Every now and then an especially weird game will come along, and Disdoored is one of those weird games. It’s an indie multiplayer survival game in a similar vein to Don’t Starve, but all of the assets are animated out of moldable plasticine. 20lb of it, in fact, a major selling point advertised by publisher Bitbox Ltd and developer Anton Riot, who is also a Biophysics Engineer.
In Disdoored, you and up to three other players build a home base and gather weapons to fight with, defences to protect you, plants to farm and livestock to domesticate. It’s a pretty comprehensive survival game, and ticks all of the boxes that you’d expect from the genre. There are monsters in Disdoored‘s claymation world that are highly-territorial, so you’ll have to get creative with making use of all of the resources available to you in order to survive.
But why survive, outside of a general enjoyment of living? There’s an underlying story throughout Disdoored, where mysterious doors have popped up all over the place. It’s where the monsters come from, which has understandably become a problem for the world’s sculpted inhabitants. As well as getting by and living off the land, you’ll also need to work on discovering ancient laboratories and looking after a sapling called Lily. She’ll apparently give you a super weapon that you can use to destroy all the doors and take back the land, hence the game being called Disdoored.
But that’s not why you’re reading this. You’re reading this because everything in this game is made out of plasticine, and that’s pretty quirky. A lot of effort has clearly gone into creating and subsequently animating the player avatars, the monsters, the animals and the trees in Disdoored. The oddity doesn’t just end at the aesthetics, though, with upgradable livestock that can result in strange evolutionary traits, like snails that lactate, “because that’s just how this world goes,” according to Anton Riot.
It’s all a little strange, but I love strange games. If you like strange games too, you can pick up Disdoored on Steam right now, as it’s just gone live.