I hope Straftat is 2024's breakout shooter, because the demo's 25 maps are gloriously unwholesome

rockpapershotgun.com:

"Do you have a ping of 1000 or something," my opponent asked, during my inaugural bout of Straftat. Ah yes, this is it, that sense of unpleasantly intimate sheepishness. That's the withering late-90s chatbox scorn I've been missing, in this age of glossy live service multiplayer. I hid under a stairwell in order to meditate upon my response, then laboriously typed: "No, I just suck." Right on cue, the other player tumbled into view and shredded me with an AK.

The player I met in my second match was more forgiving. "I honestly think the characters need more HP," they said, generously. My wrists need more HP, actually. My eyes and reflexes need urgent patching.

Straftat is the work of them what did Babbdi, a melancholy Brutalist playground which Alice0 (RPS in peace) called "a bit Bernband, a bit Off-Peak, a bit freeform explore-o-platformer". That game had terrific, haunted architecture - ponderous, gap-toothed swathes of concrete that begged to be clambered up and "broken" using such unlikely parkour tools as leaf blowers and trumpets. And so does Straftat, though it casts a wider net and seems more happy-go-lucky in its referencing.

It's a 1v1-only shooter with no progression systems, just weapons collected from maps that are dealt out at random, from round to round. You get 25 maps in the demo, with 100 in the full release on 24th October. So far, they are all surprisingly non-throwaway. The offerings include: parsley-painted Backroom-style labyrinths (look out for the flamberge spawn, nestled in the crawlspace); vertiginous square walks with sniper rifles at either end, and miniguns perched temptingly in the middle; jumbles of unhelpfully porous gantries and teleporters. Some maps feel like chunks of city, with glowering signage and abandoned cars; others are memes fleshed out into sets, surfing the entropy at the end of history. Everything looks sordid and rundown and unliveable, and I love it all to bits.

The weapons, meanwhile, range from glocks and