King of Meat is a strange name for a game, to state the obvious, and yet it totally fits the daft modern cartoon vibe that it’s going for, with bizarro riffs on quirky jokes running throughout. Set in Loregok, a techno-medieval world that’s gone absolutely ga-ga for the titular game show, your path to stardom is to dive into the dungeons, overcome platforming challenges, battle past skeleton minions, and make it through to the end. And you can become a star dungeon designer as well.
That’s right, this is dungeon crawling by way of the dearly departed LittleBigPlanet – and this makes complete sense given Glowmade’s background. Where LIttleBigPlanet pioneered accessible User Generated Content (UGC), this has exploded in importance over the last few years with the likes of Roblox and Fortnite becoming home to entire universes of created game experiences. King of Meat is much closer to a LittleBigPlanet or a ModNation Racers in scope, sticking to its particular genre and trying to nail the fundamentals.
With that in mind, the third-person platforming and dungeoneering is eminently accessible. You’ve got a jump and a Yoshi-like flutter jump that is basically all you need to get around the world, and then there’s a variety of weapons for when enemies spawn and rush towards you. You start off with sword and shield and a crossbow for a bit of range, but can swap those out for a hammer, grenade launcher, knuckle dusters and more that you unlock as you progress. The melee weapons all have particular styles, basic and charged attacks, and attack combos that you can quickly learn.
Alongside these core weapons are a gradually growing range of magical abilities, first with a bellowing belch that will repel all before you, or a simple healing flask that can come in handy for tougher levels, and beyond to giant horse hooves stamping down from above.
You’ll apply all of this to levels that blend together platforming, combat and puzzling. Glowmade has stuffed the game with around 100 levels – created, in-game, by Komstructor – and they run the gamut of ideas, being sorted into three buckets of difficulty and labelled with generalised tags for what to expect from them.
It’s nice and easy-going on the whole. Combat does lack a bit of oomph to it, and it can often feel like you’re not really doing much to the hordes you’re battling – possibly because, for the tougher enemies, you really aren’t. When there’s four of you, you can always pick up buddies that have been downed, or they can give up and respawn from the gloop cans at the next checkpoint, but if all of you are downed, it’s game over. I really enjoyed some of the examples of puzzling that I saw, though, leveraging the basics of switch pulling, button shooting, and bringing power cells to key locations alongside game logic to provide some light brain teasers. One example had you pulling switches in order, Simon Says style, while another had multiple switch combos opening different doors. A bit trickier to manage when playing without voice communication, mind you.
And, of course, a lot of that will sound instantly familiar to anyone who explored the creation tools of LBP or Dreams. There’s a straightforward logic engine running in the background that can be twisted and bent to create all manner of things, from simply spawning in enemies as you and your team enter a room, to setting spike and flame traps to run on timers, program platforms to move around the world as you need, and much, much more complicated tasks.
The creation tools try to make all of that as manageable as possible, and I think Glowmade has done a fantastic job of organising those tools and providing the views you need. It starts with a blueprint phase where you place and connect rooms and hallways together, matching up their doors together, and it’s here that you’ll really realise that this dungeon builder works entirely on a single plane, albeit with doors on two levels and the ability to raise and lower the scenery within these spaces. That does put some shackles on what you could create, but that’s not really a bad thing.
From there you can switch to a 3D view and manipulate the scenery, put in place those traps, enemies and spawners, and then delve into the nitty-gritty of hooking up and configuring the logic behind it all.
Again, there’s huge amounts of potential and possibilities here – a user level I saw shrouded the whole level in darkness, with braziers flaring only as you reached certain points, forcing you to fight enemies mostly in the dark – and that can be hugely rewarding if you have the time and the desire to really embrace this. It can also be a bit daunting and overwhelming to try and come up with a concept and then actually make it. It’s really down to the player themselves what they want to get out of this, but I’ve come to be more of a consumer of UGC games than a creator.
There’s plenty of joy to simply consuming King of Meat, though. This is a fun setting, with the shared space lobby area having you run back and forth between different vendors, who always have quirky things to chat to you about. Then there’s the interstitial cartoons, which are all fantastic and lean right in on modern cartoon styles with an excellently pitched sense of humour. It’s absolutely geared towards younger gamers, but adults will get a wry smile out of it too. Oh, and I’ve got to mention the announcer who introduces each level and booms over your achievements like it’s a cross between Wipeout and Robot Wars.
