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Katana ZERO (2019)
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Katana ZERO (2019)

I’m a notorious prude, which I think just means I fixate on shit more than most.

Katana ZERO
by Devolver Digital
Released on Nintendo Switch in April 2019

Is pixelated gore any less disturbing than Hollywood torture porn? During Thanksgiving break a lifetime ago, some friends invited me to see Hostel 2. I hadn’t seen the first one, and I’m not the biggest horror fan, but I agreed because it wasn’t often I got to see my Delaware people. 

I wish I had declined. It was the first time that, absent my parents’ directives, I covered my eyes with my hands, as if my eyelids weren’t enough to shield me from the on-screen bloodbath. I don’t know, man. I’ve watched and enjoyed my fair share of violent films. But conventions vary widely among genres. There’s a huge gulf between depicting suffering and relishing it. 

Hostel 2 gave me nightmares for years. 

But it also stoked a morbid curiosity. On several occasions, I’ve pored over horror movie Wikipedia pages, scanning the plot summaries for descriptions of each stomach-churning kill. I kept up with every death on Game of Thrones and The Walking Dead long after I stopped watching either show. I wondered how anyone could have such a sadistic imagination. So writes the girl who, at 18, read the Marquis de Sade’s 120 Days of Sodom. I’m a notorious prude, which I think just means I fixate on this shit more than most. 

I liked Katana ZERO, despite its cartoonish excess of spilled and splattered blood. Maybe it’s because, for the semi-eponymous hero, assassination is business, not pleasure. He cuts down dozens of minions impassively, perfunctorily in order to reach his mark. It’s nothing personal. He just needs to clear a path. 

Contrast that with drawn-out cutscenes of the villain’s gleeful cruelty. The game slows its pace to a crawl to show us some hapless dude endure some fucked-up shit. While Katana ZERO is unrepentantly violent, these moments are the only ones I found truly disturbing. Which of course is an indictment of the player. The game wants us to consider why we find violence alternately acceptable and reprehensible. What’s worse: assassination or torture? Quick death or drawn-out suffering? The number of people killed or how they’re killed?

I just wanted another Celeste. I wanted challenging platforming, smooth controls, instant respawns. I wanted that masocore loop of stage after stage of frustration and elation, of well-earned accomplishment. I wanted my fucking dopamine hit.

Which was kind of the structure of my College Algebra class. Our professor let us redo our homework and tests as many times as we wanted—an offer I took full advantage of. We’d earn full credit for each corrected equation. Learning deserves recognition, she argued, whether or not we get the answer on the first try. 

It was a more radical pedagogy than anything embraced by my literature professors, several of whom prized, above all, recondite theory and hot-take-y, “unobvious” readings of texts. I know exegetical legwork isn’t as quantifiable as math, but in retrospect, novelty hardly seems like a sound metric for grading. 

I filled my papers with bullshit and graduated with honors—I say glibly twelve years later, ignoring the pressure I put on myself to succeed, the stress of balancing a job with a full course load, etc., etc. I worked my ass off for my degree. But the only A I truly earned was in College Algebra, where I really had to stretch my mind.

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Sasha talks about her middle-aged bewilderment from a QTPOC perspective. And video games, kind of
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