Pit People arrived in full in March 2018, after more than a year in early access, and it is the strangest thing The Behemoth has shipped. The studio built a turn-based tactics game, then filled it with sinister robots, deadly vampires and cupcake people. It works more often than it has any right to.
Trailer, via The Behemoth.
Hexagonal Arenas and the Tyranny of Distance
Pit People is a tactical role-playing game, and its battles play out on hexagonal grids. Every character gets a limited range of motion per turn. Every action in the game is tied to distance, which sounds like a small design note until you play it. It is the whole game.
Obstacles sit inside each arena, and they matter. A rock or a wall changes where you can stand, which changes who can hit whom, which changes the fight. Placement is not decoration. It is the strategy. The Behemoth, an indie developer, built a tactics game where the ground itself is a unit.
Party Building and the Leader Buff
Players assemble parties from any combination of customized units. You pick one character as the leader and receive buffs accordingly. That choice ripples through the whole run, because the leader is not just a figurehead — the buffs shape how the rest of the party functions.
Equipment goes onto units and modifies their attack abilities, including range and movement options. Loot comes from random encounters and story missions. Weapons, gear, cosmetics — the loop keeps feeding you pieces. The customization is wide, and the game trusts you to sort it out.
Recruiting the Cupcake People
Certain characters can trap enemies and recruit them into your party pool. This is not a side activity. The source material calls it a necessary gameplay loop for growing your parties’ abilities. You fight something, you catch it, you add it to the roster.
That is where the comedy lives. The hostile world is stocked with robots, vampires and cupcake people, and the game wants you to collect them. The premise is absurd and the game knows it. The Behemoth has always traded in this register, and Pit People pushes it further than its earlier work did.
In the fast-paced, turn-based, co-op adventure you’ll quest and explore, find awesome loot, customize your fighters, and recruit strange species.
Single Player, Co-op, and the JRPG Borrowing
Pit People supports single player, multiplayer and co-operative play. It is inspired by classic JRPGs, and the borrowing shows. You build a party, you fight through an overworld, you take on story missions, you grind for gear. The structure is familiar.
The hex grid is where it diverges. Classic JRPGs rarely make distance this central. Here, movement range and attack range are the same conversation, and the arena obstacles force you to think about both at once. It is a clean idea, executed without much fuss.
What The Behemoth Gets Right
The art and tone are consistent. The game is funny without being cute about it — the cupcake people are described as brutally adorable, and that phrase does real work. Sinister robots and deadly vampires share a world with dessert creatures, and the game never blinks.
The customization is generous. Parties can be any combination of units, and the equipment system gives you meaningful levers. If you like building a squad and watching it perform, Pit People gives you a lot to build with.
Where the Hex Grid Runs Thin
The distance-based design is elegant, but it also narrows the game. Battles can settle into a rhythm where the same positioning answers keep working. The obstacles add texture, but they do not always add surprise.
The early access period ran from January 2017 to the full release in March 2018. That is a long time to tune a tactics game, and the tuning shows in the systems. What does not show is a reason the game needed that long. The core idea was clear from the start.
The Systems That Carry Pit People
Three things decide whether you stay with Pit People past the first few hours. Ranked by how much they matter:
- The distance rule. Every action is tied to range, so every turn is a positioning problem first and a damage problem second.
- The recruitment loop. Trapping enemies and adding them to your party pool is how your roster grows, and it is the only way it grows.
- The leader buff. Your chosen leader hands out buffs, so the pick shapes the party rather than just naming it.
Everything else — the loot, the cosmetics, the story missions — feeds those three. That is a tight design, and it is why the game holds up.
The Verdict, and the Score
Pit People is a good tactics game with a great sense of humor and one strong design idea. The distance mechanic, the hex arenas and the recruitment loop are the reasons to play it. The JRPG structure underneath is serviceable but not the draw.
The Behemoth stepped away from its earlier beat-’em-up formula and landed somewhere worthwhile. It is not a landmark, but it is not a misfire either. It is a strange, funny, well-built tactics game that knows exactly what it is.
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