Reviews for the new Mass Effect game are set to come out on Tuesday, but many copies of it are already out, and there is a consensus forming about the game, which is that it looks weird as hell. Our own Matt Gerardi called it “stilted as all get out,” which is putting it kindly: The faces look like thick leather masks pulled taut over some sort of mechanical contraption, their mouths moving as if powered by a Rube Goldberg machine being pedaled far off screen. Games always toy with the uncanny valley, but they generally get better, year over year. We do not expect to have to look at faces like… this.
Good lord, how does a smile like that ever come into being? What hath man wrought? Nathan Ranney has collected a lot of the game’s gloriously bizarre moments, such as this, um, “walk”:
Look at these damn mouths:
Rise and shine, you are in hell:
Elsewhere, these terrifying automatons have been corralled into video documentaries about their fell dimension. It is a pupal art form that, with time and the game’s full release, will certainly lead to some truly gorgeous films. However, here is a very good one:
And another early triumph:
Some jazzy real-world antecedents:
The game’s developers have said that the terrifying faces won’t be fixed with an early update to the game, though they famously redid the ending of Mass Effect 3 due to player outrage, so it seems likely. Here’s an idea: Maybe don’t fix it? This is a lot more entertaining than the game would be otherwise.
You can see many more examples of it here, or take one step further into hell with these videos from the internet artists Cool 3D World.