All the blood and ketchup across 250 years of modern American history adds up to this special moment: One of the most crude, lewd, and ugly video games ever made is back after 30 years, and it's coming stateside.
Automaton reports based on a news brief from Japanese site Game*Spark that writer Yoshihisa "Kowloon" Kurosawa is helping extend the foul history of his 1995 floppy disk shoot-'em-up Hong Kong 97 with an unprecedented sequel, Hong Kong 2097. It's scheduled to release in December, and it features the leading cause of overdose death in the US, fentanyl, as a cool weapon.
Protagonist Chin, presumed to be one of Bruce Lee's distant, heroin addict relatives, also seems to have a magical, Shiofuki yokai squirt power, which allows him to squirt over enemy swarms of monsters including flasher Uncle Sam, dancing hot dogs, and the American royal couple Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce, who have been swaddled in taco meat. It smells bad, but it's necessary for fulfilling an edict given to you by God – destroying the population of the fictional country Amurikkka.
"And if that wasn't enough, Hong Kong 2097 also allows you to build your dream card collection of soiled undies," says the game's description on Steam. "Can you collect all 20?"
Hong Kong 97 originally earned its reputation as "the worst" Japanese game, in part, because of internet fascination with objectively disrespectful aspects of its loose plot about killing, in its own words, "fuckin' ugly" Chinese communists in Hong Kong. The game includes an image of a real dead body in its game over screen, morbidly curious fans discovered, and Kurosawa himself has explained that Hong Kong 97 was meant to be "the worst game possible."
But to me, Hong Kong 2097 – while irrefutably distasteful – isn't like that. Political censorship continues to threaten Americans' right to make unique, bad, or revolutionary art, and under this suffocating pressure, I feel almost liberated by a game as disgusting as Hong Kong 2097 just showing up on Steam with gun penises and a tranq dart. What's shocking is sometimes also true.
