Bleak, disquieting action game Virtue and a Sledgehammer blends family heartbreak with stout wall-smashing in its new demo

Deconstructeam, of Many Nights a Whisper and The Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood, say their newest game Virtue and a Sledgehammer is about "feeling like you no longer belong in the place you grew up." Judging from the newly released demo, it’s also about catharsis. Chunky, crumbly, crushing catharsis, injected through the handle of misappropriated demolition equipment.

The place in question, lead hammerwoman Pratelle’s hometown of Virtud, is in many ways asking for it. Its residents are gone, replaced with android copies who’ll mostly attack on sight, and the masonry of its humble bungalows has a habit of getting in the way. Pratelle might stomp through its streets with the murderous gait of a dungareed Jason Voorhees, but her sledgehammer is as much a means of exploration as it is a bot-biffing weapon, and an effective one at that. Caving in walls serves both to open up pathways, and to repay Virtud’s hostility with gratifyingly righteous havoc, debris slamming across rooms with the force of the impact and weakened chunks clinging for a moment before pathetically dropping the floor. 'Ave it, jerk wall for jerks. 'Ave iiiiit.

Pratelle herself doesn’t seem to enjoy her wrecking spree as much as I was, but then I did gladly eat the crumbs of story that the demo dropped about why she’s back in town. Taut flashbacks, framed through increasingly unsettling camera angles, set up a bizarre family dynamic involving a maybe-abusive, maybe-unwell mother and genius sister Nina, who crushes snails for fun and is implied to be responsible for the town’s cyberization. It’s sci-fi, but grounded in all-too-familiar tales of parental illnesses and dysfunctional relationships.

The bond between Pratelle and Nina has snapped particularly violently, hence why the former is out scrapping the latter’s science projects. Surprisingly, though, the robots hold no angst whatsoever about (knowingly) becoming digital undead. Until Pratelle gets within bludgeoning distance, they’ll sit with one another discussing sports, gather in church to pray, and in the case of at least one couple, sneak off to a quiet corner for some lipless metal smooching. It wouldn’t be unexpected if the full game ends up using this to reframe your rampage in a harsher light, although the ‘droids maintaining their personalities does also mean that any arseholery is preserved too. The ones that choose not to attack often only do so because they’d prefer to stand there and hurl patronising insults, if not outright slurs.

The parallel between Virtud’s robotic monoculture and how real-life communities are unthinkingly sliding back towards prejudice is delivered with all the subtlety of a certain large striking tool. Yet it’s one worth making, and as grim as the game gets in doing so, you probably won’t be far from some load-bearing bullshit on which to take some small measure of revenge. Virtue and a Sledgehammer is out next year.