Sitting Ducks

For a while, the term 'friendslop' was almost a derogatory statement aimed at more obscure indie games that offer rather minimal experiences elevated by the fact you play alongside friends and have to work together to overcome challenges. But over time, more and more friendslop projects made their arrival to the point that today, friendslop is almost a genre in and of itself.

Fresh off making the atmospheric horror puzzler, Out of Sight, developer The Gang Studio has decided to test the friendslop waters, all in the form of a project known as Sitting Ducks. If you've played Peak, We Gotta Go, RV There Yet?, Pratfall, Yapyap, even Super Battle Golf, the nature of Sitting Ducks is very familiar, as we're served quite basic levels populated by junk and other items and told to use these items to overcome challenges, which in this case, are cataclysmic and apocalypse-level events.

So yes, we're dropped onto islands surrounded by water and told to use building and merging systems to create structures and items which will make surviving each catastrophe easier. You may need to simply get high enough to avoid a tsunami or instead build a formidable structure to defend against a meteor strike, and doing so is as straightforward as clicking on item to pick it up, then being offered the option to rotate said item into the right position, all before merging it with other items in a crude albeit effective building system. A lot of the junk you'll find on an island is basic construction resources, be this planks of wood or metal girders, but you'll also find crazier items as well that can be used for more creative solutions to a task or as a way to grief and annoy your friends. For example, you can ignite some dynamite to blow up zombie hordes or to put a friend's build back to square one - it all depends on how evil you feel like being on a given day.

The nature of the game is to work together to overcome these cataclysmic events, but Sitting Ducks doesn't have a defined way to overcome a problem, meaning you can just mess around in the sandbox and see what sorts of kooky creations you can put together with the simplistic yet effective building system. There is an added mechanic, a true friendslop tool, you could say, in the form of the Sticky Hand, which is precisely what you likely think it is. Your character has a hand that can grab items and drag them around, in a manner that's far less useful than the core building suite, even if it is a rather hilarious tool to annoy your friends and overcome some apocalypse scenarios, like the aforementioned zombie horde.

I do think there's room for improvement in regards to the content on offer as right now it's quite limited, almost as though it's an Early Access game that has just launched. More locations, more disasters, weirder and more obscure items to build with, just a general expansion of the sandbox to provide players with more options, this would go a long way in elevating what Sitting Ducks offers fans.

While The Gang Studio has fundamentally put together a rudimentary, functional, and often entertaining game in Sitting Ducks, like all friendslop titles, this is a project that's entirely dependent on the company you keep and what you as a group can get out of the wider experience. It's not for solo players at all, and you will likely only get a few hours of entertainment out of Sitting Ducks before you're ready to move on, as the number of cataclysms available right now are low and the experience is one that you have to make of it what you can, as is the case in all friendslop games. But, we are also talking about a title that costs less than £4 right now (£6 when the discount period comes to an end), so if you have a taste for these types of games, there's no reason not to hop in, give it a go, and see what you think. At the end of the day, we're talking about a game that's half as expensive as a cinema ticket...