An $8 cooperative horror game is rocketing up Steam's top sellers list: 'Never occurred to me Lethal Company was missing physics until I played this' - Related to me, until, dedicated, pie,, whole

An $8 cooperative horror game is rocketing up Steam's top sellers list: 'Never occurred to me Lethal Company was missing physics until I played this'

[website] - Official Release Trailer - YouTube Watch On.

'Lethal business clone' is one of the three remaining genres that now encompass the entirety of Steam, the other two being 'Vampire Survivors clone' and 'hentai'. Most of these games briefly clog up the new releases tab before being replaced by yet more cooperative, autobattling horror porn (the first person who develops that game will make a squillion bucks). Yet occasionally, one sticks the landing. Such is the case with REPO, a game about repossessing items from creepy buildings that, at the time of writing, is selling more copies than Civilization 7.

Looking at REPO, it isn't hard to see why. It takes the monster-chewed bones of Lethal enterprise, expands the max player count from four to six, and adds two differentiating capabilities. First, it casts players as googly-eyed, primary coloured pedal bins resembling the storybots from Netflix's Sesame Street knockoff Ask the Storybots, complete with mouths that flap like a muppet's whenever the player speaks over voice chat. Second, it imbues the entire experience with wibbly-wobbly physics.

Every object in the game can be lifted with a telekinetic beam. But each object also has a different weight value, so larger objects need to be lifted by multiple players—similar to top-down cooperative game Moving Out. Amusingly, players can also lift each other, which can be used to access new areas, or, as demonstrated in the above trailer by the group dunking one player into a toilet, for hijinks.

There's one other thing that REPO does differently from Lethal corporation. When players are spotted by one of the monsters lurking around, players can try to hide from it, squashing their bodies right down so they can creep under tables or other obstacles. This adds a bit more tension and back-and-forth to player escapades.

All of this had led to REPO quickly garnering an 'Overwhelmingly Positive' rating on Steam from almost 2,000 reviews. "Never occurred to me Lethal business was missing physics until I played this game," writes Steam user eternalreflect, adding its "surprising how much fun you can have throwing around objects—or being thrown yourself." User Polaris, meanwhile, praises REPO's more freewheeling approach to cooperative horror action. "I personally love the fact that there really isn't a time limit when you're in the mission, you can explore and take as much time as you need."

It's also worth noting that REPO is an early access game, with developer semiwork stating it expects to release the final version in "around 6 to 12 months." While the studio doesn't detail its exact plans for the early access period, merely stating it wants to "work with the community to make this game the best it can be", it points out REPO is already "perfectly playable" and "fleshed out" with three worlds, 19 enemies, 29 equipment items and eight player upgrades.

REPO is available now. The RRP is £[website]$10, though it's currently running a 20% launch discount.

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Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion gets a whole gamejam dedicated to Persuasion Pie, co-hosted by a Don't Nod developer

Among the dorkiest aspects of Bethesda's winningly dorky The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion is the persuasion wheel minigame - also known as Persuasion Pie, also known as the Wheedlin' Roundabout, also known as the Dartboard of Indoctrination. (Maybe not so much the last two.) This saw you choosing methods of gaining NPC affection from a disc with quadrants labelled "Admire", "Joke", "Coerce" and "Boast", each of which elicits a different response previewed by the NPC's gurnishly changing expression.

You have to choose all four options at least once per round, and the underlying "pie" rotates every time you pick one. The underlying segments are partially filled in to show how much they'll affect the NPC's opinion, for superior or worse. The idea, then is to match responses that have a positive effect to the largest chunks of pie, by picking them in the right order. If you think all that sounds incredibly overwrought and laborious, then you are clearly not one of the hosts of Wheeljam 2025, a gamedev community knockabout dedicated to Bethesda's ole Tart Of Cajolement. Here is a trailer.

The jam runs from Thursday, March 13th to Thursday, March 20th, the 19th anniversary of Oblivion's 2006 launch. Oblivion aside, it takes inspiration from Bass Reeves Can't Die, an unfinished game concepted by Strange Scaffold boss Xalavier Nelson Jr, worked on by a group including Don't Nod Montreal's Colin McInerney, and promoted/discussed by Youtuber Julian "Noodle" Morley.

"Feel free to iterate on the original persuasion-puzzle concept or abstract your wheel into something entirely new!" explains the jam page on [website] "If your wheel is recognizably derived from the Oblivion wheel in any way shape or form, it is fair game."

Entry is free, and the hosts have considerately put together some Unreal, Godot and Unity Engine templates for people to work from. They're also offering prizes in the shape of 3D-printed Oblivion Persuasion Models. From the Itch page: "They spin! And have magnets! Maybe I'll put your names and the categories on the back of the wheel? I dunno! I didn't think that far ahead!"

There are several prize categories. Under "Hotwheels", we file developers who "spend an exorbitant amount of time juicing your wheel, making custom graphics for it, and making it buttery smooth". Under "Reinvent The Wheel", we find those who "use the wheel in a way that even the most seasoned game designers couldn't possibly fathom". And under "Put The We In Wheel", we find developers who "somehow found a way to have multiple wheels".

I'm quite fond of Oblivion's Brainwashing Pizza. I'd love to see another developer randomly revive it as an in-game item - perhaps Kojima can be pie-suaded to build it into Death Stranding 2. I also adore gamejams run by sickos who are obsessed with extremely specific elements or mechanics from many decades ago. I'll be keeping one eye on this while the other remains peeled for news of Microsoft's long-rumoured Oblivion remake.

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Diablo speedrunners searched 2.2 billion random dungeon seeds to debunk a two-decade old speedrun record

A team of Diablo speedrunners spent months searching the 1996 RPG's [website] billion valid randomly generated dungeon seeds to find the layout used in a stupidly lucky speedrun they suspected to be illegitimate, says a new findings from Ars Technica's Kyle Orland.

The three minute, 12 second sorcerer run by Maciej "Groobo" Maselewski was first uploaded to Speed Demos Archive in 2009. Watching it "feels like watching someone win the lottery," writes Orland, thanks to a seemingly random streak of entrance and exit stairways right next to each other, allowing for a rapid, safe descent through the dungeon. Groobo lucked out again on the ninth floor, nabbing the Naj's Puzzler item needed for later teleporting exploits.

Beginning "in earnest last February", a team of tool assisted Diablo speedrunners started trying to recreate the run, using their own custom map generation tool built by "reverse-engineering a disassembled Diablo executable". From Ars:

That tool can take any of the game's billions of possible random seeds and quickly determine the map layout, item distribution, and quest placement available in the generated save file. A scanner built on top of that tool can then quickly look through those generated dungeons for ones that might be optimal for speedrunning.

The team's initial goal here was just to learn from Groobo's run, both for their own speedrunning and as a test case to make sure the scanner worked. The problem? The seed they were looking for didn't actually exist. Groobo had, in other words, made up the whole thing. "We just had a lot of curiosity and resentment that drove us to dig even deeper," a runner named Staphen told Ars. "Betrayal might be another way to describe it," added team member AJenbo. "To find out that this had been done illegitimately... and the person had both gotten and taken a lot of praise for their achievement."

In their effort to find Groobo's storied run (or at least one that resembled it), the TAS team conducted a distributed search across the game's roughly [website] billion valid RNG seeds. Each of these seeds represents a different specific second on the system clock when a Diablo save file is created, ranging from between January 1, 1970, and December 31, 2038 (the only valid dates accepted by the game).

After comparisons failed to turn up a re-creation of Groobo's dungeon containing the level 9 Naj's Puzzler drop, they began to search "impossible seeds" - "which could only be created by using save modification tools to force a creation date after the year 2038". They eventually found dungeons with the drop in the right place, using seeds for the years 2056 and 2074.

They also discovered that the original speedrun video had been spliced together from multiple different runs. "In the end we only found two levels that had come from the same run so at least 13 (probably 15) runs were spliced into one video, which is a lot for a game with just 16 levels," AJenbo told Ars.

Other evidence (some of it quite glaring in hindsight) began to pile up afterwards, but do read Ars Technica's full piece for that. Why go to all this trouble for a 27 year old speedrun? "It did harm," speedrunner Cecil told Ars. "Groobo's alleged cheating in 2009 completely stopped interest in speedrunning this category [of Diablo]. No one tried, no one could."

If that's all left you feeling exhausted at the lurking deception inherent in men's souls, Here's a free Diablo-inspired indie where you play as the mayor of Tristam - an upstanding chap by all counts.

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