I’ve noticed this one seems to be chilling (lobby emptyish), so I would love to pipe it up to people who might not know about it.
I’ve been obsessed with Spy Party recently. It’s this casual-not-casual 1v1 strategy game where one person plays a spy trying to complete innocuous missions at a crowdy cocktail party while the other player is a sniper trying to catch them in the act and shoot them. And the whole game runs just 3-4 minutes. The spy wins if they finish their missions or the sniper kills an innocent, and the sniper wins if the spy fails or they catch them redhanded and fire their ONE bullet.
Dev has basically stopped, but the game is pretty much complete. What a blast. You probably want to make sure you have a friend to play with in case the lobby is sleepy (there’s usually one or two people inviting me to a game immediately when I join, but mostly because they’re chilling alone waiting for a join). A buddy of mine and I keep going back to it over a bunch of other games because it’s so damn addictive.
This game is really neat. When I checked it out a year or so ago there was a dedicated community playing but I still needed a friend because everyone else was so advanced I wouldn’t last more than a few seconds.
For real! One thing I realized pretty quickly is that Spy Party is so much more fun if you prefer to play “more casual” instead of “more hardcore” and have the friends to suit.
I’m terrible. My buddy I play it with is slightly better than me. We have a blast. About all the skill increase I foresee is me learning to be less crazy on the trigger as sniper. After that, I’ll never watch 16 civilians enough to know how far each is towards a win.
I really enjoyed my time with this game a couple of years ago. I should play again.
I feel like the appeal of this game moved to Deceive, Inc. The devs appear to use data from player movement to progressively make the NPCs unpredictable. So, people will see a character start, stop, suddenly change direction, and hit a wall. So, they shoot them - and it will turn out to be a genuine NPC.
Huh. It seems dramatically different. I watched some solo of it and it’s not drawing me in like Spy Party did. I think the simplicity is part of what I liked about it. Deceive looks like it regularly devolves into little shoot-and-run matches. An FPS with a spy gimmick (which is cool, but I hate FPS games)
Just Act Natural on steam is similar and more casual. If you don’t mind the claymation style animation I highly recommend it. Cheaper, more active, and I think more progress has been made than Spy Party too
