Machine Party, a competitive party game in which losing a round is fatal, is out now on Steam. Rock Paper Shotgun reports that it is the latest release from Mike Klubnika, the developer behind Buckshot Roulette, made alongside a collaborator credited as GDeavid. The pair describe it as a party game "where failure is lethal."
The game requires a minimum of two players and supports up to four. Competitors are pushed through a run of minigames in which finishing first is the objective and finishing last carries a fatal penalty. Rock Paper Shotgun frames the design as a deliberate inversion of the Mario Party formula, keeping the format's competitive needling while making the violence it provokes literal.
The minigames
The outlet's account of the launch build describes four of them. One has players circling a room to avoid a robot vacuum fitted with a buzz saw. Another sets a blocky, brutalist Rubik's Cube in front of each player, to be dismantled square by square until it matches a target shape. A third is a speed-eating contest in which peas must be swallowed one at a time. A fourth puts players on an escalator running downwards, suspended above a pit of saw blades, with the goal of reaching the top. Failure in each ends the same way, and Rock Paper Shotgun says the launch build contains more rounds than the ones it lists.
The presentation, in the outlet's description, is as gory as it is absurd, with the individual games sitting closer to the traps of the Saw films than to anything in the family party games the format usually evokes.
Local co-op comes later
The one confirmed omission at launch is local co-op, which the released version does not support. A launch-day post on the game's Steam page says the mode will be added in late August. Per Rock Paper Shotgun's reading of that post, local play was not part of the original plan and was scheduled after enough players asked for it.
Machine Party is available on Steam now.
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