Push Me Pull Still The Grossest Local Multiplayer Sport
Wrestling ballsports
Push Me Pull You is the most delightful game to ever make my skin crawl. It's a 2v2 local multiplayer wrestling ballsport where each team cooperatively controls a two-headed, four-handed horrifying stretchy sausage of a person, trying to keep control of a ball by wrapping their bodies around it and each other. I adore the eerily real movement and pitter-pattering of the meatmonsters' hands and yet want to look away.
A wee bit later than its once-planned 2014 release, it's now due in early 2016. That's fine, though, as a new trailer shows developers House House have been busy adding swish new modes and ballarenas:
Oh sure, put cheery music on the stuff of my nightmares. Thanks, House House.
It's awfully good fun. Working with the other end of your body, you'll need to coordinate wrapping your coils around the ball and delving into the other players' folds, winding and twisting and dragging and pushing. It's got great character options too, with a selection of mundane heads which became hilarious and awful when attached to another head by twenty metres of serpentine flesh.
The Wild Rumpus showed Push Me Pull You last year, where it went down a storm, and I'm keen to get my hands on all that's changed over the past twenty months. I've only played a simple mode where you try to keep the ball in your side of the arena, but it's got others too. One mode will give each team their own ball, and they'll need to defend theirs while shoving their opponents' out. Good stuff. Another appears to have three balls and I don't even know what's happening there.
Push Me Pull You is coming early next year to Windows, Mac, and Linux.
[Disclosure: I know House House a bit. Some of them stayed with Wild Rumpus at GDC this year, and we may have stolen a few of their anecdotes as in-jokes. It's also conceivable that I filled one House Houser's mouth with mayonnaise at a bar after yelling "OPEN YOUR FUCKING MOUTH" while holding a squeezy bottle above his head. I think he thought I wouldn't do something so cruel?]