Returnal, a relatively punishing action game out next week for PS5, treats your character being near death the way many games do. When your health gets dangerously low, your screen displays a series of cracks (meant to mimic a busted visor) and starts pulsating red (meant to mimicâŠthe blood rush of adrenaline?). These âred screens of almost-death,â as I like to call them, have been de rigueur game design for agesâand I, for one, am so very over it.
Returnal is just the latest game to do this to me, but most games Iâve played recently have a similar set-up. Outriders muddies the screen when youâre low on health. Doom does the same exact thing. Gears goes redscale when youâre about to die, as if to scream, âGet those mountainous biceps behind cover, if they can fit.â In games like Uncharted and The Last of Us, color drains from the screen. Tomb Raider. Quantum Break. Call of Duty. Battlefield. I could go on. I bet you could, too.
This ubiquitous design choice isnât without rationale. In, gosh, 2016 (what is time?), the folks at Game Makerâs Toolkit released a terrific video explaining how and why every game features the red screen of almost-death. Once upon a time, action games didnât always lean on blurring the screen to indicate damage; instead, because it was imperative to signal enemy attacks to the player, the screen remained clear. Enter: the health bar. But, over time, thanks to games that introduced a recharging shield mechanic (hi, Halo), game designers focused more on raising the stakes within individual fights rather than between fights. Thatâs where a visual cueâsay, a screen that goes red and maybe a little bit blurryâcomes in.
The red screen of almost-death also helps ramp up the stakes. Youâre on the brink of deathâa tense situationâso the game therefore increases the tension, possibly with the hope that it could stoke some dormant survival instinct. Red screens of almost-death also serve as an immediate visual cue to warn the player about impending death. They make sense, especially in games that donât have health bars.
But I can understand something and still be annoyed by it. (Exhibit A: Those plastic anti-shoplifting packages that send thousands of people to the hospital every year.) In games like Doom and Outridersâwhere you restore health by killing enemiesâbeing low on health makes those enemies harder to see, which makes it harder to kill them, which makes it harder to get health, so then you die. Itâs an ouroboros of failure.
Plus, plenty of games that use the red screen of almost-death also have indicators of your health already on the screen, which makes the whole thing more annoying and unnecessary. If I want to know whether or not Iâm about to eat it, I can just peek at the lower left-hand corner. I donât need to lose any ability to tell whatâs going on on-screen, or suffer through seconds to minutes of a red, pulsing screen until I find a health item or meet my drawn-out fate.
Ultimately, itâs a minor quibble, and I donât mean to offend the game designers whom Iâm sure work very hard to make these near-death effects so stressful. But in particularly punishing games where I die a lot, it all starts to feel like overkill. Iâm dying, I know, I get it! Iâm sure the red screen of almost-death isnât the sole cause of, say, how many times Iâve died in some tough games. But it sure hasnât helped.
