Terminally Online: Splatter and an Era of Cyberdeath

This is a feature excerpt from Unwinnable Monthly #183. If you like what you see, grab the magazine for less than ten dollars, or subscribe and get all future magazines for half price.

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Further down your perpetual doom-spiral, a galaxy of bad-end possibilities present themselves in the shape of faceless, nameless manifestations. Misery loves company. A fist in the shape of hate detonates, their unidentified bodies popping as vulgar rainbows, grey and black painted vibrant in violence. A shelling in Gaza, thirteen dead, forty-eight injured. Your brain chemicals filter out the bad, drowned in a dunk tank of mindless repetition – a feedback loop sending you further down the path. A femcel school shooter posts a GDrive link to her manifesto; she forgot to set it to “public.” Downing an energy drink, you feel the buzz course down your spine, your nervous system red-lining as you listen to some Musk wannabe vomit buzzwords. Fifteen minutes ago, you watched a billionaire get shot once, twice, thrice. A dozen minutes later, a fancam edit of the shooter hits your feed. Numb to the trauma, all you can do is laugh.

Let’s not mince words; the digital world we’ve built is a waking nightmare. Battered and bruised, the masochistic amongst us clock-in for doom-scroll marathon sessions, choking on a slurry of bile and dread. Further and further down, the death spiral of the internet takes the kind, the merciful and the gullible and tears them asunder, leaving souls that hold only hate, for the world, for their community, for themselves. Any hope is destroyed, and only a cold self-defeatism remains. All you can do is embrace failure. The battle is already fought, the war is long gone, and in Catbird Soft’s Splatter, all that’s left is to crack a joke or two before the blast takes you out.

Splatter’s general gameplay loop is an easy on-ramp to the trials ahead. Armed with the classic tools of the first-person shooter trade – here, all modeled after various hand gestures – you slaughter wave after wave of rainbow-strobe goons coming at you from all corners. Imagine a shady Unreal Tournament server, where clashing models and bit-crunched.wavs fight for sensory supremacy, and you’re halfway there. On death, your enemies explode, painting the already chaotic environments in lush, vibrant gore; azure, emerald and ruby blood coating every surface. After enough time – and after clocking in a high enough body count – you move on to the next level. On a purely mechanical basis, it’s brain rot, simple and clean enough to let you lock in on the true star of the show.

Throughout each of Splatter’s levels, you make your acquaintance with four “personas” of this digital scape. If combat is the muscle that keeps you moving, the rantings and ravings of your desperate, hateful, self-centered captors is the heart that beats you over the head with its message, an unsubtle, blatant mockery. One by one, you take aim. Each character rambles interminably, and by gunning down the waves surrounding you, killing off their connections, you silence their hopes and dreams without a second thought. Some trust you, some need you, but none of them matter as far as the player is concerned. You’re here to laugh at their expense; you, the player, are nothing more than a fifth kind of monster.

Before long, the ringleaders of this pathetic circus collapse upon themselves, their grifts insoluble and their efforts gone to waste, and you leave them wallowing in the same filth they crawled out from. In many cases, it’s clear that you’re just a victim to be used, with the grand perpetrators running off to scam another day. Usually, the only closure given is a small sub-tweet directed every which way; at you, at some community, even at themselves. It’s all repetition, no winners, only a cavalcade of losers. By the end, you’re no better; locked in an endless red room, you execute hundreds on a never-ending countdown to freedom, but there’s no escape. You’re in too deep, and your violence is another form of spiraling. You become little more than a snarky quote-tweet broadcasting a racist’s message, or a screenshotted post by a mask-off fascist clinging to relevance; a carrier of the same disease.

Eventually, you stop playing, giving up on beating the horde of mindless cretins rushing you down. Technically, this escape could be considered the point of the game – you broke free from the cycle of violence, hooray! – but there’s no point in kidding yourself. The player escapes a vicious samsara, reborn as some poor schmuck getting baited by trolls on Twitter. To say Splatter is a doomer game – nihilistically despondent, suffocating in its own negative spiral – is underselling it. The game is bleak, its outlook jaded to the point of misery. Everyone ends up miserable, hating their lives (and themselves) that tiny bit more while you bail to line up more targets. A couple years ago, I would laugh off its cynicism, chalk it up to dumb jokes in the name of calling back to the web we know. Now, all I can really do is look around me and see just how bad things can be.

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Roxy S. is a writer and game developer. She’s been known to listen to music, watch anime, and even enjoy the occasional videogame. You can follow her on Bluesky.