Publisher Amazon Games and developer Glowmade pulled back the curtain on King of Meat at Gamescom Opening Night Live, and the game is as chaotic as such a silly name would suggest. At its core, it’s a dungeon crawler where players compete in a TV show-style competition for entertainment, and it also puts a big emphasis on user-generated content for dungeon building. Although straightforward in terms of gameplay, there’s a lot more to King of Meat than first meets the eye.
King of Meat takes place in the world of Loregok, a place where dragons, trolls, skeletons, and corporate commercialism all co-exist. King of Meat is the best and only source of survival entertainment out there, and players put on a show by solving puzzles, fighting enemies, and using abilities to keep ratings high. High ratings offer more rewards, while lower ratings are detrimental to the corporate world. Game Rant played a brief demo of King of Meat at Gamescom, and its strengths in worldbuilding and gameplay are clear.
King of Meat’s Dungeon-Crawling Gameplay and World
Players always start in the social space of King of Meat, Ironlaw Plaza, which serves as the backstage area of the show. Players can interact with NPCs, deal with corporations, and otherwise acquire upgrades, goods, and cosmetic items here. Once everyone is ready to begin a match, they enter the Komstruct Koliseum and choose a level from user-made and developer-made content. Our preview focused on this gameplay in King of Meat.
In up to teams of four, King of Meat players will compete in dungeons that can be accurately described as “unhinged.” There are plenty of combat and ability interactions to be had with the enemies and puzzles here, and they range from over-the-top laughs after knocking allies off the map to map-wide panic when everyone is facing off with hordes of enemies. Glory Moves are the key abilities that get the fans going, with our favorite being summoning a giant fist that comes down hitting an AOE. While engaging in this combat, players can find and pick up crowns for extra points, jump and dive around the map to get rid of status effects and solve puzzles, and more. King of Meat is essentially Fall Guys in a dungeon, and the gameplay and lore totally work when put together in ridiculous ways. From our few runs in the game, we saw a lot of similar but still cutesy enemies, but traps and environments seemed limited by only imagination.
Getting the gold requires coordination, keeping the ratings up, and otherwise winning each fight, but that’s easier said than done. Our team during the preview got close to gold several times but always fell short because, obviously, the average viewer in Loregok is as easily bored as someone addicted to their phone. The sheer absurdity in everything was a lot of fun at the end of the day.
Of course, fame is the siren’s call of the King of Meat competition. Throughout gameplay, players progress down a feature called Road to Stardom. It looks a lot like a Battle Pass and unlocks new events, environments, traps, and the like as they defeat dungeons. We only got a glimpse of it, but it’s a tried-and-true progression feature for the game.
King of Meat’s Dungeon Creator
We didn’t get to see King of Meat‘s dungeon creator during our preview because it was entirely focused on moment-to-moment gameplay, but we did speak to a couple of devs about it. In short, it sounds simple enough to be used by a child but can be complex enough that someone can truly master it. There is a freeform mode, pre-sets to choose from, and a pretty streamlined process available. Players can set down rooms, choose enemies, and traps, then customize each room to their liking, and even go so far as to mess with the traps’ logic to make it work the way they wish. That’s an optional feature, but it sounds like the dungeon creator is as simple or as complex as someone needs it to be.
King of Meat is in development for PC, PS5, Switch, and Xbox Series X/S.