There are two cool pieces of news here. First, the indie studio behind the Overcooked series, Ghost Town Games, is working on a new title called Stage Fright, and it’ll support both online and couch co-op. Rad! Second, Stage Fright is being published by No Man’s Sky studio Hello Games, a move that marks Hello’s first foray into publishing other studios’ projects. Double rad!
Stage Fright is built around co-op, and its mechanics bring Overcooked-style chaos to a series of escape room environments in a spooky, Luigi’s Mansion kind of world. It doesn’t have a release date but it’s available to wishlist now on Steam.
Overcooked and its sequel have helped re-energize the co-op genre in recent years, serving up frantic restaurant gameplay that always feels more fun — and shouty — with a friend. Overcooked supports cooperative couch play and Overcooked 2 introduced online co-op to the series. Stage Fright represents the culmination of everything that Ghost Town has learned about co-op gaming from Overcooked, complete with local and online play.
“Nothing else really played like Overcooked when it came out and Stage Fright is just as innovative, but in a really different direction,” Hello Games publishing lead Tim Woodley said.
Ghost Town Games has a core team of just three people, founders Oli De-Vine and Phil Duncan plus writer Gemma Langford. They’ve been developing Stage Fright under the codename Project Attic — because they’ve literally been building this game in their attic — and their website lists six additional contributors. There’s also the Hello Games of it all.
De-Vine and Duncan have been friends with the Hello Games crew — including founders Sean Murray, Grant Duncan, Ryan Doyle and David Ream — for years. After Hello found success with Joe Danger in 2010, they helped connect Ghost Town with the eventual publisher of Overcooked, Team17. Overcooked came out in 2016 and the rest is culinary co-op history.
“Phil and Oli came to visit us for advice with the very earliest demo of Overcooked about ten years ago,” Woodley said. “We have such fond memories of the four founders of Hello playing that Overcooked demo, screaming at each other about onions — it was instantly obvious this was something special.”
Hello Games is currently developing Light No Fire, a cooperative survival and exploration game that takes place on a fantasy planet as large as Earth, offering a mix of role-playing and sandbox mechanics. The studio is also still very much supporting and expanding its breakout hit, No Man’s Sky (and things seem to be going really well). Stage Fright will be Hello’s debut as a third-party publisher, but it doesn’t mean the studio is pivoting to publishing full-time.
“Hello Games has a bunch of experience we can lend behind the scenes, support we can give, but if we’re honest it really appeals to us to have fun working with a bunch of creative people we just love spending time with,” Woodley said. “When we played an early version of Stage Fright we got the same buzz as we had with Overcooked all those years ago. It’s just something we wanted to be involved in.”
Expect more information about Stage Fright over the next 12 months.
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