To say I bounced off SpyParty after a morning might make it sound like I did not enjoy myself, or that the game's many pleasures failed to have much effect on me. In truth, I found those pleasures astonishingly effective. SpyParty, for me, is the sweetest torture imaginable. I played a morning's worth of matches if that, even so, I felt myself teetering on the very edge of terrifying depths, and so I fled.

I have never played a game quite like this, and yet it is so simple. SpyParty requires just two players, one of whom plays the spy while the other plays a distant sniper trying to kill the spy. The spy must mingle with a crowd of AI characters and pull off a series of simple missions within a set amount of time. The sniper must scan the faces, the wash of moving bodies and fluttering hands, and work out which of the people they can see is controlled by the first human player and must therefore be killed.

Each role offers a handful of complications. There are the missions that the spy must carry out, for example, each of which affords them ample opportunity to betray themselves. They might be spotted switching over a statue, for example, or bugging the ambassador, which involves getting close to the clearly signposted character in question and doing a certain hand gesture. But beyond those tasks and others, they might just give themselves away by not behaving like an AI character. They might stop in the wrong place. They might walk without the right kind of purpose. Or they might find themselves low on time and check their watch to add a few seconds to the clock - and get plugged while they're at it.

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SpyParty, the two-player competitive spy versus sniper game set at an exclusive cocktail party, comes out on Steam as an Early Access title on 12th April priced 19.49.

In SpyParty, one player is the sniper, the other the spy who tries to avoid detection by mingling with a crowd of fancy partygoers. The skill comes from sniffing out unusual behaviour, or making your behaviour as "usual" as possible while completing mission objectives. Games last a few minutes each, with matches usually involving 10 or 20 games.

Chris Hecker, who led the development of much of the tech behind Maxis' Spore, has worked on SpyParty for eight years. Almost 24,000 copies have so far been sold on the official SpyParty website, where there is a small but bustling community of players. Things are about to change for SpyParty, though, as it launches on the biggest video game platform on earth.

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