Players join forces in Living Hell, a horror experience made for cooperative multiplayer by Joe Fender LTD, the team responsible for DEVOUR. Survivors traverse submerged subway tunnels, deserted stations, and wrecked city roads beneath a scorching sun, with a dense crimson haze covering the area. Its public playtest is now available on Steam, while the complete game is planned for Summer 2027.
Quick answer: Living Hell is a co-op survival horror game from the DEVOUR team. The Steam playtest is open for sign-ups now, and the game launches in Summer 2027.
The announcement trailer ran during the Triple-i Initiative showcase, closing out with the title reveal, the Summer 2027 date, and a prompt to join the playtest on Steam.
What Living Hell is
You play as one of several ordinary human survivors, each with their own casual outfit and survival backpack. The group includes a woman with short blonde hair in a red sleeveless top, a man in a baseball cap and blue shirt carrying a large pack, a heavy-set man in a turquoise collared shirt, and a man in a yellow knit sweater. There are no superhero costumes or elaborate gear, just people trying to get through a city that has gone very wrong.
The setting shifts between underground and surface locations. One stretch has survivors riding a grime-covered subway car as the lights cut out, with a route map tracking progress overhead. Another opens onto an outdoor street drowned in deep red fog, with a giant burning orb hanging above the skyline. A ruined police station, marked with a Medow City Police shield, serves as another area to search.
Heat is a core survival mechanic
Extreme heat is the environmental threat that shapes how you move. Each survivor carries a handheld device that reads out the surrounding temperature in Celsius and a thermal load percentage. The trailer shows readings like 45.2°C and a thermal load of 20.38%, along with an engine panel that flashes a system overheat warning.
That scanner view also pulls up a thermal scan of a survivor’s face, suggesting the heat gauge is tied directly to the character you are tracking rather than a fixed global value.
Capturing specimens and feeding the BM-770
A big part of the loop involves finding and securing glowing red biological entities. These writhing, burning organisms are picked up off the floor through a capture interaction, with a progress bar labeled CAPTURING filling as you hold the prompt. Once secured, you carry the pulsing specimen by hand through corridors to a processing station.
That station is the PROCESS UNIT BM-770, a bio-vapor machine with a chute, a status light, and a bio-vapor exhaust. You drop the organism into the chute and pull a lever to incinerate it, which lights up a green output tray. Searching areas, grabbing specimens, and running them back to the BM-770 looks like the central objective-driven task that keeps a team moving.
The enemies you will run into
The threats range from stalking creatures to full jumpscares. The trailer packs in several distinct enemy types, each attacking in a different way.
- A tall, slender humanoid with an elongated neck that screeches at the base of a stairwell.
- A grotesque green slug-like monster covered in yellow eye-stalks that bursts through a wall.
- A giant bat-winged beast that dives down out of the crimson sky.
- Human survivors who mutate and convulse, twisting unnaturally in enclosed rooms.
- A bloodied, open-mouthed face that lunges at the camera in a flashlight beam.
There is also a lone figure seen floating high in the red sky between skyscrapers, hinting at something larger looming over the city. To fight back, players can aim a nozzle-style weapon into the haze at crawling creatures and shadowy figures.
Co-op revives keep the team alive
As a cooperative game, Living Hell leans on keeping your squad on its feet. When a teammate goes down, another player can kneel beside them and bring them back, with a REVIVING progress bar filling as the interaction completes. It is the familiar downed-and-revived structure that co-op horror groups rely on to recover from a bad encounter.
Playtest access and release window
The playtest is open for sign-ups on Steam right now, which is the only way to try Living Hell before launch. The trailer ends on the exact prompt, showing PLAYTEST ON STEAM and JOIN NOW alongside the title. You know your request went through once the playtest shows as joined on the game’s Steam page.
The full release is targeting Summer 2027. No narrower launch date or time has been confirmed beyond that window, so anyone wanting hands-on time sooner should go through the Steam playtest. Living Hell is a trademark of Joe Fender LTD, the same creator whose previous co-op horror title, DEVOUR, the trailer leads with as its calling card.
