I have a wonderfully vague memory of a game my older brothers used to play on the Commodore 64 back in the day. It was a platform game, with pixel heroes and floating gantries and ladders and all that jazz, but there was also a wheelbarrow, and you needed the wheelbarrow to hold all the collectibles you picked up. When you’d all but completed each screen – as my memory had it – you then had to leg it back to the wheelbarrow and take it to the next screen where the whole thing was repeated.
Listen: I’m sure I could find out what this game was in a few minutes on Google, but I kind of want to retain my vaporous memories of it. Also, here’s REPO, the current It Game on Steam, and it’s similar enough – while also being incredibly different – that my inner wheelbarrow fan is sated.
REPO’s one of those multiplayer horror/comedy games that emerges every few months and ripples through schools around the country, around the world, I imagine, before disappearing and being replaced by something else. It’s got a bit of Lethal Company to it, in that you and your pals are dropped into strange environments and you must grab as much loot as you can and then get out of there. It’s got a bit of all of these kinds of games in it, because grabbing the loot and escaping are really only there so that when monsters attack you drop things and they explode. The game is there to create moments in which things go hilariously wrong, and you and your pals are so busy laughing you only make things worse.
I’ve been playing solo quite a bit, which is exactly the wrong way to play, but I figured I needed to learn the basics before I dived into a spiralling disaster situation with friends. And it turns out that soloing REPO is actually quite fun. In part this is because the game is just undeniably well made on the level of feeling. Walking is slow but there’s a lovely bodycam head bob to things, grabbing items and manipulating them is pleasantly Half-Lifian and everything around you has a lovely weight to it. Doors look like they could withstand nuclear blasts. Your collection cart feels like it could protect you from a few rounds before imploding, and it’s got the best kind of floatiness to it as you nudge it through another dark landscape of clutter on your way back to the extraction point.
Cue hilarious disasters, even when playing solo. On my first game playing alone, I thoroughly spooked myself. I had the cart behind me and I was working through some storage rooms, accidentally dropping valuable objects and collecting a few cheap crowns, which weren’t going to get me to the loot value target for the level I was on. I took them anyway, and then moved into an area which was clearly some kind of toilet, but there was an acoustic guitar on the floor.
This guitar was much bigger than the crowns I’d been handling so far, and I knocked about two grand’s-worth of value off it getting it back to my cart, just by bonking it against shelving and dragging it over the ground. This was horror and comedy of a kind that needed no monsters. I was a young child in an expensive glassware shop. I almost cringed myself into oblivion.
Around now, a weird droning sound picked up on the soundtrack, but I was still short on loot so I had to go a bit further. In the next room I encountered I found what was clearly an explosive gas canister. I wanted to steer clear, but it was worth a fortune, so moving incredibly cautiously I inched back to the cart with it, hit the level’s loot target and then some, and took a moment to celebrate before moving onto the next level.
This, as I’m weirdly certain I’ve typed before, is when the gnomes attacked. I thought I was out of danger, in the safe space of the van that whisks you from one level to the next, but clearly that was not the case, because here came four or five angry little garden gnomes, yapping at me and doing low-level damage. I picked one up and found that I could kill it purely by dropping it – like the vases I’d encountered out there in the wider world, the gnomes are primed to shatter on impact. One, two, three, four gnomes down, and then a giant head with staring eyes rushed out of the darkness and I was dead in seconds. Dead, but also haunted by those staring eyes, that weird floating head. Oh my gosh.
I’ve never made a game, but I suspect it’s one of the easier things to do to just create chaos. I’m sure even that’s hard, but on the lower level of things to do in game design that are hard. Anyway, it strikes me that, chaotic as REPO is, what it does is something much more elevated than that. It has pacing in its chaos – it freaks you out with nothing so that when something arrives you’re ready to properly explode. It surrounds you with delicate objects but gives you a move set with which you’re tempted to go too fast, so you end up breaking everything.
It also has that magical cause and effect combo that defines everything from Laurel and Hardy comedies to global thermonuclear war. When I saw that guitar lying on the floor of the toilet – another sentence I’m weirdly sure I’ve typed before – I knew a couple of things instantly. A) Here was value. B) Here was good fortune! C) I was going to make a mess of things. D) I was going to pay for that good fortune.
Speaking of Laurel and Hardy, incidentally, I’ve been watching REPO on youtube quite a bit and had a lot of fun following the antics of a crew who had to work together to move a piano through a level. This game really does sing with friends, in other words, and that’s before you get to gadgets you can use, monsters which encourage you to hide to avoid them, and the scraps of lore players are already starting to drag up.
In conclusion: at an uncaring glance, REPO might look like a cheap throwaway game, a sort of MEME game, with its monsters and chaos and emojis. It might look like the kind of game I mention to my eleven-year-old only to hear, “Oh, everyone stopped playing that weeks ago.” But that’s because this is what these games need to look like in order to break through for their audience. The jank and the backrooms vibes bring people in in their masses, and once they’re there – oh, this handles rather nicely, oh, this is rather cleverly put together, oh, this game is building on ideas that have come from classics. Recent classics like Lethal Company. Eternal classics like Half-Life 2. Distant classics like that old C64 game in which I once had a pretty cool wheelbarrow…
Code for REPO was purchased by the author.
