KnifePlayground is an Unreal horror royale with bodycam combat, demon clowns and a shapeshifting mansion
Let's get this out of the way first: KnifePlayground: Horror Battle Royale is an absolutely terrible name for game. You might as well call Halo "GunMap: Alien Crowd Control", or Baldur's Gate 3 "TownDungeon: Party Enhancement Simulator". But the project beneath the moniker has something to it. Announced just today and created by small Brazilian team MadMozer, it's a first-person, multiplayer-focussed, Unreal Engine deathgame that traps you in a randomly generated mansion with a bunch of archetypal horror movie munsters - demon clowns, cursed puppets, toothy ghouls and hooded axe-murderers.
There are two ways to play: a roguelite-esque one-to-four-player mode in which you undertake tackle unspecified "challenges" and puzzles while searching for a way out, and a 10-player battle royale mode in which you must fight other players and the resident creatures simultaneously. Mansion floors close after a countdown, dooming players on that level, so each round is punctuated by a rush to the elevator.
It's early days, of course, but there are a couple of things I like about the Steam announcement footage. Firstly, I'm enjoying the presentation. The game makes use of a woozy bodycam-style perspective, a choice of framing recently popularised by UNRECORD, but much less disturbing here, for all the buckets of gore, because KnifePlayground isn't a realistic simulator in which you play a police officer breaching houses.
The game also mimics straight-to-VHS B-movies with a staticky curved CRT overlay and a trailer commentator who has terrible laryngitis. The mansion itself is a work of John Wicky purple lighting and ornamental plaster fittings. And then there's the melee combat: it reminds me a little of my old favourite Condemned:
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