Urge is the most interesting open world shooter in a long while, and also, the most revolting

rockpapershotgun.com:

Every now and then, somebody has the marvellous idea of developing technology that makes video games smell. I have never been more grateful for this recurrent Quixotic daydream's mass market failure than when watching trailers for Urge, an open world survival shooter that is both fuelled and plagued by piss.

"But hold your horses, young Edwin," you sternly interject. "I do not wish to hear about, let alone play an open world survival shooter that is both fuelled and plagued by piss, on a website that children might read. It sounds like a cheap, taboo-jabbing gimmick." Friend, I once thought as you. But then I did a little research, as is my journalistic responsibility, and it turns out Urge's notions about piss - bladdergold, as they call it in the West Country, or Crusoe Cola, as it's known in the States - are rather in-depth. I'm still very glad I can't smell the game, but I definitely have the urge to play it.

Urge is currently in early access, having launched in 2021 with that most respectable of final release dates - When It's Done, You Grasping Ingrates, And Not One Second Before. It starts with you pulling yourself out of a car crash and investigating a world suffused with a mysterious fog. Not the nice kind of mysterious fog, mind you. Not fog like in Silent Hill, where it symbolises repressed trauma while elegantly covering up the limitations of the game engine. Nothing so wholesome. This fog is, basically, wee smoke. And the world of Urge consists largely of wee.

Some of it erupts from the ground in stinking geysers. Some of it fills the wobbly heads of the mutants who shamble up to murder you - victims of a strange addiction whose origins may lie in the map's larger industrial areas, or in the tunnels and sewers beneath.

In a fanciful reinterpretation of piss thermodynamics that is seemingly justified by the lore, some of the wee exists as powder - dusting the tops of storage cases, released in gusts by latrine-shaped gourds, or forming horrible