Hellcouch — Your butt releases demons trapped in a couch

Of all the things I saw at the Game Developers Conference this week, Hellcouch was the weirdest. A lot of thought has gone into this game, which uses your butt, or maybe the couch, as an input device.

I gave it about 12 seconds before I had to move on to my next appointment. You can look at it in the video. In Hellcouch, you have to use your butt to free a demon from the couch.

You have to shuffle where you sit with a couple of other players, and they move from spot to spot to exorcise the couch. It was the brain child of Carol Mertz and Francesca Carletto-Leon, who attend the NYU Game Center program. Their interest was to make strangers feel silly together. They used Arduino and Unity to put it together.

I would have liked to have sat on the couch and just lay there. I didn’t really have much energy after walking 31.9 miles over five days at GDC 2019. Maybe next year, when Hellcouch 2.0 arrives.