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Let’s get this out of the way first: KnifePlayground: Horror Battle Royale is an absolutely terrible name for game. You might as well call Halo “GunMap: Alien Crowd Control”, or Baldur’s Gate 3 “TownDungeon: Party Enhancement Simulator”. But the project beneath the moniker has something to it. Announced just today and created by small Brazilian team MadMozer, it’s a first-person, multiplayer-focussed, Unreal Engine deathgame that traps you in a randomly generated mansion with a bunch of archetypal horror movie munsters – demon clowns, cursed puppets, toothy ghouls and hooded axe-murderers.
There are two ways to play: a roguelite-esque one-to-four-player mode in which you undertake tackle unspecified “challenges” and puzzles while searching for a way out, and a 10-player battle royale mode in which you must fight other players and the resident creatures simultaneously. Mansion floors close after a countdown, dooming players on that level, so each round is punctuated by a rush to the elevator.
It’s early days, of course, but there are a couple of things I like about the Steam announcement footage. Firstly, I’m enjoying the presentation. The game makes use of a woozy bodycam-style perspective, a choice of framing recently popularised by UNRECORD, but much less disturbing here, for all the buckets of gore, because KnifePlayground isn’t a realistic simulator in which you play a police officer breaching houses.
The game also mimics straight-to-VHS B-movies with a staticky curved CRT overlay and a trailer commentator who has terrible laryngitis. The mansion itself is a work of John Wicky purple lighting and ornamental plaster fittings. And then there’s the melee combat: it reminds me a little of my old favourite Condemned: Criminal Origins, with cutaway finishing moves (yes, “cutaway” in several senses) reminiscent of Rockstar’s Manhunt.
The battle royale component’s emphasis on racing to the elevator could make every round a series of chaotic corridor brawls, but there’s some incentive to hang back and pick your moment: you’ll need to search floors for weapons such as pistols, chainsaws, shotguns and fireaxes, together with arcade claw machines that appear to bestow upgrades. It’s not clear how extensive the game’s randomisation is: will map layouts themselves change, or just weapon drops and puzzle locations?
“KnifePlayground is our first big and mature project, and after years of learning and experience, we have a well-prepared team to face all the challenges ahead,” the developers write on Steam. Their previous games include the relatively cuddly (and pretty well-received) single-screen arena shooter PiraCrash, in which you play a fiesty rubber duck with a popgun. Things have certainly escalated.