cutting. It's very visceral,” he says. “There's a viewing audience that’s OK with it from film and TV, if games handle it in the right way and don't just do it for sensationalism.”
Camera, action!
Fortunately for the squeamish, there’s more to I AM RIPPER than the understated body horror of those autopsies. Over the years, the studio has expanded their expertise across first-person investigation, the immersive sim, and third-person adventure gameplay styles. Here, looking to mirror Fincher’s rhythm of deceptive lulls alternated with nerve-jangling action, they’ve now added third-person action to their repertoire. In fact, with so many genre styles at their command, Bottomley struggles to pinpoint a specific genre for the game. “I'm thinking more about the camera as a tool than a specific genre," he says. “I'm interested in using the camera in the context that’s the most engaging.”
That filmmaker’s eye for game design has grown keener over his time at the studio. He dabbled with cinematography in their immersive sim The Occupation, but it was Dahlia View’s fixed cameras that really let him indulge his interest, experimenting with techniques like tracking shots (where the camera follows the subject, like Goodfella’s famous Copacabana scene) and painstaking motion-matching (a subtle technique where camera and actor move in sync to increase an audience’s emotional connection, for instance a downward tilt following a character as they sit down) that led to Fincher’s perfectionist reputation for demanding an exhausting numbers of takes.
As Bottomley explains, game devs have it easier than the crew of a David Fincher movie. “You have the cheat code in games because it's all in the game engine,” he says. “I can make a camera match the movement of a character because they're not human beings, and they're not doing their own little quirks.” For all their talents, superstar actors like Jake Gyllenhaal and Brad Pitt have one very human failing: inconsistency. “When we animate something, it does that animation every time!”
One area where the White Paper Games devs share Fincher’s perfectionism is their commitment to authenticity. Bottomley couldn’t imagine approaching I AM RIPPER’s quarry without the sparks of inspiration ignited by setting foot in a very real and vast abandoned industrial site. “If you go to a quarry in the northwest of the UK, you think ‘right, I know what a quarry looks like!’” he says. “But when you see the old supports left behind, the different structures, the cave systems and everything…when you're in the space, you get more creative ideas, it just feels more grounded.”
Bottomley believes players benefit from the deep understanding and authentic touch that visiting the locations and speaking to the locals gives their games—although they stop short of drawing directly from real-life cases. Out of respect for real victims, there’s no connection between White Paper's game and the notorious Yorkshire Ripper serial killer who operated in the country in the mid-to-late '70s.
The developers have been working with the Unreal Engine for 15 years now, and their mastery of the technology can be seen in every frame of the game. Moving into third person with a character who isn’t a wheelchair-user as is the case in Dahlia View (yes, it’s a British take on Hitchcock’s Rear Window!) involves significantly more demanding animations. They experimented with Wi-Fi-enabled motion capture suits on their previous games, but were never satisfied, and had to resort to animating everything by hand.
Now they have access to a full motion capture stage, Bottomley compares I AM RIPPER's animation chops to the impressive tech behind Ninja Theory’s games like Senua's Saga: Hellblade II. Even if their stated goal isn’t horror, they’re finally equipped to create the forensic crime scene investigation of Bottomley’s dreams—and their player’s nightmares.
Wishlist I AM RIPPER on the Epic Games Store.