Pigface, what a title. Does it have much to do with the game? Not really. But it does fit! As for what it is exactly, well it’s like someone combined Hotline Miami, Manhunt, Condemned, and GoldenEye. If that sounds kind of insane that’s because it absolutely is. You play as a woman who wakes up in a warehouse and is told what to do by a stranger on a cell phone. The game entered Early Access last week and is set to stay there for at least a year. The thing is, it currently has very little content, so the question stands – is Pigface worth it in Early Access or should you wait for some updates?
The game’s visuals look like they’re from straight out of the late 90s, with muddy, low-resolution textures and mostly simple assets that all come together for a very creepy lo-fi experience. You’re meant to pick missions from a map, get driven to them, and then you go in and fulfil objectives. These objectives are typically to steal something, destroy something, or kill someone. The player character is a woman in a mask and she’s going to be exclusively up against other creeps in masks. Each level also has an optional objective that’ll give you some extra cash.
Money’s a pretty big deal in Pigface. You’ll use it to buy new weapons, weapon mods, items, and armour, all of which can be selected in the van before you leave for your destination. You can even replay missions as many times as you want to grind money. The counter to this is that each time you die, you lose a pretty significant amount of money. For instance, if you’re carrying over $4,000, you’ll lose around $1,000. It’s a pretty steep, and somewhat ridiculous, consequence for failure. Even worse, the game can be pretty trial-and-error at times.
You can hold a single firearm and one melee weapon. If you run out of ammo in the field, you’ll likely need to switch to a gun your foes have dropped. Levels have a ton of dangerous enemies that can kill you very quickly, especially if you’re not wearing any armour. Even with armour, two shots from a sniper is enough to put you down. Additionally, Pigface has zero checkpoints – if you die, you start over from the beginning. It’s incredibly vexing to be one objective away from being done, only to die because an unseen enemy hit you in the back. But there are healing items you can use, and your default mask (which grant abilities like in Hotline Miami,) lets you carry six of these instead of the regular three.
There are only currently four levels in Pigface, meaning there’s one or two hours of gameplay in the current build, which obviously isn’t much. The fourth level, in particular, is especially frustrating due to a difficulty spike and how hard it is to find one of the objective items without looking it up. There are also some standard features missing, such as being able to independently control the volume of the music, turning off viewbob, and the ability to rebind controls. However, I did have a lot of fun here, as it doesn’t take long for the game to let you buy weapons that can have scopes and suppressors added to them.
I think Pigface can be a lot of fun and it scratches an itch that’s rarely addressed. But it’s kind of a big ask at its current price point of $8.99/£8.50 for a couple of hours of playtime at best (although there are typically multiple ways to approach the levels, depending on your playstyle which can extend gameplay.) I’m not entirely sure how many levels the game plans to add, but I do think it’s worth playing. Just maybe when there’s at least triple the amount of content and the aforementioned quality of life features are added in.
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