Kill Him Faster (Part 1)

Make e-sports, not war

Kill Him Faster is a game by Chris and published by Korvidae Games. Content is reproduced and referenced here for review purposes, and is owned by its owners. It has benefited from a crowdfunding campaign.

1. Every Individual Component Is The Best

In our analysis, we consider every individual artistic element of a game the best; we don’t find bad or good useful. So, the Split/Party framework assumes it is the best art, best layout, best writing, best design. This is an acknowledgment that nobody makes “bad” art on purpose; any given element is the best art that could have been produced at that point, restricted by its material conditions and constraints of time and effort. This is also because saying something is good/bad art is the most useless criticism that can be given. In practical terms, this section is for things we will not touch on the review but merit acknowledgment.

Lhuzie

Another game with an actual art direction, which I very much appreciate. It serves its purpose flawlessly: a clean presentation that evokes both 90s TVs and the look of sci fi before neon, chrome and lightsabers came all over it.

The game you get

It stands among TTRPGs as being one that is actively supported and wishes to be played. In an era where every TTRPG thing seems to be a victim of FOMO, where interest wanes even before it releases in favor of the Next Hype Thing, it is always remarkable when we see a game being this actively developed for and directed for play.

Brad

Stylishly written and easily laid out, this game is about killing Hitler and is a perfect place for design to meet layout.

2. Meet The Game At The Level It Is At

Each game comes with certain expectations and tone. To properly break it down, we have to meet the game at the level it is: not lament its choice of premise and wish it was something else, nor resent for not conforming with our politics, not letting “missed opportunities” stand in our way of applying the critical framework relentlessly. It also includes not working with the game as marketed or how it exists in our desires, but as it is.

Lhuzie

I know what you are probably thinking:“Oh look, another game claiming to be anti-fascist or queer, as if they materially are fighting fascists or improving the conditions of queer people rather than selling them as a product to straight audiences; it feels that’s all we get nowadays.”Nah, Kill Him Faster makes no claims of being anti-fascistic game or that buying/playing it is somehow activism.

It is a game about killing nazis.

The designer has a ludography of remarkable games that fully commit to their goals and deliver what they proposed for themselves. No better example of this than their previous game, Lifts — a collection/engine that takes on classics of the art-form by replacing arguments, arbitrary rulings and resolution procedures with physical exercise. It still stands out today for its sincerity and dedication to stick with this decision — and explore what it means for tabletop roleplaying; one would expect to be yet another cynical, vibes-driven, designed-for-the-post gimmicky game that is ultimately about moving TTRPG Funko Pops. This previous work has earned our trust — and Kill Him Faster is another outstanding follow-up to this iconoclastic design tradition.

Kill Him Faster is a game about a game show that combines reality TV with competitive sports, and thus, is more competitive than many may expect from cooperative collaborative storytelling. However, it should still fall into the territory of friendly rivalry rather than full-blown “PvP”: five different teams compete against each other, but all player characters belong to the same team. Thus, the same assumptions of comradery of most TTRPGs are still present in Kill Him Faster.

Kill Him Faster emulates the dynamics of wrestling and reality shows; there is an expectation of players to embrace and engage with them — playing into pilling-up drama and talking smack.

It is a game full of nazi-killing and featuring Hitler’s late corpse, it is pretty good at dealing with fascists and their ilk. It is locked in and on point; unlike other action-focused, rules-light nazi-killing romps, this one does not have forty pages lecturing you and waggling your finger at not doing this and that in our game (“do not depict/play the Holocaust, do not make the nazis cool or right by intention or accident, etc”) and then proceeding to do all the things it demanded from (time and space displacing expositions of Degenerate Art to have the Holocaust as set-dressing, cool depictions of nazi and their tech through illustration and game mechanics, having players level up by drinking the blood of Übermensch enemies). If you have been disappointed by games like Eat The Reich, Kill Him Faster is exactly what it and many similar games fail to be — light, campy ,fun action-romp that does not give the genocidal death-cult and its ideology a single molecule of oxygen.

Brad

Kill Him Faster is about a game show where you go back in time and kill Hitler. This sounds like a one page game that you read, chuckle aloud at and then move on from. Kill Him Faster commits to this concept, you play a team of people who you customize and ensure remain interesting to you.

Now I am going to level with you, I think that this concept, while fun, had a lot of chance to go tragically wrong. I will proudly state that it leans so much into the fun schlock and embraces the understanding that “Killing Nazi’s is fun, and as time travelers you may wash your hands of the problems of the world state of 1940’s” to bring maximum joy.

3. Identify What The Game Says It Is About

Games are about things. Usually. Mostly. That is often the same thing they market themselves as. This often means to establish the relationship of the game with systems, mechanical frameworks, genre, etc. This is how games establish exceptions about the nature of play and establish a common space for creation.

Lhuzie

Kill Him Faster is a game about speedrunning, where the sport you are competing at is Hitler assassination.

Brad

Kill Him Faster is what if team sports was about killing Hitler, enjoy it.

4. Uncover What The Game Is REALLY About

What the game says it is about is not always what the game is about. This is where we look at all the weird interactions, examining the system that game creates, how the way mechanics interact with the text and art, how it exists in a given context, how well parts flow together or get in the way. This creates a much richer environment that the original design could ever imagine once a game hits the table.

Lhuzie

This is really not at all a time travelling game; it is an irreverent game about speedunning — as it is fully committed to the bit.

But how you inject the dynamics of speedrunning into collaborative storytelling? Well, Kill Him Faster attempts to do that by drawing from the play dynamics of other games featuring “RPG elements” and runs — roguelikes. Characters are semi-random or full-random, available only for a few seasons. You have a limited number of runs per season; while constrained by how much you can get from each athlete, you must manage stress and resources over the course of the season. As you mow through tides of nazis, random events will hinder or help different runs.

Athletes come and go — but the prestige of the team is forever. Which puts a weird conundrum. If play is around the fame of the team, how can athletes be people? And since it draws so much from wrestling and reality TV, how can those elements work?

We have seen similar mechanics and implementations in games like World Wide Wrestling or Deathmatch Island. And how it fails or succeeds depends on how fleshed out and dramatic individual characters are — just as a reality show is only as good as the storylines can make between participants or how wrestling sings when it is muscle soap opera. World Wide Wrestling promos and Heat mechanics shine brilliantly because the focus is not on a promotion or company: it is on individual wrestlers. And each wrestler is a larger-than-life figure. This, however, was also why the Deathmatch Island’s reality/game show aspect fumbled: popularity/voting was mechanically uninteresting and the fiction created by amnesiacs-that-graduate-to-one-note characters give little hooks for petty storylines and interpersonal conflict that make for entertaining (and cheap) reality TV. Its game show elements aims for Squid Games but lands on Beast Games.

Thankfully, the other elements of the game — killing nazis and Hitler — and spectacularly implemented. And when focusing on that, Kill Him Faster is a TTRPG masterpiece.

Brad

The thing is, Kill Him Faster isn’t about people playing sports, its about dynasties. Your team starts off as nobody in this wonderful sport, and you will have to claw your way up, and then remain on top. The athletes that make up the team aren’t important, it’s the team! Sure you will yell in the face of the Cincinnati Clinchers, but if you don’t win the game you are out and the team endures. Win and the game loves you, Lose and the game hates you, but can the team survive it? Kill Hitler, win the championship and be celebrated in your local bar.

Lhuzie

Funny thing about Brad’s point. Considering how it hits the same e-sports bar vibe of Swanwick and Gibson’s Dogfight, Kill Him Faster may be more cyberpunk than 90% of neonliberal aesthete bullshit.

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