The nearly photorealistic bodycam effect led some to question whether the game Unrecord was legit, so the developer turned on no-clip.
Yesterday, developer Alexandre Spindler and Studio Drama revealed Unrecord, a first-person shooter with a striking bodycam perspective which frequently sells the illusion of being real camera footage. It’s so convincing that some questioned whether they were looking at a pre-rendered, on-rails game, or perhaps actual video footage. A few hours after the announcement, Spindler responded: “It’s not a rail shooter or an FMV, it is indeed an FPS and these images are from real-time gameplay, not pre-rendered”.
Today, Spindler went further, uploading a new video of the game which includes the Unreal Engine user interface. Near the end of the video, he frees up the camera, no-clipping through the level to prove that it’s genuinely an FPS with free movement. A lot contributes to the believability of Unrecord’s “bodycam footage,” and it isn’t all raw graphical fidelity. Combined with the features of Unreal Engine 5, presumably some ray tracing for the reflections, and today’s other advancements, Unrecord’s look isn’t totally out there.
For as realistic as it appears, there is a distinct ‘Unreal Engine 5 look’ to Unrecord that I can’t precisely describe, but can identify when I see it—the longer I look at the trailer, the more I see through the illusion. But it is frequently startling how much it looks like real camera footage. Responding to the conversation emerging around Unrecord yesterday, Studio Drama said that it doesn’t want to spoil the story by explaining its themes, but that it understands “people who may feel disturbed by the game’s images.”
