Rust's crafting update gives the survival sim real-time food cooking and pies to rival Monster Hunter, but the tastiest treat is the ability to make and throw 'bee grenades' - Related to pies, budget-priced, getting, tenement, way

Blood Typers is a budget-priced fusion of Typing of the Dead and co-op survival horror

What makes a good videogame death? Dramatic timing? Screenshot-worthy spectacle? Or maybe just getting devoured by a monster because having to type 'AMPLE MINGE' to attack it induced a helpless giggling fit. While not a laugh-a-minute experience, Blood Typers has been a very pleasant and frequently funny surprise—a co-op fusion of Typing Of The Dead's madcap keyboard tutoring and the (still PS2-bound) multiplayer survival horror joys of Resident Evil Outbreak. Not bad for less than $10.

Despite being controlled purely through typing (with the shift keys to pan your camera left and right), this is a full-blooded survival horror game. A lack of puzzles aside, everything you'd expect in a Resident Evil or equivalent is present and correct. Inventory management, safe rooms, weapons with limited ammo, keys, complex navigation and an assortment of monsters attempting to eat your brains, with maps reshuffled roguelike style, giving each of the four scenarios (with at least one more coming in updates) decent replay value.

Blood Typers | Official Launch Trailer - YouTube Watch On.

It's familiar stuff, except that you interact with everything through typing. Move across the room by typing the words on the floor. Grab items by typing 'grab [item]' when nearby, and fight enemies by switching to a combat stance with tab and hammering out the target words that float over each monster.

It's a world away from the on-rails simplicity of Typing Of The Dead (which literally traded lightguns for keyboards), but that extra complexity makes for a great time, especially when you've got friends splitting up Scooby Doo-style—a decision that seems to fit all the advanced thanks to the game's low-fi aesthetics, chunky polygons and goofy cartoonish protagonists. Tone-wise, this is also more Illbleed than Silent Hill, with your crew being an assortment of film set staff trying to escape a cursed movie lot before its monstrous (and sometimes visually glitchy) inhabitants get them.

There's good reason to move quickly, too. While enemies can and will attack at any point, a ticking timer in the corner of the screen tells you when the next horde attack will happen, spawning a swarm of enemies that can sometimes be tactically challenging to deal with. It builds tension, and across the few multiplayer sessions I played, gave our group plenty to think about.

Even playing solo you need to study the map and optimise your route if you want to escape before ammo runs dry, and with a group, coordination and planning is half the challenge. The other half is being able to hammer out whatever the game asks you to without laughing.

My biggest fear (let's be honest, these googly-eyed protagonists make it more funny than scary) with the game was that the typing side would mesh awkwardly with the survival horror and co-op. I am very relieved to say that they go together like peanut butter and blood-red strawberry jelly. The controls work shockingly well, with even basic movement requiring constant engagement.

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I especially like how each weapon's quirks are represented in how you have to type at enemies. Melee against single targets is safe if you can keep a consistent stunlocking WPM up, but mistakes leave you open to damage. Pistols are obviously safer but will miss shots on typos, making them potentially expensive if you're butter-fingered.

The flamethrower sets multiple enemies alight, with each stack of flame damage reducing the number of letters you need to type to deal the next point of damage. The SMG breaks words up into segments, doing damage for each chunk of a word, making it feel like you're firing it in bursts. My favourite weapon of choice—the adorably named Necrolexicon—is a spellbook with nigh-unlimited ammo, no need to reload and deals reasonable damage, but requires you to type longer words than any other ranged weapon, making it the tool of choice for literal keyboard wizards.

The two halves dovetail almost seamlessly. In combat, a coordinated group can decide who's going to be aiming high, low or mid, allowing the group to hit all three word targets on a single zombie simultaneously. Even prepared, a horde defense can fall apart to one panicked typo stream (or giggling fit), due to ammo wastage.

It just works as both a typing and horror game, and works smartly. You can also adjust the typing and horror difficulty levels separately. The former scales up the base word length you'll be typing, and the latter adjusts the scale and toughness of enemy spawns, and both feel immediately significant.

Still, there's a few balance issues that could be hammered out. Some of the playable characters are just objectively advanced than the rest thanks to their perks. The gothy Ophelia has a hugely useful extra three slots of inventory space, while caterer Wren can combine and distribute food items a little quicker, which I just cannot see making much of a difference. Doug the Gaffer has a flashlight that slows enemy movement, while set-builder Hadley is a bit faster building or removing barriers, which sounds useful on paper but in reality isn't much help.

Those balance quirks aren't a major issue but might harm the game's long-term replay value. Beyond that, at the moment it feels like the only down-side to Blood Typers is a handful of minor bugs. The procedural map generation sometimes obscured items with (intangible) scenery, and enemies could spawn in weird clumps. Through my three co-op sessions so far, the only major issue we encountered was one player being unable to target some zombies briefly. Irritating, more than game-breaking and far from enough to sour the experience, and our group is planning on playing more this weekend. Blood Typers is out now on Steam, costs a svelte £[website]$[website], with a juicy free demo available.

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Rust's crafting update gives the survival sim real-time food cooking and pies to rival Monster Hunter, but the tastiest treat is the ability to make and throw 'bee grenades'

Rust - The Crafting upgrade - YouTube Watch On.

Video gaming is currently in an arms race (or should that be 'farms race') to depict the most delectable virtual food possible. It’s a race variously led by the Yakuza series, Final Fantasy, and most in the recent past, Monster Hunter: Wilds, which functions a cheese naan so mouthwatering it caused a sales surge of dairy-filled bread products in Japan.

Now, brutal survival sim Rust is getting in on the culinary action, with its arguably misnamed 'Crafting revision' placing a big emphasis on home cooking. Described by developer Facepunch as bringing a "feast of changes" to the game, it adds numerous elements dedicated to the creation of haute cuisine.

First and foremost is the cooking workbench, a "new deployable that allows you to cook up some new food recipes". Items unlocked by the cooking workbench apparently offer stat and modifier bonuses, so there's a practical reason to don your chef whites (note, do not actually don anything white in Rust, unless you want to get shot).

The crafting enhancement also makes substantial changes to the act of cooking itself, with all food items getting a visual model when placed on cooking deployables, while that food now "cooks in real time". You'll see steaks brown, chicken griddle, ribs crisp, and many other foods verb in an alluring manner. Likewise, food spoils over time too, so you need to make sure food is cooked or refrigerated to slow the decaying process.

New food items you can cook include bread, which comes bundled with the ability to grow and gather wheat, and an entire spectrum of pies, with each pie type providing different stat and modifier bonuses. Cooking a pie also rewards you with an animation of your character wafting the fresh pie smell toward their face, as you can see in the upgrade's release trailer above.

Other new capabilities include herbal teas you can make to warm up or cool down your character, a chicken coop for domesticating wild fowl, an engineering workbench, and a "hopper" that can be attached to storage items to suck up any nearby dropped items. This includes any creature that is killed in range of the hopper, which will be "harvested" Fargo style. That'll put you off your pie.

Anyway, now we've had the main course and dutifully eaten our vegetables, we can move onto dessert. Rust is getting bees. BEES. The official best insect will create hives on wild oak trees, which you can harvest for their delicious honeycomb (just make sure to wear a hazmat suit so you don't get stung to death). Bees can also be farmed by building beehives, providing access to what is clearly the greatest video game weapon ever devised—the bee grenade.

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This is, really, just a jar full of bees, which you can lob at other players to make them *Eddie Izzard voice* COVERED IN BEES. Specifically, thrown swarms "will slowly create up to 3 smaller Swarms to attack players in a nearby radius". Bee swarms can be fought with fire and water, or by wearing a hazmat suit. Alternatively, Facepunch implies you "run like the wind to get away".

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This brutalist life sim gave me a free tenement block to renovate, but my mushroom addiction kept getting in the way

It isn't every day that someone gives you an apartment, let alone an entire block of them. I'll admit, the whole-ass tenement that's just landed in my lap is run down, disconnected from the mains, and filled with glowing green mushrooms.

My new digs also might be located in the sealed off district where they contain people infected with a strange and debilitating fungal infection. And fine, the name of the district is literally "Open Sewer". Nonetheless, you'd be nuts to look a gift horse like that in the mouth, even if unveiled horse is unfurnished and smells overwhelmingly of damp.

This is the setup for Obenseuer, a delightfully strange blend of survival game and life sim from the makers of spooky structural analysis puzzler INFRA. Currently in Steam early access, where it's been since way back in 2018, the simplest way to describe it is House Flipper meets Pathologic, and it's the latter influence that attracted me to it.

Regular House Flipper has never appealed to me. Given I can't afford to renovate my own house, the idea of sprucing up an imaginary one seems like a mild form of torture. But if you throw in disease, depression, and some kooky NPCs, then pass me a paint-roller because I'm all in, baby.

Obenseuer sets the bar for weirdness high before you even acquire your dilapidated tower block, as a bunch of shadowy figures ask you via television screen what kind of addiction you have. From the four available options I select "mushrooms", mainly because it's more interesting than alcohol, and if you select "none" you get a worse addiction than if you just pick one outright.

I also have to answer several other questions, such as whether I have anyone close to me (Answer: my cat). And if there's anyone out there who I think might "pose a threat" to me (Answer: my crazy neighbour). Oh, and in answering the final question about my health, I end up with a mild alcohol dependency anyway.

While the visuals are simple, the district oozes with grimy, eerie personality.

Having completed this questionnaire, I'm informed that through what the TV people believe is a clerical error, I've been given a whole tenement block. I'm also given a complementary relocation package, which includes some food and drink, some mushroom supplement (for my mushroom cravings), and a disconcerting teddy bear, and then I'm unleashed into Obenseuer.

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The district is about the size of an American city block, comprising several shops like a pharmacy and convenience store, several rundown apartment blocks in addition to the one I own, and a lot of people living in caravans or just out on the street. While the visuals are simple, the district oozes with grimy, eerie personality.

My tenement is slightly separated from the district proper, located on the far side of a drainage canal and cordoned off by a chainlink fence. Here, some chancing citizen has set up a toll both seemingly designed to annoy me specifically, and it costs me ten Obenseuercoins (the district's local scrip) just to access my tenement.

The apartment block itself is an absolute dump: with no water or mains supply, a stairwell that has collapsed halfway up the tower, and rooms littered with all manner of detritus, including many piles of fluorescent yellow bags that all read "BIOHAZARD".

Needless to say, I have my work cut out for me. Obenseuer's renovation system is both intricate and convoluted. Before you can even begin decorating any apartment, it must be personally surveyed by you, then cleaned of detritus and wall graffiti (which requires you to buy cleaning fluid to remove).

At this point, you can hire a local contractor to do specific jobs for you, everything from fixing up the walls to fitting kitchens. Yet even the simplest job costs twice the amount of money you start out with, and that's just for labour. You must also supply the parts. Planks, nails, bricks, metal sheeting, even construction tarps must be factored into your financial equations.

At the outset, you can earn money by working for a local rooftop farm (which, to be clear, is a farm on a rooftop, not a farm that grows rooftops, though that would probably be more helpful) or by recycling bottles at the nearby bottle bank.

Neither brings in a whole lot of cash, however, and what little money you earn is often frittered away attending to your personal needs—eating, drinking, sleeping, using the facilities (which in my case was a "bucket potty" I found in a nearby apartment storage unit), and managing your various addictions. The game even simulates your mental health, with actions like eating poor quality food potentially leading to depression.

It's pretty punishing, probably a little too punishing with the current system balancing. It's incredibly easy to end up trapped in a subsistence feedback loop, not least because serving one need can increase another. Just drank a beer to satisfy your alcohol craving? Now you need to pee! Also, while it isn't entirely clear, addictions seem to be exacerbated the more you satisfy them, which may explain why my character seemed to be constantly inhaling mushrooms.

It's pretty punishing, probably a little too punishing with the current system balancing.

That stated. you can claw your way to success in Obenseuer, you just need to figure out how. You can purchase workstations to craft items that you can sell to local merchants. You can turn to a life of crime, breaking into people's houses and stealing everything that isn't nailed down.

Simply poking around can often yield surprising rewards. Many areas of the district are bricked or boarded off, and these can be 'accessed' using the right tools, with many containing hidden valuables.

Assuming you can raise the funds to get an apartment to a basic living standard, you can then let it out to tenants located around Obenseuer. Different tenants have different requirements. Some only need the bare minimum, like walls that aren't falling down and plumbing. Others are right prima donnas, requiring things like electricity and a functioning kitchen. What do you want next, an indoor toilet? This isn't the Ritz, you know.

In any case, getting tenants in provides a passive source of income, which obviously makes renovating the rest of the block easier. But it will also help you pursue your real goal of unravelling the mysteries of the district.

I'm not going to explain much of this here, but there's a lot more to Obenseuer than is initially obvious. Finding the right people, and taking on the right quests, can open up pretty massive new areas of the map. There's some wild stuff going on right under your feet.

But you don't need to delve too deeply to discover that Obenseur is profoundly odd. The local mini-market has a fully simulated checkout system. There are vending machines that dispense live rats. The general store is run by a robot made out of rubbish bags.

After poking around my tenement, I discovered that the crazy neighbour I thought I'd left behind was living on the first floor, and was absolutely delighted to see me despite my character seemingly having no memory of him. You can even ask him to pay rent, though something about him, perhaps the fact he had his face painted like someone had put a clown mask on a shark, convinced me this was a bad idea.

It's also worth noting that, while the game is ostensibly about becoming a capitalist slumlord, you don't have to engage with the tenement renovation at all.

You can just wander around chatting to people, subsisting on the meagre funds you collect from recycling bottles, or sticking every coin you have into the mushroom vending machine (there's several of these too) and getting stoned off your nut on hallucinogenic mycelium. Obenseuer may still be deep in early access, but it's already a fascinating and, provided you don't mind applying a bit of elbow grease, surprisingly rewarding time.

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