R.E.P.O. is Steam’s latest viral horror despite its high mate requirement – but the devs are working on matchmaking
R.E.P.O is a six player co-op extraction spooper that currently sits atop Steam’s best seller charts, having amassed around 70k players the week following early access launch on Feb 26, and another 160k since then. That’s around 230 thousand players avoiding knifey chef frogs and persistent ducklings while extracting valuables to fill a cash quota. It’s a bit Lethal Company but even heavier on the absurdity.
As far as I can tell, this popularity comes down to two things. Firstly, the game is a verdant flub factory, stuffed with the sort of chaotic physics mishaps that translate very well to short video clips. Even the loot extraction point can kill you if lingered in too long. Secondly, the ‘Jim Henson does Nier Automata’ robots you play as flap their mouths in time to your mic chatter, making even the most bowel-curdling fear shrieks from your teammates look like a hammy comedy routine.
I’d usually emit a croaking complaint about being too old for anything viral – the acrid dust cloud from my throat lingering in the air momentarily before cascading downwards and coating me in a grimy sheen of irrelevancy – but R.E.P.O. actually looks great. As it stands, though, you need five willing friends to play: a truly biblical quantity of mates, in the sense that it’d be faster to carve co-op partners from my own ribs than hash out that sort of byzantine scheduling.
Good news re: my organs staying shielded – developer Semiwork are planning on introducing public or private matchmaking. This’ll come with a kick button to keep players honest, although they do say it’s not quite that simple, since server coding is new ground for them. Here’s the update video.
Joining ironmates mode is a new museum level, which they show off by demonstrating some award-winning box parkour. There’s also some quality of life bits, like a border at extraction points to show when loot is out of bounds so you don’t accidentally let it get crushed. Semiwork also show off a squinty, angry facial expression. Finally, there’s a bucket you can pop over the duckling monster that likes to imprint motherhood on one of your crew then follow you around getting in your way and biting anyone that tries to touch it.
My current idea o’ the day is Russian literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of the ‘chronotope’ – time and space configurations as a kind of contextual bubble – as mentioned by valued RPS community member #9976 in the comments to Sunday’s Booked For The Week. A fifteen minute internet rabbit hole with coffee this morning led me to this video by the eminently listenable Belgian sociolinguist Jan Blommaert, who gives the example of a lecture: the space is the hall, the time is the lecture slot, and this particular chronotope encourages or necessities certain identities, roles, or modes of behaviour within in. An insightful framing of the twin navigations of interpersonal relationships and horror-harried spaces in social extraction games? You, uh, you might be starting to see why I’m enthusiastic about R.E.P.O.’s no-mates mode.