Police bodycam footage nowadays doesn't do much but instill an unpleasant, creeping sense of dread in me. As police brutality becomes more well-documented, more and more bodycam clips of police committing atrocities have begun to circulate – and while it's a good thing that these records are so easily accessible, their pervasiveness is a symptom of our broken justice system and the necessity of bodycams in itself points to the truly appalling amount of racially targeted abuse perpetrated by the people who are supposed to protect us.
Studios Drama, a French game developer, naturally did the most tone-deaf thing possible: developing a first-person shooter from the perspective of a police body camera.
The graphics and post-processing are genuinely stunning, but that only adds to the sense of gut-wrenching realism. Watching the player clear out room after dilapidated room, with appropriate callouts and reports to dispatch, is eerily and tragically familiar, stirring up uncomfortable memories of the hundreds of clips just like this that have found popularity on the Internet. For some, it will no doubt be an unrestrained power fantasy – but for others, it will be all too real.