Pummel Party

The item economy is the best thing here, and I keep pointing at it because most party games on Steam never bother building one. You do not simply roll, move and hope the dice like you. You collect things, you hold them, and then you aim them at whoever is currently ahead. That single decision turns every turn into a quiet negotiation with the room. Spending an item early is safe and boring. Spending it on the last lap is cruel and memorable, and the board keeps offering you chances to be cruel. The loop itself is familiar to anyone who grew up on console board games: roll, move, land on a tile you did not want, then everybody drops into a minigame. What makes it stick is that the space between the minigames is not dead air. It is where the grudges get assembled. Who it is for is easy to describe, because the answer is a full couch. Up to a group of friends with controllers, or friends who do not even own a copy, since Remote Play Together streams them in and full controller support means nobody is fighting over a keyboard. Split-screen is here, Remote Play reaches phones, tablets and TVs, and online PvP exists for the nights when everyone is in a different city. Three players works. Six works better. One player poking at it alone will never understand why anyone recommended it, and I would not pretend otherwise just because the store page lists a single-player mode. What works is the craft in the small stuff. The minigames are short, physical and mostly built around ragdoll physics, which means the funniest moments are the ones nobody designed: a bad landing, a mistimed swing, a body folding over a ledge at exactly the wrong angle. Rebuilt Games clearly understood that a party game should be over before the group gets restless, and a board runs about the length of one sitting rather than sprawling into an evening-devouring campaign. I respect a game that knows its own runtime. The Steam Workshop support and the included level editor extend that further, since custom boards are where the community keeps the thing alive years after release. If your group burns through the official boards, the tail end of the game is other people's homemade ones, and some of them are genuinely inspired. Where it disappoints is the part every game in this shape struggles with. Randomness runs the show. You can play a tactically flawless board and still lose to a late dice roll, and if your friends are the type who take that personally, you will feel it in the room. The minigame lineup is uneven too. A handful are perfect little contraptions you will request by name, several are fine, and a few will get skipped by group consensus after the second time they come up. Online is the weaker half of the package. Physics-driven minigames are only ever as smooth as the worst connection in the lobby, and playing with strangers strips out the entire reason this exists, which is watching someone's face when you hit them. It is PC only, so the friend on a console is out. And the Friendship Ruiner tag is not a marketing joke. It is an accurate content warning. What I like about it, as someone who usually spends my time defending quiet six-hour narrative games nobody covers, is that this is a small self-published release that found its audience purely on word of mouth and word of shared screen. Nearly sixty thousand Steam reviews sitting at Very Positive is not an accident, and it did not get there through advertising. It got there because somebody dragged five friends into a lobby and the story afterward was worth retelling. That is the honest measure of a game like this. It is not something you play to be moved, it is something you play to generate an hour of noise you will reference for months. Buy it if you have the people. If you do not have the people, no amount of Workshop boards will fill the chairs, and I would rather tell you that now than have you find out alone.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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