From Doom to Call of Duty, Half-Life to Grand Theft Auto, it’s the most common action in all of videogames, a banal, dispassionate input that we mostly execute without thinking. You point the gun. You shoot the gun. You kill whatever is on the screen. The Last of Us, Spec Ops The Line, and various others present moral challenges to this tradition, but it’s still almost always the same: you kill in videogames without really feeling anything either way. From Cult of the Lamb and Hotline Miami publisher Devolver Digital, and created by independent developer René Rother, a new shooter, and one of the most stylish and unique games of 2024 so far, makes every single bullet an involved exercise in planning and delivery. Available right now, this is a vicious, vivid variation on virtual slaughter.

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