The Overcooked team has a new creepy-cute co-op game called Stage Fright

There are two great pieces of news here. First, the indie studio behind the Overcooked series, Ghost Town Games, is working on a new title called Stage frightand will support both online and co-op. Glad! Second, Stage fright is published by No man’s sky studio Hello Games, a move that marks Hello’s first foray into publishing other studios’ projects. Double glad!

Stage fright is built around co-op and its mechanics bring Overcooked-style mayhem to a series of escape rooms in a haunted world of Luigi’s Mansion. No release date, but it’s already available for wishlist Steam.

Overcooked and its sequel have helped revive the co-op genre in recent years, offering frenetic restaurant gameplay that always feels more fun — and flashier — with a friend. Overcooked supports couch co-op play and Overcooked 2 introduced online co-op to the series. Stage fright represents the culmination of everything Ghost Town has learned about co-op gaming from Overcooked, along with local and online play.

“Nothing else is played like this Overcooked when it came out and Stage fright is just as innovative, but in a really different direction,” said Hello Games head of publisher Tim Woodley.

Ghost Town Games has a core team of just three people, founders Ollie De-Vine and Phil Duncan plus writer Gemma Langford. They have evolved Stage fright codenamed Project Attic—because they literally built this game in their attic—and their website lists six additional contributors. There’s also Hello Games out of it all.

De-Wine and Duncan have been friends with the Hello Games team — 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 OvercookedTeam 17. Overcooked came out in 2016, and the rest is culinary co-op history.

“Phil and Ollie came to visit us for advice with the earliest demonstration of Overcooked about ten years ago,” Woodley said. “We have such fond memories of the four founding members of Hello playing that Overcooked demos shouting at each other about onions – it was immediately obvious that this was something special.”

Hello Games is currently in development Burns without firea co-op survival and exploration game set on a fantasy planet the size of Earth, offering a combination of RPG and sandbox mechanics. The studio is also still supporting and expanding on its breakout hit, No man’s sky (and things look like this it’s going really well). Stage fright will be Hello’s debut as a third-party publisher, but that doesn’t mean the studio is turning to full-time publishing.

“Hello Games has a bunch of experience that we can provide behind the scenes, support that we can provide, but if we’re being honest, we really like having fun working with a bunch of creative people that we just enjoy spending time with,” Woodley said. “When we played an early version of Stage fright we got the same noise as with Overcooked all those years ago. It’s just something we wanted to be a part of.”

Stay tuned for more information on Stage fright in the next 12 months.