Just Hanging Around turns the Hangman drawing into your own body

It is a one to four player co-op game built on Hangman, played in first person in a medieval town full of locals and merchants. The session is run by the Executioner and their assistant. Players take turns guessing a word one letter at a time, and every mistake costs a body part.

That last sentence is the whole design. On paper, Hangman’s cost is a line of ink on a figure nobody is attached to — you can lose six times and still feel like a spectator. Moving the game into first person makes the counter yours. The pieces come off the player who guessed wrong, in front of everyone, and the state of the round is something you read off each other instead of off a scoreboard.

The second move is the duello. Mid-session you can pick a friend and challenge them, at zipline jousting or with a crossbow, and the loser goes back to the word game missing a body part. That quietly converts a cooperative guessing game into something with a debt market — a mistake is no longer only yours, because there is a mechanism for handing it to someone else.

The third move is money. Against the Executioner’s assistant you can play mini games — tic-tac-toe, rock paper scissors, crossbow archery — and winning pays in coins. Coins bribe the Executioner for power-ups, potions and duello cards. Or you save them for the afterlife and buy tomatoes to throw at your friends, which buys you nothing at all.

Are lives outdated game design? argues that a life counter is only worth keeping when you can say what it is for — raising the stakes, rewarding mastery, or just padding a failure out over several attempts. Hangman is the oldest diegetic life counter in the world: a fixed number of wrong answers, drawn in public, with the loss visible before it is fatal. Rebuilding it as a body in a first-person scene is a bet that the counter reads harder when it is a thing rather than a number, and the duello is the part that makes the stakes real, because losing one is a life you did not spend on a guess.

How game designers protect players from themselves is the essay for the coins. Its point is that when a safe, reliable route to victory exists, players take it, even when the exciting route is the reason the game is good. Here the reliable route is obvious — bank your winnings, buy potions and power-ups, guess more letters correctly. The tomatoes give you nothing and are the most interesting thing on the list. Whether anyone ever buys one depends entirely on how the prices are set.

How to combine video game genres is the risk. A mash-up works when each genre has a job and both point at the same focus, and this game is carrying a word puzzle, an archery duel, a jousting run and two board games at once. Word games are slow and turn-based, so filling the wait is a real problem worth solving. The test is whether winning at the crossbow feeds back into the letters — coins to power-ups to a better guess — or whether the mini games are just somewhere else to be while it is not your turn.

Just Hanging Around is made and published by Synthify Inc. It is coming soon on Windows with no date announced, and it is listed under Action, Casual and Strategy, headed into Early Access — which for a game whose value is a party sitting around one word is the sensible way to ship it, because the tuning only shows up with four real people in the room.

It lists single-player alongside multiplayer, co-op and online co-op, with Steam Achievements, Family Sharing and Remote Play Together. That last one matters more than it looks: for a party word game, one person owning it and inviting three friends is the difference between playing tonight and coordinating four purchases first.

If the appeal is the alphabet being treated as a physical object rather than a text field, You Remembered is the other one on this list — a platformer where the letters you type become the level you climb. Both take the most abstract material a game can use and give it weight in a 3D space; one lets you stand on it, and this one takes it off you a limb at a time.