B.F.G:Crew replaces the targeting computer with a person

You and your friends operate a single ridiculously large cannon. One of you is the Spotter: you watch for incoming mechs, work out the angle and the azimuth, and then say those numbers to everybody else. The rest of the crew is down on the gun deck, and their job is the whole firing sequence — choose a shell, move it, push it, lift it, load it, wind the elevation and the azimuth to the numbers you were given, open the breech, close it, remember the blast doors behind you, and fire.

The unusual part is that almost none of those are game verbs. There is no aim, no reload, no fire button in the ordinary sense. Every step is a physical control somewhere inside the machine — levers, dials, wheels, buttons — and they have to happen in the right order, which makes the cannon a procedure that several people are performing at speed rather than a weapon anybody holds. Getting a shell out of the barrel at all is an achievement. Getting it out at the correct angle before the mech arrives is the game.

Shells are where the planning lives. Between assaults you replenish stock and decide what to load: the ordinary high explosive, the high-velocity armour-piercing round, a laser shell, or the nuclear one that does exactly what you would expect. Each is good at something different and each costs, so the crew is spending a budget one shot at a time while under pressure to just fire something.

The threat escalates on a schedule. Artillery bots shell you from a distance, land factories push waves of exploding bots at the walls, and eventually flying Stratofortresses turn up and rain guided missiles on the position. You are the last gun of the last city and every other fortress has gone quiet, so the framing is a survival question rather than a campaign: how long.

Proximity voice chat is the connective tissue, and it is not a convenience feature here. The Spotter’s numbers only exist as speech. Who is standing near whom, how clearly somebody shouts across a firing deck, and whether the person on the elevation wheel heard the correction are all load-bearing parts of the design.

The Power of Video Game HUDs argues that a HUD is a design tool rather than decoration — it decides what players notice, how confidently they act, and which mechanics a game can carry at all. B.F.G:Crew takes that to its limit by deleting the readout entirely and handing the job to a human being. The elevation figure is not on screen for the person turning the wheel; it is in somebody else’s mouth, and it can arrive late, garbled, wrong, or not at all. Every failure a good HUD exists to prevent becomes the content instead.

Can we Improve Tutorials for Complex Games? is the problem the studio has to solve to ship this. The essay’s point is that deep genres tend to teach everything up front, before anyone is invested, and that lessons land harder when they are spaced out and arrive with a reason attached. A cannon with dozens of interlocking controls is precisely the machine that tempts a fifteen-minute lecture before the first shot. The escalating waves are the alternative: each new type of mech is an excuse to need one more part of the gun, and the crew learns the machine by being short-handed in front of it.

How Games Use Feedback Loops covers the risk sitting under the shell economy. Negative loops correct a losing position; positive ones let it spiral. Here a fumbled load costs you a wave, a lost wave costs the city, and the expensive shells you burned surviving it are not in the rack for the next one. That is a spiral by default, and whether the result is tense or miserable comes down to how much stock a crew can rebuild after a bad night.

B.F.G:Crew is made and published by [Ricorp](https://impress.games/press-kit/ricorp/bfg-crew), coming soon on Windows with no date announced yet, and listed under Action, Casual, Indie and Simulation. It is multiplayer and online co-op, offers a playable-without-timed-input option, and supports Family Sharing.

Casual and Simulation on the same store page is the honest description of this one. The machine is simulated in the sense that it has too many parts and a real order of operations. The tone is not, because the entire premise is a joke about how many people it takes to fire one gun, told at the scale of the apocalypse.

If the appeal is a multiplayer game where talking is the mechanic rather than the plumbing, Speak is the other one on this list — an online diplomacy game built around the private call between two real players. Same principle approached from the opposite end: take the voices out of either game and nothing is left but people standing near controls.