I have a wonderfully vague memory of a game my older brothers used to play on the Commodore 64 back in the day. It was a platform game, with pixel heroes and floating gantries and ladders and all that jazz, but there was also a wheelbarrow, and you needed the wheelbarrow to hold all the collectibles you picked up. When you’d all but completed each screen – as my memory had it – you then had to leg it back to the wheelbarrow and take it to the next screen where the whole thing was repeated.
RepoPublisher: SemiworkDeveloper: SemiworkPlatform: Played on PCAvailability: Out now February on Steam in early access.
Listen: I’m sure I could find out what this game was in a few minutes on Google, but I kind of want to retain my vaporous memories of it. Also, here’s REPO, the current It Game on Steam, and it’s similar enough – while also being incredibly different – that my inner wheelbarrow fan is sated.
REPO’s one of those multiplayer horror/comedy games that emerges every few months and ripples through schools around the country, around the world, I imagine, before disappearing and being replaced by something else. It’s got a bit of Lethal Company to it, in that you and your pals are dropped into strange environments and you must grab as much loot as you can and then get out of there. It’s got a bit of all of these kinds of games in it, because grabbing the loot and escaping are really only there so that when monsters attack you drop things and they explode. The game is there to create moments in which things go hilariously wrong, and you and your pals are so busy laughing you only make things worse.
I’ve been playing solo quite a bit, which is exactly the wrong way to play, but I figured I needed to learn the basics before I dived into a spiralling disaster situation with friends. And it turns out that soloing REPO is actually quite fun. In part this is because the game is just undeniably well made on the level of feeling. Walking is slow but there’s a lovely bodycam head bob to things, grabbing items and manipulating them is pleasantly Half-Lifian and everything around you has a lovely weight to it. Doors look like they could withstand nuclear blasts. Your collection cart feels like it could protect you from a few rounds before imploding, and it’s got the best kind of floatiness to it as you nudge it through another dark landscape of clutter on your way back to the extraction point.