Just because Steam sensation Peak is a deeply unserious game doesn’t mean it can’t cross over into ominous territory. Such was the case in late July, when the developers suddenly added a cannibalism feature that would allow Peak players to eat one another. Not long after, the developers ended up nerfing the feature and making it opt-in, and the team told Polygon a bit about the decision-making process.
In Peak, you have to worry about your level of hunger if you want to survive. After the cannibalism update, if players got hungry enough, others would start appearing in front of them like a giant rotisserie chicken just waiting to be eaten. If a teammate went full Yellowjackets, they’d be satiated… at a cost. The other poor sod dies, and the cannibal ends up getting cursed. Both of these states can be reversed with the right items, but as you can imagine, things went south for some unwitting players quickly.
Immediately, some players started pleading for the cannibalism feature to get reworked. According to one player, some jerks started actively stashing away food so that there was no choice but to eat other people. “Now players can ACTIVELY kill you which is a very toxic issue when playing with randoms,” the player wrote.
Speaking to Polygon, Landfall Games head of communications Hanna Fogelberg said that the team decided to make cannibalism opt-in for the sake of the players. After the patch adjusting cannibalism, players who have cannibalism turned on will see the option pop up earlier than before, and there’s a greater penalty for eating your pals. The idea, it seems, is to make cannibalism less appealing and therefore cut down on potential toxicity from people abusing it.
“Well, shockingly, not everyone is down to eat their friends,” she joked. “We thought we were living in a pro-cannibalism society, but we were mistaken. No, but Peak is inherently about cooperation and friendship, so we wanted to give players the option to opt out of being eaten or being able to eat others. We didn’t really get a lot of displeased players, just some who politely asked for a way to opt out, and we thought it was a very reasonable request.”
Peak is the product of two indie studios coming together, Landfall Games (Content Warning, Totally Accurate Battle Simulator) and Aggro Crab (Going Under, Another Crab’s Treasure). And apparently, the cannibalism feature came as a surprise to many of the folks at Landfall Games, who were on vacation when the mechanic was put into the game.
“We were both delighted and a bit shocked, along with the players!” Fogelberg said.
Don’t worry though, the people behind Peak aren’t going soft on us. If anything, the perilous scouting game might be about to implement even more dark features with its big Mesa update that drops today. The update, which the developers describe as the game’s first “major” addition, adds a new biome, new items like dynamite, and new badges. Already, players think they’ve spotted things like dust storms in the trailer. But worryingly, one of the characters in the teaser is depicted with a flower crown in what appears to be a nod to Midsommar, the Ari Aster horror film. Midsommar involves a gruesome trip to Sweden, and the folks at Landfall Games are Swedish. My guess? There will be more funny, messed-up ways to kill one another in the Mesa update.