Babbdi was a game with a harsh and gritty Brutalist aesthetic, and it was also a game about playing scales on a trumpet, jumping off walls with a baseball bat, and using a leaf blower to fly. Sneaking out in the winter of 2022, it was a gloomy but enjoyable free-to-play game with a huge but well-hidden imagination, where your only clear goal was to find your way out of a small concrete city.
Now, developers Lemaitre Bros. are making a terrific 1v1 FPS called Straftat, scheduled to release on October 24, 2024 with over 100 arenas. It's similarly in love with concrete, but also features blunderbuses, dual-wielding guns, Gatling guns, corner-peeping, curved swords, cowboy hats, and beehive hairstyles.
Technically, this isn't news. Straftat has been in the public domain for the past year – below you can find unedited WIP captures from March. But this is the first time I've seen its Steam page, and I subscribe to the epistemological position that reality only exists when it's observed. So, Straftat's Only It was available as of the date this news article was written. You're welcome.
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There are a few schools of thought on the name. One is that Straftat means “crime” in German, perhaps a reference to some kind of edgy Berlin club. There are certainly a lot of crimes in the game, from crimes against windows (Straftat is part of the informal window-throwing genre recently re-popularized by Tactical Breach Wizards) to crimes against fashion.
Another interpretation of the name is that it's short for “Strafe Tactics,” a Modern Warfare-like feat of technology that seems at odds with the game's bleached-out, flowing vibes. Third, there's the suggestion that Straftat is “Tat Farts” spelled backwards, which is a speculation I support — it certainly describes a lot of free-to-play live service games. I'm not sure how the Lemaitre Bros funded the development of Straftat, but then again, I wasn't sure how they funded the development of Babbdi either — will they be selling these hats and hairstyles, or will they allow player trading like Counter-Strike and Diablo? Whatever their approach, I hope it keeps working.
I really enjoyed the pace, variety and energy of the game, and it's enjoyable to see the developers' flair for first-person environments being applied to such a vast album of maps, but I naturally have some concerns about diminishing returns.
Some maps are more tense with fog and trees, almost Darkroot Garden-like, while others are urban areas filled with signs and props that could have been copied from Babbdi's infrastructure. The battles bring back memories of the dueling communities of games like the Jedi Knight series. There doesn't seem to be any progression nonsense to worry about – just power-ups on the map. You can learn more on the developer Discord.
Too optimistic for a game with brutalist architecture? You might prefer Lorn's Lure.