Reprinted with permission from West Brunswick High School’s The West Wind.
Ultrakill is a video game known for being a skill-based challenge for anyone fond of fast-paced shooters, but has also gained popularity over the years due to its soundtrack and characters. Although I was cautious of Ultrakill due to its first-person shooter status, I quickly fell in love after looking into the biblical themes and unique ideas of the game’s world.
The story starts out with God, a lonely being who created the tree of life, a tree that flowed with blood to sustain any of the beings that He chose to create. Quickly afterward, God made humanity, a flawed creation that reflected His own. God made Hell in a bout of frustration as some humans refused to acknowledge His power and this was treason in the eyes of God. An angel asked God a question, ‘is the punishment not too severe? Eternal agony simply for not believing in you?’. Upon realizing this, God tried to terminate Hell, only He couldn’t. Hell was not just a place but a cosmic being rivaling even God in power. God wept for humanity, hoping that they would never make something so horrid as He had.
Unfortunately, humanity would. At the beginning of WWI, Russia invented a new weapon, a robot fueled by blood affectionately named the Gunnerman. Every time these machines were dropped into trenches, the generals knew none of them were making it out alive. Countries around the world began to realize this, and so they began to make machines fueled by blood as well. God’s fears of humanity were quickly becoming true, causing Him to withdraw even from His role in heaven.
Once the Guttertank was built to combat the Gunnerman, the war was no longer fought by humans. The war escalated further and further, every country making bigger and better machines to kill each other. Eventually, Japan made the Earthmovers – a colossal machine standing at almost six hundred meters, powered by solar energy and blood, and designed to level cities in seconds. The war was finally slowing down, and the Earthmovers couldn’t kill each other. The rest of humanity had built cities on the backs of Earthmovers and eventually, after machines had trampled the Earth, it was destroyed.
After 200 years, there were no more people to kill and the sun was blotted out by the ash. As Earthmovers began shutting down, the last of the humans climbed down and saw there was nothing to fight for. There was no life–the only thing left were the machines.
Humanity tried to rebuild itself from the rubble by mining into Hell, building artificial police to keep the peace and even finding new uses for the previous war machines. However, ‘New Peace’ failed. The workers sent into Hell were devoured and absorbed into Hell and by the time they realized this, it was too late. Hell was hungry and eager to consume anything in its gaping maw.
By now, God has either abandoned heaven and Hell, died or simply disappeared. There is no order and most of humanity has been left to rot in Hell due to the atrocities of the war. Heaven tried to pick up the pieces by making a holy council, but they too were corrupted by human carelessness.
Ultimately, Ultrakill was made by Arsi “Hakita” Patala to process his feelings on why God would ever create hell, and I’m not sure that he answered that question for himself or any of the players. But I think that’s part of the point. Why would anyone make hell in good conscience, knowing that millions would suffer for eternity just because they didn’t believe in you?
It feels weird to say that a first-person shooter made me consider my opinions on God, but it really did. I still don’t believe in any god(s), but I feel slightly more at peace knowing that if there are, they’re just as flawed as we are.
Humanity is the true reflection of God, and when I realized this, I felt like I understood every useless or petty action He took in the Old Testament. God is a human with unlimited power and, as such, we are gods with nothing but our minds, able to create and destroy. Humanity follows in God’s footsteps by creating things that they could never undo, destroying things they could never remake, and that is why God left.
Ultrakill is an amazing game with a beautiful soundtrack, and despite this entire rant, you have to go digging for all of this. The main gameplay isn’t anything too deep other than Gabriel’s story, and I’ll leave those discoveries to anyone interested in the game.
