Dire comedy bloodsport King Of Meat should have been called King Of Meme

Please, enough with the ironic deathgames already

I genuinely don't like sucker-punching video games the second they're announced, but playing Glowmade's King Of Meat is three hours of my life I won't get back, and every second I spend writing about it extends that total, dragging me closer to a regretful demise. Here's the stuff I'm more positive about: buried at the core of this spurting interactive snarkfest there is a moderately OK third-person dungeon-crawler for groups of up to four.

The dungeons span several challenge tiers and consist of hallways and arenas with action-platformy widgets such as spike pits or spinning bars or timed exploding barrel dispensers. Enemies so far consist of different cuts of troll and skellington, spawned in unpredictable waves, and there are treasure chests tucked behind smashable walls or deposited in high alcoves.

You get a few dozen of those dungeons for your money (it's a pay-upfront game), but you can also build and share your own maps using a LittleBigPlanet-style editor, which I wasn't able to try during my hands-on earlier this month. Combat is a serviceable blur of melee combos, musketry and special move cooldowns, whose not-very-intricate intricacies are quickly lost in the scrum. It's a colourful and dare I say, carnivalesque affair, with cartoon SFX bursting from the seams, and while the build I played had some latency and glitches, there were feelings of slight amusement to extract from the act of competing for the largest gold haul and sabotaging your mates by, for example, throwing bombs at them.

Any ethos of enjoyment operative within King Of Meat is, however, soon hunted down and strangled by its humour and worldbuilding, which mostly exists to ironise the fact that it is a big gaudy unlocks grind. The game corresponds broadly to the definition of a satire: it takes place in a medieval fantasy world raddled by corporate themepark shittiness, like Shrek but, you know, 23 years later. Five giant companies have built themselves a WWE-style deathgame in which warriors vie for fame and trinkets. Self-awareness dusts the proceedings like dandruff. Everything is a rancid meme or a winking fourth-wall-shaker or a gust of lukewarm slapstick: sausage hammers, foam swords, Viking hats, a special move where you can burp people into crevices.

The writing delivers a variety of skits and caricatures with some spirited voice-acting, but I found it all basically unbearable. As an example, there's an audience hype mechanic that boosts your treasure earnings when you avoid damage and do rabble-rousing stuff like, well, mostly just smashing lots of barrels. The topmost audience hype level is "yaaaaaas". Reading that line, I thought with renewed agony of the teaching job I almost landed in 2006, before I was 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 the runner-up. The children gazed upon me with awe and respect. Nowadays, they just send me death threats over Twitter.

Image credit: Amazon

King Of Meat's satire is all gums. During our hands-on, the developers cited films like The Running Man and Starship Troopers as influences, but they shied away from saying that the corporations in the game are parodies of any particular realworld company or practice. It's the kind of social commentary you often get in video games, even those not published by Amazon: make people feel vaguely clever about the flensing capitalist hellscape they actually inhabit, but don't offer any kind of focus or sustained structural criticism. Do not join the dots between the punchlines.

The developers also told me they aren't lampooning other progression-sodden live service games, which is probably just as well, because King Of Meat has more peripheral merchandising than most actual sports stadiums. A solid third of our hands-on was dedicated to showcasing the shops and stalls in the game's hub plaza. Whenever it looked like we were having too much fun in the dungeons, they'd trot us outside to pick up a new cosmetic or booster or what-have-you. It was like boarding a rollercoaster only to be ordered to dismount every 50 metres to buy some plushies.

I might feel better about King Of Meat if the hands-on event itself had been a little less Hype. The developers attending were mostly blokes in their 30s and older, and I grew profoundly sad watching them attempt to whip themselves and the assembled journomass into a frenzy of merriment over things like novelty shoulder pads. Still, allowances should definitely be made here for my advancing years and increasingly resentful state of mind. It is generally good to be upbeat about your own work, and there were journalists at the event who got swept up in the mood, but as a miserable old shit, I felt like Grinch at their school nativity play.

Let me say it out loud, and without shame: I don't have it in me to get Hype any more. Certainly not for the act of looting dungeons. I think I have literally shed and excreted whatever gland it is that produces excitement about loot. And while I do occasionally find jokes about burping funny, the delivery has to be immaculate. It has to be delivered with the sober precision of a willowy kung fu swordsman bisecting a single, azure raindrop in a hurricane, and even then, I am not going to laugh at it more than once, even if you guffaw performatively in my ear.

Image credit: Amazon

King Of Meat, then: probably not going to wishlist. I had a more pretentious angle in mind for this write-up - the developers told us they couldn't remember who came up with the title, which felt appropriate to a dystopian fairytale that is all sheen and gesture with little sense of any actual, vital flesh beating at its core. Again, though, I am going to die some day, and I don't wish to do so while thinking mournfully of the hours I spent attempting to extract an overblown Thinky Piece from a game about sausage hammers. King Of Meat is on Steam and has no release date just yet.

Correction: This article has been amended to reflect that not all the developers present at the event were men.