I adore the premise of DoubleWe: you’re given a randomised appearance, dumped in a cramped sci-fi shithole full of dodgy-looking NPCs, and forced to find kill your identical clone before he can emerge from the crowd and shank you first.
There’s a demo for Steam Next Fest, and it’s provoked in me some of the most pulse-quickening paranoia since the days of DayZ.
ID’ing the clone is, despite the ruffian density, usually the easy part. You have a mirror on you at all times, and the Evil You typically prefers to bide their time and blend in instead of rushing straight for the kill, so you have a few moments to memorise your doppelganger.
Still, that window is better spent scrounging up a flimsy knife or one-shot pistol from weapon stashes. Rather than wrapping you in a comfort blanket of justifiable self-defence violence, however, arming yourself only serves to up the tension further.
Opening the stashes is agonisingly slow – my very first death came when the clone took advantage of my apparent difficulties with operating a briefcase – and the weapons themselves force you into close-range, all-or-nothing confrontations with an opponent who’s far less likely to miss their swing.