A barbarian with massive muscles, an even bigger shotgun dominating the right side of the screen, a joint of epic proportions on the left, a deliberately invasive HUD, and one fixed idea: turn the office into a battlefield — DEATH TO THE CULT OF LABOR. CYBRLICH and the Death Cult of Labor, the highly anticipated boomer shooter coming in the near future from the aptly named CYBRLICH Studios, does not want to be “clean,” elegant, or minimalist: it wants to be loud, excessive, divisive — in short, impossible to ignore.
It’s a shooter that blends cyberpunk and dark fantasy in a way we’ve never quite seen before, featuring fantastic handmade 2D animation, recapturing the primordial feeling of classic FPS games and pushing it further, all the way into the grotesque.
In an industry that in recent years seems to have chased standardization more and more — minimal interfaces, extreme readability, feedback calibrated to the millimeter, gameplay loops optimized to never truly disturb the player, and increasingly flat, uninteresting environments — even once –untouchable series have ended up sanding down their own sharp edges.
Even the latest, controversial installment of DOOM has shown us how aesthetic and gameplay choices can make a formula more “accessible” and systematic, but also incredibly mid, flattening something many believed was already perfect in its brutality and immediacy. That’s the price of homogenization: everything works, but everything starts to look the same — and to feel boring.
CYBRLICH Studios wants to move in the opposite direction, shouting a loud FUCK YOU to that very culture of pointless corporate drones and quarterly earnings reports that is slowly killing our favorite hobby. The team wasn’t born in a boardroom, but at a hot-dog-and-cheap-beer party. And it shows: the game has the same chaotic, punk, and genuine energy of people bringing together different skill sets to build something that doesn’t look like anything else.
Five people, zero funding, and a considerable amount of creative rage; backgrounds ranging from TV to 2D animation, from tabletop RPGs to tech art, united by a common goal: to create a hyperkinetic, satirical shooter bursting with personality, one that takes the symbols of cyberpunk and brings them back to their political core.
In this interview, CYBRLICH Studios tell us where they come from, how they work, and why their radical choices are not optional — they’re foundational pillars.
THE INTERVIEW
THE DEVS
• Tell us something about CYBRLICH Studios: how many people are you, where do you come from, and how did this creative collective come together?
Did it all start from a shared vision, a common frustration… or from a total rejection of the “rules” of the industry? CYBRLICH it’s your first game?
Peter: Eric Knittel, Clipper Arnold and I (Peter Larson Schmidt ) are the co-owners of CYBRLICH Studios, but the project was kicked off by me and Clipper. Eric joined a couple months later. On top of us three, Sam AC Smith and Christian ‘Hacho’ Brzozowski are studio members. Since it’s only the 5 of us (plus the odd freelancer here or there), no one really does just one thing. We all share responsibilities, putting our brain together for stuff like game design, narrative, and boring administrative stuff.
Here’s a short, inexhaustive rundown of who we are:
- Peter (me): I have about a decade of experience in TV and advertising, as you can see from my portfolio. I also teach 2D FX Animation at the School of Visual Arts in NYC, and I’m the art director and animation lead.
- Clipper: He is the frontman of the punk band Red Tank! and has designed and self-published several tabletop RPGs through Kickstarter with his studio, Polyhedra Games. Clipper is our music director and co-lead programmer alongside Eric.
- Eric: He is a full-time tech artist with about a decade of experience in the video game industry. He’s the team’s tech artist and co-lead programmer.
- Sam: He worked for 8 years as a creative marketing specialist at Nickelodeon. He now handles sound effects, music, and marketing for us — and he also created our trailer.
- Hacho: He is a recent Animation graduate from SVA and Peter’s former student. He handles all of the 3D work, some of the 2D, and contributes to level and game design.
The whole thing came together when Clipper and I met at a hotdog eating party in Bushwick, NYC. I remember telling Clipper that I thought his Death Traitors shorts were cool and that kicked off a friendship based around our shared interest in art, games, and tabletop RPGs. Two years, and many sessions of Mork Borg, later we started working on CYBRLICH.
At first, CYBRLICH was a small side project. We wanted to mash cyberpunk, dark fantasy, and office aesthetics into a boomer shooter tied together with fluid animation. I don’t want to make it sound all visual though, we also planned to add this sequence right at the start of the game where the player makes a choice – sign a contract with a Wizard and send emails until you die or pull the ‘Employee of the Month’ sword off the wall and start fighting. That sequence was critical to us.
Clipper and I have had a lot of conversations about how modern cyberpunk media is too obsessed with brand identifiers – cyberlimbs, evil corporations, neon lights, etc – and not enough on the actual punk politics that gave those brand identifiers power in the first place. I could go on a big tangent about that, but suffice it to say that we didn’t want to make something that was aesthetically rich but had no soul. The commentary was critical, but we also knew we needed to layer that commentary into a game where you do cool stuff like shoot skeletons and eat burgers.
So yeah, originally Clipper and I were planning on making this a small game made up of a single room with one narrative choice and a handful of weapons and enemies. Eric joined the team shortly after. The three of us assumed the whole thing would just take a few months.
Fast forward to our first playtest in the Summer of 2024. The game was super rough at the time. The animations were all unfinished, there was only one enemy, and the level itself was this narrow corridor that made dodging enemies impossible. Even our set up was weak: A single laptop, crammed into the corner of a shared table without any accompanying posters or business cards or anything like that.
But none of that mattered. People really resonated with it.
I think that’s when CYBRLICH really started.
• Cybrlich and the Death Cult of Labor feels like the result of very different worlds colliding.
Animation, tabletop RPGs, programming, video games, music… and a deep hatred for soul-sucking corporations: how much do these backgrounds — often far removed from traditional game development — influence both your way of working and the political and cultural message of the game?
Peter: CYBRLICH definitely comes from a lot of places. First and foremost, everyone on the team has worked a shitty job before. We’ve all had to sit through unnecessary meetings led by pathetic supervisors who get off on the authority imparted to them by an incompetent boss. The whole system we live under is a behemoth, unstoppable and uncaring, but it’s a behemoth made up of some of the least intelligent, least creative, least popular people in the world. Losers with the power to choose whether or not you can afford rent this month. It’s a huge joke, it’s just not a very funny one.
But huge jokes that aren’t funny are some of my favorite kinds of jokes. You just need to ramp them up a bit first.
That’s where the dark fantasy and cyberpunk influences really come in handy. The melodrama of dark fantasy and the topical absurdism of cyberpunk act as accelerants, heightening the office culture stuff as much as you need. From there it’s all about keeping a firm grip on the steering wheel so you can stop things from getting too goofy and keep the core message intact.
• What does it feel like to work in an organized way on a project that openly criticizes hierarchies, toxic productivity, and the cult of work itself?
How does work actually function inside CYBRLICH Studios?
How did you divide roles between art direction, code, narrative, and sound design? Are there clear boundaries, or is the process intentionally chaotic and collaborative, in line with the spirit of the game?
Eric: There’s definitely a lot of chaos in the collaboration, but we’re also super organized (at least for a bunch of art freaks and punks making an indie video game in our bedrooms!).
I think we all just care so much about making CYBRLICH that it’s easy to work together. Our roles and responsibilities are pretty loose compared to a corporate environment, but we make it work. I think it helps that our skills naturally compliment each others’. Everyone’s got areas of expertise but we’re all interested in learning more about the process, so we help out wherever we can.
Peter: Speaking for myself, after ten years of working in animation where you don’t control what you draw, how you draw, or own any of your artwork. It is a joy to hone my craft while working on something that I own a piece of.
Everyone on the team is working part-time right now. We have no funding, so we all need to have side jobs. That means that we put in the time we can. Sometimes that’s a lot, sometimes it’s not.
It’d be awesome if all that changed and we were able to all go full time, but for right now I find plenty of contentment in the craft itself.
ART DIRECTION
• Your game immediately stands out for its visual impact, especially when compared to a segment of the indie industry that seems to have lost the experimental drive of its early days in favor of settling on what “works” and what’s trendy — pixel art, low poly, cel shading.
What’s your take on this trend? How conscious was the decision to go in the opposite direction? And what are your declared influences, as well as the less obvious ones — perhaps outside of videogames altogether — that helped shape the final aesthetic of Cybrlich and the Death Cult of Labor?
Peter: A lot of CYBRLICH is built on making stuff that we think is cool and want to see in games. For me, a lot of that meant intense animations dripping with personality. There’s a lot of amazing art in games, but solid 2D, cel animation isn’t very common.
I don’t want to see puppet animation or rigs or 3D animation pretending to be 2D! I want more Pizza Towers, Cupheads, and Silksongs! I want more games with honest to god, 2D, hand drawn animation! So here we are with CYBRLICH.
In terms of the game itself, I’m not interested in making a rehash of DOOM or ULTRAKILL, but I am interested in exploring what those games feel like in a primordial sense.
Let me give you an example: When I think about the shotgun in DOOM, I imagine this gigantic gun that takes up a third of the screen because it’s so iconic and so powerful. And yet, everytime I play DOOM I am surprised to find that the gun isn’t actually that big.
That’s not to shade DOOM. DOOM is perfect.
What I’m trying to say is that I don’t want to make a game that feels like DOOM. I want to make a game that feels like what I remember DOOM feeling like when I was 12. That’s what guides a lot of our artistic decisions, like why we made our shotgun really, really big.
You could repeat this process for a lot of other games, inside and outside the boomer shooter genre. Void Bastards is important to me. So is Metal Gear Solid and Quest for Glory and Monkey Island and Fallout and Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines. None of these have 1 to 1’s the same way DOOM does, but none of them are far from my mind.
• The huge, deliberately “invasive” HUD is impossible to miss, especially in an era where many games aim for minimal, almost invisible interfaces.
Where did this very counter-trend decision come from? Is it mainly a commentary on the overload of interfaces and stimuli in contemporary digital life, or a direct homage to the exaggerated, hypertrophic HUDs of old-school FPS games? Or perhaps both?
Eric: We grew up playing those old school PC games with the huge, chunky UI and I think there’s definitely an homage there, or maybe an attempt to bring back the feeling we got playing those games as kids. We get a lot of comments online about the massive HUD. Some people love it and some people hate it (which is ok – good art is divisive and a game made for everyone is a game made for no one).
CYBRLICH is big, over-stimulating and over the top. One of our core game design pillars is spectacle. A lot of people who see a clip on social media jump to the conclusion that the hands should be smaller, but when I think about how that would feel, it doesn’t seem right. So much of the game’s personality would be lost. It would be like making a curry without any spices. And when people play the game, they get it. Almost no one who plays the game complains about the hands or the big HUD.
Peter: Trends in art are cyclical and the era of sleek minimalism has been over for a while now. Skinny jeans and iMacs are out, wallet chains and rainbow LED PC Towers are in. Maximalism is what’s up, but culture moves at different speeds in different places so a lot of people haven’t noticed yet.
None of this means that the age of the gigantic, vibey UI is around the corner. There is a practicality to minimal UIs, but I think their utility is a bit overstated. Yes, you can see more of the screen when there’s less UI, but is that a universal good? What if your game is designed around having a big UI? Different games have different needs, you know?
CYBRLICH rewards skillful play, but not the kind of skillful play that means you get one-shotted by an off-screen enemy if your FOV isn’t cranked to 120. It’s important to us that when you play CYBRLICH you feel like a barbarian with big hands and a big gun who eats big burgers and doesn’t care if he gets hit a few times in the process of demolishing his place of employment. The big UI is a part of that.
• Considering how much is constantly happening on screen — frenetic combat, a bulky HUD, visual effects, and gags all competing for the player’s attention — how did you work on balancing combat readability with the deliberate desire to “fill” the scene almost to the point of suffocation?
How much of the chaos is calculated, and how much is allowed to explode freely in order to convey specific sensations?
Peter: The chaos is both thematically important and mechanically calculated. We’re heightening the stimulation in the same way we’ve heightened everything else about the setting. What if your phone was constantly buzzing and attached to your face type shit. But what’s really crazy is that eventually all that noise starts cohering into something that makes sense.
The hands are busy, but they also operate separately from one another, so what might seem like a lot of noise to a viewer is actually a lot of flexibility for the player. You can shoot your gun and eat a burger at the SAME TIME!
The warnings about low health or low ammo always pop-up in the same places, so you don’t need to read ‘WARNING: You are out of spoons. Please do drugs!’ Eventually you get into this rhythm where a pop-up in the upper right corner has you reflexively hitting a joint.
The enemies don’t immediately spawn in huge numbers that overwhelm the player. They spawn in gradually increasing numbers, giving the player time to fall into a flow state.
In general, the level of stimulation matches the situation you are in. Things aren’t usually going crazy unless you’re in a bad situation, and if you’re in a bad situation then things should be going a little bit crazy.
• Your art direction features black-and-white characters, while the environments are built on a grayscale palette with red as a strong accent that immediately draws the eye.
How deliberate was this visual separation? Is it mainly intended as a symbolic tool to reinforce the satirical and critical tone of the game, or does it also stem from specific aesthetic or narrative references you wanted to explore? Are we wrong in seeing a subtle nod to They Live as well?
Peter: Any connection to They Live is purely coincidental and extremely flattering. We did make a deliberate choice when we started painting our dystopian office environments in grayscale and spot reds, but the choice to limit the palette was mostly practical.
I wanted the animation to be fluid and detailed, but that kind of animation takes a lot of time even if you’re only doing line art. Adding a color and, god forbid, a shadow pass to every frame of every asset would multiply the number of hours needed into infeasibility. We just couldn’t do full color.
Plus limited color palettes look cool and are under utilized. It’s a win/win.
THE GAMEPLAY
• From a purely gameplay perspective, what are the core pillars of Cybrlich and the Death Cult of Labor?
What did you want to be immediately clear — for example rhythm, movement, weapon handling — and where did you deliberately choose to go against classic boomer-shooter expectations in order to serve the tone and message of the game?
Eric: In terms of gameplay, our core pillars are fast paced, over-stimulating gameplay, absurd power fantasy, and flow state through application of skill.
We want players to enter a flow state where they’re blasting enemies, chomping burgers, smoking weed. Rinse and repeat. Unlike classic boomer-shooters, ammo is infinite and resources are plentiful. We never want players hunting for ammo or holding back because they’re afraid of running out. We want them to go all out, every fight. This isn’t a game where you’re going for a perfect run – you WILL take hits, but The Barbarian is tanky with a plentiful supply of healing burgers.
The trick is managing your inventory during the course of a battle. While you’re eating a burger, your left hand is busy; you can’t switch to the deepweed to refill your mental health. When you’re smoking deepweed you can’t eat a burger to heal up. When you’re reloading, you can’t attack or switch weapons. So it’s a question of timing – choosing the right item for the moment, choosing the right weapon for the encounter. A split-second choice at the wrong moment is the difference between life and death.
And we want EVERYTHING to feel reactive. When you shoot a gun, a dozen things happen. Recoil shakes the screen,the UI pops and flashes, an enemy bursts into a pile of bones, ceiling tiles disintegrate, a Baphomet explosion leaves a crater, fires start, scorch marks appear, blood splatters on the floor, a giant bullethole marks the wall. We never want players to take an action that feels like it doesn’t affect the world. We want the player to feel like The Barbarian, tearing through the Lichcorp Tower, leaving a trail of chaos behind.
THE SOUND DESIGN
• The music and sound featured in the trailer seem to draw from a very specific imaginary, recalling a certain punk-infused thrash metal vibe, similar to bands like Municipal Waste, with additional electronic incursions and almost industrial EDM elements.
Will we hear these tracks only in promotional material, or is this a direction you pursued from the very beginning for the full game as well? What was your approach to the soundtrack, and what kind of sonic palette are you building to support the game’s satire?
Sam: The music in the trailer is taken from the game, so you’ll definitely hear more of it as you play. Most of the game’s music comes from Clipper, one of the team leads. He’s on paternity leave right now, so I’ll speak for him as best as I can. The music is meant to support the aggression, chaos, and overstimulation the player experiences as they infiltrate the dystopian LICHCORP. EDM elements remind us of the technology and bureaucratic structure that the CYBRLICH utilizes to exercise control, with industrial sounds conveying additional harshness and brutality.
Outside of CYBRLICH, I’m the bassist in Clipper’s punk band Red Tank! I know punk music is important to him, so I think adding it to the game is both a form of self expression and a way to elevate the frenetic energy of the gameplay. I’m relatively new to the punk scene, but one thing I’ve taken away is that its music isn’t always a call to arms against oppression. Sometimes it’s a celebration of living through it and imagining a better future. It seems to exist in the space between nihilism and hope, and I think the game mirrors that paradigm.
• Aside from the OST, is the sound design meant to feel aggressive, disturbing, or ironic in reinforcing the message of Cybrlich and the Death Cult of Labor?
Sam: The sound design is definitely meant to be aggressive. When the protagonist cuts a demon in half, we need to hear the sound of its organs fall out and plop on the ground. Weapons should feel mighty, impacts should be dangerous, and UI should be punchy. On the other hand, I wanted a game that features cartoonishly evil motives to also sound…well, cartoonish.
I try to achieve this by mixing grotesque sounds with carefully sprinkled silly sounds. When you defeat a skeleton, it sounds almost like a bowling ball striking pins. When skeletons catch fire, they yelp a pained “yowch!” To keep with a cyberpunk theme, I also add a lot of glitchy textures, most of which I make using my Korg MS20-mini synthesizer.
Overall, I want CYBRLICH to sound cool, tactile, satisfying, and fun.
• The voice acting in the trailer works damn well: it’s theatrical, sarcastic, and adds another layer of bite to the message.
Is this something we can expect to see in the actual game, or will it remain confined to promotional material? How interested are you in using voice as a narrative weapon, rather than just a “luxury optional”?
Peter: Clipper did the voice acting for the trailer and he absolutely killed it.
I hope that we get the opportunity to explore voice acting! It would add a whole new creative dimension to the project, one that would make everything cooler and funnier and more accessible. But time and money are the two gigantic obstacles. If we have the resources, then I think we will at least explore voicing the core characters, but no promises.
DEMO AND RELEASE DATE:
• Can we expect a playable demo of Cybrlich and the Death Cult of Labor anytime soon? Do you already have an idea of when the full game will be released?
Peter: I want to say six months from now, but I’ve been saying that for about six months now. We have made a lot of progress in this semester, but we really want to make sure that the game is in a solid place narratively and mechanically before we put a demo out. That said, if anyone reading this is interested in playing the game they should join our discord. We’ve been building a cool community on there and it’s also where we source playtesters .
As for the full release, I can’t hazard a guess. We still have so much left to do. At least a couple years.
And it is with the hope of seeing a full version of CYBRLICH and the Death Cult of Labor as soon as possible that we take our leave from its creators. The feeling is that of having witnessed a project in full evolution, yet with a crystal-clear identity — one that rejects homogenization, embraces risk, and places personality and vision at the center of every choice.
In a landscape often flattened by safe formulas and recurring trends, the five-member team at CYBRLICH Studios proves that there is still room for excess, experimentation, and an authentic voice. We can only wish the very best to this barbaric creative collective — may the chaos remain controlled, the animations grow ever smoother, and the Lichcorp Tower stand ready to collapse under a well-aimed barrage of shotgun blasts.
We would like to thank the guys at CYBRLICH Studios for answering our questions and we wish them all the best with their self-titled project!
Follow us on our website for more reviews and articles coming in the next few days!