I have a confession: I have played a lot of The Behemoth‘s new game, Pit People. We had the pleasure of sitting down with the development team and trying Pit People at PAX East 2017, which was one of the first major unveilings for the game since release. After playing it for several weeks, I am in love:
The Behemoth has has become a well known indie game development team, mostly from the success of Castle Crashers and Battleblock Theatre. Their games have a knack of striking the perfect balance between fun gameplay, hysterical commentary, and challenge. If you have not had the opportunity of playing either of the aforementioned games, we highly recommend you pick them up.
Game&Comic sat down with The Behemoth‘s Production Coordinator, Ian Moreno. When asked what the best way to describe Pit People is “Chaos Management” was the term Ian started with. Pit People is a turn-based strategy game where the player needs to manage a team of fighters to defeat enemies while maintaining and advancing position.
If you are curious how the idea came into fruition, Pit People started as a seres of early sketches and concept fighters by Pit People Art Director, Dan Paladin. What began as a fight/stop early concept gameplay is now a fully dynamic turn-based strategy game. The Behemoth takes pride in the fact that each of their games offers a widely different gameplay style, but still manages to retain the charm of previous games that we have enjoyed. Pit People was the team’s attempt to tackle a new game genre: Strategy. However, the team emphasizes that this is a more approachable and simplified strategy game in the fact that the focus on on position.
Your team of characters is fully customizable. In a typical team, there are about 6 character slots, but this can vary since certain types of fighters take up more (or less) slot space. There is a full array of fighters from human brawlers to zombie archers to cupcake healers to rainbow horses, and seemingly everything in between. One of the fun aspects of Pit People is you have to actually catch new playable characters by battling and capturing them. Any character you meet in battle has the potential to be captured and once caught, that character is here to stay. Each character has customizable weapons, armor, etc. which can be acquired through completing missions.
The game has a main storyline, and so far from Early Access, the storyline is relatively short. However, each main story battle increases in battle level difficulty tremendously, so you have to spend a lot of time searching the region for new fighters, leveling up, acquiring gear, and become stronger as a team. This extends the overall feel of the gameplay, because many times, I enjoyed and focused more on roaming around the world searching for a certain character, acquiring loot, and helping with side missions than I did actually trying to beat the main story. Plus, the game is still in Early Access, which means there may be more story on the way.
It is also worth noting that the game offers an “auto-battler” feature, which streamlines battling for the player at the expense of additional loot or points. Multiplayer is also incorporated, and the entire game can be played with a friend, which is a lot of fun.
Pit People is available on Steam Early Access right now for Windows. At $14.99, you will surely get your money’s worth (and likely, a lot of laughs). There is currently no confirmed release date, but The Behemoth has launched a series of updates since their Early Access began. The team mentioned they hope a full version of the game to launch within the year, but that there is no official release date.
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