ranzware
When a trailer for Midnight Murder Club, a lights-out multiplayer party shooter, aired at The Game Awards last December, I clocked the developer logo immediately. It was Velan Studios, the folks behind the dodgeball brawler Knockout City. That game was excellent, but like so many live service games that cultivate a modest audience, it died an early death in 2023. The experience had me reflexively worried for Midnight Murder Club, another multiplayer-only game—was Velan going down the same free-to-play road hoping that more people buy skins and battle passes this time?
Not at all, as I learned while chatting with the Midnight Murder Club team last week. They’re a much smaller outfit than made Knockout City, and the new game isn’t quite so ambitious. The pitch is simple: Six players are locked in a mansion with the lights turned off, armed with a gun and a flashlight. No seasons, no battle pass—you just get unlocks by playing. It’s pitch-black deathmatch with optional twists and a handful of modes. It already looks fun, and it’s trying something genuinely surprising with its price tag.
“The only light that is ever created in the game comes from another player,” game director Eric Feurstein told PC Gamer. “So there’s this game of chicken that gets played—who’s going to turn on their flashlight first?”
Midnight Murder Club was born from an idea Feurstein had 10 years ago while watching Twitch streamers play Trouble In Terrorist Town and Prop Hunt with friends.
“I thought it’d be funny if there was no light,” Feurstein said. “So when a streamer played our game, someone would join their stream and they would just see a black screen. So that’s the game I designed.”
As Feurstein described his game with a wide smile, I was transported to a bygone era of multiplayer shooters—before live service, skill-based matchmaking, and ubiquitous competitive modes—that were designed primarily as social spaces. An average Midnight Murder Club match oscillates between tense gunfights, blind treks down hallways, and sudden jump scares, but it’s still an inherently chill game made for friend groups. Players vote on which mode to play next, house rules are encouraged, and proximity chat is always on.
“The best way to play this game, we think, is with a group of friends, everybody with their mics on,” said marketing director Josh Harrison. “Like yeah, you want to get the kills, but more than that, we make it easy for you to almost forget about the score because your number one goal in the moment is ‘What’s the funniest thing I can do right now?'”
“There was one person that I played with, some random stranger in one of the betas. Whenever he got a kill, he would run around singing ‘I’m Bill Nye the Murder Guy!’ We just give people permission to have fun and make the game their own in a way that is not all that common out there today.”
I wondered if Feurstein had accounted for the type of Midnight Murder Club player who will just sit silently in a room waiting for easy targets to come to them, and his answer was surprising: You totally can, but it’s not very practical or fun.
“Usually what ends up happening, if you pick a room to haunt, is you will hear a lot of firefights going on around you and every once in a while someone will walk into your room,” he said. “So you just watch the points going up as you’ve been sitting there for two minutes not getting any kills.”
But we all have that friend who’s going to annoy the lobby by camping anyway, and for that scenario, Velan has Campfire, one of the modifiers players can activate in the Wildcards mode. With Campfire on, standing still for too long will set you ablaze.
Free-to-join
It sounds basic, but it was refreshing to hear a developer talk about their multiplayer shooter in terms of custom lobby rules and scaring the pants off your buds instead of metas and MMR. We’re in something of a golden age of co-op games about getting scared with your friends—Lethal Company and Phasmophobia made proximity chat a mainstream feature, and one of the best-selling games on Steam right now is another co-op thriller called R.E.P.O.—but the trend hasn’t caught on in casual PvP shooters. If Midnight Murder Club was released 20 years earlier, it probably would’ve been a Source mod with a small but vibrant server culture.
The point is to be generous so that players understand that we are trying something new.
Eric Feurstein, game director
It’s a lot harder to wrangle my friends together to play something these days, and you can double that if the game costs money. I asked Velan what Midnight Murder Club is like alone if my friends don’t pick it up to play with me, and it was like I’d walked right into the question they hoped for:
“We know that party games live and die on being able to get your whole friend group to pick it up,” Harrison said. “So we have two versions of the game. We have Midnight Murder Club, it’s going to be coming out at $20. But then we also have Midnight Murder Club Guest Pass Edition. That is a free download, and you can join a lobby hosted by anybody who owns the full game.”
To be clear, the Guest Pass Edition is not a demo. It’s the full game playable for free as long as you play with someone who owns it. No other strings attached.
“Sounds scary, right?” Feurstein added.
We’ve seen the Guest Pass used before in dedicated co-op games like Hazelight’s It Takes Two, but Velan is taking a bigger swing by allowing just one out of six Midnight Murder Club players to actually own it. Ferustein said the idea came about because he is “extremely conscious” that people aren’t going to play Midnight Murder Club for dozens of hours per week like they would Call of Duty.
“The games that my friends and I play, you know, we play the RiffTrax game, we play Jackbox, we play Golf With Your Friends, but we don’t play every day for four hours,” he said. “We play every once in a while because we treat them like board games you buy.”
Panning his webcam over to a collection of, conservatively, about 50 board games neatly stacked on a shelf, Feurstein made his case.
“You play when you want, and for as long as you want, and then maybe you’ll say ‘That was great! What else do you wanna do?’ That’s the whole idea, I think, of a party game, is that it doesn’t require hundreds of hours out of you, and it’s inclusive of you being able to get friends involved as frictionless as possible.”
The Guest Pass Edition is a good deal, and the first I’ve seen that meaningfully attempts to address the conundrum around making sustainable multiplayer games in 2025: If you go free-to-play, the game has to be built around microtransactions that too few players actually buy. If you charge upfront, the community could die before it even has a chance. Feurstein hopes that by making it easy to play with friends, players will recognize what Velan’s trying to accomplish with Midnight Murder Club.
“The point is to be generous so that players understand that we are trying something new. We’re trying to be generous, and it shows.”
Midnight Murder Club is coming out in early access on March 13 on Steam and PS5. The free Guest Pass Edition launches simultaneously.
Source link
Kurt Indovina
Add comment