WARNING: THIS ARTICLE CONTAINS SCENES OF VIOLENCE AND GORE

Playing or reading something in public is not attention but attachment: looking cool is out the window, but I like being dominated by the noise and ongoing of the outside world while I’m engaged with something. I’m not weird, I do not have a playlist of coffee shop ambience I listen to while reading books or comics so I can hone in on what’s going on in the page. I’m guilty of wishing there was more life trickling in. Built from scratch places aren’t popping up as much anymore in America and we’re all looking for safehouses.

I tried to play Beyond: Citadel at two separate parties in 2024 – once on Halloween because I felt like it fit. Really it was the tailend of a friend’s Over The Garden Wall party and here’s me, sitting cross legged under a table running through levels of Beyond Citadel. Nobody watched, and other people made great background noise. The core loop of Beyond Citadel is the kind of brain-salve that makes the rest of the world melt away and turn into noise. Usually, when I’m writing about a game it’s an exercise in shutting out the rest of the world – where I find myself and where I’m going is not as important as seeing what’s next.

A blood red moon dominates a white background like a leering face too far away to make out details. Piled high on the page in rich black and grey is the bombed out scaffolding of what was once a town, a village, or even a city. There are enough bodies in the refuse that they blend into the ruin like a slurry of wet concrete still struggling to set as the exterior melts away. The page feels like it could curdle in my hand and drip between my fingers. This is the work of the Ero Guro artist, Suehiro Maruo.

Ero Guro, a type of Japanese genre-play that has a body of works spanning the drawn arts going back a hundred years or more – dominates many different genres from underground cinema to the nihilistic fervor of punk zines and beyond. Steeped in gore, lurid sexuality and unrepressed violence, I could be describing Beyond Citadel or the entire Ero Guro artistic history.

Beyond Citadel is white text written in a pure black void etched into the mind of the player, into the head of the protagonist. High tech armor and pure skin link to a story of violence, retribution and angels. It drips in pink and red subtext melting off of the monitor and threatening to drown my keyboard. Now look: you show me a picture of a videogame where a correctly proportioned firearm hovers in front of the caved in head of a cartoon character and I’m going to try and find where I can play it.

Not that I hate to say it, but the first thing that initially introduced me to Beyond: Citadel was the reputation it had on social media for being a vile, disgusting first person shooter filled with gory visuals of disembowelment and grievous bodily harm. Every word laced into descriptions of it made it sound like a j-horror fever dream from the splatterpunk era. Violence is getting harder and harder to recommend to friends, and I think that’s why I like Beyond: Citadel so much. Murder cute anime characters, listen to them gasp and wheeze out their dying breaths. Punch holes through their skull and skin with automatic gunfire, sever heads and watch as the blood pools on the floor. Graphic violence is a thicker well to drink from than just words on a page.

There are brains and brain-stems, there are pieces of skulls and splintered ribs. Everywhere drips with a type of body horror preoccupied not with having a body, but possessing and ownership itself. Extra characters turn their bodies over to the player so they might be useful, and the plot of the game kicks off with a forceful abortion. The divine stretches out of heaven to remove the twins from the player’s womb. She’s committed the grave mortal sin of incest, and the heat death of the universe cannot continue unless a suitable punishment is arrayed. We, as players, are no longer capable of standing as something righteous.

It was easy to consistently find words online about the Content – capital C, featuring gore or gunshots, or lascivious fanart of the protagonist or other characters (usually depicted in a way she’s depicted in the game) rebuked, reaffirmed, recommended: all of the ways the game can be shared, are, and so – if you make a google search of Beyond Citadel it’s easy to find a list of similar things the game is ‘like’. It’s like Neon Genesis Evangelion in one article, or Blame! It is like a canon of things that increasingly resembles easy to digest comics and anime that are popular enough to be their own nostalgic movements.

The director of the game, who I couldn’t find any english interviews with, has built a prison of religious horror on the back of a traditional type of ero-guro artwork that goes back to movies and comics like the intense erotic artwork of Suehiro Maro pushed into a hentai aesthetic of bloodied ahegao faces and overly sexualized bodies twisted by gunfire and steel, a contrast in the deep metal cities and sepulchres that the player navigates. Is this Neon Genesis Evangelion? It doesn’t seem like it to me, and yet it’s been hard to find any written words approaching games like this as more than just bare comparisons with other works that are ‘dark’.

One of the difficulties with writing about indie games now isn’t clearly that there are so many little darlings popping up all of the time, but that works of violence and sexuality are endlessly pushed to the fringes of critical consensus without being seriously addressed. I see this while looking for reviews of Beyond Citadel that have more to say than blase comparisons to 90’s anime the author grew up with.

The tapestry of Ero-Guro works has underlying political themes about war, possession of the body, fetishization and sexual proclivity often backed up in a type of sensationalist filmic core. Faces and wounds undulate and are peeled back like sexual organs. Whimpers and moans, on screen, are taken to the tenth degree by foley’d chainsaws sawing into the screen and creating a break with reality. So, is it homage when I can put a chambered round through an anime girl’s (and it’s always a girl) head with no repercussion? Well, the repercussion is often found in the world the game lives in and where that’s going all we’re going to need is more ammo.

Like Maruo’s artwork becoming popular (and later, artists like Shintaro Kago) with women, the actual depictions of violence in Beyond Citadel are about collection and ownership of the body. We display and learn about the inner-workings of our pilot-clone-protagonist and the world she lives in, while stripping away what remains of the identity and autonomy of our brainwashed soldiers working for the apocalypse. Just as the hands of angels descended from heaven to make a choice over her own body and reality, now her choice arrives as the player pulls back the bolt on a rifle madelong before the world turned inside out over itself. How do you react to an open wound?

We’re in love with a special kind of romance: the mechanical kind. Every round fired has a place it must go even though Beyond Citadel is not quite on the level of something like Receiver (or the real world) works where bullets are navigated one reload at a time with spare cartridges and broken bodies. Our protagonist is us, the world was taken from her, and we have to find a way to claw it back.

The divine is always around the corner somewhere. Sometimes it’s in the heads of brainwashed soldiers left behind inside the titular Citadel. When the game reaches for the fantastic in later levels we’re equipped with a veritable arsenal, (and for the more polite, a violence toggle.) Beyond Citadel wouldn’t be whole without the wheezing corridors of abandoned girl-parts. It’s impossible to not constantly come back to the shock, and then thrill, of the violence. Later chapters of the game put you in a constant river of blood that threatens to drown every inch of the map.

Suehiro Maro’s works, like the anthology comic DDT, frequently deal with a type of nihilistic violence. Maruo’s work is permanent ink, as the post-WW2 era of Japan where colonization by foreign powers and intense violence were consistently reflected. Like the protagonists of horror comics contemporary in the states to Maruo’s own output: violence never comes as a liberation. Rather, the destruction of humanity in the sufferers – often dismembered page after page. Later works like Midori can be viewed through the lense of a blood-soaked liberation. Bodies are often coveted until so malformed by violence they become impossible for the world to use.

The protagonist of Beyond Citadel links to the player by putting my hands on the gun. This is not a showcase or a morality fable, and the final choice can only be mediated by revenge and aggression. Struggling to grapple with this difficulty paints a picture of hollow-bodied women ambling out of their own caskets only to often be put down as gruesomely as the player can, and the game reaffirms that there’s no liberation from this story by shuffling the next copy-of-a-copy into the firing line.

Art can walk the line of a stranger holding a hand asking us to come with them, follow them into the weeds. It can’t harm me, not really, even if that hand belongs to a rotting spirit that wants to devour me in a field of flowers. As I melt away, I become like so much of the world I’m made of.

There are dozens of games like Beyond Citadel buried on Steam and itch.io, some that consider themselves artworks of erotic gore and others that split themselves into the category of surreal hyper violence or pure pornography. The filth rises high while we’re not paying attention to it – in a country that grapples with a descent into violence, paranoia and increasingly policed obscenity. We’re recreating the circumstances that have led to the rise of avant garde art, while lacking the ability to engage with it meaningfully. Losing the shape of the world as bodies drift into rubble. Suehiro Maruo’s artwork came from the experiences he had living in postwar Japan, Beyond Citadel also came from somewhere in real life – and the hundreds of avant garde erotic games that are filling up digital storefronts did too. Is there too much out there, wanting to get in?