“People Playground” is a sandbox game developed by Mestiez and published by Studio Minus. It was released on July 23, 2019, and has captured the hearts and sanities of many since then. I am one of the individuals whose heart and sanity have been seized by this beautifully designed outlet for any pent-up anger I may have.
The main point of “People Playground” is to use the tools it gives you to kill, torture, mend or protect virtual human-looking ragdolls. The base categories of items are entities, melee, firearms, explosives, vehicles, machinery, biohazards and miscellaneous.
One of my favorite items in the game is the fusion bomb, which hails from the explosives category. The sheer power of this explosive is hilarious in many situations. Spawned a bunch of entities and now the game is lagging? No problem – just activate a fusion bomb and they all instantly disappear.
Of course, players are not only limited to the base game items. The modding community for “People Playground” is
thriving with many talented modders releasing jaw-dropping innovations to better the gameplay. From simple item mods and grip fixes to changing the entire game into a first-person 3D sandbox, nobody knows what new favorite mod they might find when they scroll the Steam Workshop page for “People Playground.”
One of my personal favorite mods is the Time Traveler mod. The hijinks I get up to with this seemingly immortal being rival those of old “Looney Toons” cartoons. The Time Traveler is an entity that, upon receiving any damage, will quickly reverse time to a state of being perfectly stable and without any injury. It also can record an extended period of movements as long as the head is not destroyed. Once the ability is reactivated or the head is destroyed, the entire recorded series of movements will play again in reverse. It can even regenerate destroyed body parts if something like the Disassembler is used on it.
Mods are not the only things available on the Steam Workshop for “People Playground.” Players can also share contraptions they made to do any variety of things, like killing entities in creative ways or testing the limits of the game.
A popular trend that many contraption makers follow is trying to make the tallest building that will not fall as soon as it is spawned in. I do not really like this trend as it clogs the Workshop page with hundreds of contraptions named something like “The TRUE TALLEST BUILDING 100% NO CAP NO CLICKBAIT” and hides many gems of interesting or truly game-changing mods and contraptions from people like me who do not have much time to scroll through the Workshop page or try to figure out how to filter tallest building contraptions out.
Despite any negatives of the game or its modding community, “People Playground” is a great game to let out any anger built up during the day, and I love it for that. It gets six out of six revolver shots to an acid-spitting Gorse and its prize is one digital human spared from my tomfoolery.
