BREAKOUT BABY is one of the stranger pitches to cross our desk this year: a first-person horror roguelike built on the bones of a maze-chase arcade game, in which you are responsible for escorting one extremely unlucky infant through floors crawling with grotesque creatures.
Developer STH and publisher Assemble Entertainment have just released a demo on Steam and itch.io, and the full game is due sometime in 2026.
The Twist That Makes It Work
That’s a smarter adaptation than “Pac-Man but 3D” suggests. Making the objective and the threat mechanically inseparable creates constant tension without needing to complicate the rules — you always know exactly what you should be doing and exactly why it’s a bad idea.
Losing the top-down view compounds it. Pac-Man’s whole tension came from perfect information: you could see every ghost and plan around them. Dropping to first person removes that entirely, and the creatures stalk and ambush rather than following fixed patterns.
Clear every pellet on a floor to unlock the next — while the noise you make draws creatures toward you.
Waking the baby reveals the locations of nearby enemies, trading a moment of safety for information.
Discover gifts scattered through the floors that can completely change the shape of a run.
Grotesque enemies that stalk, hunt and ambush rather than patrolling predictable routes.
The roguelike layer sits on top of all this. Those twisted gifts are the run-defining variable, meaning each descent through the maze floors plays differently depending on what you find — the standard roguelike promise, applied to a structure that hasn’t really hosted it before.
Dark Comedy, Deliberately
STH describe BREAKOUT BABY as blending arcade maze-chase mechanics, dark comedy and high-stakes survival, and the comedy is very much intentional. This is a game built to make players say “wait, what?” out loud — the absurdity is the point, not an accident of presentation.
Assemble frame the target audience as fans of arcade survival, high-pressure roguelikes, creature-driven horror, and games that are simply strange. If you’ve ever enjoyed something specifically because it shouldn’t exist, this is aiming squarely at you.
Who’s Making It
That’s a genuinely broad slate for one publisher: a bleak, punishing dark-fantasy survival RPG on one hand, and a first-person Pac-Man horror comedy about a weaponised infant on the other. Whatever else you say about Assemble’s 2026, it isn’t predictable.
BREAKOUT BABY arrives on Steam and itch.io in 2026. The demo is available on both right now.
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