Last year, we wrote about how every new live service shooter starts with its own distinct aesthetic before inevitably succumbing to Cosmetic Uglification, when tie-ins and collaborations result in a game overrun by "a clown show of brands." Impressively, the next game Amazon is publishing, King of Meat, has decided to skip over this painful process by starting with an incomprehensible aesthetic mishmash from day one.
This is Jackson Pollock: Gamer's Edition, a grab bag of random ideas and systems smashed together in the hopes of reverse-engineering why Roblox prints a million dollars a day. The core setup: a four-player co-op game in which you make your way through short dungeons, smacking braindead enemy mobs with light three-hit weapon combos and solving a few puzzles like "stand on the button" or "pull the lever on that platform" to progress. The theming: a game show, complete with sarcastic announcers commenting on what happens as you go. (The developers describe it as "joyfully unhinged," which mainly means there are some trite jokes about commercialism in this game published by a two trillion-dollar company.)
