After teeing off on mobile devices in 2014, the best, most challenging, and most addictive golf game in the world ever has finally landed on PC. Desert Golfing is out now on Steam. 

Don't be fooled by its seemingly bland and two-dimensional aesthetic, beneath Desert Golfing's simplistic veneer lies a deep and intuitive game—wherein endless levels are procedurally generated with no pars, leaderboards or game overs. 

Playing is simple: You click and drag to set each shot's pitch and power, sink each hole with as few shots as possible, and move onto the next. In judging each hole's elevated platforms and sinking crevices, Desert Golfing is as much a puzzle game as it is about pitching and putting. 

Here's how its mobile version looks in motion, courtesy of YouTube person tangents:

Over the years, I've lost a lot of time to Desert Golfing—to the point where I chose not to install it on my latest phone. A quick glance at the PC Gamer Slack chat paints a similar picture, with one of my colleagues (who will remain unnamed here) racking up a score of 5557. I don't judge, I know what this game is capable of.     

It seems Desert Golfing landed on Steam earlier this week, where it costs £1.69/$1.99.

Cheers, RPS.  

"For us, the release of PUBG 1.0 is not the end to anything," CH Kim, CEO of PUBG Corp, told me over the phone (through a translator) earlier this week. "It's just one of the many milestones that we looked forward to accomplishing. We've seen a lot of Early Access games stay in Early Access for a very long amount of time. That's why we made a promise early on that we would get out of Early Access and make our 1.0 release within this year."

That day has come, as PUBG is now officially out of Early Access. The new desert map, Miramar, is live on servers along with the new weapons, vehicles, and vaulting and climbing systems that a lot of players have already been experiencing on the test servers for the past couple of weeks.

If you're diving into Miramar for the first time, we've got a guide to the new desert map here. And, while PUBG has only just left Early Access today, it's natural to wonder what might be in store for it over the upcoming year.

CH Kim told me that, apart from continuing to work on better optimization and performance, one main focus would be on making improvements to PUBG as a budding esport, both for players and viewers.

"We are in the process of discussing with a lot of different production companies around the world to see [what] we could work together on, but we'll be putting in the effort to figure out what different tools and functions we can add to make the process itself more attractive and enjoyable," Kim said.

"When it comes to the in-game rules we are doing a lot of experimenting right at this moment, we've been gathering some of the top [ranked players] in Korea and trying to test out the speed and the size of the blue zone. We tried removing the red zone for certain games, and those are some of the experiments that have taken place so far. And when it comes to the scoring system, because with battle royale you can't just have one match and be over with it, there needs to be a series of matches in order for us to get a winner, we're making tweaks and we're further fine-tuning what to do with the scoring system as well. 

"While the core game mechanic itself will remain the same, we feel that throughout this experiment we could have some sort of more established tournament for PUBG next year.

"Or, like, a PUBG league next year," Kim added.

I also asked Kim about the sudden rush of battle royale games and modes that have been appearing over the past few months, as well as his take on Brendan "PlayerUnknown" Greene's recent comments about needing stricter IP protection in the gaming industry.

"For us, we feel like it's very natural for the genre itself to expand," Kim said. "Brendan commented for some companies that were specifically copying some of [PUBG's] game-specific features. I think he expressed his concerns toward that, but the fact that the last man standing battle royale genre itself is expanding, its something that we feel is very natural. And for us, we feel like [ours is] the first game that showed the world that this is a genre that could gain wide popularity within the gaming industry."

If you're not one of the 25 million people who have already bought PUBG, the price of $30 on Steam hasn't changed as it leaves Early Access.

Ultimate Chicken Horse’s levels look like sketches of booby-trapped underground lairs I drew when I was six years old. They’re patchwork obstacle courses of spike traps and wrecking balls where arrows bend round black holes right into the path of the helpless squirrel you’re controlling. And all of it is built, piece by piece and turn by turn, by you and your friends.

That’s the game’s hook: you start off with a blank slate and gradually create a platform monstrosity out of wooden planks, trap doors, and robots that fire rideable paper aeroplanes. Each player chooses an object at the start of a round and plonks it wherever they choose. Then everybody has a go completing the level simultaneously before adding another block and repeating the process. The creation tools are simple but after a few rounds you’ll have something that you can only complete by pulling off the most ridiculous of shimmies.

So why write about it now, more than 18 months after it first came out? Well, it’s just got a major new update called Elephantastic, and I reckon it’s the perfect excuse to jump in. The free update is timed to coincide with the PS4 launch, and adds cross-play. But it also adds a Challenge Mode that will help rookies perfect their jumping, new toys to play around with, and two new levels, one of which is brilliant. Plus, now you can be an elephant. Mustn’t forget about that.

One of the new levels, Volcano, isn’t all that special. Its gimmick is a series of shifting platforms balancing on jets of molten lava. It looks impressive, but there’s no getting away from the fact they’re just platforms moving slowly up and down.

However, the other new stage, Jungle Temple, is one of the best in the game. You jump through its ruins and collect a giant coin to trigger a rolling boulder that crushes everything in its path, Indiana Jones-style. Triggering that boulder, either accidentally or deliberately (you get more points if you finish the level with the coin), leads to a manic scramble to get out of its path. If you can find a nook you can take cover, but otherwise you’ll have to run for it, leaping between platforms and dodging traps to reach the red flag before you’re squished.

It adds a sense of panic to a game that already tests your nerves. The sheer number of traps keeps me constantly on edge, which is why I’ve missed more simple jumps in Ultimate Chicken Horse than I have in any other game. I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve died because my hands were so excited about the impossible gap I’d just slipped through that they sent me clumsily off the edge of a cliff. It’s a game as much about holding your nerve as mechanical skill.

It’s also a game about finding the right mix of difficulty and enjoyment. Lay out a simple path and it’ll be dull (you’ll know by the "Too Easy" emotes spammed in chat), but too difficult and you won’t be able to finish it. You’re also competing against your friends for a high score, so you’re trying to build the level around their weaknesses. Maybe they’re great at dodging traps but can’t get to grips with blocks covered in ice, for example. I’m playing with someone who’s much better than me, so I try to get a cheap win early on and then spend the rest of the time making the whole thing impossible. It’s a valid tactic, I reckon.

Thankfully, even if you’re bad at the jumping bits you can have fun in other ways. You get points for completing levels, but you also get points for killing your friends with well-placed traps. The new items in the Elephantastic update fit the bill perfectly. Chief among them is a giant wrecking ball that obliterates any player it slams into, and a spike trap that activates a second after you first touch it. Hop on and off quickly and your friend coming up behind you will get the point.

This is definitely a game that’s better with friends. You want someone to share those great escapes with, those crazy runs where you’re not quite sure just how you avoided both the punching sunflower and the flying hockey puck at the same time. My friend got out of a sticky situation by warping in and out of a black hole’s range so that it spat him out at exactly the right angle. "IT POOPED ME OUT!" he screamed with delight. It’s not a moment I’ll forget in a hurry.

But if you are playing alone, then the new Challenge Mode is a good place to start. You play levels made by other players where your goals are chiefly to just get through the damn thing in one piece, and secondly to compete against friends for the best completion times. If you’re new to Ultimate Chicken Horse, sort them by difficulty level and get a feel for how far you can jump. And then, when you’re feeling confident, click over to the online multiplayer. You can always find a match, servers fill up quickly, and people are generally friendly. Plus, the emotes are great for sarcasm. Mess up an easy jump and you’ll get a chorus of "Well Played."

It’s by no means a perfect platformer. Some of those easy jumps you miss will be down to the floaty controls (that’s my excuse anyway), and you sometimes slide off the edge of blocks when it looks like you shouldn’t. But those tiny gripes won’t be enough to stop you having a good time. Grab a group of friends and stomp all over it.

To the Moon was Kan Gao’s first commercial success, a game about memory, loss, and dreams of being an astronaut that many players felt a strong emotional connection with (by which I mean everyone cried). To the Moon exceeded expectations for a game created with RPG Maker, but it was not his first. Before that, he spent many years working with the much-mocked engine, refining his poetic writing through many smaller games.

Though lacking polish and scope, those first projects are an intriguing glance into Gao’s mind, and share many traits with the award-winning To the Moon. They have lovingly crafted soundtracks, deep themes and a focus on storytelling and atmosphere, on small gestures and human emotions (plus annoying puzzles and birds). Those early experiments can be downloaded for free on Freebird Games’ website, and can be a nice appetizer before To the Moon’s new sequel Finding Paradise.

But are they all worth playing?

Quintessence

Superficially, Quintessence looks very much like every teen’s first RPG Maker game, with default art assets, rough menus, and a wonky battle system. As soon as you start playing, however, you realize it has one big redeeming quality: craft.

It may look cheap, but its cutscenes are composed with the care you’d expect from a Final Fantasy game. The camera movements, the lovely animations, the pacing of the dialogue, the music, the expressions: everything is calculated. Quintessence feels cinematic.

It’s a game that starts at the ending, with a final dungeon and a hardened group of heroes solving puzzles and battling monsters. After their tragic defeat, we’re back to the start to witness how everything started. This is not a start in medias res followed by a flashback, though. Thanks to a pact with a deity, the protagonist effectively rewinds time, getting another chance to relive events. 

Unlike To the Moon, we’re not back in time to make everything better: the protagonist wants to avoid getting involved in this mess in the first place, but it doesn’t take much for him to get tangled again in a story full of shapeshifters, magic, and lies.

It’s an intriguing tale, but its pacing is glacially slow. Every map change is an excuse for a new cutscene, a conversation, or a new character to be introduced. Quintessence is packed with details, and the never-ending dialogues, combined with the intricate maps, can sometimes feel overwhelming. Battles, on the other hand, are a convoluted real-time affair, often just an excuse to stretch your fingers before the next dialogue.

It’s a game that demands patience, and unashamedly wears its JRPG influences on its sleeve. Those willing to give it a chance will get to enjoy a lengthy, compelling story full of twists—albeit one that might possibly never get an ending.

As Gao’s attention shifted to commercial work, the fate of Quintessence became uncertain. Although Gao stated his determination to finish the game, it has been officially on hiatus for more than five years, and it’s still missing its final chapters. Even if you are interested in a look at his early work, you may want to hold off for now.

The Mirror Lied

"This is NOT a horror game," the description says. There are no monsters, no jumpscares, and no ways to get a Game Over: you’re just a faceless girl in an empty house, tasked with the duty of… watering a plant. 

Weird, but not horrifying. And yet, there’s something palpably disturbing in the way the house withers and shifts as you explore it, looking for answers in dusty rooms illuminated by crepuscular lights.

Books in the libraries have titles, but the pages are all blank. The phone keeps ringing, ominous messages telling you that a mysterious "birdie" is coming to get you. And the world map pinned on a room gradually gets emptier, continents disappearing one after another. 

This is not a horror game, not one of the many Yume Nikki-inspired RPG Maker titles with small girls fighting big monsters. And yet, it’s impossible to walk away from The Mirror Lied without feeling a bit uneasy. What was it all about? I don’t know. Nobody knows (the most accepted theory: "some metaphor about the bird flu"). Perhaps not even Kan Gao knows for sure—people tried to ask him, and this was his official response: 

While Gao hasn’t made proper horror games, this sense of uneasiness, of crumbling realities and distorted dreams, brings to mind the two mini episodes that were released after To the Moon, the Holiday Special Minisode and Sigismund Minisode 2. 

Do You Remember My Lullaby? 

Kan Gao’s works are sometimes criticized for their lack of interaction. His virtual words can sometimes be reduced to little more than the occasional puzzle or brief walk from a cutscene to another. In this case, he solved the problem by simply not having a game at all.

Do You Remember My Lullaby? is an immersive movie about a mother and child, narrated with few words and many small gestures. It’s a Christmas story, perfect for this holiday season—though being a Kan Gao game there is no happy ending and everything is terrible. Even in this game, Gao used RPG Maker’s default assets to paint its world, but to call them simply "default assets" would belie what he did with them.

Instead of making assets from scratch, Gao focused on improving what he already had, giving each character a full range of small movements, expressions and gestures. Simple scenes, like a mother making a cake, are portrayed with an attention to detail that makes everything feel more humane. A perfect non-game to try if you have half an hour and a pack of tissues to spare.

Lyra's Melody

It’s another sad game, this one. But not for the usual reasons.

Lyra’s Melody is the forgotten idea for a full-fledged game, that became less and less important as To the Moon became Gao’s main project. The only trace of its existence are some forum posts that gives us a brief summary of what it could have been:

When Ralle Peregrine was a child, he began to hear a mysterious melody in his head. Around the same time, his childhood sweetheart, Lyra Shire, began to lose her hearing.

As they grew up, Ralle became a guitarist to accompany the strange melody that only he hears whenever he closes his eyes. By then, Lyra had gone completely deaf.

He wrote many songs for her, but she could hear none of them.

One day, when Ralle was playing the mysterious tune at his usual spot, a wagon came by and stopped. Out came a man; a wanderer named Traviston Estel, with a piece of rye hanging out of his mouth.

That of which he soon spat out, as he took out a music box, echoing the very melody that Ralle has been hearing all these years.

The only playable demo is a lovely, criminally brief affair with no fights and the usual mix of cutscenes and minigames. Not much happens in terms of plots, but the interactions between the two protagonists are pleasant enough to leave us wondering. As it stands, it's the ghost of a tale that may never be, worthy of a play only for the most fervent fans.

If you didn't enjoy To the Moon, Gao’s previous works aren't going to blow your mind. There’s no artistic revolutions here, no dives into new genres or new ideas. Kan Gao’s path has been focused on polish—on the meticulous refinement of his particular style of storytelling over the course of 10 years. It makes me wonder what he could do with a bigger budget and full team behind him, but I think I already know the answer. Gao’s games are popular because they manage to strike a chord even in their primitive, pixelated form. Additional resources would help him reach a bigger audience, but his games would remain exactly the same. Because this one time, they sent a poet.

Stardew Valley creator Eric Barone has been teasing fans of the hit farming sim for months. It started with a cryptic screenshot of a boat which, it was confirmed, would be part of upcoming singleplayer content. More recently, publisher Chucklefish dropped a slightly less cryptic screenshot of (what looks like) an underwater base alongside multiplayer beta details. Today, Barone is at it again on Twitter, but thankfully he brought some hard facts this time.  

New town and NPC events are especially interesting given Chucklefish's previous update, which said inter-player marriage and new town festivals a la the Flower Dance are making headway. The option to re-spec professions is also a head-turner, at least for me. In my experience, being able to mulligan skills is a surefire stress reliever.

Hello Neighbor makes for a great elevator pitch. You play as a suburban kid in a Pixar-inspired technicolour neighborhood where something sinister lurks beneath the bright colours and exaggerated lines. During the game's opening you witness your middle-aged neighbor behaving strangely, shouting and boarding up the door to his basement. Your task is to invade his house and discover his secret, using stealth and trickery to evade a single, ostensibly reactive, opponent.

It's an ambitious idea with a lot of promise: Alien: Isolation by way of The 'Burbs and Home Alone, a kid-friendly stealth horror sandbox. Unfortunately, Hello Neighbor doesn't deliver: after months of alpha versions, the launch version of the game is buggy, inconsistent, and frustrating. The initial charm of the art style and premise quickly gives way to trial-and-error drudgery, and the atmosphere that Hello Neighbor tries to cultivate is quickly punctured as the game's mechanical issues are starkly exposed.

There's no real distinction to be made between the neighbor's dynamism and his inconsistency. He has no routine that you can plan around or try to disrupt. Hello Neighbor doesn't clearly communicate what he can see, what he will be disturbed by, or what will trigger a search. I've had him run past me unfazed because I've got one ankle concealed in an inch of shadow and I've had him launch at me like a heat-seeking missile from 20 yards away when I was sure he was looking in the other direction.

There is a sort of reactivity at work, in that he'll lay traps near doors you frequently use and place cameras to block certain pathways, but these are easily cleared. Given that there's no real consequence for being caught—you're simply reset back to the start of the area—this feature doesn't add much beyond additional busiwork. It certainly doesn't create the sense that this strange, leaping, grunting, tomato-throwing man-thing is an intelligent opponent.

Each level has a fixed solution, with limited room for meaningful decision making. Once you've figured out the correct sequence of blocks to stack, doors to unblock, tools to find, power switches to flip and pipes to tinker with, Hello Neighbor devolves into a series of trial-and-error solution attempts. The neighbor exists to frustrate those attempts, but getting caught isn't a big deal: you keep any pickups that you've found and the level state remains much as you left it. In fact, it's often better to get caught rather than get drawn into an escape attempt. Getting reset back to the start of the level is a more effective way of shedding the neighbor's attention than trying to engage with Hello Neighbor as a stealth game—which is a clear sign that this isn't really a stealth game at all.

Instead, Hello Neighbor is best thought of as a puzzle game where you're frequently set back to the start of a section with very little you can meaningfully do about it. Puzzle solving also suffers for floaty movement, inconsistent physics, and bugs—such as key items vanishing—that can completely derail your progress. Some of the puzzle solutions, particularly in the second act, are inventive, but the frustrating, stop-start way in which you work towards them robs the game of its charm.

As Hello Neighbor progresses it becomes distinctly stranger, and the solutions to its puzzles move further and further away from the core premise. The house grows into a teetering, unlikely labyrinth full of egregious leaps of logic—think full-on Gabriel Knight 3 cat moustache territory.

I had exactly zero fun attempting to crack Hello Neighbor's later stages on my own, and it feels inevitable that you'll be pushed towards YouTube tutorials to figure out the frequently bizarre logic. In fact, Hello Neighbor seems far better suited to Let's Plays than actual play. It's a game whose bizarre logic benefits from quick-cut skip-to-the-solution editing, whose half-functional AI neighbor can be funny when it's not your playthrough that he's disrupting. 

In that the game functions as a vehicle for people to entertain one another, it has some potential as a pass-the-controller puzzle experience for players with a very high tolerance for repetition. That doesn't excuse the many areas where it doesn't function at all, however—those bugs, glitchy animations and crashes that crop up too frequently to be ignored.

Hello Neighbor's chief redeeming feature is its art, which is striking, and the often inventive setpieces that it constructs around its central mystery. There is genuine imagination and a sense of style at work, here, it's just a huge shame that it's bolted to such a frustrating, inconsistent game.

There's such huge potential in this idea, and sometimes when you're creeping through the neighbor's kitchen listening for the sounds of him moving about in another room you get a sense for the atmospheric home-invasion adventure this could have been. But then something goes wrong—you repeatedly collide with a low frame while trying to mantle through an open window, your hands clip through the floor while cowering under the bed, the object you're holding pings off at an odd angle never to be seen again—and the illusion breaks completely. Once it's gone you can never quite get it back, and when you realise that getting caught doesn't matter that atmosphere of fear will never really return. A sufficiently enthused YouTuber might be able to summon it back for the benefit of their audience, but for the regular player Hello Neighbor doesn't earn that kind of investment.

Our pick for Breakout Game this year, PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds, is finally leaving Early Access and heading to a 1.0 release on PC later today. To prepare for that moment, Nvidia has a new 'Game Ready' driver update for GeForce GPU owners.

The new 388.71 WHQL driver release promises to deliver the "best possible gaming experience" in PUBG.  It also adds support for CUDA 9.1, has a new SLI profile for Warframe, and a handful of new and updated 3D profiles.

As with most driver releases, Nvidia's driver team stomped out a few bugs with this newest release. They include:

• [YouTube]: Flickering may occur when playing videos in full-screen mode.
• [YouTube][Notebook]: Artifacts may appear when pausing video playback.
• Lines appear across the screen momentarily while booting into Windows.
• [Titan V]: TDR error occurs and the display goes blank while playing a Bluray
• disc at high resolutions.
• [GeForce GTX 1080][Notebook]: The driver may not recognize or install the GPU.

You can let Nvidia's GeForce Experience software fetch the new drivers automatically, or grab them here and install them manually.

Cuphead has sold over two million copies, developer StudioMDHR announced today. 

"Even in our wildest dreams, we never thought our crazy little characters would be embraced by this many fans from around the world and we are continuously humbled by your support," wrote studio co-founder Chad Moldenhauer. "So to everyone who has drawn fan art, composed memes, performed songs, conquered challenge runs, streamed their playthrough, or just played Cuphead and had a good time, we love and appreciate all of you from the bottom of our hearts."

Cuphead hit one million copies sold roughly two weeks after its September 29 launch, and at the time Steam Spy reported that approximately 575,000 copies had sold on Steam. Steam Spy now shows that roughly 1.1 million copies have sold on Steam, further cementing PC as the platformer's premier platform. (It's also available on GOG and the Microsoft Store.) 

To celebrate this sales milestone and the holiday season, MDHR has been giving away Cuphead game keys on its official Twitter. Your chances of snagging a non-redeemed key are slim, but if you feel like running with the bulls, you may want to keep an eye on their feed. 

If I’ve got the Latin right, Opus Magnum means “work great”. And by gosh, once you get into this puzzle game about building incredible alchemical machines, you’ll feel the buzz of working great over and over. It’s rare to play a game that provides such intense satisfaction, driven by a perfect balance of clearly defined and self-driven challenge. Flexible, intricate, demanding and deeply fulfilling, this has to be one of the very best puzzle games of the year, if not the decade. 

Opus Magnum is the latest in a series of similar machine-making games to which developer Zach ’Zachtronics’ Barth has apparently devoted his creative life. Magnum is probably most similar to his first and best-known, SpaceChem, in which you build chemistry machines. He went on to make games about electronics (Shenzhen I/O), computer chips (TIS-1000), and creating factories for aliens in the first-person Infinifactory. But despite Opus Magnum’s fantastical setting, in which you play an alchemist caught between warring Germanic families, it’s probably his most accessible yet. If you bounced off SpaceChem’s cold abstractness (I did) or felt bamboozled by Shenzhen I/O’s arcane complexity (me too), you might find yourself captivated by this one.

In each puzzle you’re tasked to produce a specific alchemical product. It might be booze to bolster an elderly soldier’s courage or a ladder to help stage a robbery, but whatever you’re making, it’s a set configuration of elements—air, water, fire and earth—and various types of metal. It’s your job to combine them from a predefined set of elements and components, transmuting air into salt, quicksilver into higher and higher grades of metal.

You perform these actions by placing your elements and components on a table divided into hexes. You’ll use arms to pick up and move elements or rotate them in place. There are tracks which transport them across the table. There are glyphs which bond elements together when they pass over them, and some which transform elements into different ones. You command all these mechanical pieces using rules. At the bottom of the screen is a sequencer in which you place simple commands for each component on the board: pick up, put down, move clockwise or counterclockwise, extend, retract, turn, repeat, wait. So you’re essentially building machines and then programming them, building and testing your way to your solution.

The magic to Opus Magnum is that while there are theoretical perfect machines, the space in which you construct your solution is so wide open that you feel like you’re piecing it all together entirely yourself, and the restrictions are entirely common sense (elements can’t collide with each other and you can’t pull them in two directions at once), so frustrations are usually down to your own inability rather than arbitrary rules, although at a high level the technicalities by which the game times and repeats instructions can be hard to parse.

You complete a puzzle when it can churn out six products to order, and then it’s scored against three criteria: the total cost of all the components you used, the area of the table you used and how many actions your machine took. You’ll see how your Steam friends rated and a histogram showing where your ratings lie across all players; I challenge you not to feel tempted to go right back again by this to make your machine better, and to wonder, how on Earth was it possible to make it *that* quick?

The three ratings are somewhat divergent from each other—a fast machine often costs a lot, for example—so you have to decide for yourself which one you value. But before you know it, you’ll be caught up in mechanical arms races, and this, my apprentice, is when you’re playing the real Opus Magnum. It’s a game for tinkerers. You can spend hours refining, rebuilding and reimagining your machines to shave cycles off them. Put it this way: I had 12 hours on the clock when I started the second chapter of its five; 12 hours of bragging over the early puzzles with my friends, being crushed by their counter-designs, and trying to come back with something superior. Puzzle games are rarely so free-wheelingly competitive, and the pleasure in that is down to how broad your options are. Heck, you can forget the ratings and build the most insanely convoluted machines instead. If it works, it works.

The fact that Opus Magnum is exquisitely presented, with each arm and component cast in burnished steel and moving with faultless precision just seals its appeal. I can watch my machines’ dances of arms and pistons, patterns of elements slotting perfectly into place, forever. And, naturally, you can generate gifs of them at a click of a button so everyone else can appreciate your genius. That simple feeling, of personal pride in a creation plugs into the very best qualities of not only the puzzle genre but all of creative play. Opus Magnum works great because it gets you to work great. 

Nominally a multiplayer brawler, Gang Beasts could more accurately be described as a slapstick facilitator. Rather than a deep or technical fighting game, it’s more a tool for daft, physics-led pratfalls. In that regard, it’s reminiscent of Coffee Stain Studios’ Goat Simulator. Though Gang Beasts is comfortably the funnier of the two, it’s similarly shoddy and annoying at times. In some ways, it’s not actually a very good game—yet its weaknesses are often the making of it.  

In case you’ve managed to miss it during its three years in Early Access, or at the dozens of gaming events at which it’s been showcased, Gang Beasts pits a group of wobbly fighters against one another across a variety of compact arenas. Double Fine might claim it’s “in the style of Streets of Rage or Double Dragon”, but it makes those creaky arcade hits look like models of precision and refinement. Boneloaf’s clumsy, tottering avatars are deliberately awkward to control, and the scraps play out like drunken altercations at chucking-out time – all missed headbutts, amateurish grappling and the occasional lucky haymaker laying someone out cold. 

Though they’re not one-button simple, the controls are intuitive, and offer a broader moveset than you might first think. It’s weirdly hard to land a regular kick, but combine it with a jump at the right time and you can knock an opponent flying. You can throw a left or right jab, but the same buttons can also be used to grab hold of people, railings, cones, girders or ledges. You can even climb walls, releasing your grip with one hand and hitting jump to swing yourself upward—particularly crucial on the Subway stage where you’ll need to clamber back onto the platform before a train arrives.

In practice, most matches devolve into frantic button-mashing, as you grab and fall over one another, never entirely sure who has the upper hand at any given moment. Amid the flailing arms, legs and heads, one of you will sporadically go limp, but the lack of any real feedback will rarely let you know why. When someone is prone, the race is on to lift them up and throw them to their doom—whether it’s off the side of a building or into an incinerator—before they successfully shake off their concussion. Even when all seems lost, you can enjoy the catharsis of taking your rival down with you by clinging onto an arm or leg as you’re dangling over the edge. 

The stages present as much of a threat as any opponent. One has giant chutes that open and close beneath your feet; another has collapsing floors; a third puts you all on thin ice floes, forcing everyone to race toward the only solid ground: a bobbing buoy. Trapped within a glass elevator, you can smash the sides or clamber up through a hatch before headbutting the cables and grabbing hold as they snap, sending those still inside plunging to their deaths. Customisable outfits add to the fun: it’s hard to remain grumpy at the physics screwing you over when you’re watching a man with a pumpkin for a head throwing a bear with a rucksack into a meat grinder. Or when a moustachioed penguin atop a runaway truck is smashed in the head by a road sign, accompanied by a resounding clang.

All of which makes it a hoot of a local multiplayer game. It’s a giggle with two players, and appreciably funnier with four. But that was true three years ago, and many of the same flaws are still present. Levels have several blind spots—during one online game, I was kicked for inactivity when I survived a fall by clinging onto the back of a building, with no way of seeing where I was to pull myself up. The presentation is bare-bones at best, and the other game types lay bare the game’s fundamental flaws. The infuriating Waves mode pits you against a series of ludicrously capable AI opponents: it took me four games to win a single round, and even that felt like a fluke. The woolliness of the controls and the feeble feedback are harder to forgive when the playing field doesn’t feel level. And while a football mode makes for an endearingly chaotic kickabout, you’ll probably play it a couple of times and not bother again. 

Online play is a bit of a bust, too. Matchmaking can take a while, but the real problem is that Gang Beasts’ wilful clumsiness needs to be shared with others: feeding off the yelps of frustration from a friend or family member is all part of the fun. Against unknowns over the internet, that in-built frustration overwhelms the slapstick. It’s here you realise why it’s been received so well at events: it’s the kind of game where four people can crowd around a TV, laugh themselves silly for 10 minutes and then forget about it until the next event rolls around. Three years on, Gang Beasts is still that kind of game. But it’s not much more than that.