The people behind amazing Brutalist parkour game Babbdi are making a free 1v1 FPS with over 100 maps

Babbdi was a game of stark and severe Brutalist aesthetics, and also, a game about playing scales with a trumpet, walljumping with a baseball bat and using a leafblower to fly. Snuck out over winter 2022, it was a sombre but delightful freebie with immense though well-hidden imagination, in which your only explicit objective was to find a way out of a small concrete city.

Now, developers Lemaitre Bros are making a gott-dang 1v1 FPS called Straftat, slated for release on 24th October 2024 with over 100 arenas. It's similarly in love with concrete, but it also has blunderbusses, dual-wielding, Gatling guns, corner-peeking, curved swords, cowboy hats and beehive hairdos.

Technically, this isn't news. Straftat has been public knowledge since last year - find some unedited WIP capture from March below. But this is the first time I've laid eyes on the Steam page, and I adhere to the epistemological position that reality only exists when it is observed. As such, I consider it entirely logical and coherent to assert that Straftat has only existed as of the writing of this news post. You're welcome.

There are several schools of thought on the name. One is that Straftat is German for "criminal offence", perhaps a reference to, like, an edgy Berlin club of some kind. There are certainly many offences being committed in the game, from crimes against windows (Straftat is part of the unofficial defenestration genre recently re-popularised by Tactical Breach Wizards) to crimes against fashion.

Another take on the name is that it's an abbreviation of, like, "Strafe Tactics", a Modern Warfarelike techno-flourish that seems out of synch with the game's bleached and swooping vibes. And thirdly, there's the argument that Straftat is "Tat Farts" written backwards, which is the speculation I favour - it certainly describes a lot of free-to-play live service games. I'm not clear how Lemaitre Bros are funding development of Straftat, but then again, I wasn't clear how they funded development of Babbdi either - will they be selling those hats and hairdos or allowing player-trading, a la Counter-Strike and Diablo? Whatever their approach is, I hope it carries on working.

I really like the pace and variety and energy of this, and it's a pleasure to see the developers' talent for first-person environments applied to such a vast album of maps, though I naturally have some concerns about diminishing returns.

Some of the maps are more suspenseful with fog and trees, almost Darkroot Garden-esque, while others are fleshed-out urban spaces with signage and props that might have been cribbed from Babbdi's infrastructure. The combat gives me flashbacks to the duelling communities of games like the Jedi Knight series. It doesn't look like there's any progression bullshit to worry over - just on-map power-ups. You can learn more over on the developer Discord.

Too upbeat for a game with Brutalist architecture? You might prefer Lorn's Lure.