Midnight Murder Club, the new first-person shooter from Knockout City developer Velan Studios and published by PlayStation has surprise-launched out of early access today.
Similar to how Velan Studios took dodgeball, a game most people are introduced to when they're kids and gave it more of an intense spin with Knockout City, the team has turned hide-and-seek into a much more intense, and violent time, with Midnight Murder Club.
The game takes place in a pitch-black mansion, where players have to navigate the darkness through audio cues. Eric Feurstein, game director on Midnight Murder Club at Velan Studios, said in a PlayStation Blog post the team wanted to make its more violent version of hide-and-seek feel "like a party game, where it's tense and spooky one moment, then chaotic and hilarious the next."
It arrived on PC in early access this past March 13, 2025, and at least on Steam, has failed to make much of a splash, since it's only ever reached a concurrent max of 178 players.
Today's 1.0 launch is hoping to change that however, with a new single-player PvE mode called Graveyard Shift, and the introduction of a new mechanic, Wildcards, which the studio hopes will add a bit more chaos to the fun of Midnight Murder Club.
Another boon in Midnight Murder Club's favor is that you don't need to convince your friends to buy the game with you if you want to try it out. You can buy it, and then get your friends to download the Guest Pass version of the game, which lets them play for free. So long as one person has bought the game, you can fill your team with friends who haven't yet spent a cent on it.
"Midnight Murder Club started out as a weird idea I had almost exactly 10 years ago to this day," writes Feurstein. "Back in 2015, I hacked together a small prototype in my bedroom and emailed it to my friends to play together. I never really knew what would become of it and a decade later I finally decided to pitch it to Velan and it was amazing how more people saw the potential of this strange idea of a shooter in the dark."
"In some ways the game is very similar to that small prototype, but also extremely different thanks to all the feedback we received over Early Access and the various playtests with everyone. Very few people get to enjoy this feeling of pitching a game idea, seeing it grow, and then playing the game with the public like we have with Midnight Murder Club."
It's a nice story to hear, how Midnight Murder Club grew from Feurstein's small prototype to its launch today. But if it can't garner the number of players needed to keep a multiplayer game alive, it won't have such a nice ending, and go the way of Velan Studios last major release.
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