Hertfordshire, 12th of March, 2026 – Numskull Games and indie developer Smitner Studio announced that their dystopian pixel-art block-pushing puzzle game 'Hazard Pay' will launch on PlayStation 5, Nintendo Switch and PC via Steam in June 2026. Step inside the nightmare today with a playable demo now available on Steam.
It’s 1982 and you’ve been beckoned to a secretive research facility in an authoritarian Cold War-era state. Hazard Pay puts you in the shoes of a government cleanup specialist dispatched after a catastrophic containment breach. The mission seems simple: destroy evidence, restore order, and collect your hazard pay. But inside the facility, the truth behind the experiments quickly begins to surface, and reality is far more sinister.
The officials want silence, not survivors
Inside the Institut für Proteintherapie (IPT), a government program intended to solve a national food crisis has spiralled into a biological horror. Resident scientists who were attempting to synthesise artificial proteins have created horrific ███████████████ that now ████ ██████ around the facility. Navigate laboratories, dormitories, and experimental chambers while encountering the terrifying results of these experiments.
You’ll cross paths with PRS-86, a blind predator that tracks blood with lethal precision, and The Collector, an evolving organism that has grown beyond the control of its creators.
As the clean-up specialist, you are only one of many expendable workers sent in to contain the situation. If you die, another will replace you.
Choose your own nightmare
Hazard Pay blends stealth, survival horror, and narrative choice in a tense facility-wide clean-up operation.
Players must:
- Navigate across sectors of the research facility
- Avoid deadly bio-organisms that hunt through scent and sound
- Decide the fate of trapped scientists
