I don't really like video games that scream at me the moment they're announced, but playing Glowmade's King Of Meat is three hours of my life I can't get back, and every second I write about it extends that total and pushes me toward a regretful ending. Here's what I'm more positive about: At its core, this gushing, interactive, tongue-in-cheek fun is a moderately good third-person dungeon crawler that can be played with groups of up to four.
Dungeons span a range of difficulty levels and consist of corridors and arenas with action platforming gadgets like spike pits or spinning rods or timed exploding barrel dispensers. Enemies so far consist of different cuts of trolls and skellingtons that spawn in unpredictable waves, and there are treasure chests hidden behind breakable walls or nestled in high alcoves.
You get a few dozen of these dungeons for your money (it's a pre-paid game), but you can also create and share your own maps using a LittleBigPlanet-style editor that I didn't get to try during my hands-on experience earlier this month. Combat is a handy blur of melee combos, rifle fire and special move cooldowns, the not-so-subtle complexities of which quickly get lost in the shuffle. It's a colourful and, dare I say, carnivalesque affair, with cartoony SFX bursting at the seams, and while there were some lags and glitches in the build I played, there was still a sense of light fun to be had from the act of competing for the biggest gold haul and, for example, sabotaging your friends by throwing bombs at them.
Any sense of fun that might have operated in King Of Meat is soon hunted down, and its humor and world-building are drowned out, mostly to ironize the fact that it’s a big, flashy lock-picking job. The game meets the general definition of a satire: set in a medieval fantasy world filled with corporate theme-park scum, like Shrek, but, you know, 23 years later. Five giant corporations have built a self-aware WWE-style deathmatch where fighters compete for fame and trinkets. The irony dusts the proceedings like dandruff. Everything is a corny meme or a winking fourth-wall breaker or a tepid slapstick treat: sausage hammers, foam swords, Viking hats, a special move that lets you burp people into cracks.
The writing offers a variety of sketches and cartoons, with some lively voice-overs, but I found them all fundamentally unbearable. For example, there's a viewer hype mechanic that increases your treasury earnings when you avoid damage and mostly just do riot-inducing things like smash a bunch of barrels. The highest level of viewer hype is “yaaaaaas”. As I read this line, I thought back to the boring teaching job I almost got in 2006, before I was tricked into becoming a professional online bullshit writer. Oh, I could have been a serious contender in the world of education, you know. It was a school in Croydon and I came second. The kids looked up to me with admiration and respect. Nowadays, they send me death threats on Twitter.
King Of Meat’s satire is pure bubblegum. The developers cited movies like The Running Man and Starship Troopers as inspiration during our hands-on review, but stopped short of saying that the companies in the game were parodies of any specific real-world company or app. It’s the kind of social commentary you often see in video games, even ones not published by Amazon: It makes people feel vaguely smart about the flensing capitalist hellscape they actually live in, but it doesn’t offer any focus or sustained structural critique. Don’t connect the dots between the jokes.
The developers also told me that they weren't lampooning other progression-saturated live-service games, which is probably a good thing, since King Of Meat has more environmental goodies than most real sports stadiums. A solid third of our hands-on time was dedicated to showcasing the shops and stalls in the game's central square. When it looked like we were having too much fun in the dungeons, they'd pull us out and ask us to pick up a new cosmetic or power-up or whatever. It was like we were being ordered to get on a roller coaster and get off every 50 feet to get a plush toy.
I might feel better about King Of Meat if the hands-on event had been a little less hype. The developers in attendance were all men in their 30s and up, and I felt a deep sense of sadness as I watched them try to whip themselves and the assembled journalists into a frenzied glee over things like innovative shoulder pads. Still, my advancing years and increasingly irritable temper must certainly be excused here. is It's generally good to be optimistic about your own business and was Reporters at the event got into the spirit, but PR people, please do your homework before inviting the Grinch to your school nativity play. I have a pretty public record for being a miserable old shit.
Let me say this out loud and without shame: I no longer have the power to generate Hype. Certainly not for the act of looting dungeons. I think I've literally poured and thrown out whatever it is that's been generating excitement around loot. And while I sometimes find the burping jokes funny, the delivery has to be flawless. It has to be delivered with the sober precision of a wispy kung fu swordsman splitting a single blue raindrop in a hurricane, and even then, even if you performatively laugh in my ear, I won't laugh at it more than once.
King Of Meat, then: probably not wishlisting. I was thinking of a more ambitious angle for this post — the developers told us they couldn’t remember who came up with the title, which felt appropriate for a dystopian tale that’s essentially all flash and swag, with very little of the feel of real, live meat. Still, I don’t want to do this while I’m dying one day and wistfully think about the hours I spent trying to squeeze a slapdash Thinky Piece out of a game about sausage hammers. King Of Meat is on Steam and doesn’t have a release date yet.