Berry establishes the game's personality almost immediately: fallen players can be torn apart, their heads carried back to the cart, and their bodies restored for another attempt. It is a gruesome revival system presented with deliberately silly enthusiasm, and that contrast between toy-factory horror and slapstick comedy becomes the defining feature of the session. Even the tutorial embraces that tone, with accidental deaths, dangerous demonstrations, detachable body parts, and a supposedly safe introduction that repeatedly goes wrong.
The cooperative mechanics show considerably more depth than simply collecting valuables and surviving monsters. Players can establish trails with colored glow sticks, ping locations, heal one another, carry revival items, use temporary equipment such as bunny ears, and improvise roles such as medic or navigator. Objects also have multiple purposes: some are valuable enough to sell, while others may be worth keeping because they improve survival. The surprise hare is an especially good example of that risk-reward design, offering guaranteed value or the chance to split it into uncertain rewards.
Enemy encounters give those systems urgency without turning the session into straightforward combat. Boogie Bots, Cat-Bees, Mr. Light, and other threats force the group to retreat, improvise, and occasionally sacrifice valuable resources simply to stay alive. Cat-Bees are particularly effective at creating cooperative panic because another player may need to intervene, while the repeated appearance of scattered heads and limbs makes failed encounters funny without eliminating their consequences. The session demonstrates how quickly an organized loot run can deteriorate when several threats converge.
Navigation may be just as important as combat. The factory contains vents, slides, vertical routes, shortcuts, puzzles, pits, and areas that become confusing once the group moves away from familiar landmarks. Glow-stick trails consequently evolve from a tutorial gimmick into a practical survival tool, with green markers eventually providing a route back to Berry. The critters' ability to climb extensively and squeeze through smaller spaces also gives exploration a playful physicality that fits the character design.
Quota progression provides a simple but effective structure for all that disorder. Every excursion becomes a judgment about whether to return with modest loot or continue searching for something more valuable, while limited chances and escalating danger discourage endless exploration. Reaching the 5,000 quota on the second shift creates a satisfying payoff because the group has spent much of the run getting lost, reviving one another, and scrambling for the final few hundred in value. The infinite-survival format also makes the quota feel less like a conventional endpoint than a challenge to see how long a team can keep adapting.
Shift three is where the early look becomes substantially more intriguing. The map changes and the familiar loot-running rhythm gives way to symbol puzzles, batteries, new spaces, and a much larger-feeling route through the factory. The team is soon overwhelmed badly enough that survival depends on recovering multiple heads and navigating through a swarm of Cat-Bees. That escalation suggests meaningful run-to-run variation rather than merely increasing enemy health or raising the required quota, while the mention of modifiers points toward additional rule changes during longer attempts.
The main limitation is that the guided developer session is often too chaotic to explain those systems cleanly. Players talk over one another, instructions are interrupted by jokes and deaths, known bugs appear, and potentially interesting mechanics sometimes receive only a hurried explanation before the group moves elsewhere. The developer's energetic participation makes the demonstration entertaining and unusually candid, but it also means this is closer to a lively multiplayer showcase than a controlled examination of balance, progression, or long-term replayability. As an early look, however, it succeeds at demonstrating a surprisingly flexible cooperative horror loop while leaving enough unexplored to make later shifts worth seeing.
Pros
- Berry's body-recovery system turns player death into a memorable cooperative mechanic rather than a simple respawn timer.
- Glow-stick navigation, healing, equipment durability, loot decisions, climbing, and improvised team roles give the survival loop meaningful variety.
- Multiple enemy types create entertaining emergencies that require cooperation rather than relying entirely on direct combat.
- Quotas provide clear short-term objectives while encouraging risk-reward decisions about when to extract.
- The dramatically altered third shift suggests that later progression can change maps, puzzles, threats, and rules rather than merely raising difficulty.
- The developers' participation provides useful explanations while preserving the spontaneous comedy of discovering mechanics through play.
Cons
- Overlapping conversation and constant joking sometimes make mechanical explanations difficult to follow.
- Several systems are introduced rapidly without enough time to demonstrate their strategic value in depth.
- Bugs and unexpected interactions occasionally interfere with the intended demonstration.
- The guided nature of the session leaves long-term balance, replayability, and the difficulty curve largely untested.
Cooperative scavenging, gruesomely comic revival mechanics, shifting environments, and escalating enemy pressure give the game a distinctive identity beyond its familiar toy-horror setting. The presentation can become messy when explanations compete with multiplayer chaos, but that same unpredictability demonstrates how naturally the systems generate memorable situations. The changing third shift is particularly promising evidence that surviving another quota may lead to more than simply repeating the same run at higher difficulty.
