Ready or Not – Review

Ready or Not is unsettling in its portrayal of power and weakness. The much-anticipated and now-controversial debut from VOID Interactive looks like a shooter but plays more like a horror experience. It’s claustrophobic, stressful, and provocative without meaning to be. The more you play, the more a sensation of wrongdoing sneaks up on you and becomes entrenched. With a sigh of relief and a tingling awareness that what you’ve just played hints to unsettling truths, you finally step away.

If you squint hard enough, Ready or Not has what appears to be a narrative impulse. You’re a SWAT cop chasing down criminals in a city where violence is on the rise, and the criminals aren’t afraid to fight back. There’s no diegetic motive to jump in other than the nebulous promise of bringing order to a lawless world. However, for what Ready or Not aspires to be, that’s sufficient – at least for now. The game’s old-school level challenging method is the player’s drive.

You’re dumped in with a considerable tactical disadvantage after you choose a place from the city map. You have no idea how many enemies are present or how the labyrinthine urban settings are laid out. To make matters worse, the levels are dark and cramped, with plenty of barred doors and blind nooks. The horror genre is rife with design hints like this, with shades of Resident Evil, Perception, and Until Dawn.

The horror potential in Ready or Not, like some of the best in the genre, comes from pushing the bounds of normalcy. Houses and hotels, a car dealership, and a petrol store are among the locations that make up the everyday fabric of towns and cities. The level design, on the other hand, makes these normally safe locations feel dangerous. It’s a disconcerting contrast. The very real and ever-present gaming risks serve as a counterpoint to the ambient invocation of fear.

VOID Interactive is a game that you can play online. In terms of level design and moral social consequences, Ready or Not is a horror game.
You can have all the weaponry in the world, but if you’re not prepared to use it, it won’t help you. That is a lesson to be learned. Whether you’re ready or not, Ready or Not is all too eager to teach. Some of the doors have been booby-trapped. Enemies will sometimes camp in strategic locations, attempting to eliminate you before you ever see them. The threat is always present. You’re still a squishy human, despite your tactical gear. Open firefights are rarely successful. Instead, you must proceed deliberately around the locations, inspecting doors for traps and convincing them to surrender one by one by kicking through the doors they’re hiding behind with a show of force.

With all of this in mind, you can conclude that Ready or Not is a triumphant and heroic film. You’re fighting insurmountable barriers to bring the criminals to justice.

You’d be mistaken.

Regardless of your flaws and the flimsy context for your acts, you’re an intruder in these areas. You have a large backup group and military-grade equipment that you’re employing to infiltrate people. You’re still a living example of state authority handled with a blunt club.

In Ready or Not, your sole goal is to diffuse crises that, in the most general terms conceivable, threaten social order. To be fair, the mission debriefings emphasise that bullets should be used only as a last resort, and the scoring system favours captures over kills. These non-diegetic components, on the other hand, clash with the on-the-fly gaming.

VOID Interactive is a game that you can play online. In terms of level design and moral social consequences, Ready or Not is a horror game.
Almost every interaction with the gaming world is marred by violence. Doors are slammed or kicked open. Flashbang and stinger grenades cause hostiles to become disoriented, allowing you to force them to surrender. Gunfights can erupt with little warning. To some extent, all of this is to be expected. Ready or Not may be a horror-tinged, urban-set game, but it’s still a shooter at its core.

The interactions between your squad and the hostage NPCs are the most frightening. These are intended to be crime victims, but your only choice is to restrain them and report their presence to an operator, rather than quickly extracting them from the danger zone or even treating them with kindness. Perhaps it makes sense. Perhaps it’s to make sure they’re not a plant. Maybe…

That’s where the lack of narrative framing in Ready or Not becomes an issue. No matter how much I attempt to explain the harsh, punishing course of action in the lack of a rationale, it feels heartless. It’s a form of violence directed at people who have already been victims of violence. You’re not a hero in that situation. All you’re doing is adding to the trauma of the situation. You’re using force in places that should be safe, such as your home and workplace. I can’t help but feel that I’m even more of a bad guy than the ostensibly hostiles, which adds to the horror.