"Aw, that's cute" is not something I thought I'd say about My Friend Pedro but here we are. The slow-motion murder platformer extravaganza now has a 'tiny player mode' and it's properly adorable. This comes as part of the Code Yellow update, which adds 14 modifiers to the skateboard shoot-a-thon including cinematic camera mode, big head mode, adjustable focus speed, and adjustable player speed. There's also an option to hide the HUD and a timer for speedrunners. 

According to publisher Devolver Digital's blog post announcing Code Yellow "nearly half a million folks" have bought My Friend Pedro. I can see why—it's a hyper replayable score-attack kill-em-up with a goofy theme, and I had a blast playing it.

The update coincides with a discount of 30% on Steam, which will last over the weekend.

My Friend Pedro, a 2D bullet-time score-attack action-platformer, is almost entirely the work of one developer: Victor Ågren, aka DeadToast Entertainment. Publisher Devolver Digital recently announced that his game sold 250,000 units in its first week (across both PC and Switch), so Victor's probably pretty happy about that.

To celebrate, Devolver have put together a charming video about Victor and the four-and-a-half year journey of My Friend Pedro, which began as a Flash game made for a student project, was put on the backburner when Victor got a job at MediaMolecule, and finally came out this year.  Watch the whole thing embedded above.

Among the nuggets of information the interview reveals is that Pedro, the player's mentor, was almost a flying gnome, "but bananas are easier to animate" as Victor explains.

Read our review of My Friend Pedro here.

The gamers running at me have swords, because all gamers own swords, I guess. They also have Monty Python Dark Souls cosplay armor, but it can't save them from the shotgun blasts that reduce them to lumps at my feet. I'm out of ammo before I'm out of gamers, the last one charging with sword held high. But any object you kick is a one-shot kill in this game, and dead gamer lumps are kickable objects.

There are more impressive gun-fu stunts in My Friend Pedro than breaking somebody's neck by kicking their dead friend's torso at them, but this moment of improvisation is typical of what happens between gif-able highlights. Once or twice per level I'll do something like skateboard through a window and then kick that skateboard at someone while shooting someone else, or I'll throw a frying pan into the air and then ricochet bullets off it to clear a room. 

But the meat and potatoes of My Friend Pedro isn't these set pieces. It's jumping in and relying on the combination of a generous slow-mo meter, physics objects, and a lot of bullets to see you through.

This shit is bananas 

I should mention the talking banana. His name is Pedro and he's full of potassium and advice on how to kill people, whether retired mafiosi or Christmas-themed bounty hunters or gamers driven to madness by violent videogames. There's a story in My Friend Pedro but a minimal one—it feels like the plot of another hyperviolent Devolver game, Ruiner, only told on fast-forward. Pedro is there to explain things, but more importantly he appears in the corner of the screen when you pull off a high-scoring combo and tells you what rank you got at the end of a level.

It's a score-attack game, with bonus points for chaining together kills in combos. There are leaderboards, and I have replayed several levels just to get a higher rank than James. (Suck it, James.) Chasing high scores makes me look ahead at a level and think things like, "I should ride the barrel onto that guy then jump off while dual-wielding and split my fire so I can shoot that one and the other before I land." 

Split-fire looked neat in the gifs Pedro's designer showed off during development, but I was worried it would feel rough in play. I was super wrong. It's easy: right-click on one dude and hold to lock him in, and then for every left-click shot, no matter where it's aimed, the right-click guy gets a bullet as well. Levels that drop you down shafts with enemies on both sides, or have doors full of goons opening around you, are built for this. I never stopped enjoying it.

These are also fine moments for dodging by pressing W, which sends you into a bulletproof pirouette. Shooting while dodging sends bullets flying in whichever direction your guns happen to be pointing during that part of the animation, wild sprays flying around as you whirl about like a dog in a tumble dryer. Again: enjoyable.

Later levels reduce the number of physics objects like skateboards, basketballs, and knives, as well as goons to fling them at, in favor of mines, lasers, spinning platforms, and traps that require more perfectionist play. There's not as much freedom to rack up combos and a lot more falling to your death. They're less fun to replay, and I wish there were notes in the level select screen that said "this level is cool and has a skateboard" or "this one has too many lasers". There's one in the dream-like midsection with no enemies, a pure platforming challenge that doesn't play to My Friend Pedro's strengths.

So some levels are weaker, but before long there's always a refresher level that plays completely differently, a motorbike chase or a freefall or a boss fight. To pay My Friend Pedro the highest compliment, its boss fights didn't annoy me. They're bombastic, inventive, and they're over fast.

Along with the score, at the end of every level Pedro gives you a gif of a highlight to save or share. Postcards from murderland, they slice My Friend Pedro into a handful of enjoyable seconds. Its take on bullet-time is fun for more than seconds, though. Unlike Superhot or Max Payne I never got tired of its bullet-time thanks to short levels, high variety, and a storyline that's purest nonsense.

My Friend Pedro is a 2D sidescrolling action game about a guy in a gimp mask who commits mass murder because a banana tells him to. To be fair, the guys he kills are trying to kill him too, but it's impossible to know who started it, so is it really self-defense? I honestly can't say. 

What I can say, as of today, is that My Friend Pedro will be out on June 20, and that there is a new trailer marking its forthcoming release with yet more two-dimensional ultra-violence, banging music, and a banana who loves you.   

The Steam listing speaks eloquently about what you'll be doing in the game, but offers very little on why. "My Friend Pedro is a violent ballet about friendship, imagination, and one man’s struggle to obliterate anyone in his path at the behest of a sentient banana. The strategic use of split aiming, slow motion, and the ol’ stylish window breach create one sensational action sequence after another in an explosive battle through the violent underworld," it says. 

"Unleash a torrent of destruction with an incredible level of control over both your weapons and your body. Twist and turn through the air while aiming both hands at priority threats or line up a perfect ricochet to drop an unsuspecting gangster from behind." 

There will also be at least one motorcycle chase, physics-based puzzles that can kill you, and an automated GIF generator so you can make and share your own clips of mayhem with minimal fuss and muss. And you know what? That's good enough for me. Sometimes, if the "what" is entertaining enough, the "why" doesn't have to enter into it. Still, if you want to find out more about the game, you can do so at deadtoast.com. 

Tom described My Friend Pedro in 2016 as "a 2D Max Payne that looks bananas." Two years later, he declared to the world that he was sick of waiting for it—but, temporal reality being what it is, he would continue waiting anyway, because the preview build he played was "stupidly good fun." He'll be happy to know that his wait is almost over, as Devolver announced today that it will finally be out in June. 

There's no specific release date yet, but I'm willing to let that slide because what we have instead is a new gameplay trailer that is, to use the precise scientific terminology, absolutely bonkers. It's two-fisted, fully automatic, and wildly violent, and there is also a giant, sentient banana lurking in the background, smiling approvingly when you artfully massacre the crap out of guys who I assume are bad in some way. 

(They have guns, after all, and they appear to be hanging out in a seedy part of town, although according to the Steam listing you're only murdering them all because the banana told you to. Maybe it said "Would you kindly?")

Hey, whatever. My Friend Pedro looks nuts (on more than one level), and it's not as though I haven't committed high-velocity videogame mass murder on thin pretexts before now. If the banana wants me to put these bozos in the ground, consider the hole dug. 

Wall jump, spin, split fire and take two goons out. Land, spin, reload, kick a fuel can into the air, detonate for a big multikill. In My Friend Pedro you play a balletic gunman on a mission to dispatch phalanxes of thugs with maximum style. Every slow-motion spinning kill ticks up your score. The point here isn't to merely survive and complete the level, it's to dispatch perps with combos so spectacular you have to capture the footage and share a gif on the internet.

There's a button that will package up moments into gifs for you, because My Friend Pedro knows what it is. Your slow-mo bar is generous enough to keep you in bullet time for pretty much as long as you like. That lets you aim your twin pistols at multiple targets using a neat control system. You mouse over your first target and hold the right mouse button to pin a reticle for your off-hand gun, then you aim at your other target and use left-mouse button to fire both weapons at the same time. 

This is useful for diving into rooms full of flanking gangsters, which you do a lot. Every room in playable demo felt like a toybox full of objects to play with. The kick button lets you knock over tables for cover, kick goons through panes of glass, or even kick bits of goon at other goons. If you kick a goon's head at another goon's head, it will kill that goon, and you will earn points. This is a very fine game.

Your character feels as light as a paper cutout as you jump around, reload, and spin to dodge enemy bullets. You're frequently springing off tip-toes and floating over the heads of your tracksuited foes. It feels great, and the controls are so slick I was stringing together awesome combos after just a few rooms.

My Friend Pedro is due out in 2019, but there's a chance you've played it in some form already. An early Flash version was released ten years ago. Since then the game's lone developer Victor Agren has pursued a career at Media Molecule working on the LittleBigPlanet series before going indie once again to expand My Friend Pedro into a full game. 

It looks great too. The backgrounds are inspired by the Tokyo street photography of artist Liam Wong, who uses a strong purple palette. Your gunman's yellow jacket and red explosive canisters helpfully pop out of the detailed urban backgrounds. Agren mentions Bollywood action scenes as another influence, and I can see that in the way the physics of the world bends to ensure the most stylish action happens in any given moment. If you kick a saucepan into the air and shoot it, the ricochets are guaranteed to hit nearby enemies.

Once I have completed the demo level Agren boots up another one from later in the game and shows off his skills with a skateboard. You can ride it, of course, and you can kick it into enemies to kill them. Ideally you will land right back on the board afterwards after a spin and a reload to earn more points. There's a spectacular moment when Agren rides the board through a window, jumps off it and swings on a rope back into the building to gun down more surprised goons.

I also get to ride a motorbike in a boss fight level. I shoot cars full of yet more goons until they explode and eventually duel a gang boss in a big truck. He lobs bombs out of a hatch that I shoot in slow motion while backflipping on the bike. It's stupidly good fun. If the game keeps up this level of slapstick nonsense carnage for its entire running time it will be delight. The 2019 release window suddenly seems so far away.

With E3 2018 safely over our shoulder, we pick the best games we saw at the show.

Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice

When Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice was first revealed at the Xbox press conference, it honestly looked like Dark Souls: Japan. I figured it'd be the same riff on ancient Japanese history in the way that Bloodborne twisted Victorian England. But man was I wrong. Not only is Sekiro gorgeous, it's also a near complete subversion of everything we associate with Dark Souls. It's not an RPG, it has no multiplayer, and it's character isn't customizable.

But for each piece of that formula it rips out, From Software sticks a new one in. Sekiro is much more open-world, with levels designed to be scaled vertically using a cool new grappling hook. While it still has the same combat, it's completely reworked to capture the feel of dueling rather than hacking enemies to bits. It has stealth and enemies that look a lot more intelligent than your average Dark Souls lot. Simply put, it's everything I could have wanted from the next Dark Souls—which is to say, it's nothing like Dark Souls. —Steven Messner

Control

With a transforming, supernatural gun and powers like levitation and telekinesis, Jesse is sent in to figure out what went wrong inside The Oldest House, which won't be the linear environment we've seen in games like Alan Wake, but more metroidvania in its structure. My favorite part of the demo was when Faden comes upon an employee inside an observation chamber. As he hears Faden approach, he starts begging for her help: "Oh god, are you here to relieve me?" He's been staring at a refrigerator for days, possibly longer—if someone isn't looking at it, he warns that it will "destabilize." This is but one strange side quest within The Oldest House, Remedy says. —Evan Lahti

My Friend Pedro

Devolver Digital's surreal anti-conference, now in its second year, has become a highlight of E3. After last year's frenzy of satire somebody obviously said, "Hey, that was quite popular but maybe we could show some more games next time?" And so they did. Between Metal Wolf Chaos XD and SCUM was a trailer for My Friend Pedro, a game you'd be forgiven for thinking was just another of their blood-drenched parodies. But no, I've been following My Friend Pedro's development on Dead Toast's Twitter for a while now, and it's definitely real.

The pitch is basically "2D Max Payne but even more over-the-top". There's a generous bullet time meter and physics has been bribed to look in the other direction while you flip and pirouette your way through levels, doming bad guys with bullets and sometimes frying pans. The frying pans can also be used to ricochet bullets off, making for the wonderful possibility of throwing one up in the air, slowing down time, pinging a few bullets off it into bad dudes, then kicking the frypan out of the air and into a final enemy's face just as time spools back up again.

There's also skateboarding and motorbike chases and dual-wielding that lets you lock onto separate targets with each gun. Best of all there's a built-in capture that saves your best moments in each level and lets you upload them as a gif, like Opus Magnum but with more slow-motion headshots. When this game comes out next year Twitter's going to become a parade of nonsensical violence. It'll be like that one cool fight from Deadpool only I won't have to sit through all of Deadpool again. I'm down with that. —Jody Macgregor

Phantom Doctrine

The action is turn-based XCOM-style strategy featuring both stealth and shooting, but successful extraction from a mission doesn't result in anything as grand as an armored airlift. Instead, a nondescript van pulls up to the curb and then speeds away once your agents are inside. Your army in Phantom Doctrine, being developed by CreativeForge Games, isn't comprised of soldiers, but spies during the Cold War of the 1980s.

Between missions, when you head back to your upgradable headquarters, Phantom Doctrine is awash with paranoia. It even has a conspiracy board, where you can examine gathered intel and link clues together with red string and pushpins to unlock new missions. While you're dressing up your agents and forging them new passports you'll also want to rifle through their skills and abilities looking for anything that wasn't there the last time you checked. There's a chance they may have been captured while out in the field and brainwashed by your mysterious enemy. That's right, one of your own spies may be a double agent, and the presence of skill you didn't assign them might be your only clue.

The idea of having a squad of NPC agents you can never completely trust is wonderfully intriguing. So is the fact that you can brainwash enemy agents yourself, and then activate them during a mission, essentially flipping them to your side. You can even plant a tiny bomb in the head of an agent, so if they're captured they won't have the chance to talk, with the added bonus that they'll blow up whoever captured them—though this will mean the loss of whatever intel happens to be in the room when it explodes. Er, plus the loss of your agent, naturally.

The cat-and-mouse one-upmanship of espionage and counter-espionage looks incredible and makes me desperately wish Phantom Doctrine was out right now (it's coming this summer). There were a lot of great games on show at E3, but this one especially piqued my interest. Jody also got some hands-on time with it recently. —Chris Livingston

Destiny 2: Forsaken

Look, I know. I bloody know. I am the boy who cried Destiny, and I do not blame you for not wanting to hear more about it. And certainly not how this next expansion is going to fix most of what went wrong. But, but, but! From speaking to Christopher Barrett and Scott Taylor at E3, it's clear that both Bungie knows it has a mountain of trust to earn back, and more importantly has a plan that addresses the most egregious problems. That means bringing back random rolls on weapon and armor and leaning into the endgame activities that keep players coming back.

Of what I was able to try at the show, the slice of opening story mission featured typically bravura alien-shooting, with Cayde-6 front and centre Golden Gunning-escapees from the Prison of Elders and then nonchalantly tossing a 'nade over his shoulder to clear up the survivors. Until he isn't. Suddenly I was jump cut into the climactic cut scene in which Cayde dies at the blue hands of Prince Uldren. It was different, and even colder, than the moment in the story trailer released during E3. If we ignore the slight suspicion that the developer just didn't want to keep paying Nolan North for voice work, then it really does feel like Bungie is full committed to Forsaken taking a much darker turn.

Perhaps even more of a surprise was what an instant hit the new Gambit mode felt like. This hybrid of PvP and PvE provides plenty of scope for 'hero moments' as players hop into each others' arena to wreak havoc or face plant spectacularly. In order for Gambit to truly stick around, the four promised maps will need to be sufficiently varied and the loot pool will have to be worth grinding for. That latter point will conclusively answer whether the game is back on track, but with September 4 looming I now feel pretty optimistic. Don't make that face. —Tim Clark

Dying Light 2

Dying Light has quietly become one of the best and most successful zombie games in modern memory. It's basically a dramatically improved version of Dead Island: more satisfying melee combat, smoother shooting, more interesting RPG elements, and topped off with a first-person parkour system that, for my money, is infinitely more fun than holding up to climb in Assassin's Creed or Tomb Raider. Plus it lets you dropkick the hell out of zombies. 

It was darn good at launch, and it's only gotten better as Techland's handed out heaps of free content over the years. But Dying Light has one problem no amount of DLC can fix: the writing is terrible. I remember exactly two things about the main story: there was a bit where a kid got turned into a zombie and I wasn't sad at all, and the main villain had a bit where he screamed the protagonist's name at the sky like that scene from Star Trek 2: The Wrath of Khan. The dude you play as is so forgettable that I don't even remember the name the bad guy screamed. 

But! Dying Light 2 is a golden opportunity for Techland to deliver a good story and a fun zombie sandbox, and it sounds like they're making good headway. They've enlisted the help of some of The Witcher 3's writers, for starters, and based on what Steven saw at E3, he reckons the sequel is ripe with meaningful, world-altering decisions. And I'm so down for a humanity-driven Dying Light that takes itself seriously. — Austin Wood

Maneater

“Just a small town shark. Livin’ in a lonely seaaaaaaaaaaaa. I killed a load of stuff to upgrade my teeeeeeeeeth.”

I was knee-deep in magazine deadline when I watched the Maneater trailer from the PC Gaming Show. As a trailer it seemed pretty average. It was the moment after the trailer finished which had me enraptured. Sean ‘Day9’ Plott clarified that you play as the SHARK and it’s an RPG kind of thing so you can upgrade your shark to fulfil its lifelong dream of killing all humans (and some other fish). Then I read a bunch more promising details in Wes' Maneater interview.

Obviously there’s a bit of dissonance here—sharks are amazing, beautiful, curious creatures and we are far, FAR more of a danger to them than they are to us. But it’s also an RPG where I get to be a SHARK on a revenge quest instead of some blank-faced human on a revenge quest. I hope this ushers in a golden age for animal RPGs—geese, praying mantis protagonists, mage bees… Turns out I’m perfectly happy to park my “we shouldn’t anthropomorphise creatures” philosophy if it means I can ruin human holidays. —Pip Warr

WINNER - Cyberpunk 2077

I never want to forget that weird feeling of vertigo I had during the opening moments of the first-ever showing of Cyberpunk 2077's behind-closed-doors demo. I had a mountain of expectations, of course, but CD Projekt Red toppled all of them the moment the character creation screen closed. It almost took me a minute to understand what I was seeing—is Cyberpunk 2077 a… first-person shooter? Holy hell. I don't know why I didn't see that coming.

The next 50 minutes held several more moments when I had to sit back and check my expectations for what kind of game this would be. Drivable vehicles? Real-time dialogue choices that don't break up the action? One of the most densely packed and detailed cities I have ever seen in a game? Cyberpunk 2077 wasn't content with merely being The Witcher 3 but with androids—but it all was still pinned together by those familiar RPG systems.

It was an impressively meaty showcase (one that was running on a single 1080 Ti to boot) that showed CDPR was willing to take bold risks and try new things. And, when you consider the leap from The Witcher 2 to The Wild Hunt, that's exactly what made The Witcher 3 so great in the first place. It was a great demo that offered an exceedingly detailed look into a game that might not be out for years, which is a refreshing reveal to have at E3. So, yeah, Cyberpunk 2077 was definitely the best thing I saw all week. —Steven Messner

Maybe you remember a little Flash game published by Adult Swim website back in the day, something about slow-motion shootouts and a talking banana called My Friend Pedro? That version of the game was an amusing time-waster you could play in your browser, and it ended with you eating Pedro, growing wings, and then flying up into the sky for a final showdown with a guy in glasses who I assume was the game's creator. He tried to kill me with a flyswatter.

My Friend Pedro is back, and it looks even weirder this time. The new version—subtitled "Blood Bullets Bananas"—had a trailer during Devolver Digital's E3 showcase, but I've been following its development on Twitter and creator Dead Toast's blog for a while now, and its slow-motion guns akimbo skateboard/motorbike/barrel-riding bullet ballet has made for some excellent gifs. Like this, for instance.

That kick's new to this version of My Friend Pedro, and so are the ricochets. Stationary signs and mobile frying pans seem to be the main option for getting bullets around corners and behind cover, as shown here. 

 Barrel-rolling's also a new addition—not to 2D games more generally of course, though I've never seen Donkey Kong pull off a move as gory as this. Note the LOVELY x4 bonus at the end, suggesting combos and perhaps a score attack mode. 

And while much of what we've seen so far takes place in a grimy, urban setting (with a few high-tech touches) the full game will also include visits to a more whimsical location called Pedro's World. Is this a plane of existence known only to talking bananas? 

Pedro's World will apparently involve a break for reality, making even more physics-bending possibilities. I haven't ridden a skateboard since I was 17 but I'm pretty sure they don't work like this.

My Friend Pedro won't be out until 2019 but it already looks impressive, like someone took the opening fight from Deadpool and made an entire game of it. Dead Toast note that not every feature on the dev blog is guaranteed to make it to the full game, but if you want to see more of Pedro in action you can check that out here.