The horrible comedy bloodsport King Of Meat should have been called King Of Meme

I really don’t like sucker-punching video games the moment they’re announced, but playing Glowmade’s King Of Meat is three hours of my life I’ll never get back, and every second I spend writing about it extends that total, pushing me closer to a regrettable demise. Here’s what I’m more positive about: buried within the core of this bubbling interactive snarkfest is a halfway OK third-person dungeon crawler for parties of four.

The dungeons span various levels of challenge, and consist of corridors and arenas with action platforming widgets such as spike pits or spinning bars or timed exploding barrel dispensers. Enemies so far consist of various troll and skellington pieces, spawning in unpredictable waves, and there are treasure chests hidden behind breakable walls or laid out in high alcoves.

You get a couple of dozen of such dungeons for your money (it’s a paid game), but you can also build and share your own maps using a LittleBigPlanet-esque editor, which I didn’t get to try out during my hands-on earlier this month. Combat is a serviceable blur of melee combos, musketry and special move cooldowns, the unfussy details of which quickly get lost in the scrum. It’s a colourful and, dare I say, carnivalesque affair, with cartoon SFX bursting at the seams, and while the build I played was a little patchy and glitchy, there were still mild feelings of amusement to be had from the act of competing for the biggest gold haul and sabotaging your mates by, say, throwing bombs at them.

Any ethos of fun at work in King Of Meat, however, is quickly rushed and strangled by the humour and world-building, which exists largely to ironise the fact that this is a big, flashy unlock grind. The game roughly fits the definition of a satire: it’s set in a medieval fantasy world plagued by the shittiness of a corporate theme park, like Shrek 23 years later. Five giant corporations have built a WWE-style death game in which warriors battle for glory and trinkets. Self-awareness dusts the proceedings like roses. Everything is a gross meme or a winking fourth-wall shaker or a smattering of tepid slapstick: sausage mallets, foam swords, Viking hats, a special move that lets you burp people into crevices.

The writing delivers a variety of skits and caricatures with some lively voice acting, but I found it all pretty much unbearable. For example, there’s a crowd hype mechanic that increases your treasure income if you avoid damage and do incendiary things like, well, usually just smashing lots of barrels. The highest crowd hype level is “yaaaaaas.” Reading that sentence made me think with renewed pain of the teaching job I nearly got in 2006, before I was duped into becoming a professional online shitposter. Ah, I could have been a serious contender in the world of education, you know. It was a school in Croydon and I was the second. The kids looked at me with awe and respect. These days, the only thing they send me are death threats on Twitter.

King Of Meat’s satire is complete and utter bullshit. During our hands-on, the developers cited films like The Running Man and Starship Troopers as inspirations, but were reluctant to say that the companies in the game are parodies of any particular business or real-world practice. It’s the kind of social commentary you often get in video games, even those not published by Amazon: make people feel vaguely smart about the cringe-worthy capitalist hellhole they’ve actually found themselves in, but offer no real focus or sustained structural critique. Don’t connect the dots between the jokes.

The developers also told me that they’re not making fun of other progression-drenched live service games, which is probably a good thing, since King Of Meat has more peripheral merchandising than most real-world sports stadiums. A solid third of our hands-on was devoted to checking out the shops and stalls in the game’s hub plaza. Whenever it seemed like we were having too much fun in the dungeons, they’d trot us out to pick up a new cosmetic or booster or whatever. It was like getting on a rollercoaster and having to get off every 50 meters to buy some stuffed animals.

I might have felt better about King Of Meat if the hands-on event itself had been a little less Hype. The developers in attendance were all dudes in their 30s and up, and it made me deeply sad to watch them try to whip themselves and the assembled journalists into a frenzy of glee over things like new shoulder pads. Still, my advancing years and increasingly resentful state of mind should definitely be taken into account here. The is In general, it is good to be optimistic about your own work, and there were journalists at the event who got all excited, but PR people, please do your homework before you invite the Grinch to your school Christmas pageant. I have a pretty public record of being a miserable old fart.

Let me say it out loud, and without shame: I don’t have it in me to get Hype anymore. Certainly not for raiding dungeons. I think I’ve literally shed and excreted the gland that produces excitement about loot. And while I find jokes about farmers funny from time to time, the execution has to be impeccable. It has to be delivered with the sober precision of a sleek kung-fu swordsman bisecting a single, azure raindrop in a hurricane, and even then I’m not going to laugh more than once, not even if you performatively bellow in my ear.

King Of Meat, then: probably not on the wishlist. I had a more pretentious angle in mind for this article – the developers told us they couldn’t remember who came up with the title, which felt fitting for a dystopian fairy tale that’s all gloss and gestures, with little sense of actual, vital meat at its core. Then again, I’m going to die someday, and I don’t want to do it while mournfully remembering the hours I spent trying to extract an over-the-top Thinky Piece from a game about sausage hammers. King Of Meat is on Steam, with no release date yet.