Mosh Pit Simulator is bizarre, disturbing, funny and unapologetically crass—the sort of fever dream that could only leak from the brain of Sos Sosowski, the Polish indie developer behind the well-received (and patently ludicrous) bomb defusing game McPixel (2012). Now, Sosowski has announced that Mosh Pit Simulator is finally coming to Rift, Vive and Windows VR starting tomorrow.
Update (January 30th, 2019): Sos Sosowksi announced that ‘Mosh Pit Simulator’ is heading into early access tomorrow, January 31st, at the price of $20. Sosowski says the early access version will contain Story Mode, with more features and gameplay modes to be added throughout the game’s projected six-month stint in early access.
Original Article (October 22nd, 2018): Slated to release on Steam Early Access on January 15th, Mosh Pit Simulator isn’t really a simulator, at least no more than Goat Simulator (2014) is about living the life of your garden variety goat. It’s essentially a single-player VR physics sandbox based in a world that’s overrun by naked zombie-like creatures who grotesquely amble around after a terrible accident. These aren’t your run-of-the-mill zombies though; they don’t have brains or bones, and they still want to live normal lives, like driving cars and going out on the town for some light shopping. It’s your job to save the world somehow—probably by smashing the ever-living crap out of it.
I went hands-on with a prototype of Mosh Pit Simulator at Gamescom 2016, and it proved to be every bit as bright, insane, and off-putting as Sosowki said it would be. You can take my word for it, or just watch the trailer to see what sort of mayhem the fully-destructible physics-based game has in store.
The game promises rockets, explosives, engines, and plenty more objects to build with, and a story mode that’s admittedly something Sosowski calls “the most ridiculous plot in video games.”
While I can’t speak about the story elements of the game, or even how they’re supposed to work in a world that lets you smash up the entire one kilometer island, my sneaking suspicion is that it’s more about chaos, breaking expectations, and having the sort of madcap fun of making your own interactions, like popping rocket engines on a bus loaded with the undulating, naked humanoid creatures and sending it into the sky.
Sosowski says the game came out of his frustration with how VR games force you into specific interactions, which left his instinctive need to destroy everything around him completely unfulfilled. “[M]ost of the titles are rigged to prevent me from doing that, and to keep me focused on the actual point of the game,” he says. Born from this frustration, Sosowski decided to create a game that will let you destroy anything and everything.
“The idea behind Mosh Pit Simulator is, that you are inside a video game, with those weird humans, all governed by video game rules, but since you wear VR goggles, not all of the rules apply to you. In VR, nothing really exists, so you can lift everything up easily, punch with near-infinite strength and wreck total havoc to the extent where physics engine can’t cope up anymore.”
“But why are they naked?” I asked Sosowski back at Gamescom 2016. To him, it all makes perfect sense. “When people don’t have bones, how are their clothes going to stay on them? They’ll just fall off. So the people just fell out of their clothes. That’s why they’re all naked.”
It’s a sort of ‘safe for work’ level of naked though; Sosowski says from the onset he’s been making the game suitable for audiences 12 and up. There’s no blood or gore, and the humanoids are distinctively mannequin-like, meaning there’s no offensive anatomical bits that might otherwise send the game in a much weirder direction.
During the Early Access period, Sosowski aims to bring a number of small game modes that will let you experience it in different ways including:
- Driving Mode – where you can drive around in the car and wreck havoc
- Spider Mode – where you can sling yourself around (not for the faint of heart)
- Animatronics Mode – where you can create, record and play back animations
- More items that will help you build and craft more advanced contraptions, like joints and devices
- Additional environments (forest, desert, train)
- Add more tweaks and options and cheats
- Tools to help people with motion sickness
- Steam integration (achievements, workshop)
Check out Mosh Pit Simulator on Steam here.