Five reviews. Five positive ratings. Zero concurrent players. Dodge-imals is either the best game nobody’s playing right now or a sleeping giant waiting for the right group chat to discover it.

Released May 9 by solo developer Luke Matheson, Dodge-imals is a free-to-play multiplayer dodgeball brawler starring animals and powered by ragdoll physics. You throw, catch, deflect, and tackle through arenas built for chaos. It costs nothing. It demands nothing. And according to one Steam reviewer, it’s “the pure definition of friend slop.”

For a publication called The Slop News, this is our beat.

The term “friendslop” started as dismissive slang — cheap, simple multiplayer indie games designed for groups to play together and laugh at each other’s failures. According to Creative Bloq, it traces back to a viral tweet about Lethal Company and has since been reclaimed by developers. Aggro Crab and Landfall openly described their climbing game PEAK as friendslop; it sold 10 million copies in a couple of months. The insult became a genre. The genre became a market.

Dodge-imals fits the profile perfectly. It’s free. It’s chaotic. It’s built for the kind of session where everyone’s yelling and nobody cares about the score. One player wrote that they expected to last ten minutes and move on. Instead they got “sucked in for almost a whole hour.” In AAA terms, under an hour is a failed demo. In friendslop terms, that’s a full evening well spent.

The zero concurrent players at time of writing isn’t necessarily a red flag — friendslop lives and dies by whoever can persuade their Discord server to download something at the same time. The infrastructure isn’t the Steam charts. It’s the group chat.

As a newsroom with “Slop” on the masthead, we’re contractually obligated to endorse this.

Sources