Potato Mode is known for making beautiful games ugly, but what about games that are beautifully horrific? That’s the existential question at the heart of this week’s episode, as Joey Yee and Erick Tay fiddle with the settings in Mortal Kombat X.
After a quick revisit to a couple of the more cringe-inducing Fatalities, the duo start tinkering. The in-game settings still look reasonably decent, so it’s off to some under-the-hood wire-cutting to make it look bad to the bone, and spleen, and heart. Suddenly the character models are a lot more putty-like, complete with neon-colored brains and spaghetti innards.
All this makes the Fatalities a little easier to stomach, but only just. Potato Mode looks at a medley of vicious kill animations, and even these smooth putty-men show their suffering. Sure, it’s not quite as awful to watch a Play-doh Scorpion die horribly, but you can definitely still tell that a person’s arm isn’t supposed to just pop off like that. Witness all this and more in the video above.
