A demon rat and a duck star in this buddy cop RPG

There's a demo of My Familiar, if you're into rap-battling demon animals.

A JRPG oddity has made its way onto Steam, an comedic fantasy buddy cop RPG that’s about some weird, extremely asocial demons battling in a city falling down around their ears. You’re a trashy rat creature, you have no idea what’s going on, and your job is to climb a tower—but you’ll need to make some friends (and enemies) to get there.

The real sell here is that it’s got some decent laughs and writing, but more than anything that it’s just pretty dang cool looking. The kind of gutterpunk, trashy modern demon aesthetic is rich with ideas for characters, and the game looks to deliver mobster rats, investigator chickens, and various other weird-as-heck denizens in spades.

I mean really, there’s some dudes who are like… water buffalos, I guess? With boomboxes? They kind of dress like an 80s street crew. It’s goofy as hell and I love it.

The playable characters will include “a self-loathing party fowl, a disembodied diva, a remorseless sausage thief, a totally jacked, luchador duck, a self-righteous robber-baroness, and some sort of weird, purple rabbit/goblin/rat thing.” Okay yeah that’s good, I like that list a lot.

The plot is about your crew of weird misfits fighting their way across the city to a tower that will supposedly let you, the rat thing, go home. I say fighting because most everyone on the streets in this place seems to want to pick a fight. To me, it’s kind of like if The Warriors were set among a set of rejected, also-ran Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles villains in the vein of Bebop and Rocksteady.

You can play a demo of My Familiar on Steam. It’s a bit too relaxed for my tastes—the turn-based combat could use a touch more complexity—but it’s hard to complain when it’s an in-progress game with such nice art going on. I particularly love the graffiti-inspired menu screens. My Familiar is one I’ll be keeping my eye on.

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