Multiplayer party game Minutes to Mayhem pits four furniture-possessing ghosts against a grandma with a hatchet, tasking the phantoms with driving her temper through the ceiling before she can chop them up.
It’s up to you which side you want to be on in Minutes to Mayhem. You can act as Mrs. Hatchet, an old woman who has no interest in taking guff from some poltergeists, or the ghosts who intend to wind the poor woman up. As Mrs. Hatchet, you need to figure out which pieces of furniture are possessed and hack them to bits, and meanwhile, the ghosts need to hop aboard various household objects and use them to knock Mrs. Hatchet for a loop.
Akin to Prop Hunt, Minutes to Mayhem is naturally fun to watch and play simply from watching furniture spring to life and start racing around the house. Having your friends become a squad of couches and chairs, or just bringing a bottle to life and having it scoot across the floor is enough to have players cackling. That your job is to take this furniture and clobber Mrs. Hatchet adds some fun action, encouraging all-out attacks from fridges, or a more stealthy approach where a lamp suddenly thumps someone on the head.
The furniture provides a variety of mobility and combat options. Big stuff does more damage to Mrs. Hatchet’s mental state, but little stuff will allow you to sneak around a little easier. The old woman is pretty tough, so you’ll need to work carefully to overcome her and her hatchet. Switching from big to little stuff as necessary gives you many different ways to plan an attack, but you can’t change up willy-nilly, though. If you’re being attacked, you get trapped in your current body, needing someone to distract Mrs Hatchet to get away. Teamwork is key among ghosts.
As Mrs. Hatchet, you have to inspect your house for things that are amiss. The area is quite large, and you’re discouraged from wrecking well-behaved furniture, so you can’t just go wild. You do have a fair amount of health and a handful of furniture-freezing abilities, though, and given the silliness of play, it’s hard for the furniture to resist doing silly things, providing many opportunities to fight back even if you’re outnumbered.
Minutes to Mayhem feels well-balanced in this regard, with the goofiness of chasing living furniture keeping the game moving and lively. It’s just hard not to want to do something funny as a living frying pan, even if it gets you caught, creating a multiplayer game where the goal may be to drive Mrs Hatchet batty or to defeat living furniture, but it often shifts to who can do the silliest thing. It seems purely designed to create a fun, laugh-inducing mood among its players.
This natural encouragement to be silly, coupled with the sheer fun of becoming living furniture as an old woman tried to hack us up with an axe, created a party game that we kept coming back to. With its laugh-out-loud play style, it was definitely one of the top games of the 2018 Sweden Game Conference.
Minutes to Mayhem is currently in development, but you can follow its creators on Facebook.
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