This year's game market has to be said to be extremely lively, only 4 months after the beginning of the year, there are heavyweights such as "Kingdom of Salvation 2", "Civilization 7", "Monster Hunter: Wildland", if you look further, there are also "GTA6" and "Death Stranding 2" that have attracted much attention, and they are all unique in their respective fields, and each game has a deep IP heritage, as well as a large group of loyal fans.

Then the problem also arises, in the market environment where all schedules are crowded out by big games, the difficulty of solo travel is probably much more difficult than in previous years.

At the end of February, steam ushered in the first popular indie game of the year, "R.E.P.O", which reached a peak of 27W in the first month of its launch, and once surpassed the new monster hunt on the steam best-selling list. Even, as a game with the same multiplayer cooperative track, its popularity can also wrestle with "Two Shadows Wonderland".

This is not the most exaggerated, "R.E.P.O" basically did not have any publicity when it was first released, but it is still popular on overseas platforms, on YouTube, there are not a few videos with tens of millions of views, but on TikTok, there are hundreds of thousands of game contributions, and players have been swiped by this game. At present, according to overseas statistical platforms, 2.5 million copies of the game have been sold in the past month, and the sales are estimated to exceed 100 million yuan.

@VG Insights

Best Laugh Game of the Year

After a few plays, you can see that the core gameplay of R.E.P.O. is borrowed from Deadly Company, and the game revolves around "treasure hunt-transport-evacuation". Players are hired by a mysterious AI to infiltrate abandoned human ruins in search of high-value items, from heavy cabinets to fragile ceramics, in a challenging handling process.

Although the label corresponds to horror games, there is an unwritten rule among players that once the game content involves multiplayer, it will become a "laughing game".

The design of the monsters is equally absurd and hilarious. For example, there is a tadpole-like monster that will parasitize the player like a face-hugging worm after contacting the player, and the player will not only be unable to control itself, but will also intermittently spit out green liquid, which is both disgusting and full of black humor.

In fact, this kind of monster is already relatively friendly.,It won't cause substantial damage to the player.,There are also reapers.、Skulls are powerful monsters that can kill players in seconds.,When everyone suddenly encounters them around the corner,The teammates who were still gagging a second ago instantly staged "Flying separately when the disaster comes",Of course,You don't need to run faster than the monster on the way to escape.,Just be faster than your good friends.。

Or encounter the troll old man, a mechanism monster that can hear and distinguish the position, it has no vision, a bit like the kind of monster in the "Quiet Place", but don't think you can escape it if you know his mechanism, it will sometimes hit paronychia and fall to the ground, very funny, whoever doesn't hold it will be taken away by a shot, a set of combos clean and neat.

Abstract monsters are a must-have part of the game, but the player's main purpose is to "pick up trash". Due to the game's slimy feel and realistic physics engine, players are prone to bumps and reduce the value of items when carrying them, and players will experience the joy of "stressing your teammates rather than improving yourself".

For example, once a teammate stumbled upon a bottle worth 7,000 yuan, and shouted "Fortune, fortune, fortune" and asked you to carry it to the cart, but you accidentally broke something as soon as you got your hands on, and looked back to find him hanging there with a disgusted face, his eyes were three points like watching his stupid son learn to walk for the first time, and seven points like watching a moving garbage can.

When four people carry the piano together, if the tilt angle is not appropriate, it will crush teammates, and if it accidentally touches an item with an explosive effect such as "gasoline barrel", it is possible for the whole team to ascend to heaven, which is very programmatic.

If you want to beat the game seriously and speed run the game like the "god of the game field", I think this also goes against the original purpose of the game. Because the design of some items is full of the author's "bad taste", for example, the doll will move wildly when the player grabs her, and there is a high probability that she will be scared half to death when you first see her; The staff will continuously fire lasers when it is bumped, attacking indiscriminately; The hourglass comes with a time slowdown stance and will also change the player's voice, sounding like a voice changer with an "uncle" accent; There's also a love potion that will make players constantly confess to their companions...

In the unfortunate event of annihilation, the player will eventually be teleported to an arena where only one person will survive, and all kinds of grievances and grudges will be perfectly resolved. In short, after the game you will like your team very much, everyone is suspicious of each other and attacks each other, just like real enemies.

Catch the express train of traffic

On the solo track, this year's "R.E.P.O", last year's "Mita", "Animal Well", or even earlier "Deadly Company" actually have a bit of horror elements.

On the surface, this kind of game seems to verify the formula of "hunting horror = traffic password", but if you look deeply at its development trajectory, you will find that it is not a single element that really drives success, but a set of survival rules that are deeply bound to the contemporary communication ecology.

Some time ago, the author of "Joker" published the development log, which mentioned that the attention of the game in the EA stage is not high, and with the spontaneous play of many big streamers in Europe and the United States, the number of game wishlists has skyrocketed, and it broke out again at the time of release. The same logic was found in Animal Well, which at the time also benefited from the promotion of the big streamer Game Donkey, as the first title of his new publishing company.

Good ideas are certainly one thing, but there is no shortage of good ideas on the solo track, and we all know that there is no such thing as buying recommendations and buying ads on the Steam platform, so for small group developers with limited publicity funds, it is often very effective to increase exposure by working on the whole thing in the game, getting some show effects, adding horror tags or something.

Looking back at the whole design of "R.E.P.O.", the sudden fright, the funny reaction between teammates, and the dramatic scenes when the mission fails, naturally have the characteristics of "catching people in three seconds" short videos, and when countless funny and famous scenes of "selling teammates" are made into videos, they can form a secondary spread among the player group.

The emoji-like emoji on the cover of "R.E.P.O." is also very recognizable, and the art core is close to the "brain rot culture" prevalent on the Western Internet, although it cannot be said that players can come to play games after reading the cover, but when players come to the game through the video, they will also sigh in their hearts "It turned out to be you", which further strengthens the player's cognition, and from this point of view, it is also in line with the classic concept of "agenda setting" in communication.

Essentially, this "designed for the spread" approach is no different from many of the party games that have preceded it. "Deadly Company" swept the live broadcast platform with the screams of the anchors one after another, precisely because its level design deliberately created a dense number of accidents to ensure that each live broadcast could produce multiple high-energy clips.

However, traffic dividends are often accompanied by a brutal metabolic cycle. Most party influencer games are like a tidal wave, making huge waves when the streamer is popular, and quickly exiting the game when the novelty wears off. Although "R.E.P.O." maintains a 96% praise rate through community operations, and the author also promises to update levels, props, monsters and other content for a long time, it is obvious that its core experience is destined to face the challenge of aesthetic fatigue, and besides, the contradiction between production capacity and content consumption cannot be well solved by many large manufacturers, and I don't think I need to be too optimistic for a small team of only 3 people.

In any case, R.E.P.O. is now very successful, with the highest number of online users of 27W comparable to the previous 24W of Deadly Company. Back to the beginning of the article, when the masterpiece occupies every slot of players, and the player's attention is gradually diluted, the "Internet celebrity" of solo games is also a very competitive evolutionary direction.

epilogue

The reason why multiplayer co-op games are a big hit on Steam is that they perfectly fit the "social" needs of players. Most of these games don't pursue hardcore or narrative depth, and some don't even have a story. Because sometimes, all you want is "Tu Yile".

Buckley, the PR director of Palu the Phantom Beast, recently said at GDC that the team itself had no idea why the game had suddenly exploded.

Compared with "R.E.P.O." and "Phantom Beast Palu", there is actually something in common - the dispensable plot is all stitched monsters, and the technical power is so bad that it failed to update the in-game matchmaking function in the first time, but its emphasis on cooperation and nonsensical gameplay still attracted many players to join in with friends, which may confirm the saying "friends are the highest configuration".

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