Police bodycam shooter Unrecord shocks viewers with its unsettling realism

polygon.com:

An independent game studio made a big splash this week with footage of its project Unrecord, a first-person shooter in which players take on the role of a police detective. What sets Unrecord apart from its FPS contemporaries is its presentation: Players witness the action through the slightly warped lens of a police body camera.

Unrecord looks unsettlingly real due to its Unreal Engine 5-powered, photorealistic graphics, but there’s more to the game’s presentation than just convincing lighting and believably derelict game levels. The fisheye-lens distortion and herky-jerky movement as the player chases down and shoots at suspects look nearly indistinct from real-life bodycam footage that we’ve been inundated with as police departments release similar footage to the public, often for incredibly distressing reasons.

In fact, some viewers have questioned whether the gameplay footage of Unrecord is gameplay footage at all. The studio behind it, known as Drama, says it is — “We do not use any real videos or external rendering,” it promised — in an FAQ released on Thursday.

“There have been many doubts raised about the authenticity of the gameplay,” the studio said. “The game is developed on Unreal Engine 5, and the game footage is captured from an executable and played using a keyboard and mouse. It is not a VR game. In reality, it seems rather flattering to compare the graphics of Unrecord to reality, but fortunately, we know that a game first focuses on gameplay and universe on which we primarily concentrate. Considering the high production costs of a video game and our global reputation at stake, if Unrecord were a scam, it would be a blockbuster scam.”

Reaction to Unrecord has varied from disbelief (“I refuse to believe