I don't really like video games that make themselves look stupid the moment they come out, but playing Glowmade's King Of Meat is three hours of my life that I'll never get back, and every second I spend writing about it adds to that total, bringing me closer to a regrettable end. Here's what I'm most positive about: At the heart of this interactive, action-packed snarkfest is a third-person dungeon crawler that's decent enough for groups of up to four.
The dungeons span multiple difficulty levels and consist of corridors and arenas with action platforming widgets such as spike pits, rotating bars or timed explosive barrel dispensers. Enemies so far consist of various cuts of trolls and skeletons, spawned by unpredictable waves, and there are treasure chests hidden behind breakable walls or deposited in high alcoves.
You get a few dozen of these dungeons for your money (it’s a paid game), but you can also create and share your own maps using a LittleBigPlanet-style editor, which I didn’t get to try out when I went hands-on earlier this month. Combat is a serviceable mix of melee combos, musketry, and special move cooldowns, the not-so-complex intricacies of which quickly get lost in the fray. It’s a colourful and, dare I say, carnivalesque affair, with cartoonish sound effects blaring out from all sides, and while the version I played had some lag and glitches, there was some mild fun to be had from competing for the biggest gold haul and sabotaging your comrades by, for example, throwing bombs at them.
King Of Meat’s spirit of fun, however, is quickly hunted down and strangled by its humor and world, which exist only to ironize the fact that it’s a big, flashy unlock-a-game. The game largely fits the definition of satire: it’s set in a medieval fantasy world peppered with corporate theme park crap, like Shrek but, you know, 23 years later. Five giant corporations have built themselves a WWE-style death game in which warriors vie for glory and trinkets. Self-awareness covers the proceedings like dandruff. Everything is a stale meme, a wink at the fourth wall, or a whiff of lukewarm gag: sausage hammers, foam swords, Viking hats, a special move that makes people burp into crevices.
The script features a variety of skits and caricatures with lively voices, but I found it all fundamentally unbearable. For example, there’s an audience hype mechanic that increases your treasure gains when you avoid damage and do things that infuriate, like, well, mostly, smashing a bunch of barrels. The highest level of audience hype is “yaaaaaas.” Reading that sentence, I thought with renewed agony of the teaching job I almost got in 2006, before being duped into becoming a professional online shitposter. Ah, I could have been a serious contender in the world of education, you know. It was a school in Croydon and I was second in line. The kids looked at me with awe and respect. Now they just send me death threats on Twitter.
King of Meat’s satire is made of bubblegum. In our review, the developers cited films like The Running Man and Starship Troopers as influences, but they avoided saying that the companies in the game are parodies of any real business or practice. It’s the kind of social commentary you often find in video games, even those not published by Amazon: they make people feel vaguely intelligent in the face of the harrowing capitalist hell they actually live in, but they don’t offer any kind of sustained focus or structural critique. Don’t connect the dots.
The developers also told me that they don't make fun of other live service games that focus on progression, which is probably a good thing, since King Of Meat has more peripheral merchandise than most real-world sports stadiums. A good third of our hands-on time was spent showing off the shops and stalls in the game's central plaza. Whenever they felt like we were having too much fun in the dungeons, they'd have us trot outside to grab a new cosmetic or booster or something. It was like riding a roller coaster only to be told to get off every 50 meters to buy stuffed animals.
I might feel better about King Of Meat if the hands-on event itself had been a little less hyped. The developers in attendance were mostly guys in their thirties and up, and I was deeply saddened to see them trying to whip themselves and the assembled journalists into a frenzy of mirth over things like novelty shoulder pads. Still, my advanced age and increasingly resentful state of mind certainly have to be factored in here. East It is generally good to be optimistic about one's own work, and there is were journalists at the event who got carried away by the atmosphere, but as a miserable old fart, I felt like the Grinch at their school's nursery.
Let me say it out loud and without shame: I no longer have the energy to get into this. Certainly not the act of raiding dungeons. I think I have literally eliminated and excreted the gland that produces excitement about loot. And while I sometimes find burp jokes funny, the delivery of them has to be impeccable. It has to be delivered with the sober precision of a slender kung fu swordsman slicing a single azure raindrop in two in a hurricane, and even then, I will not laugh at it more than once, even if you performatively laugh in my ear.
King Of Meat, then: I'm probably not going to put this on my wishlist. I had a more pretentious angle in mind for this article – the developers told us they couldn't remember who came up with the title, which seemed fitting for a dystopian fairy tale that's all gloss and gestures with little sense of the actual, vital flesh beating at its heart. Then again, though, I'm going to die one day, and I don't want to do so thinking sadly about the hours I spent trying to extract an overblown Thinky Piece from a game about sausage hammers. King Of Meat is on Steam and doesn't have a release date yet.
Correction: This article has been edited to reflect that not all developers at the event were male.