Door Kickers: Action Squad is a game about shooting people. That’s pretty much the whole thing: you kick in doors, and then you shoot the people behind them. You get skill points here and there that allow you to improve your ability to shoot people, and you can periodically unlock new guns (for shooting people), all of which is pretty fun. Video games have always been fairly preoccupied with shooting people, after all. They even put triggers on the controllers.

Despite that simple pleasure, something about Door Kickers leaves me stressed out. You’d think it might be some kind of political grievance, as it’s a game about a militarized police force that does nothing but unilaterally execute people, but it’s not. The game doesn’t really seem to revel all that much in that problematic framing: the bad guys are all heavily armed and taking hostages, so you can kind of blanket assume they’re the real deal, and the 80s stylization makes it feel more like a genre reference than a statement about real-life policing. For the most part, it just feels like an unexamined framework to allow you to shoot a lot of people.

Here I am getting ready to Kick a Door

Instead, the stress all comes from a single mechanic: hostage rescuing. Most levels are full of hostages – identical blonde ladies tied up and waiting to be rescued – who are unfortunately as susceptible to your bullets as the enemies who have captured them. They become obstacles you have to try not to hit as you shoot inches over their heads to kill their captors. Completing a level gives you a ranking of between one and three stars, but if any of the hostages die, you can’t make it to the full three stars. You’re incentivized to keep them safe.

All of this seems like a reasonable way of doing things, but in practice, I find that it does something strange to my brain. I don’t want the hostages to get hurt, because even within the loose narrative framing of the game, I know I’ve screwed up when they do. The game reinforces that emotional consequence by including a mechanical punishment – a lower star ranking – and as a result, I feel like it’s important that no hostages ever get hurt. Three stars aren’t necessary to complete a level and move on, but it feels like they are, and I end up playing levels over and over until I can get a perfect score, no innocent blood spilled, no mistakes, no guilt.

Mission Success. Is it, though? Is it?

What should be a fun romp in which I do Door Kicking and shoot a bunch of guys for no particular reason quickly becomes a strange kind of chore, more of an obligation than a joy. I’m relieved when I run through one of the levels with no hostages, because only then do I feel free to truly Door Kick as the game intended. I’m not sure that I really see this as a failure of the game design, so much as a failure of my own mental and emotional capacity, but it still leaves me wishing there was some other way of doing things, some way to remove the mechanic of hostages and the sense of guilt and obligation they create.

It reminds me very much of the experience I had playing Dishonored. I went into that game knowing about the much-marketed “no kill” playthrough possibility, but instead of a fun challenge or interesting narrative option, it was an albatross to me. Most of the time I spent playing it felt like a struggle, save-scumming and fighting with the game, or looking up the ideal routes in guides online, trying to make sure I didn’t mess anything up. The game provided all sorts of cool tools for slaughtering people, which I think I probably would have enjoyed, but I never got to use them because I was preoccupied with doing things in what felt like the correct way.

Guilt-free slaughter, not a hostage in sight.

It’s not just about repetition or perfectionism, either. When I think of Door Kicking in this manner, one series that immediately comes to mind is Max Payne, and I played those games in a very similar way: I kicked open every door, jumped through the room in slow motion, and tried to shoot everybody without getting hurt. If I did get hurt, I would usually reload it, not because the game demanded it, not because of any trouble finding healing resources, but because I felt like I had messed up. That didn’t stress me out, though, because there wasn’t any moral framing to it. The game didn’t tell me I had made a mistake; it was me and me alone.

I recognize that these are “me” problems. If nothing else, I have a powerful ability to derive stress from anything and everything. Still, I think there’s something to be said for the way emotional cues, as tongue-in-cheek as they may be, tie into gameplay. I want to Kick Doors and shoot my enemies as an unexamined avatar of state violence, and that’s all. I don’t want to be saddled with the weight of failure and the haunting sense that I’ve let someone down. That’s what real life is for.