Gameshow shooter Deathrun TV has a 'pilot episode' you can play now

Deathrun TV had its world premiere on the Future Games Show, where host Troy Baker called it "a game show shooter where you earn likes for dunkin' on competitors, and causing a little wanton destruction." It looks like The Running Man crossed with The Binding of Isaac—a top-down shooter with zombies, traps, mobile mines, and some kind of horned blob monster, where your score is based on how many likes the audience give your performance.

You can dual-wield pistols, machine guns, and shotguns, and earn mutations that prevent your gun from overheating, boost your speed, or earn you more likes. Seems like there might be some kind of roguelike element to Deathrun TV, since as the intro puts it, "...in a seriously disturbed future, likes are everything, death is nothing. The run is all that matters."

Deathrun TV is the work of indie studio Laser Dog and publisher Merge Games. A pilot episode is live now on Steam. Is it a demo? The first chapter of an episodic saga? Guess we'll have to play it to find out.

Jody Macgregor
Weekend/AU Editor

Jody's first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia's first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He's written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, Five Out of Ten Magazine, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody's first article for PC Gamer was about the audio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he's written about why Silent Hill belongs on PC, why Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, and how weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.