Coal Duty is a 1-5 player co-op extraction horror-comedy from Corecrew Games. Its free demo goes live on Steam on Thursday, October 8. Keys are available to press and content creators now, ahead of the public launch.

Coal Duty is about what you can hear. The game runs on proximity voice chat, so a crew can only hear each other at close range, and so can everything else in the tunnels. Calling out a route, warning a friend about the thing around the corner and screaming all carry exactly the same distance. Some of the creatures down there are blind. Some are fast. Some look like coal until they don’t.

 Every shift drops the crew into a freshly generated mine with one instruction: meet the State coal quota. Push deeper and the haul improves, and so does the company. Tickets earned on delivery are the only currency the State recognizes, and whatever a crew chooses not to report stays between them and the dark. Between shifts, miners return to a persistent hub with barracks, a workshop, a tavern and a smuggler working out of a restricted area the State does not officially acknowledge. It is also where escape plans get made, and there is more than one way out.