The people behind the awesome Brutalist parkour game Babbdi are creating a free 1v1 FPS with over 100 maps

Babbdi was a game with a stark and austere brutalist aesthetic, and also a game about playing scales with a trumpet, wall-jumping with a baseball bat, and using a leaf blower to fly. Released secretly in the winter of 2022, it was a bleak but delightful freebie with an immense but well-hidden imagination, in which your only explicit goal was to find a way out of a small concrete town.

Now, developers Lemaitre Bros are making a gott-dang 1v1 FPS called Straftat, set for release on October 24, 2024 with over 100 arenas. It’s just as infatuated with concrete, but it also has blunderbusses, dual-wielding, Gatling guns, corner-peeping, curved swords, cowboy hats, and beehive hairdos.

Technically, this isn’t news. Straftat has been publicly known since last year—you can find an unedited WIP recording from March below. But this is the first time I’ve seen the Steam page, and I hold to the epistemological position that reality only exists when it is perceived. As such, I consider it perfectly logical and coherent to claim that Straftat only existed at the time this news item was written. You’re welcome.

There are several schools of thought on the name. One is that Straftat is German for “criminal offense”, perhaps a reference to some edgy Berlin club. There are certainly plenty of offenses in the game, from crimes against windows (Straftat is part of the unofficial defenestration genre recently repopularized by Tactical Breach Wizards) to crimes against fashion.

Another take on the name is that it’s an abbreviation of, like, “Strafe Tactics”, a Modern Warfare-esque techno-flourish that seems out of place with the game’s bleached-out, swooping vibes. And third, there’s the argument that Straftat is “Tat Farts” spelled backwards, which is the speculation I favor – it certainly describes a lot of free-to-play live service games. I don’t know how Lemaitre Bros is funding Straftat’s development, but then again, I didn’t know how they were funding Babbdi’s development either – are they going to sell those hats and haircuts, or allow player trading, a la Counter-Strike and Diablo? Whatever their approach, I hope it keeps working.

I really like the pace, variety and energy of it, and it’s a pleasure to see the developers’ talent for first-person environments applied to such a huge album of maps. I do worry about diminishing returns, of course.

Some of the maps are more exciting, with fog and trees, almost Darkroot Garden-esque, while others are fully fleshed-out urban spaces with signage and props possibly swiped from Babbdi’s infrastructure. The combat gives me flashbacks to the dueling communities in games like the Jedi Knight series. There doesn’t seem to be any progression nonsense to worry about – just on-map power-ups. You can learn more over on the developer’s Discord.

Too cheerful for a game with brutalist architecture? Then you might prefer Lorn’s Lure.