Hideo Kojima’s OD finally has its first trailer, and yes, of course, it’s entirely cutscene, but oh my word, what a cutscene. You’ll oscillate between “Good grief, I can’t believe this is the Unreal Engine and not real life, and “Oh god, what the fuck is that?” throughout its three minutes.
During Kojima Productions’ tenth anniversary celebrations, Hideo Kojima finally revealed some moving images of his forthcoming horror game OD, a project he’s co-creating with horror maestro Jordan Peele. What we get is an incredibly tense scene in which the perfectly rendered hands of Sophia Lillis (It, I Am Not Okay With This) attempt to light a whole mess of candles. It’s tense because of far too many sounds, from Lillis’s own terrified breathing, the ambient sounds of adjacent apartments, and that infernal knocking at the door.
By the end, whoever was knocking clearly ran out of patience and let themselves in. We see the sinister, shadowy figure over Lissis’s shoulder (and note the face-shaped scars all over her own face), its thudding footsteps unnervingly slow, as it whispers demonically. Then, in case you were wondering if everything was going to be OK, it grabs for her and she screams. After the titles we cut back to see vast, grey hands clutching Lissis’s face in a truly iconic image.
Which is all lovely and scary! It, of course, tells us precisely nothing whatsoever about the game, other than that it’ll feature baby-shaped candles and be dreadfully frightening. There are so many horror elements taking place at once here, from the worms crawling out of a candle in writhing bundles to the awful image of the cartoonish baby-faced candle melting to reveal its wick, accompanied by the noises of a real baby screaming nearby. Oh, and the tall, awful demon-thing—I’m yet to be convinced he’s a goodie.
At the live event, there was all sorts of empty bluster about how the game will change the very fabric of reality, perhaps requiring that humanity once again reset the yearly clock to a new After OD era, while not actually saying anything at all about what happens in the game. Microsoft’s Phil Spencer declared it “truly visionary” while Kojima, modest as ever, added “this is totally different, even as a system.” But best was Kojima’s declaration that as he travels all around the world scanning spooky locations for the photorealistic game, “I want to scan a ghost for the first time, and I want to get an award for that.” Good luck with that.
Still, the trailer is freaking cool.
