The sumptuous art of Winnie Song’s BADBLOOD belies its brutal subject matter. Here’s the gameplay in a nutshell: You and another human being play hide and seek simultaneously, each of you seeking and hiding at the same time. The seeking happens in and out of the game. The first person to find the other one kills them. In the game.
This subversive game encourages you to do something that would have been frowned upon 18 years ago when huddled around a game of Goldeneye 007: the practice commonly referred to as screen cheating. In BADBLOOD, you can’t see your enemy directly on your half of the screen until they strike, so discerning their probable location, and your own in relation to theirs, often requires visual information from both points of view.
Even when you’re armed with input from both perspectives, you still have to correlate and interpret the data, and you have to do it quickly. Go ahead and look at your adversary’s half of the screen; you might end up even more confused than before. Each player views their window on the world from a different orientation. Your north might be 90 or 180 degrees away from your foe’s north. Furthermore, those orientations can shift at any moment.
You can stalk through the game’s high grasses slowly and stealthily, or you can move quickly and potentially reveal your location—or fake out your enemy. A single accurate blow will dispatch your prey in a spasm of stylized violence. But if it turns out you were wrong about their location—if you strike and hit only empty square—you’ll be left momentarily vulnerable to attack while you recover.
There are 4 different characters as which to play, each one differentiated by a stunning character design and a gameplay-altering special ability: the hitwoman, the hunter, the mechanic, and the kid. Also, there’ll be a second game mode, which wasn’t playable in the latest demo, in which the two players take turns being designated hider and seeker in 30-second rounds.
Playing BADBLOOD can make you feel trepidatious, terrified, and triumphant, all in the space of a minute. Games of BADBLOOD can be intensely quiet, or there can be a lot of shouting involved. It’s already been Greenlit, and it’s expected on Steam before the end of the year. It should be available for both PC and Mac.
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You can also check out the single-player “prelude” game BLOODSPORT.
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