Raise plants and monsters alike in claymation survival game Disdoored

Disdoored is a multiplayer survival game about breeding monsters, harvesting crops, and opening magic doors in a painstakingly handcrafted claymation world. It's coming to Steam Early Access later this month, where it will go for $20.

Developer and clay master Anton Riot says over 20 pounds of plasticine modeling clay have gone into Disdoored. Every character, item, weapon and creature was sculpted by hand and animated using traditional stop-motion techniques. In total, Riot and his team took over 20,000 photos to get everything moving.

Its art is its most striking feature, but Disdoored is pretty interesting all around. Your goal is to solve the mystery of the doors which have appeared throughout the world, creating portals to other worlds filled with horrible monsters. Your only clue is a young sapling named Lily, who you must befriend by "catering to her every whim." Nearest I can tell, her whims involve farming.

"Players must establish a base, cultivate farmland, create defenses and amass an arsenal," publisher BitBox says. "Terrible beasts that are both hungry and highly territorial pose a constant threat, but some can be domesticated and upgraded to create entirely new species." Naturally, you can also explore those mysterious doors, which sound an awful lot like dungeons, and you can do everything with up to three friends in multiplayer.

Austin freelanced for PC Gamer, Eurogamer, IGN, Sports Illustrated, and more while finishing his journalism degree, and has been a full-time writer at PC Gamer's sister publication GamesRadar+ since 2019. They've yet to realize that his position as a staff writer is just a cover-up for his career-spanning Destiny column, and he's kept the ruse going with a focus on news, the occasional feature, and as much Genshin Impact as he can get away with.