Creative slaughter sim 101 Ways To Die announced for PS4

Thanks for checking out this blog post about our upcoming game, 101 Ways To Die. The game is a physics-based puzzler full of gore and dark humour. It has been described as ‘reverse-Lemmings’ due to the puzzler gameplay style and the fact that as the player you are deliberately trying to cause the AI characters harm, rather than save them!

The game assigns the player to the role of laboratory assistant to a crazed Professor who, despite devoting years to scientific research, has little to show for it. His life’s work is an unsavoury book focused on gore and destruction entitled “101 Ways To Die” – which the Professor was certain would guarantee his scientific legacy.

Sadly, in the final stages of completing his work, a lab accident resulted in its near-total destruction. The player’s role is to help the Professor recreate the book by completing over 50 levels and constructing numerous ever-more-dastardly traps to kill poor unfortunate Splatts – strange creatures also created in the lab for the purpose of aiding with the Professor’s experiments.

Players are provided with an inventory of traps and tools to place down at the start of the game during the planning phase and then once the Splatts are released they must then activate these tools to cause as much carnage as possible. Many levels already have pre-placed traps that the player will need to interact with and combine with their inventory to achieve even higher combinations.

 
The 101 recipes of death that the players are trying to discover include simpler combinations focused on forcing the Splatts into an accident – such as ‘Blasted Spikes’ (exploding a Splatt with a mine, the blast forcing it onto a wall of spikes), ‘Ball Point’ (a cannon firing a cannonball into a Splatt and pushing the Splatt onto a bed of spikes) and ‘Hot Love’ (placing some slime for a Splatt to slip on into a lava pit!).

More complex combinations will require the player to exercise both a sense of positioning to get the Splatt into the right place, and timing its misfortune well – aiming them as they helplessly fly through the air!

For example, these recipes include ‘Airbourne’ – where a Splatt flies from one bumper (a kind of swinging log) to another then is impaled by a harpoon and shot into a fan which pushes them against a wall. Then there’s ‘Bouncy Ball’, where a Splatt flies from one bumper to another and into a boulder. ‘Cal-Horrific’ has you distracting a Splatt with a well-placed cake, exploding a bomb next to them, and sending them flying into nearby spikes, while ‘Shredded Beef’ sends a Splatt from a bumper onto a mine and then into spikes!

There’s actually a huge range of tools and considerations for the player to harm the poor Splatts, including death logs, spikes, fans, lava pits, cannons, bumpers, bombs, boulders, mines, cakes, harpoon guns, conveyor belts, switches and teleporters – so there really is no excuse not to be as creatively sadistic as you like.

During early development of the concept we considered whether the gameplay would be based on the player controlling each character running and jumping to activate the various tools they had placed down (kind of like a self-destructive Super Meat Boy!) but upon some playing with the idea we didn’t feel it gave the player the strategic gameplay we were wanting.

Please enjoy our teaser trailer and look out for further information about the game as launch approaches. Find out more at www.101waystodiegame.com or at @101WaysToDie on Twitter.