Video Game / People Playground

People Playground is a violent sandbox game by mestiez. In this game, you can torment and kill characters like humans or androids with various objects, weapons, or big contraptions that you made.

This game is available on Steam and Itch.io.

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People Playground provides examples of:

• A.K.A.-47: Most gunpowder-based guns have generic or fictional names like the rifle or G1 submachinegun. The AK-47 is the sole exception.
• Alien Blood: Gorses have green blood. It's acidic enough to the point it melts humans completely leaving nothing but the bones.
• And I Must Scream: Using the life syringe can result in this, bringing back humans only to make them die painfully over and over.
• Art Evolution: In the 1.16 update, all of the in-game items got more detailed pixel art, some of which were completely resprited, such as the Flamethrower.
• Artistic License – Biology:
  • While the blood loss and instant kill from head shots are realistic, sadly, shooting the heart does not result in instant death. It takes a little bit for a human being to die from being shot in the heart.
    • However, it's worth noting that the time does depend on where in the heart they were shot and the magnitude of the damage. There are indeed plenty of cases where a shot to the heart does cause virtually instant death (a few seconds at most). Conversely, some head shots don't result in instant death.
  • Heart shots, chest shots, neck stabbing, and any other rupture of major arteries should result in blood squirts and sprays where appropriate.
• Art Shift: The easter eggs you can discover often contain objects that are rendered in a vastly more realistic style than the rest of the game, the most notable being the Normal Sized Gun, and the pipe network you could find by pulling off a random wall panel on Tower.
• Awesome, but Impractical: The reconstructor is definitely this. While it can revive a human or other entity from death or unconsciousness, it draws the line at repairing any damaged skin and tissue that the player shot or beat.
• BFG: The Beam Rifle is the heaviest gun that characters can grab with their hands, and it fires a powerful concentrated beam that destroys most destructible things in one shot.
• Boom, Headshot!: You can kill humans instantly by putting a bullet or sharp object on their head. Bonus points if the gun is capable of blowing the human's head off.
• Bottomless Pits: The Void map doesn't have any surface, so things just fall and disappear unlike other maps.
• Brown Note: Powering up a jukebox with a industrial generator makes the music extremely loud (even for the player), and the head of characters near the jukebox will explode.
• Car Fu: This game has various vehicles, and you can use them to run over people.
• Chainsaw Good: The chainsaw is one of the melee weapons, and it's good at dismembering beings alive.
• Charged Attack: The Accelerator fires destructive energy projectiles, and it can fire even more deadly and huge ones by charging for awhile.
• Concealment Equals Cover: Averted for conventional firearms. Most guns can easily pierce soft and thin objects like wooden sticks or tables, and powerful guns like the sniper rifle or minigun can even penetrate steel walls.
• Cruel and Unusual Death: Practically anything the player does is fully capable of leading to this, often with terrifying results.
• Deader than Dead: While the life syringe can revive dead creatures, it's unable to regrow missing body parts. So if the head of a creature is obliterated to bloody pieces, it can't be revived anymore.
• Deadly Rotary Fan: Fans generate strong air currents, and mutilate anyone who touches em.
• Design-It-Yourself Equipment: You can build your own weapons, vehicles, or weird contraptions by combining various objects. In Steam version, you can publish your works to the Steam Workshop.
• Disintegrator Ray: The Disassembler fires a projectile that breaks down the molecular structure of the target, and it often results to One-Hit Kill.
• Easter Egg: Plenty, many of which have been added or removed with updates. They range from strange objects found in an obscure corner of the map, to contraptions you have to build that cause strange events to happen.
• Elaborate Underground Base: The Substructure map takes place in large underground base filled with facilities and dark rooms.
• EMP: The EMP Generator and nuclear blasts generate an wave of electromagnetic pulse, and it will destroy most electronic items.
• Explosive Barrels: The Red Barrel is a barrel with explosives, and it can be detonated by shooting it.
• Fatal Fireworks: Fireworks can be used to cause an weak explosion and burn characters. If you massively increase the size of fireworks, it will explode like a nuclear bomb but more saturation.
• Flatline: When a living being dies while they are connected at a heart monitor, the cardiogram screen will display it.
• Flechette Storm: Spike grenades launch lots of small spikes when detonated. Great for turning people into living (or dead) cacti.
• Flying Car: The Hovercar is a vehicle that floats on the ground and can fly fast. Also, you can build your own hovering vehicles via some hover thrusters.
• Freeze Ray: The Freezeray weapon rapidly decreases the temperature, and kills lifeforms by freezing them.
• Game Mod: There are lots of mods you can download from the Steam Workshop. They usually add new items or reskinned characters.
• Gatling Good: The Minigun has an almost realistic rate of fire and it can kill humans in less than a second.
• Giant Spider: Gorses are alien spiders that have a huge mouth. They spit acid projectiles at nearby characters.
• Gorn: Wounds that characters receive are quite gory and realistic.
• Gun Accessories: 1.26 update added several attachment for guns. Some of them modify firearms to shoot explosive, electric, or incendiary rounds!
• Hand Cannon: Naturally, the Magnum Revolver and the Handcannon(duh). One of the easter eggs takes this up to eleven, spawning in a humungous version of the Revolver (referred to in-game as the "Normal Sized Gun") that dwarfs even the Machine Gun. A shot from it is roughly comparable to a tank shell.
• Harmless Electrocution: Averted. Even at very low voltage, being electrocuted is often fatal to humans because it has a chance to stop the heart of them.
• Healing Potion: The life syringe can heal and reconstruct damaged beings, regardless of the injury or whether it is dead or alive, though if anything loses its limb, it's gone for good and cannot be restored by the syringe.
• Healing Shiv: The Reconstructor can "repair" damaged or killed organic characters with healing juice. It cannot repair the damaged skin despite the fact that it's called a reconstructor.
• High-Voltage Death: Generators produce a huge amount of electric charge, and it can fry the entire body of humans in seconds.
• Hot Blade: You can heat up any bladed weapon with fire or other heat source to invoke this trope.
• Immune to Bullets:
  • Downplayed with Androids. They don't take much damage from most bullets, but high-caliber guns like the Sniper Rifle or Minigun can damage them effectively.
  • Zombies in the early versions of the game were practically bullet sponges and took multiple shots to kill.
• Impaled with Extreme Prejudice: Using spears or big spikes can impale humans, and you can even pin them to the wall or floor. For additional cruelty, you can electrify your weapon with batteries, or make it scorching hot with some heating elements.
• Kill It with Fire: You can use the Flamethrower or the Pyrokinesis power to burn anything to a crisp.
• Lampshade Hanging: Some description text of items point out its weirdness.
  The description of Bicycle item: "An electronic bi-wheeled unicycle with no chain??? How does it work"
• Laser Blade: The Energy Blade can cut people and androids like butter, and it also heats up things.
• Lethal Lava Land: The Lava map has a huge sea of lava. It's very hot and burns things very quickly.
• Lightning Gun: The Stormbaan is a weaponized Tesla coil, and it electrocutes everything nearby.
• Literally Shattered Lives: Frozen characters are much easier to dismember.
• Ludicrous Gibs: Sufficiently powerful explosives can mutilate humans easily.
  • The Bazooka (obviously based on the WWII M1 and M1A1 Bazooka) is capable of tearing apart any organism it is fired at. It can even tear humans in half.
  • The Beam Rifle is known for doing this, practically butchering humans and gorses quite easily.
• Machine Blood: Downplayed. Androids don't bleed visually, however they still die from "blood loss" if you extract oil from their body too much.
• Magical Defibrillator: Using a defibrillator can revive the dead, but it's more downplayed than most video game examples; It usually doesn't work when "patients" have mortal injuries like gunshots in the head.
• Magikarp Power: A laser pointer only emits a harmless laser when it's unpowered, but it fires a more powerful and lethal laser when it's powered with various batteries. If you power it with an industrial generator with the maximum output, it will emit an extremely deadly purple laser that causes lots of explosions. It's no wonder that many people have tried to recreate the Death Star with it.
• Meatgrinder Surgery: Using blood vessel wires, you can perform surgeries on organisms that can result in humans with multiple heads, two gorses fused to each other, and other horrific combinations. Amputation is easy, provided you have a shotgun at hand.
• More Dakka: While guns like submachineguns or the Minigun naturally have higher rate of fire, you can make most ranged weapons to fire projectiles with the extremely high fire rate. Speed up a Metronome to 32hz, and attach propagation wire to the gun you like from it, so you can have a gun that fires projectiles 32 times per second.
• Nail 'Em: There are few guns that launch sharp objects. For example, the Scherbenwerfer can fire large blue crystals, and Spike Rifle fires lots of small spikes rapidly.
• Neck Snap: You can break a character's neck by grabbing, then quickly rotating it. They will die without spilling any blood. Made more blood chilling in a recent major update which changes the neck breaking sound to be more realistic.
• No Fair Cheating: For the achievements requiring you to build a contraption, you can't use a pre-made version. You have to build them yourself.
• No Plot? No Problem!: This game doesn't have any plot or lore at all.
• One-Hit Polykill: Bullets fired from stronger guns easily penetrate soft material like wood or flesh, so you can kill multiple humans at once with one bullet.
• Our Showers Are Different: The Liquid Outlet is a shower head that can dispense any liquid that is connected to it via tubing. Therefore, you can make humans shower in anything from acid to life serum.
• Our Zombies Are Different: The Zombie Syringe can turn living beings to zombies. Zombified characters are no longer immortal, but that can be changed with the ultra strength syringe which can make it so even headshots don't kill them directly (it takes a few headshots to actually kill them when the ultra strength syringe effects are applied).
• Pinball Projectile: The Ion Cannon fires the ball of energy that burns anything it touches, and it will ricochet a lot until it explodes.
• Playing with Syringes: You can conduct horrible experiments on characters to your heart's content — using actual syringes, to boot! The syringes will inject certain (often deadly) substances into lifeforms, and include a death syringe, an acid syringe, and a life syringe — the last can heal and resurrect damaged bodies, allowing you to subject them to tortuous experiments again and again.
• Public Domain Soundtrack: You can spawn a jukebox, and it plays various classical pieces.
• Purple Is Powerful: When charged up by a generator, thrusters and lasers will begin to glow purple.
• Sentry Gun: You can spawn sentry guns, and they will shoot nearby characters. They come in regular, laser-firing, and ceiling-mounted varieties. You can also build your own sentry gun by combining ranged weapons and detectors.
• Shock and Awe: You can generate lightning bolts out of thin air by using the Lightning god power.
• Shoot the Fuel Tank: Some vehicles have a fuel tank inside the body, and destroying it will render the vehicle useless.
• Shout-Out:
  • there are multiple ones to Portal.
    • The Sentry Gun of this game is clearly based on those games, due to the similar behavior (turrets can only shoot the target in front, get knocked down rather easily). In-dev footage shows that they had a placeholder texture that looks just like the Portal turrets.
    • The launch platform can launch objects into the air, not unlike the Aerial Faith Plate from Portal 2. In older versions, this item was exactly named "Aerial Faith Plate".
  • Container wagons that you can spawn are sometimes painted with Japanese letters "わたモテ". It says "Watamote".
  • One of the skins for car looks similar to Takumi's AE86.
  • One of the weapons is the Worm Staff from a game Mutilate-a-Doll 2.
  • The 1.15 update added the Physics Gun. Unfortunately, it can't freeze objects in midair.
  • The description for the torch says that it "prevents mobs from spawning".
• Slow Laser: Blaster weapons fire beam projectiles that fly slower than bullets from conventional firearms.
• Soft Water: Averted. Dropping characters into the water from heights will heavily injure or outright kill them, like when you drop them on the ground.
• Springs, Springs Everywhere: The Aerial Faith Plate can launch objects or characters into the air. It somehow can launch extremely heavy objects like tanks or freight cars too.
• Static Stun Gun: The Stunner launches an electric energy packet and it immobilizes humans. It's one of the few weapons that can neutralize people without killing, but overusing it might fry them alive and kill them as a result.
• Sticky Bomb: Sticky grenades stick to objects or the environment, then explode.
• Stripped to the Bone: The flesh and skin of people can melt from acid damage. An extreme amount of heat also can reduce the body of beings into a charred skeleton.
• Subsystem Damage: There's a surprising amount of depth to the bodily damage that a human or even gorse can sustain:
  • Each limb has its own individual health that is affected by trauma (stabbing, blunt impacts, gunshots, fire etc.). Damaging or depleting their health reduces their integrity, such that at low health the subjects act closer to ragdolls with little to no strength in their body. Bones can also break, with corresponding loss of ability and even death if done to the upper torso (spine) or head (neck).
  • Blood pressure and volume are simulated in a simple manner. Bleeding wounds reduce both and steadily worsen all health, irrespective of body integrity. Too low of either can kill.
  • Humans and gorses can suffer from internal bleeding, numbness, shock (pain; makes them cower in the closest to a fetal position the game allows currently) and adrenaline rushes (makes them ignore damage up to a point, albeit behaving somewhat erratic) once they suffer injury.
  • Lastly, consciousness and breathing are tracked. A Tap on the Head can put a human to sleep so long as it's not a hard enough impact to completely kill them, and minor chest damage (weak pistol shots through body armor) impedes breathing and slowly suffocates.
• Super Drowning Skills: While both humans and androids can't swim, androids will malfunction and die in seconds when they enter into a body of water. Apparently they are not water-proof at all.
• Tank Goodness: You can spawn tanks from vehicle tab. It's huge and heavy, and you can use it to run over people or fire its cannon to destroy the target.
• There Is No Kill Like Overkill: Humans in this game can't take much damage and they can be killed with a pistol or some baseball bat. But nothing prevents you from using more overpowered and destructive weapons like a Beam Rifle, tank, or nuclear bomb.
• Thunder Hammer: The Power Hammer is a huge and deadly melee weapon that releases electric shockwaves on the impact.
• Tim Taylor Technology: Many machines or electronics become more powerful by electrifying them with batteries or generators. For example, vehicles become more faster, lights become brighter, and the output of Thrusters become increased by just attaching some batteries.
• Unrealistic Black Hole:
  • The Decimator device emits a black hole-like substance that disintegrates anything that goes within its bounds. Furthermore, powering up it with a generator spawns a huge black hole, and it sucks everything nearby until it despawns.
  • One of the usable powers is "Pull", and it drags and pulls anything within a radius.
• Video Game Caring Potential: The Pacifist achievement requires the player to not kill anything for one hour while at least one Human is spawned in.
• Video Game Cruelty Potential: There are so many methods to maim, torment, and murder characters. You can bash them with blunt weapons, impale them with bladed weapons, perforate them with guns, blow them up with explosives, crush them with heavy objects, inject harmful substance with the syringes, and so on...
• Villain Protagonist: You just go around killing people and destroying androids to your heart's content.
• Weaponized Exhaust: The fire from thrusters is extremely hot, and it quickly burns people to death. The only thruster that averts this trope is, the ion thruster.
• Why Am I Ticking?: Injecting nitroglycerin into characters can turn them into a living bomb. They will violently explode from any slight shock they received. They can also explode if they are shot or burned.
• Wide-Open Sandbox: There are no defined objectives in the game, and you can do what you want to do in this game. You just can kill characters for kicks, make your own killing machines, build some cool vehicles, create contraptions that play a song with bells, and so on...
• X-Ray Sparks: The skeleton of characters shows up when they are electrocuted.
• You Nuke 'Em: There are exceptionally powerful bombs in the game and you can use them.
  • The atom bomb generates a huge fiery explosion with a mushroom cloud, and the explosion will reduce humans into charred skeletons.
  • The fusion bomb is a much more powerful version of atom bomb, which of course generates an even larger explosion...
  • Uniquely, fireworks that have been resized to the size of the atom bomb also explode the same way, albeit more colorfully.
• Your Head Asplode: From the 1.26 update, weapons with powerful damage outputs can explode human heads either at close range or from much farther ranges.