Killer Queen Black Trailer Shot
Image: Liquid Bit

Alongside the news of Deceive Inc getting a second lease of life, I mentioned briefly that the critically adored but seldom-played competitive platformer Killer Queen Black had partially re-emerged on Steam after years of being functionally offline. Yesterday, original devs Liquid Bit made a surprise news post on Steam, announcing that the game has now been fully revived with a full server browser tied to Steam's native multiplayer API. Better yet, it's completely free now.

Originally a rare 10-player indie arcade game playable at only a few choice locations, Killer Queen Black was the home adaptation, paring it down to a slightly tighter 4v4 experience built for local or online multiplayer. It's a pick-up-and-play arcade team game with multiple ways to win. Your team of little bee-people can either assassinate the enemy queen (the most powerful unit, and de facto team leader) until she's out of lives, scoring a military victory. Alternatively, the worker bee players can collect enough berries from around the map to fill all the slots back at the hive for an economic win.

Or... the funniest way to win is for a worker to take a berry (for encouragement) and climb aboard the snail in the center of the screen, slowly riding it towards one of the goals on either side of the arena. Especially funny as whoever's going for this victory is just sitting and chilling while everyone's fighting for their lives around them. It's good fun, easy to learn, and was highly praised when it first came out, but it was a hard sell to get people on board with a PvP-only niche game without any live-service trappings.

But that's not an issue now, especially with the game being completely free to pick up. While you can join public servers, this one's best played with friends, so if you can rustle up seven pals, this one's a great way to spend the evening. The only downside to this free re-release is that ranked play and matchmaking aren't returning features. But players are free to host, browse, and join public servers or invite players to join their games via Steam. And that's all we need to enjoy it again.

Killer Queen Black is completely free on Steam. More of this sort of thing, please!