Amazon Games has announced King of Meat, a new game from ex-Lionhead and Media Molecule developers.
The party game is part co-op action multiplayer and part dungeon builder. Players team up online in the fictional King of Meat TV show to complete dungeons filled with enemies and traps; then dungeons can be created from scratch and shared with the game’s community.
Developer Glowmade is led by Jonny Hopper who previously worked for Lionhead on the Fable series and Media Molecule on LittleBigPlanet, along with other staff from those companies.
With that knowledge, it’s clear where the game’s irreverent British humor and focus on user-generated content stems from.
Prior to the game’s announcement, I was able to go hands-on with the game and had a lot of fun with its explosive, chaotic action. Players team up in groups of four to tackle dungeons bridging with skeletal and goulish enemies, spike traps, bombs, bottomless pits, and more. The controls are tight but the action is relentless, between belly flopping jumps and combat that balances dodges and parries with outlandish special moves. I could stomp on enemies with a giant horse hoof, for instance, or belch enemies off platforms.
Best of all, this works against teammates too, adding a welcome competitive edge. Spotting some crowns on a high ledge worth extra points, I belched my fellow players away to grab the treasure for myself. Trolling is highly amusing, but players will need to work together for the top scores.
It’s a little like Fall Guys, then, but with a naughtier, sillier tone. Unlike Epic’s game, though, King of Meat won’t be free-to-play, but nor is it premium. It’s “right in the middle,” Hopper told me.
“We’re being very clear, we’re not doing a battle pass,” he continued. “There’s no kind of pay-to-win, pay-to-progress stuff… We’ve got an offering that is out of the box 100+ levels, 30-40 hours of actual game. That’s the kind of thing we “I want to be playing.”
It’s clear that building a community and encouraging creativity through building dungeons is key to the game’s longevity, although post-release Glowmade will be adding new content, levels, costumes, and story beats. It’s not exactly a live-service game then, something Hopper said is a “loaded term”, but there’s clearly an intention for the game to evolve over time through new content both from players and the developers.
So why a co-op game? “In terms of the tone of what the game is – working together and having fun together rather than working against each other – that as a primary focus was something we felt fitted us,” said Hopper. “The game has a fairly weird wrapper on it, but at its heart it’s quite wholesome. One of the cool things about being in a game show where all the skeletons are actors, you’re not actually killing anybody… So we’ re working together, everyone’s playing apart and everyone goes down the pub afterwards to have a laugh about it – that’s the approach.”
Our preview didn’t include time with the build mode, but Hopper assured it’s been designed for controllers first for intuitive ease of use. Players will first create a layout before filling it with enemies and traps with a simple stamp system. These can then be linked together with switches and the like to form logic puzzles.
Dungeons can be built completely free-form, or for specific leagues where certain rules and themes are in play. Moderation is, of course, a big part of this, but once approved player-made levels will be included in general rotation.
User-generated content is the “backbone of the studio,” said Hopper. “It’s about longevity, but it’s actually about empowering people to be creative. The nice thing about what we’re doing is giving people opportunities to make stuff that has never been made in ways they didn’t think they could do it.”
That goes for dressing up characters in the creator as much as dungeon creation. “We’re trying to make it hard to make something bad,” he added. “Suddenly four hours later, you’re a level designer. I think that’s the thing that brings us joy to see and brings people joy to do. That’s the real key to it.” As for the actual building, it will feel less like a tool and more like a game itself: “tactile, fun, with different audio and things moving and responding.”
After playing a dungeon, players can reward the creator – just like in LittleBigPlanet. It builds a community by connecting players and creators, and incentivizes creators to make interesting levels.
Between dungeon runs, players will return to the central plaza to receive gold from completed challenges, level up weapons, unlock new costumes, and plenty more. There are a variety of deranged, vibrant characters to meet and it all ties in with the whacky corporate theme of the game. After all, players will need to please the show’s audience with their antics to keep a combo going, and between each session loading screens include bizarre adverts for, to pick one example, armor polisher called Mom’s Spit.
That humor is down to a collective effort from the team and the enduring spirit of the Guildford development scene, which includes Lionhead, Media Molecule, and previously Peter Molyneux’s Bullfrog Productions (Theme Hospital) among others. “The game is not the product of one person,” said Hopper. “If you meet the team, you’ll go ‘oh I completely understand why this team has produced this game’.”
The studio’s motto for the game is “joyful creativity,” and that certainly rings true playing through King of Meat. Its name is as farcical as the action, but it could prove to be a new multiplayer favorite.
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