The Culling Is Insane

The Culling is Smash TV meets The Hunger Games

If you ever wished The Hunger Games had reveled a bit more in all the murder and mayhem, I'd humbly like to suggest the irreverent slaughter of The Culling, recently released to Steam Early Access. Griffin McElroy and I scrambled through this virtual Battle Royale with only a few rocks and sticks to protect us from total oblivion.

polygon.com

I watched a few streams over the last couple days of this new game The Culling and I gotta say, this game is bat shit insane.

It's practically a game version of Battle Royale, or Hunger Games, or that island from Arrow, or any other sort of "fight to live" type of scenario.

16 players are dropped onto some tropical island and they have 20-or-so minutes to kill each other using a multitude of weapons and supplies found within the arena. It. Is. BONKERS.

Probably the most promising thing to me about it, even though the brutality of it isn't for me, is the potential for expanded content. Because the game sessions are so short and the combat so saturated there's a lot of pieces in play, all of which can be swapped out for new parts to create wholly new scenarios.

Should be noted that Xaviant, the developers, have been partnered with multiple publishers and companies for this product which might no longer qualify it as 'indie', but since it's in Early Access I gave it a pass for now. We'll see where it ends up in a year or two.