Heads up, hotshot: you are being dispatched to a hostile alien planet. You will have to overcome life-or-death challenges that test your wits, physicality, and raw luck. You may die. You will almost certainly be hurt. Also, the whole thing is being televised. How many friends would you like to take with you?
If you answered three, you’re in luck—Marked For Mayhem is a four-player dungeon crawler which just got a world premiere at the PC Gaming Show Tokyo Direct, and I pretty much just gave you its elevator pitch in the opening paragraph. The aim of the game is to venture to planets that would really quite like to kill you and complete bounties, beat foes, take on bosses, and even partake in a few minigames.
Wishlist Marked for Mayhem on Steam
Marked For Mayhem is a four-player dungeon crawler with an interesting premise: what if you had to deal with two essentially contradictory goals at once? Here, it means working with your team to overcome challenges while also competing with your teammates for the singular, individual winner position. I predict broken friendships aplenty. Sign up for the beta.
To do that, you’ll need to cooperate with your pals. But this is no love-in: you’re competing with them too. In addition to trying to beat missions as a team, you’re all competing individually to see who can nab the highest score. And if that ain’t a dose of tension that will absolutely, definitely result in a few teams biffing their missions in a fit of competitive pique, I don’t know what is.
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We get a little of this in the trailer, where we see teams of competitors uniting to take on big robotic bosses, taking on hordes of foes in spacious arenas, and navigating environmental hazards. But they’re collecting points all for themselves, too, and at the end just one of them gets to take centre stage as the singular winner.
It’s an interesting wrinkle, ain’t it? I rather like the idea of compelling players to deal with two contradictory impulses at once—to function as a team and to win as an individual. I’ll be honest, it’s the kind of thing that might lead to me and my pals not speaking to one another for months. But so long as I win, well, it’s all worth it.
Check out our Steam page with all the games, updates, and DLC featured in the show. You can also read our roundup article which includes every announcement from the show in the order it aired.