Item Asylum is an extremely chaotic fighting game developed by JPX Studios for the Roblox platform, where you use various items from memes, video games and other media to defeat other players. It was released on the 9th of September, 2020.
Before a round starts, players will spawn in one of over 50 lobbies, where they will have a choice to vote for one of three maps. Each map has a prefix that dictates the gamemode of the round, such as ffa_circus, tdm_cave or tc_shorefront.
In FFA (or Free-For-All), every player gets three items when they spawn: a melee item, a ranged item, and a miscellaneous item. While the melee and ranged items are self-explanatory, the miscellaneous item is interesting since you never really know what it’ll do. Some miscellaneous items give you a bonus for your stats, others apply buffs or debuffs to those around you, and some do absolutely nothing. TDM (Team Deathmatch) is similar to FFA, but instead of being a free-for-all, each player is put in one of two teams. ELIM (Elimination) is a variant of FFA where each player only has three lives, and the last person standing is the winner. If all players alive have one life left, or the timer reaches 0, SUDDEN DEATH will begin, lowering all alive players to one life, fully healing them, setting the timer to 60 seconds, and spawning a blue ‘safe zone’ somewhere on the map. Once the timer runs out again, the safe zone will turn red, and everyone outside of it will begin to take damage. The zone will then shrink until it disappears. Sometimes, a special modifier will be added to the round, limiting which items can be given to the players. TC (Tower Control) is also similar to TDM, but instead of fighting, the main objective is to either capture all the towers in your path or protect them until the timer runs out, depending on your team. You can choose from a selection of classes, which change the type of items that you’ll get. GG (Gun Game, referencing CS:GO) doesn’t give you a miscellaneous item, and your loadout changes every time you get a kill. At 16 kills, your loadout becomes a single melee item, which has a (purely cosmetic) golden appearance, and you gain a golden outline that is visible through walls. If you can get a kill with the golden weapon that you are given, you win the round. The load-outs are always the same for each amount of kills.
Onto the more unique game modes. ZS (Zombie Survival) sets a few players as zombies, which are weaker than regular players and have predetermined items. If a non-zombie (a survivor) dies, they become a zombie. Although weak, zombies have a chance to gain mutations upon spawning, which gives them the upper hand. These mutations can give the zombies more health, make them faster, give them special abilities, and even allow them to use melee weapons, although they deal less damage than usual.
MU (Murder) is a murder mystery game mode where one player is the murderer, one is the sheriff, and the rest are innocents. The goal of the murderer is to kill every other player, and the goal of the sheriff and the innocents is to stop the murderer from doing so. The murderer can collect “clues” in the form of bright green objects that spawn across the map in order to activate special abilities. If an innocent collects five clues, they obtain a firearm that they can use to stop the murderer.
KIT (Weapon Kits) allows you to pick from 3 kits every time you spawn. Each kit has up to 3 items, as well as certain stat changes, some positive and some negative. These kits are coloured based on their rarity and usefulness, green being the most common, followed by blue, purple and yellow.
JGN (Juggernaut) picks one player at random as the juggernaut, who gets to choose an extremely powerful moveset and is given health that scales to the number of players in the game. Every normal player is given three lives and has to defeat the juggernaut before time runs out or everyone dies. Players who lose all their lives in this gamemode are set to spectators and can watch the rest of the round play out.
The final game mode, BOSS, is unique to certain maps and makes every player on the server fight against a single (multiple in certain cases) very powerful enemy. Each of the 11 bosses have unique moves and gimmicks, and their health scales to the amount of players. Players get a certain amount of lives that change depending on the boss and the player count. Much like in JGN, players who lose all their lives during a boss become spectators.
Based on your performance during a round, you’ll get points, which you can use in the shop to buy tags and emotes. You can find the items you buy in your inventory, where you can equip one of each at a time. You can use an emote by pressing the “G” key on your keyboard. Tags show up in place of your name whenever you send a message in chat. Most tags are 1-3 words before or after your name, shown in their own unique colour. (e.g. Hard Boiled [username] or [username] Prime). A few tags also have unique fonts.
When you die in Item Asylum, three things will happen. Firstly, a death message will appear in the bottom left, often including the username of both you and the person who killed you, but not always. There are several custom messages for ending a player’s kill streak (more than ten kills without dying), plus some for if you die due to an environmental hazard or by resetting in the menu. Secondly, a death effect will play; the one that plays is dependent on the weapon that killed you. Lastly, a death sound will play, most happening randomly, but some only playing under certain circumstances. (Side note: if you die without being attacked by anyone, a remix of the Seinfeld theme will play on top of these)
All of the songs in Item Asylum are composed by Aden Mayo. Some of the songs are remixes, including songs like A-Train and The Skeleton Appears. The other songs are originals, including songs like Baseplate, Thunderstorm and my personal favourite song, 10 Hours.
Overall, Item Asylum is a very unique game, and if you like fighting games, memes, or even just general chaos, you should definitely try it out at least once. If you do decide to try it out, you can play it here.