Medieval Mordhau, Valve VR headset, funny Eat The Rich vault up the charts

The Valve Index VR Kit features improved visual and audio fidelity. — AFP Relaxnews

Mordhau finds fans with its hectic, historical combat, Valve leaps up its own store chart with a high-fidelity virtual reality range, and players command a ridiculous horde of shoppers in slapstick freebie Eat The Rich.

Offering medieval skirmishes for up to 64 players, including the currently favoured last-person-standing Battle Royale format, Mordhau has been enthusiastically adopted in its first week on Steam after a successful crowdfunding Kickstarter campaign two years ago.

Medieval battlefield combat has a well established fanbase on PC, with Mount & Blade (2008-2011), Chivalry: Medieval Warfare (2012), For Honor (2017) and Kingdom Come: Deliverance (2018) providing increasingly sophisticated takes on the formula.

Skill-based combat and comedy spectacle combine helping make Mordhau both a serious simulation and a silly bit of fun, with the game's blood and gore an optional setting.

While Mordhau conquered Steam's revenue-based chart with a relatively wallet-friendly US$25 (RM104) price, the site's second- and fourth-placed best-sellers for the week are two of its most expensive products.

At 40 times the price, the US$999 (RM4,147) Valve Index VR Kit bundle costs sold more than 40 times less units than Mordhau during their shared debut week.

The company behind Steam itself, US-based Valve Corporation, helped Taiwanese hardware brand HTC develop 2016's Vive virtual reality headset, and is now producing its own high-end edition.

The Valve Index VR Kit contains a headset, two base stations, and two controllers. The headset and controller pack totals US$749 (RM3,109) and the headset on its own costs US$449 (RM1,864), not including the cost of buying or building a suitably powerful PC.

Pre-orders opened on May 1, with shipping to begin in July.

One of this week's hot and comparatively innocent indie freebies is Eat The Rich, at fourth place in Itch.io's otherwise horror-stuffed chart of most popular downloads.

It's an in-progress project in which players direct a growing horde of wobbly, naked shoppers around a store in search of big total savings (and bigger overall spend).

At the end of each superstore sweep, various coupons, coffee, crowd size, and social media bonuses are applied to better the next round's haul, while ignoring the skyrocketing debt that results from such a cyclonic consumer spend. – AFP Relaxnews