Sometimes keeping it simple is the best way to show well at PAX. Stealing the spotlight is often more about grabbing passerbys’ attention than anything else, and as I strolled through the considerably large and generally unpredictable Indie Megabooth, located squarely in the middle of the main exhibition hall, it was apparent where most of the boisterous yells, claps, and jeers were coming from. They’d been generated by Move or Die, of course—the party game created by the cool guys at Those Awesome Guys [whose booth was right across from developer Those Douchebags. ~Ed. Nick Tan].
The resident Awesome Guys at PAX East seemed a bit preoccupied with some admittedly Awesome-looking chicken wings when I arrived, but that didn’t stop me from hopping right into a game after a brief wait for some showgoers to finish up. What immediately caught my eye was the game’s curb appeal; bright colors, dark lines, and a chibi-comic-strip art and animation style keep the title pumping happy-drugs through your brain just long enough to sustain attention before it drains in a blaze of internal rage. This occurs when you lose to your friends and neighbors by a single point, of course, which did not happen to me at all because I won. (And my friends and neighbors were conspicuously absent.)
Most of the action takes place in relatively small, contained stages built from blocks, and once participants choose a character the action is flipped on almost immediately. Move or Die is competitive by nature, but the beauty is in the game’s ability to, more often than not, tailor itself to the varied skills of its participating players. Each 20-second round’s gameplay style is drawn from a presumed larger pool of mini-games and range across everything from simple stomping of your opponents Mario-style to clever cover-the-most-area-in-color Splatoon-isms.
I quickly identified the latter as my strength, and made a point to win said round every time it appeared. Doing this successfully bought me some insurance for the rounds where I wasn’t as skilled, such as the dodging of falling blocks or a challenge that actually requires you to shoot other players with briefly-granted projectile weaponry.
Outside of the party-game shenanigans and point accrual, the frenzied nature of Move or Die very much resembles Adult Swim Games’ Duck Game. Like that game, four players are unleashed into contained stages for twitch-based movements that make or break their continued survival, and successes are tallied to determine an end result. I’m not sure if Those Awesome Guys were inspired by this game, but if they are, I’m sure they’d agree that it and Move or Die paired together could make for tremendously raucous evenings of buddy-bonding, laughter, and revenge. Because party games are secretly always about revenge.
The latest gameplay gizmo to grace the core Move or Die experience (which itself has been available on Steam for a bit of time now) is something its devs are calling “mutators.” Mutators are made available every couple of rounds, are implemented single file from a choice of three, and are selected by a random player given choosing power via a gameshow-style spinner. Mutators range in impact, from awarding participants double-jumping abilities to swapping visual skins and confusing the living daylights out of everybody. It really comes down to whether or not you’d rather benefit yourself or ruin somebody else, and it's this distinction (among other things) that gifts the game its considerable replay value.
My main takeaway from Move or Die is that, despite potentially facetious reports on Steam, killing your friends actually isn’t all that maddening. The best party game is the one that is more fun than infuriating, while still tapping into the experiential benefits of both. If the roaring crowds around PAX booth #7165 are any indication, ruining friendships has remained and will remain fun within the four-player party realm for the foreseeable future. If the game that enables this is one where I can play as a green-hatted kitty named Link or a literal superimposed Kappa, then I say all the better.
