Besiege celebrates a decade of building deadly contraptions with a reworked sandbox mode, adjusted level designs and slow-motion explosions

Besiege, the physics puzzler about building rickety siege contraptions, has officially been pummelling castle walls for ten long years. To celebrate, developer Spiderling Studios has an "exciting year" planned for the decade-old construction sim with "community events & future updates" coming throughout the next twelve months. The first of these updates is already here, making numerous additions and adjustments to the game.

For this anniversary update, Spiderling says it "wanted to focus on additions centering around Besiege's community & core player base". Some of these changes focus on features that orbit the game, such as achievements. With the update, Spiderling has added 25 new achievements, most of which are for the base game, but some target the Splintered Sea expansion. Many of these new achievements involved collecting a "Strange Fragment" to complete them, which are apparently related to the game's source cube—the starting block from which you build every contraption. Cryptic!

The update also introduces Steam trading cards to Besiege, while tweaking in-game stat tracking and ranking. Here, Spiderling has added a global leaderboard for stats like time, damage taken, and "block score", which gives you a higher rank for assembling a machine that uses the fewest building blocks.

Elsewhere, the update overhauls the final level of Tolbrynd island, the second of the three islands players visit across their construction career. Spiderling explains it has "long been unhappy" with this level, so they've finally reworked it into "something cooler and more exciting." You'll also now encounter the rulers of these three islands as physical presences in the game, and can therefore bombard or bludgeon them as your heart desires.

Outside of the campaign, the anniversary update reinstates the original sandbox mode, which is expanded to accommodate larger machines, and has received "a dramatic makeover with all new models and textures". Moreover, a general adjustment has been made to the Timescale slider, automatically slowing the game down when it's under heavy physics load. Spiderling explains that "an added bonus of this effect is that large explosions and crashes will automatically occur in slow motion," which is neat.

Finally, the update lets players travel back to Besiege's origins, providing access to the alpha version that originally breached Steam back in 2015. "We thought this would be a fun way for everyone to see just how much Besiege has changed over these past 10 years", Spiderling explains. Activating the alpha version requires you to go into the 'betas' tab in Besiege's 'properties' menu on Steam, and select 'Alpha Besiege' from the dropdown box.

I haven't returned to Besiege since I reviewed it in 2020, but I remember having a thoroughly enjoyable time with it, and it's great to see it still trundling along after all this time. As mentioned earlier, there's more to come from Spiderling this year too, with the studio still to unveil its 2025 roadmap. There's also one other phrase in the update announcement that caught my eye, with Spiderling stating "We can’t wait to show you our future plans for Besiege and more..." Could this mean Spiderling is cooking up something new? Ten years is certainly a long time to work on just one game.