Turns out there is a killer trick to creating hyper-violent entertainment: do the slow stuff fast, and the fast stuff slow.
That's literature right there. And cinema. Someone doing crucial research into a baddie's tax affairs, or the ballistics analysis on a bullet lodged in cartilage? Montage, I reckon. Or handle it over the phone. "Give me the highlights, doc." "In English, professor?" Someone getting a load of buckshot through the head, however? Ease into that one. Approach at glacier speed, alive to the possibilities. The finger tightening on the trigger. The matter leaving the barrel. The nimbus of gases. The compression wave cast through the air.
I read about this trick recently in a book about the author of the Jack Reacher novels, and then I saw it implemented - and gloriously so - in Superhot, a first-person shooter in which time only moves when you do. That's it, basically. The whole thing. You're not quite the writer or director, as these scenarios are very tightly defined from the off, but you are the choreographer. And, as is often the case, you are choreographing a very specific kind of dance. The dance of slaughter. Sulphur and bone-fragments. The triumphant crescendo afforded by a popping of the human skull.
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