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Fall Guys developers on how they’re redefining the battle royale
The offbeat 1 vs. 100 battle royale game Fall Guys was just revealed earlier this month. We talked to the developers about their inspirations for the game and plans for the future.
Growing up, we’d always hear about these fabulously-weird Japanese game shows where contestants would wear a Velcro suit and get launched at a wall covered with the stuff, or where four people would stand on platforms and jump to avoid a stick that would send them careening into water if they mistimed it. Those are exactly the sort of absurd activities that you’re likely to find in Fall Guys, an upcoming indie game made by UK-based developers Mediatonic.
Announced at the beginning of June, Fall Guys casts 100 players as wobbly capsule people who must endure a gauntlet of three or more challenges, culminating in a single champion. If that sounds like the set-up to a multiplayer game or two you might’ve played recently, that’s by design.
“Look, there’s no doubt that battle royale games are huge right now,” says Mediatonic producer Luke Borrett, who helped guide us through the game’s demo at E3 2019. “With Fall Guys, we’re trying to take that concept in a whole new direction, with a little bit less violence and more accessibility. We’re trying to make a game in the style of certain Japanese game shows that almost anybody can pick up and play.”
Throughout the demo, Borrett continually references the TV program Takeshi’s Castle as a major influence on the concept of the game. The show, which starred iconic Japanese actor and director Beat Takeshi as a “Count” of a castle that issued bizarre and sometimes brutal physical challenges to a raft of contestants every week, became a cult hit in the West, thanks in part to Spike TV airing a dubbed version of it in the US that they called MXC. “It’s to the point where to explain the game, we just ask people, ‘have you seen this show or that show?’,” Borrett says. “And if the answer’s yes, they’re likely to get it almost immediately.”
Inside of a large RV in a car park adjacent to the LA Convention Center customarily rented out by the game’s publishers, Devolver Digital, we were guided through three different events. In the first, we and 99 other contestants threw ourselves at a linear track with a number of walls blocking our path that increased as we went forward, with no way of telling if they were impassable or not except by watching other players smash into them. With this game, we quickly learned that there’s a significant disadvantage to leading the pack, so we let others smash a path through for us.
You have to make it to the top of the hill to win a game of Fall Guys
© Mediatonic
The next event gave half the remaining players a tail and scattered us around a large yard with novelty hammers and floating platforms, with the objective to have a tail at the end of a short time limit. If you’re lucky enough to have one, you should try to avoid the grubby hands of those who are trying to get yours – camping out on top of a platform or in a nook guarded by the giant hammers proved useful to avoiding my foes, though a strategy of remaining perfectly stationary didn’t work out too well. Luckily, we were able to recover my tail before the counter reached zero.
The final event was the most recognisable reference to Takeshi’s Challenge yet: a long, labyrinthine slope with boulders issuing down from the top, twisting paths, and treacherous terrain. The first contestant to reach the summit has to jump and grab the crown to be declared the winner. We managed to come in first in our initial competition, but didn’t realise that you needed to press the “grab” button to actually collect the crown, so we were sent rolling down a long slope as a fellow competitor won instead. Luckily, the second time around, we came out on top and were rewarded with a large novelty crown for my efforts.
A typically hectic moment from a match of Fall Guys
© Mediatonic
While Fall Guys is incredibly fun in its current iteration, we’re fully confident it’ll be even better come its final release in 2020. For one, as Borrett himself admits, a large part of the game’s appeal lies in the fact that you know that every single one of the 99 other contestants is an actual person. At the E3 demo, only four of the hundred were actual humans, so it was easy to outsmart the mob of AI competitors. For another thing, the likes of Mario Party has shown us that a wide variety of events is the difference between a pick-up-and-play game that you can’t put down, or one that you only try out a couple of times before forgetting about it.
Fall Guys looks like a promising party game for those who want something a little different from their 1 vs. 100 fare. Borrett says that the team hasn’t decided on an exact price point yet, but he suggests it’ll be somewhere in the “ten to twenty [USD]” range. After launch, the team at Mediatonic plans to supplement the 30-or-so events that the game comes with out-of-the-box with more offerings, depending on how much it catches on with the audience. “This is a battle royale game that anyone can play,” Borrett says. “You can play it with your kids, you can play it with your friends. And we’re exploring all the possible multiplayer options, split-screen, on your couch, you name it.”
Fall Guys will be landing on PC and PlayStation 4 in 2020.
