The hostile and ever-stranger world of Killer7 seems to have prophesied the paranoid geopolitics of the 21st century. The game’s broad subtext appears to be that a world growing ever more complex will inevitably produce a society devoid of meaning, where the strangest conspiracies are allowed to fester and eventually explode.

The story centres on a terrorist group that uses a virus to turn humans into body snatchers—figures who assume a normal human appearance before rapidly transforming into demonic, human bombs. In this world, anyone can be a target. No motive can be inferred, no forensic logic applied, resulting in a paranoid society where deranged individuals feel no shame in committing inhumane and bizarre acts. Two chapters have you embarking on a manhunt for a child organ trafficker; another has you tracking a terrorist to his “paradise,” where he has seemingly cured most diseases by infecting himself. His motive is simple and horrifying: having contracted the Heaven Smile virus, he asks only that you end his suffering.

The game’s control system reflects this worldview almost perfectly. Killer7 is, in effect, an on-rails survival-horror first-person shooter, and it must be seen to be believed. Its puzzles range from having a woman slit her wrists to appease a blood-craving door, to switching to a character whose sole ability is jumping onto rooftops. The experience is disorienting, fragmented, and often difficult to comprehend—but so too is the modern world the game’s science-fiction nightmare appears to have anticipated.

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