Babbdi was a game with a stark and gritty brutalist aesthetic, and a game about playing scales with a trumpet, jumping walls with a baseball bat, and flying around with a leaf blower. Stolen in the winter of 2022, it was a grim but charming free-to-play game with a huge, if well-hidden, imagination, where the only clear goal was to find a way out of a tiny concrete city.
Now, developer Lemaitre Bros. is making a damn good 1v1 FPS called Straftat, set to launch on October 24, 2024, with over 100 arenas. It’s the same with concrete, but it also has blunderbuss, two-handed weapons, Gatling guns, corner peeks, curved swords, cowboy hats, and beehive hairdos.
Technically, this isn’t news. Straftat has been widely known since last year – below is an unedited WIP from March. But this is the first time I’ve looked at it Steam pageand I hold the epistemological position that reality exists only when it is observed. Consequently, I find it completely logical and consistent to say that Straftat has Just existed at the time of writing this news. Here you go.
There are a few schools of thought on the name. One is that Straftat is German for “criminal offense,” perhaps a reference to some Berlin club. There are certainly plenty of crimes committed in the game, from crimes against windows (Straftat is part of the unofficial defenestration genre, recently re-popularized by Tactical Breach Wizards) to crimes against fashion.
Another interpretation of the name is that it’s an acronym for, say, “Strafe Tactics,” a Modern Warfare-style techno-bloom that doesn’t seem to fit with the game’s whitewashed, glitzy vibe. And third, there’s the argument that Straftat is “Tat Farts” spelled backwards, which is a speculation I’d support – it certainly describes many free-to-play live-service games. It’s unclear to me how Lemaitre Bros. financed Straftat’s development, but then again it wasn’t clear to me how they financed Babbdi’s development – are they going to sell those hats and hairstyles, or allow players to be traded like in Counter-Strike and Diablo? Whatever their approach is, I hope it continues to work.
I really enjoy the pace, variety, and energy of this game, and it’s great to see the developers’ talent for first-person cinematography translate to such a vast collection of maps, though I naturally have some concerns about diminishing returns.
Some maps are more tense, with fog and trees, almost like Darkroot Garden, while others are elaborate urban spaces with signage and props that could have been lifted from Babbdi’s infrastructure. The combat reminds me of the dueling communities in games like the Jedi Knight series. It seems like there’s nothing to worry about in terms of progression – just map improvements. You can find out more at Discord Developer.
Too bullish for a game with brutalist architecture? Maybe you prefer Lorn’s Lure.
