“That game with the massive dead body was created using generative AI!” roared the masses. “Oh shucks,” said I, “Don’t worry, I’ll soon find another massive dead body game to write about.” Reader, never let it be said that I am not as good as my word. In All Haul The King, players team up to drag the huge, elastic carcass of a goblin sovereign from one end of the world to the other. Your goal is to get him onto the Throne of Resurrection. This might go easier if you transform him into an anvil. Anvils don’t wobble around quite so much, after all. Here is a trailer.
Yes, it’s one of those boisterous and blundering, kamikaze co-op affairs that tends to get branded “friendslop”. The debate goes on as to whether the term “friendslop” is vacuous and needlessly pejorative, or a useful label for a certain sensibility of multiplayer experience. As trends go, I prefer the friendslocalypse to the earlier Vampire Survivorlike lemming rush, but I have to say, I’m getting tired of trailers that simulate a bunch of streamers clowning around together and overreacting to every pratfall.
Still, All Haul The King jumps out at me because it’s the work of Housefire, and Housefire are the creators of splendid horror offering Eclipsium – a game that will cause you to encase your own hands in concrete, so that you never have to be afraid of them again. Their new game strikes a very different tone, but the lurid colours and odd proportions are somewhat reminiscent.
The key difficulty in All Haul The King is that a huge decomposing greenskin is not a precision instrument. Good luck finding his centre of gravity as you lug him over cracked bridges, or punt him through puzzlerooms using magnets and pulleys. Or feed him things that make his buttocks detonate. The Goblin King may be dead but his digestive tract is still wholly operational, somehow. He will eat flowers. He will eat rats. He will eat your friend. And whatever he guzzles will have an effect on him that is either helpful or amusing. I hope it’s not just fart jokes. I am not above the odd fart joke, Housefire, but I need them to be surrounded by other, cleverer jokes so that I don’t feel bad about enjoying them. You can also experiment with magic, casting spells that turn penguins into fridges and anvils into rats.
All Haul The King has a playtest underway right now, with the full game “coming soon”. Ever the entrepreneurial soul, I’ve been thinking about licensed dead goblin crossovers. Puck from A Midsummer Night’s Dream has been called a “hobgoblin”, and then there’s the Green Goblin from Spider-Man – I would suggest going with the live action Willem Dafoe intrepretation. Willem Dafoe is a majestically creepy man, and I’m sure he’d like nothing better than to be memorialised as a dead goblin king with gastric superpowers.
If talk of prominent singleplayer horror devs switching to multiplayer intrigues you, you might also want to check out the next game from the Mouthwashing devs.
