Sometimes you’ve simply gotta take off your shirt, gentle up a smoke, and get your greatest mate to smack you within the again with a stool. The newest game from Radiator 2 and The Tearoom creator Robert Yang, Hard Lads is a quick story of alcohol, furnishings, and cigarettes, all in service of adapting the viral story of two English lads attempting their hardest to claim their heterosexuality by stripping down and getting bodily.
Hard Lads is a painstaking recreation of viral 2015 video British Lads Hit Each Other With Chair – whereby one lad kisses his eventual attacker, downs his drink, smashes it on the group, lights up a cig, and is promptly clobbered with a deck chair. You’ll need to watch that first, yeah?
A self-described “masculinity simulator”, there’s an exquisite simplicity to Hard Lads’ interactive recreation. Yang’s rendition of a grim, dreary English backlot is shockingly correct, populated by action-figure analogues to the video’s topless blokes. The telephone digicam is used each to seize and direct the motion, pointing at contextual clues to have the lads smoke, drink, kiss, and combat. Even the wee lad who fetches the dropped cig makes an look, showing and disappearing in a literal puff of smoke.
More than only a quirky physics gag, nonetheless, Hard Lads is an try at ripping aside the weird homophobia on the root of British Lads. In an artist’s statement, Yang notes that “practically everyone in this video has failed this public test of masculinity”.
“The actual insult is that they suppose queer vitality will be dispelled so simply! The video reveals how straight mate vitality is definitely fairly fragile. It simply takes one minute to totally destroy the lad’s masculinity on video. In the top, I argue that queer love can be the pressure that honors masculine vulnerability, and so solely we’ve got the facility to reclaim these lads.”
Hard Lads is a bit softer than Yang’s previous work, with its personal retailer web page reckoning it could be “considered PG-13”. Having beforehand launched public lavatory cruiser The Tearoom and (extremely NSFW) penis pictures sim Cobra Club, Yang’s work has typically fallen foul of platforms like Twitch consistently blocking his gay games – an issue The Tearoom solved by changing genitalia for a extra “acceptable” object. Guns.
This time, although, there’s no nudity. No intercourse. Just two bros sharing a kiss, a smoke, a beer, and a bit little bit of bodily violence. Hard Lads is free / pay-what-you-want over on Itch.
Disclosure: In between making raunchy queer games and educating game design, Robert Yang sometimes writes for us at RPS. If you’re in any respect in stage design and map-making, try his two-part retrospective on Counter-Strike’s infamous fy_iceworld.
