Push Me Pull You is a local-multiplayer game about friendship and wrestling, that finally bridges the gap between competitive sports and nightmarish body-horror. The game is currently in development by House House, a four-person games studio based in Melbourne, Australia. It was a featured game at That Venus Patrol & Wild Rumpus Party at GDC 2014, and this week releases its first gameplay video.
More about this dreadful game
Connected at the waist, you and your partner must use a shared body to wrap, writhe, and wrestle the ball into your half of the court. Love each other, work together, communicate and coordinate, and prove that a good friendship can overcome anything (unless you find yourself up against an even better friendship!) It’s a bit like a big hug, or playing soccer with your small intestines. With every action affecting both you and your partner (and lots of shouting at each other) PMPY combines the best parts of 2v2 local multiplayer with the worst parts of your last breakup.
Push Me Pull You, which Rock, Paper, Shotgun called a “massive rubbery skin pile of contradictions … grotesque yet adorable, simple yet complex, smart yet dumb as a little kid’s smile,” started as the passion project of four friends – Nico Disseldorp, Stuart Gillespie-Cook, Jake Strasser and Michael McMaster – who love local multiplayer games and wanted a game they could play together. With no funding, very little experience, and a sketch of two naked people who share a body but can’t get along, the newly formed House House team spent December of 2013 huddled in their share-house living rooms working on what they were calling their ‘summer project’.
“We debuted the game to a room full of our friends on New Years Eve, and were shocked and delighted by the response – people were transfixed – they were yelling at the screen, cheering on the players, but most importantly they were laughing,” said Strasser. “After someone found our website, the game was asked to be a part of That Venus Patrol & Wild Rumpus Party at GDC, and we have been working on our ‘summer project’ ever since.”
Anyway – we have a video
The video shows how important communication is once you can’t move anywhere without moving together. Shouts of “get in the bag” and “ok, now carousel” show the ridiculous language that becomes necessary when trying to coordinate the movement of your gross, shared torso.
“We were interested in how the 2v2 competitive dynamic made co-operation and communication the most essential aspect of its play” McMaster said. “PMPY takes that co-operation to its logical extent by literally joining teammates together.”
As a means of enforcing teamwork, every action in Push Me Pull You affects both you and your partner. By stripping away the expected binary verbs of a sports game (e.g. sprinting, tackling, passing) in favour of a physics-based movement system, the game allows for a fluid, non-prescriptive set of verbs to emerge – since you can’t just pick up the ball with the press of a button, you’ll need to use your shared body to scoop it up and carry it, or wrap around it to protect it, or push it away so that your opponent can’t reach it, and so on. These freeform tactics evolve through consecutive games as players invent their own strategies and counter-strategies, producing an expressive system of play.
