Video Game / Besiege

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Besiege is a physics-based game in development by Spiderling Studios in the United Kingdom for Windows, OS X and Linux. The game was released in early access on Steam on 28 January 2015, and after a long beta period, gained its full release on 18 February 2020.

The game allows players to build outlandish medieval siege engines to pit against castles or armies. Players select from a collection of mechanical parts that can be connected together to build a machine. Each level has a goal, such as "destroy the windmill" or "kill 100 soldiers". Although the goals are relatively simple, the wide variety of possible approaches allows for experimentation.

On May 24th, 2024, Besiege got its first Downloadable Content in The Splintered Sea, where the player must navigate the levels of the stormy seas of Autilis. On June 22th, 2026, the second DLC in The Broken Beyond was released, where the player travels to outer space with their rocket-powered machines.

OBJECTIVE: Read 75% of everything

• Action Bomb: The early Tolbrynd zone The Duke's Prototypes features yaks with bombs strapped to their backs, who will pursue the player's machine and explode on impact.
• All Deserts Have Cacti: Krolmar has cacti that will break parts off of your machine if you touch them, despite Krolmar having Arabic cultural influences.
• Alliance of Revenge: The last zone in the base game, appropriately named "Last Stand" has you face against Empress Namia's remaining army, who are joined by forces from Ipsilon, Tolbrynd and Valfross which you have conquered prior to setting foot there.
• Annoying Arrows: The archers can't do much damage individually and are unlikely to destroy blocks unless in large groups or given copious amounts of time. Their main purpose is to prevent you from building suicide-bombers loaded down with explosives that just drive into targets, since even a single arrow can detonate a bomb without a problem.
• Anti-Frustration Features: Unlike everything else which reacts rather realistically with surrounding components and will put stress on touching parts or break if overlapped, braces completely ignore these properties. A brace can be placed under, inside, and intersecting whatever you like without problem, and they can even pass through other objects while your machine is in motion during game play. Braces also happen to be completely unbreakable and while they can break off of a part (or break other parts if they put too much stress on them) they themselves will never snap. As braces are the go-to method of strengthening your contraption, and often the only feasible way to make it work without falling apart, this allows the player to be much more freely creative while still allowing the game to be very heavily physics-based.
  • Whenever you beat a level, you unlock the next level and the one after that, in case you can't beat the one that's coming up.
• Arrows on Fire: Firing a crossbow through a flamethrower's flame will ignite the arrow, setting fire to whatever it hits.
• Asteroid Thicket: The Stonemist Field in the Broken Beyond, as its name suggests is a field of rocks that float in space and block your path. The objective is to reach the other end of the level with your machine, whether by maneuvering around the asteroids or blasting them apart.
• Attack of the Monster Appendage: The last zone of Autilis has a Type 1 example: the creature of the Devouring Pit must have six of its eight Combat Tentacles destroyed to clear the zone.
• Awesome, but Impractical:
  • Incredibly large or incredibly compact vehicles can easily become this, particularly the former. Building these is basically the entire point of the game.
  • Making tank treads out of a chain of hinges and wrapping them around wheels. They slow your vehicle down, rob it of traction, are less able to transverse obstacles, make your machine bigger and heavier than it needs to be, are time-consuming to make, are difficult to keep from sliding off the wheels, and literally do nothing better than if you simply left the wheels bare. Damn do they look cool though, and the soldiers of Ipsilon will stop thinking they're gangster real quick when you roll up in a tank and start running them down.
  • Gears. There is nothing an array of gears can accomplish that just using a single powered wheel or spinning block can do better, and you'll struggle to find any legitimate uses for the things. But they make your contraption look all Clock Punk and such, and that is just frigging cool. In fact, pretty much their only genuine legitimate use is being used as buffers to keep tank treads from slipping off — yes, their only use that isn't awesome but impractical is as a component to something else that is awesome but impractical!
• BFS: A sword of exceptional size and weight is found planted in one of Tolbrynd's later zones, Argus' Grounds where it was once wielded by a giant, whose skeleton now surrounds the area. The main objective of the level is to pull out the oversized sword with your machine and then bring it towards the extraction point.
• Design-It-Yourself Equipment: You build your siege engine from basic parts.
• Difficult, but Awesome:
  • Flying machines on the whole. They can go anywhere on the map, avoid obstacles, attack enemies from their blind spot above or well out of their reach, and avoid damage from running over uneven ground or into enemies. Of course they are very difficult to control as weight, balance, and ballast are constantly in conflict and even the slightest bump can send them careening out of control and into an unavoidable crash. An array of anglometers tied to propellers can create an autostabilization system, but the size and weight of this alone will take up a lot of room and make the thing needlessly huge and cumbersome which leaves little to no room for weapons and gear.
  • Automation blocks like the logic gates, timers and the aforementioned anglometers are quite unclear in their uses aside from emulating key presses on first glance, as they require understanding of concepts like boolean algebra and timing diagram. Once the player gets the hang of them however, they can be used to automate mechanisms that would otherwise require multiple keys to work, such as a machine that can hold multiple cannons or bombs and reload them one at a time, a two-wheeled contraption that can stabilize itself without player input, a Walking Tank or even a Rube Goldberg Device that accomplishes the level's goals in just one press of a button.
• Downloadable Content: Two expansion packs add new parts and levels that follow a theme in each one: The Splintered Seas has the player sail the seas of Autilis with their nautical machines, while the Broken Beyond has them fly to other planets in the fantastic solar system with their spacecrafts.
• Earth-Shattering Kaboom: One of the Broken Beyond zones, Ragnos Refinery tasks the player with pulling the planet's moon towards it, where it then collides with the ground and blows up the planet in spectacular fashion.
• Faceless Goons: The most you'll ever see of any NPC's face is a nose poking out from under a hood.
• Fantasy Counterpart Culture: Krolmar takes design cues from Arabic culture, despite also featuring cacti.
• Fire-Breathing Weapon: The flamethrower spews out flame, and is useful for burning enemy soldiers and wooden structures.
• Foreshadowing: On the map screen of Krolmar, sailboats can be seen approaching the island for refuge, and they bear emblems from the previous kingdoms that you have conquered. This hints to them becoming part of the enemies you'll be facing off against in the last zone.
• Fractional Winning Condition: A bunch of the levels don't mandate the player to fulfill their objectives entirely, such as The Queen's Fodder, where the player must butcher at least four-fifths of a company of soldiers.
• Frictionless Reentry: Averted in the Broken Beyond DLC. Entering a planet's atmosphere too fast will rapidly heat up your machine, which will set its wooden components on fire. Armor plates and other metal blocks can be placed on the sides that experience air friction to prevent the machine from burning, or you can use parachutes or boosters to slow its descent.
• Glass Cannon: Most of your machines aren't very durable. Even basic Ipsilon soldiers can rip it apart in pretty short order, Tolbrynd halberdiers will hack parts of your machine off in seconds if you allow them, it takes only one good shot from an enemy cannon or bomb to utterly demolish your vehicle, and fire will burn the entire thing to cinders in no time. Your best bet is to go in fast, hard, and mercilessly, and it doesn't hurt to rig your vehicle with bombs and a remote grenade which you can use in a last ditch effort to take out your foe with the blast and burning debris.
• Grim Up North: Valfross is a freezing land where the player will be fending off grizzled vikings just as much as they'll be fighting the environment, such as in the Frozen Path and Relict Frost.
• Hair-Trigger Explosive: The provided bombs are extremely sensitive, to the point that they're often more dangerous to the player's vehicle than the enemy. Just slightly jostling them may cause them to explode, though Murphy's Law means they often fail to explode when you want them to.
• Infernal Retaliation: If one of the enemies you burn with your flamethrower happens to run blindly into your construction, it may catch fire.
• Light and Mirrors Puzzle: The Forgotten Sanctum tasks the player with picking up a large mirror and holding it under a Solar-Powered Magnifying Glass at the right angle to melt a pot of gold.
• Military Mashup Machine: Given that you create siege engines from various parts, some of the machines will inevitably become this.
• Made of Explodium: Bombs, of course. Usual practice is to build a catapult to fling them at the enemy, or just put them at the front of your vehicle and drive into them for a Suicide Attack. Some maps also feature bombs buried in the ground as mines, which have to be carefully navigated around.
• Meet My Good Friends Lefty and Righty: Human NPCs have a randomly-generated name that pops up at the bottom of the screen when they are killed. Amusingly, the same goes for the Combat Tentacles of the Devouring Pit, with names like "Slappy" and "Rippler".
• No-Damage Run: One of the secondary objectives in every level requires the player to beat it without their blocks taking damage at all. While a non-issue in most cases, it can get demanding in levels that are filled with enemies and obstacles that will inevitable lay a scratch on the machine, requiring the player to think outside the box and either build flying parts to bypass them, put on a lot of armor plates to No-Sell projectiles or simply snipe the target with bombs from afar.
• Not the Intended Use: Some of the building parts can be used in ways that are unorthodox from what they're purposely designed for.
  • Shrapnel cannons don't actually fire a projectile, but effectively are just a "force" cannon with enough umph to punch holes in walls or hit enemy soldiers with fatal concussive blasts. This programming quirk means they'll send bombs flying without detonating them. Place a shrapnel cannon and a grabber holding a bomb in front of it, keybind both to the same button, and pressing that button will fire the bomb like a cannonball.
  • Half pipes and plows are made for channeling blocks and pushing aside obstacles respectively, but their low friction means they can also be used as skis.
  • Metal jaws are usually placed as a pair since their main gimmick is biting enemies with enough force to reduce them to a paste. Said force makes them good components for a more powerful and compact catapult, which can be made by stacking a few jaws on top of each other and then attaching a grabber with a bomb at the end.
• One-Hit-Point Wonder: Civilian buildings will collapse from a single hit from just about anything, in contrast to castle walls which are much more durable.
• Recoil Boost:
  • The cannon has rather strong recoil, which can be exploited as a form of thrust.
  • Mount a grabber on a vehicle. Plop a block on the grabber. Put two reverse-aimed shrapnel cannons set to full strength aimed away from what you're aiming at on either side of of the block. Plop another grabber on the end of the block. Plop a bomb on that. You've created a BFG that'll topple any building in one shot from across the map.
• Schizo Tech: The machine parts you can work with look like medieval/renaissance technology, but the self-moving and flying parts actually make them modern, remote-controlled robots.
• Shout-Out:
  • One mission in Tolbrynd is titled "Farmer Gascoigne" and pits you against unique scythe-wielding enemies.
  • One of the rocks in Ordyce Lode breaks apart to reveal not a giant chunk of gold, but a dragon egg from Game of Thrones.
  • An achievement name for collecting the strange fragment in Towering Eye is appropriately called "GoldenEye".
  • The achievement for ringing all three Awakening Bells at the same time is called "Professional Hunchback".
  • Another achievement for breaking all of the crates for Ambush's side objective is called "Bandicoot".
• Siege Engines: The point of the game is to get creative building these. Designs can range from the mundane (wheeled carts with cannons on them) to the fantastical (zeppelins that drop bombs on the enemy) to the bizarre (Humongous Mecha with sawblades for hands).
• Simple, yet Awesome:
  • Literally putting a simple bomb on wheels will get you through a lot of missions.
  • Almost any mission where you just need to wholesale destroy structures, an army, or animals, can be taken down by the simple and effective war crime that is a a massive box of bombs. Build a tray as big as you can, fill it with bombs, copy it, and stack it three-times high. Put a single remote grenade in it to detonate it, put some basic wheels on either side, and wrap it in some wood paneling to hold off arrows. Then just drive it straight into the fray and hit the detonate button. If the blast doesn't wipe out everything, the raining flaming bits of wood landing all over the map will finish the job for you. It takes about 5 minutes to build.
  • The cannon that fires itself is a very simple and effective design, consisting of an unattached cannon on a ramp aimed away from the target that is hurled at the target by the momentum of its cannonball. You'd be downright amazed what this thing will take out.
• Space Is Air: Averted in the Broken Beyond expansion. Aerodynamic blocks work normally in the atmosphere, but in the void of space where there is no air, they are practically useless for movement. The player has to use boosters, control thrusters and intertial steering to propel themselves through space.
• Spikes of Doom: One of the provided blocks. Not much good against structures, but they work great against squishy human enemies.
• Steam Vent Obstacle: Having a water cannon with a torch or other source of fire heating it will make it fire steam instead, which in effect becomes an unlimited ammo flamethrower that can't ignite stuff. It packs enough punch to send enemy soldiers flying and can even generate thrust for flight.
• This Is a Drill: One of the available weapon blocks is a rotating drill head you can attach to your machine to either break through fortifications, pierce unfortunate soldiers or mine for gold in one of the zones in Valfross.
• This Looks Like a Job for Aquaman!: The water cannon has few uses in standard gameplay, other than pushing enemies around and being paired with a fire source to produce a steam cannon. However, it's the only thing that can extinguish the titular Sacred Flame of Zone 30.
• Those Magnificent Flying Machines: The flight-oriented parts give this impression, being mostly wood and canvas and based on Leonardo da Vinci's flying machine sketches.
• Threatening Shark: Predatory sharks called Razorteeth appear as enemies in a few Autilis zones, who can easily chew wooden ships apart. One of the zones has them guard a gold treasure that you need to carry towards an extraction point, while another requires you to kill a large shiver of Razorteeth sharks.
• Too Awesome to Use: Bombs, boulders and other similar projectiles
• Video Game Cruelty Potential:
  • The player is given carte blanche to build all kinds of devilish contraptions to inflict pain on enemy soldiers, civilians, and animals alike. Sawblades, flamethrowers, bombs, spikes, cannons, and drills are among the tools on your arsenal. The things you're doing with the machine aren't heroic, either: destroying villages, poisoning wells, smashing religious artefacts, the list goes on.
  • One of the zones in the Broken Beyond has the player race against their opponents who are all piloting space bikes in the canyons of the moon. There are no rules against killing or crashing the other drivers with your machine whatsoever.
• Video Game Perversity Potential : It's entirely possible to build perverted vehicles that either emulate people having sex or are shaped like a penis with flamethrowers and cannons attached to the tip.
• Warrior Prince: In the last zone of each world where you fight against an army at their remaining fortress, the ruler of said world joins them in battle to personally take down your machine. Ultimately however, they are just as durable as their soldiers and therefore be run over, shot or blown up with ease.
• Xenomorph Xerox: One of the zones in the Broken Beyond takes place on an abandoned space village that is overrun by swarms of eyeless bipeds with fanged mouths called Xenomaws, who will leap at your machine to bite chunks out of it.