From Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart through the original Prey to the obvious touchpoint Portal, gaming hath no greater love than that for an unassuming door which stitches together two places that are notionally far apart.
This rampant enthusiasm for teledoors might seem strange, given that video games are make-believe worlds held together by arbitrary squiggles of magic language. There is fundamentally no reason any video game door should obey the customary laws of spacetime. But don’t let that stop you watching the announcement trailer for Motion Blur’s Black State, a third-person stealth shooter which is heavily redolent of Metal Gear Solid but also, awash with doors that work in mysterious ways.
If you don’t have three minutes to spare, here’s a summary: following some Matrixy preamble, a bro in glistening webbed armour with a backful of sleek, corrugated guns runs down a corridor, opens a door, finds himself in a speeding tube train (“DESTINATION: UNKNOWN”), opens another door, walks into a military base stacked with shipping crates, rouses the fury of sundry gun-toting chaps in rain cloaks, and throws himself into a spot of cover-shooting mixed with close-quarter finishers and drone grenades.
You can see the Metal Gear influence immediately: the protagonist has an agreeably Campbellished radio contact, and the radial awareness icons and last-ditch opportunity to cap alerted guards in slow motion are straight out of The Phantom Pain. The trailer’s snatches of dialogue suggest that it’s going to spend a lot of time belabouring the high-concept mythology of this world. Apparently the brotagonist works for a group called the Architects. There is also a glum lady who seems to live in a reptilarium, and a lairy individual with horns whom, given a sufficient budget, you’d expect to be voiced by Troy Baker.
I admit, I’m writing this up partly because I’d love to know what Metal Gear Solid creator Hideo Kojima might do with the concept of teleportation doors – that is, the Hideo Kojima who has a supernatural aptitude for being granted infinite time and wealth to pursue any fantabulous brainfart he has while chewing on his Instagrammed sandwiches. Going beyond the opportunity to warp through perimeter defences, imagine the NPC high jinks that might result from guards being lured through doors that have a slippery relationship with the geography.
Imagine stocking an outpost with intricately chained portals so that people leaving a random portaloo teleport in front of jeeps, which then skid through through doors and end up colliding with patrolling helicopters, which then preserve their momentum as they tumble through a final set of doors and erupt from the very same portaloo at the start of the chain, polishing off the base commander whose tea you recently laced with laxatives. Or how about a Rainbow Six: Siege setup where all the windows lead out of other windows, ejecting SWAT teams as they invade, like popcorn from the pan. It’s probably been done. But has it been done in photorealism-humping Unreal Engine 5, with all the associated bells and whistles?
I doubt Motion Blur – a new studio based in Istanbul – have the resources for anything quite that sandboxy. I wouldn’t be surprised if the magic doors turned out to be comparable to those gaps you squeeze through while the game loads the next major area. But I’m intrigued to see more. Black State will be available on Steam and the Epic Game Store. There’s no release date yet.