Fire and remember: 23 great unorthodox weapons in video games

There’s nothing new in noting that a disproportionate number of video games are focused on violence. Killing in games is, after all, very easy (and not just in a squishy moral sense). It’s a simple, easy-to-implement formula: Apply Bullet or Blade A to Enemy B, drop loot, repeat as needed until game is complete.

Weapons fascinate in games, though, because of how they let us interact with the world (usually in a very “now there’s slightly less of it” sort of way, admittedly). They let us change things, alter things, affect things. If we’re talking about guns and swords, these changes happen in simple and binary ways: stab, shoot, bludgeon, etc. But what about the other weapons? What about the more unorthodox entries in the gaming arsenal?

That’s what we’re contemplating here today: Some of the most interesting weapons in all of video game history that aren’t a simple series of well-statted axes or spears or Uzis or other straightforward implements of death. What lurks in the weeds, beyond your Super Shotguns or your Master Swords?

Many of the entries in this list (presented in roughly chronological order of their first appearance) are practical tools as much as killing ones; quite a few concern themselves with movement, that other major way we interact with virtual worlds. But together, they share one key element: They transform the basic assumptions about violence in games, taking the rote and making it, for lack of a better word, joyful. If games can never shake their link with killing, at least they can display a jot of the unique interactive creativity that only the medium can posses.

A Horrifying Necktie Shoved Into A Bottle Of Pure Alcohol — Disco Elysium (2020)

ZA/UM’s stunningly beautiful Disco Elysium is not, on the whole, a violent game. But it does contain some moments of shocking violence, and when they happen, it always helps to have fashion on your side. Given that the bumbling, drunken, amnesiac detective you play as in DE has managed to lose his gun by the time the game starts, it’s completely possible that you’ll come to the game’s most deadly encounter ostensibly unarmed. But no man is truly defenseless when he has a garish necktie—one that whispers to you as you walk through the war-torn streets of Revachol, encouraging you to (among other things), buy a bottle of almost pure alcohol to dunk the tie into to make a makeshift Molotov cocktail. Deployed at the right moment, in the right way, this surreal, goofy, absurd object can save a number of lives—not unlike its unconventional, but potentially heroic, owner. [William Hughes]