Game: Dead Party
Developer: Radiation Blue (Freiburg, Germany)
Publisher: Snail Games USA
Genre: Co-Op Party Action · Base Defense
Platform: PC (Steam)
Demo: Available now
Players: Four-player online & local co-op
Setting: Shady Hill, Halloween
🧟 Radiation Blue and Snail Games USA have launched a demo for Dead Party on Steam. The four-player co-op zombie defence game combines scavenging, barricades and improvised traps with an unusual primary weapon: rock music.
🎸 The Demo Is Live on Steam
This is the first hands-on opportunity with Dead Party, covering its blend of co-op action, base defence, improvised traps and rock-powered zombie destruction. For a game built entirely around four people shouting at each other, getting a group into the demo is the only real way to evaluate it.
It’s Halloween in the once-peaceful town of Shady Hill. UFOs appear overhead. The neighbourhood’s dead start climbing out of their graves — and four unlikely heroes are all that stands between humanity and an invasion as bizarre as it is relentless.
When things get truly desperate, there’s one weapon the undead can’t handle.
Dead Party is a four-player co-op party action game about defending buildings from waves of increasingly dangerous undead — and it has a considerably better idea of what it wants to be than “shoot the zombies.”
Rather than simply mowing down the horde, you scavenge your surroundings, break objects apart for resources, build barricades, deploy traps, and adapt your defences as things close in. Different zombie types and map layouts force teams to rethink their approach and make use of whatever happens to be lying around.
Rock Music Is a Weapon
🎸 The Undead Can’t Handle a Guitar Solo
When the barricades start falling, you can harness the power of your guitars and music-based abilities to push the horde back. It’s an unconventional twist on frantic co-op combat, and it’s the thing that gives Dead Party an identity beyond its genre.
It’s also a smart fit for a party game. Music-based abilities are inherently area-of-effect and inherently theatrical — exactly the sort of thing that produces a memorable moment when someone pulls one off at the right time, which is the currency four-player co-op actually trades in.
🤘 Worth Noting: This Team Has Done Rock Zombies Before
Radiation Blue’s credits include Dead Block — a 2011 zombie barricade-defence game that also leaned on music and improvised fortification. Dead Party isn’t billed as a sequel, but the shared DNA is hard to miss, and it means the studio is returning to territory it has genuinely worked in before rather than trying something cold.
Four Modes, All Different
🎤 Stage Equipment
Use stage gear and the power of music itself to hold back the undead.
📡 Antenna
Power up generators and unleash jamming radio waves against the invading forces.
💀 Skull Cannon
Collect zombie skulls and fire them at the UFOs overhead. Yes, really.
🌊 Horde
Forget the escape plan entirely. See how long your team lasts before you’re overwhelmed.
That’s a decent spread — each mode changes what you’re actually optimising for, which should keep a group from settling into one routine. Skull Cannon in particular sounds like it does something genuinely different with the resource loop, turning the horde itself into ammunition.
🔨 The Defence Loop
• Scavenge your surroundings for anything usable
• Break objects apart for raw resources
• Build barricades to funnel and slow the horde
• Deploy traps where they’ll do the most damage
• Adapt as zombie types and map layouts change the maths
Story Mode and Four Characters
Beyond the co-op modes, Dead Party includes a Story Mode following four distinct characters, each with their own abilities, strengths, weaknesses, equipment and individual storylines.
Distinct strengths and weaknesses is the detail worth flagging there. In four-player co-op, characters who are genuinely bad at something create dependency between players — which is usually what separates a co-op game where you play together from one where you happen to be in the same room.
Both online and local co-op are supported, which for a party game is the right call. Plenty of co-op titles quietly drop couch play; keeping it means Dead Party works whether your friends are on Discord or on your sofa.
🧟 Zombies
🤝 4-Player Co-Op
🏰 Base Defense
🎸 Rock Music
🛋️ Local Co-Op
🎉 Party Action
Who’s Making It
☢️ Radiation Blue
An independent developer based near Freiburg, Germany, working as a small and deliberately efficient team. Their collective credits are substantial: Genesis Alpha One, Hitman: Blood Money, Velvet Assassin, RiME, Galaxy on Fire, Gothic, Neocron, Dead Block, Das Schwarze Auge 1 & 2 and The Settlers, among others.
That’s a genuinely deep set of credits for a small studio — Hitman: Blood Money, RiME and Gothic alone represent three very different kinds of accomplished game. It suggests a team with far more experience behind it than an indie zombie party game might imply.
🐌 Snail Games USA
Publishing duties fall to Snail Games USA, bringing Dead Party to Steam.
The Dead Party demo is available on Steam now, ahead of the full release.
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