I’ve just read the article over at Kotaku about SpyParty (read it here), a game which sees spies try to carry out their secret missions under the nose of a watching sniper who has to identify and eliminate them among a crowded room. The only problem is the sniper doesn’t know who’s the spy. In most games this probably wouldn’t be an issue, you could just hose the crowd and scratch it up to collateral damage, but in SpyParty you only get one shot so you’ve got to make it count. I love this element of it, having to take your time and make you’ve got the right person before you fire, watching the crowd to try and pick out spy player’s character and take them out before they complete their mission, having to second guess both the game and the other player. The designer wants to have these parties take place across multiple rooms with multiple players on either side, presumably with the snipers each being allocated a single target to identify and kill at the beginning of the round.
As the title of the Kotaku article says this is a smart game, in my opinion a bloody genius one and it’s just a shame it’s at least 2 years off.
You can follow the development of SpyParty here
