The next battle royale game is an interactive live-action movie
In Bloodshore you choose the fate of the participants in a winner-takes-all TV show.
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Despite some idiot claimingthe battle royale gold rush was over back in 2019, there are still plenty of BR projects elbowing their way into the crowded field. This year we’ve seen Naraka: Bladepoint make a big splash (andVampire: The Masquerade—Bloodhuntmake a small ripple), and of courseSquid Gamewas not only very good but set viewership records for Netflix. People still can’t get enough battle royale, and that’s probably not gonna change.
There’s a bridge between videogames and TV shows, and that’s the interactive video, like we saw with 2018’sBandersnatch. Now battle royale is invading that space, too. The next battle royale is calledBloodshore, and it’s a live-action “interactive battle royale movie” launching on Steam in November. In Bloodshore you watch people trying to kill each other and make choices about who gets to kill who.
“Bloodshore is an interactive action movie about a televised battle royale between high-profile streamers, entertainers and death row inmates,” reads the game’s pageon Steam. “You control the fate of Nick, a washed-up actor who fights for a life-changing cash prize. All is not what it seems in this latest season of Kill/Stream, the hottest reality TV show on the planet. Can Nick uncover the truth about Bloodshore Island before his time runs out?”
As you can see from the trailer, we’re not exactly dealing with Squid Game levels of production values (and the prize isn’t nearly as big, either). It also doesn’t look like it’s putting any sort of new spin on battle royale: contestants jump out of a plane, land on an island, grab some guns, and start killing each other to win 100 million dollars as a maniacal game show host narrates the carnage.
Cheesy as it all looks, maybe it’ll at least be entertaining (though it’s from the makers of FMV gameThe Complex, which we didn’t love, so maybe not). The only decisions shown on screen in the trailer is a choice of who lives and who dies, but hopefully there will be more interesting ones along the way: The press release says “Relationships are tracked and can influence the story” and for a 60-90 minute movie there are a total of eight hours of footage, implying there’s a lot of branching storylines you might see.
Bloodshore launches on Steam on November 3.
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Chris started playing PC games in the 1980s, started writing about them in the early 2000s, and (finally) started getting paid to write about them in the late 2000s. Following a few years as a regular freelancer, PC Gamer hired him in 2014, probably so he’d stop emailing them asking for more work. Chris has a love-hate relationship with survival games and an unhealthy fascination with the inner lives of NPCs. He’s also a fan of offbeat simulation games, mods, and ignoring storylines in RPGs so he can make up his own.
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