‘Content warning’: Get famous or die trying

The graphics style flips from pleasantly colorful to eerily pallid when you go from the overworld to The Old World. The simple art style becomes more detailed and grotesque, and the style changes from soft shapes to a rough texture, almost like linen. (NME)  

How far would you go for internet fame? Social media is full of people doing pointless and dangerous things for the chance to go viral, but would you put your life on the line? Better yet, would you put your friends’?  

In “Content Warning,” you play as a crew of diving suit-clad explorers trying to get famous on the fictional website “SpöökTube” by filming scary creatures that are trying to kill you.

You descend through the earth in a diving bell into what’s referred to as “The Old World,” a musty and perpetually dark wasteland that looks like the remnants of an ashy, post-apocalyptic town. Using a flashlight and a camera, you must hunt for spooky things in the blank-white wreckage of a hotel, a parking garage, a railroad station and several other locations.  

The graphics style flips from pleasantly colorful to eerily pallid when you go from the overworld to The Old World. The simple art style becomes more detailed and grotesque, and the style changes from soft shapes to a rough texture, almost like linen.

Human bones and twisted monsters riddle The Old World, contrasting with the player-characters’ almost cutesy diving suits and their helmets, with emoticons and three-letter words. customizable 

Your progress is tracked by a system of “views,” where your score gets bigger the longer that monsters and other phenomena are on the screen. The first section of the game is split up into three days, or opportunities to film videos, with a quota of 3,000 views by the end.

If you meet the quota, you move onto the next set of three days with a quota of 39,000 views. If you don’t meet the quota, all your viewers forget about you and fall out of relevancy, starting the section all over again.   

What makes “Content Warning” unique from other survival-horror co-op games is the mechanics of the camera that you use to film inside the game. More than just serving as a way to be scored and progress through the game, the camera records your voice along with whatever you point it at.

You get to rewatch what you’ve filmed when you return to the surface, reliving the moments when you screamed into your microphone from a jump scare or when your friend was devoured by a massive spider.  

The game isn’t without its faults, though. There’s virtually no story aside from “film monsters, go viral.” The origin of The Old World is never explained, and the contained island hub leaves much to be desired in the way of overworld exploration. 

Even so, “Content Warning” is definitely worth playing. It’s only $7.99 on Steam, which is a refreshing break from the recent trend of $60 AAA titles and online multiplayer games crammed with microtransactions. 

The game has an art style and premise similar to “Lethal Company” and monster-hunting gameplay like that of “Phasmophobia,” so fans of those games shouldn’t miss out. “Content Warning” is a fun, entertainingly scary game and a new twist on a typically overdone genre.