EGX Rezzed: Gambitious Preview

Gambitious Digital Entertainment had a large presence at EGX Rezzed this year, with three games attracting a lot of attention. It brought three games: the follow up to the insult simulator I reviewed at the end of 2016, Oh...Sir! The Hollywood Roast, a cross between Dungeon Keeper and Theme Hospital in MachiaVillain, and the gory brutal top-down brawler Redeemer.

Oh...Sir! The Hollywood Roast is more than just a reskin of the previous game as Vile Monarch has redesigned the UI to give players more information about what is actually scoring them points. Most of the mechanics are the same, but now there’s a breakdown of how effective an insult was. The setting has moved from Monty Python inspirations to the streets and settings of Hollywood, with not-Gandalf and not-Tom Cruise being the two characters playable in the Rezzed demo. Vile Monarch has said that there will be more characters and stages in The Hollywood Roast, so I just hope that the online mode has more legs in this iteration.

MachiaVillain, aside from having one of the best names of the show, is a horror movie villain management simulator made by a married couple. The aim of the game is to build a horror mansion to scare them all, following the core rules of horror: you can’t kill anyone unless they’re alone (or having sex), you have to kill the virgin last and never harm the dog. At your disposal are a team of horror minions, each with their own skills. You need to farm resources and add rooms to your mansion for your minions to live and work in, and for your victims to die in.

Each day, you can send out an advertisement to attract those victims, and the more people you kill the more you can gain from the League of Machiavellian Villains. These rewards let you build up your treasure, and larger mansions with more treasure will attract more teenagers. The developers hinted that if too many people die, there’s a chance that the authorities will investigate - but they’re just slightly more dangerous victims!

Speaking of victims, there are plenty in Redeemer; this brutal top-down action game sees you punch, kick, shoot and slice your way through soldiers and other hellspawn. The weapons degrade, but every enemy drops their weapon and the fists are very effective. There’s also a range of guns, since Redeemer is set in a future where monks are cyborgs. The combat was very satisfying, but I feel that I need a lot more time to get a real impression of how it plays because I sucked at it. The developer had to skip parts of the levels for me so I could see all of the different environments in the demo, that’s how bad I was at it. Those environments were gorgeous - well, they were until they became covered in gore, at which point they were gore-geous…

Oh...Sir! The Hollywood Roast is due out this spring, MachiaVillain is set to release in the autumn and Redeemer has no set window as of yet, but they are hoping to release this year.