Content warning for discussion of extreme violence and self-harm.
You haven’t died in a videogame till you’ve died in Casualties: Unknown, a profoundly unwholesome cousin of Spelunky that simulates injury, infection and sensory distress with the same gusto Crusader Kings 3 reserves for papal politics. This is an intricate and imaginative celebration of pain – not just an exacting survival game full of gauges to manage, but a laboratory study of just how many ways an animal body can feel, before it finally gives up the ghost.
I am one of a million canine hominids, created to undergo spectacular indignities by vicious human scientists, in a universe of suffering that spans several games from developer Orsoniks. I am the sorrowing vat-grown pup of a conclave of star-faring Dr Moreaus. My task is to collect… something, some gadget of great importance, from a cave on a deathly planet, located beneath three kilometres of booby-trapped and infested, poisonous and hateful rock.
Currently, I am trying to burrow into a sealed titanium drop pod with my bare paws, so that I can sleep somewhere warm. Too warm, in fact. The drop pod heaters feel like they were vindictively designed to discourage occupants from lingering, but I’m finding that dehydration is easier to address than hypothermia – there are pools of groundwater around that harbour only a slight risk of “minorly” poisoning my intestines. So into the pod we go. After ripping away a layer of rubber, I smash some glass panes and promptly step in the fragments.
My computer screams, a hideous jangle of chords and static. The interface becomes a fritzing, flexing sphincter of pinks and reds. My punctured dogsbody flops and writhes, spurting yellow fluids and gobs of unintelligible text, ignoring my button inputs. They are my avatar no longer. They have been reduced to a squirming facet of the simulation’s agony.
I gawp in guilt and terror at the status bar, now jammed with pulsing icons, then switch to my health display and determine that I am “bleeding catastrophically” from my right hind paw. I need to bandage that paw quickly. But first, I need to remove the glass. This takes the form of a ‘minigame’ in which I guide a shaking clawed hand with the cursor, hauling out shards even as my poor character threatens to pass out from the ordeal.
I’ve got two of five shards out when the earthquake kicks in. Already doubled over and delirious, my pioneering pooch is launched over the nearest cliff. They fall about 50 feet, rag-dolling off crags with a concussive whump, till they smash into a flooded wooden platform. The anatomical diagram on the health screen lights up like a wickerman. I don’t appear to have broken any bones, but everything is hurting. What’s more, I am soaking wet and hypothermia is taking hold, stretching blue veins through the clenching colours of my pain. The screen begins to look like some exotic, putrid flower.
Wringing my hands, I allow my mutant mutt about 10 seconds to recover from the shock of the fall, then open the health screen again and slowly tug out the last three shards of glass. It’s actually easier than before, but not for the happiest of reasons: landing on my head appears to have numbed my senses. There will be longer term consequences, probably. Now I just have to bind the wound… except that I must have dropped my roll of gauze, while tumbling through the abyss. With sirens still flashing on the HUD, I peer about for a cave plant or other source of crafting materials. On the other side of the platform, I spy the corpse of another pitiful lab experiment. Perhaps there’s a bandage in that huddle of clothes?
I hoist my sagging and babbling starpup to their feet, and limp over to investigate. Then I step on a pressure plate, and a six foot blade shoots up through my left thigh.
The screen is almost obliterated by crimson snow. The noise is… indescribable. I open the health screen again to assess the damage but I can’t, because my dogperson has fallen into utter derangement. They want to be rid of their too-fruitful arteries, their stinking yellow blood. The clawed hand reappears, and I am forced to rake my own torso with it to regain access to the controls.
I am now gushing my life out from head to foot. Going by my plummeting heart rate, I have about 30 seconds to burn before I lose consciousness forever. I see no means of recovery, and I can’t bear to watch my character bleed out. So instead, I detonate the chip embedded in their brain – the same chip responsible for the interface’s rash of icons and warnings. According to the subsequent mission report print-out, my canine pioneer was feeling “dejected” when their head exploded.
The worst thing about the scenario I’ve just recalled is that it represents Casualties: Unknown at its least punishing. All of the above took place in the first of the game’s 11 biomes – each procedurally generated, and 300 metres high – on the default “Tough” run setting. Resources are more plentiful up here, while active threats are fewer. There is scope to faff about and prepare – gathering plant matter for a crude woven bag, so I don’t have to carry everything in my hands or mouth or tuck it into the folds of my body. There is time to crack open supply crates, and craft an implement of some kind.
The main danger, traps aside, is falling. Casualties: Unknown’s terrain generator is not your pal. As regards the opening couple of biomes, at least, it works like a broken muck spreader, ejecting a mix of filthy clogs and particles that snag your jumps and often oblige you to dig through rock and gravel. You’ll often be doing all that in the dark, and even the smallest of exertions takes a perceptible toll – whimpers of effort, wheezing breath, double vision. The one major consolation is that you can wall-jump and slide down surfaces, a mocking touch of Prince of Persia.
Still, further down is where life gets truly unpleasant. There are sonic traps in certain biomes that cause brain damage and massive hemorrhaging. There are vast, rumbling insects you simply cannot afford to get close to, because they are guaranteed to bite off a limb. And the absolutely dreadful thing about that is that it won’t necessarily end your run: given a tourniquet and antibiotics, you may yet pull through. Perhaps you’ll find or craft a prosthetic. The game’s characters are, in general, astonishingly tough for all their immense capacity for pain.
Casualties: Unknown is a brilliant and unusual piece of design, uninhibited by any commercialised and sanitary notions of ‘fun’ and ‘difficulty’. It’s committed to recreating the surge of sensation through flesh. There’s something intrinsically vital about this. Like Project Citadel, perhaps, its extravaganzas of torment are about feeling more present and alive in a twisted world, more in control. I’m not the writer to discuss this, and I know little about the developer’s circumstances, but it feels like an exploration of trans survival in the face of a brutalising biopolitical regime: the online wiki notes that the game’s zoomorphic Experiments or “Expies” have their own ideas about gender, though I’m finding it tricky to distinguish those accounts from the categorisations of the evidently unfriendly boffins who engineered them.
I would like to get to the bottom of things. I would like to find that goddamn gadget. I would like to return to the surface and massacre the bastards who sent me down here. Still, I’m not sure I have the willpower to witness everything my avatar might have to endure in the process: barotrauma, sepsis, strokes, ruptured ears, hallucinations… As I’ve hopefully made clear throughout this piece, it remains an open question as to whether I am them, or simply one of their human tormentors. You can read more on Steam and Itch.
