“Cutout” gives you an enemy’s arm instead of a new sword

Gamescom produced a wonderfully nasty new horror-game announcement this week.

“Cutout” is an action-horror game built around a papercraft world, and developer 906 Games has taken the phrase “tear your enemies apart” pretty literally. Publisher Big Blue Sky Games announced the project for PC via Steam and the Epic Games Store. No release date has been set.

The game follows Lena through a grim fairy-tale world rendered in a handcrafted paper aesthetic. Combat allows her to use parts taken from defeated enemies, which explains the developer’s wonderfully horrible pitch: other action games give you a new sword, while “Cutout” gives you the arm that was holding it.

That visual approach could get wonderfully gross. Papercraft usually suggests cheerful little dioramas and children’s art projects. Turning the same textures into severed limbs and horror creatures is exactly the sort of creative bad behavior I want from indie horror games.

Composer Sergio Missaglia is getting strange with it too. He recorded parts of the score using instruments he had never played before, including broken instruments bought from secondhand shops, specifically chasing a raw and unfamiliar sound for Lena’s journey.

No launch date means there is plenty we still do not know about “Cutout.”

The basic proposition, however, is already beautifully stupid in the best possible way:

Paper fairy tale. Monsters. Rip their limbs off. Keep the useful ones.

Fine. I’m listening.