DOS-style horror adventure Infested DX lands on Steam October 27

If you touch the wrong storage crate in Infested DX, your space suit dissolves, your crew turns into sludge, and you get sent straight back to the previous screen.

Infested DX swaps modern hand-holding for instant pixelated death

The game leans straight into late-eighties DOS sci-fi graphic adventures and gooey B-movies like Galaxy of Terror. You play the sole survivor of a ruined space expedition aboard the 5-Alpha space station, wandering a deserted starship to find a cure, patch together an escape route, and stay breathing.

Back when getting a Sound Blaster card to play death squishy sound effects required an extended argument over IRQ channels, DMA settings, and autoexec.bat files, graphic adventures made deep space feel cold, strange, and unsafe. Solo developer Jeff Canam, who also worked on Beyond Shadowgate, hits that exact frequency here. The design skips modern objective markers, glowing path lines, and explicit hint systems when you're stuck in a room full of contaminated air locks.

Instead, navigating the ship plays out like a room-by-room exercise in bad news where picking up the wrong item dissolves your space suit. You interact with your surroundings through a classic command menu laid out across the lower screen, selecting actions like examine, take, move, use, and open. If you spent the early nineties clicking through dark corridors until an alien turned your crew into soup, this setup will feel immediately familiar.

When an inventory screen feels like an armory and a trap

The core puzzle design demands extreme care with every item you put in your pockets. The Infested DX gameplay loop encourages constant experimentation, but it also punishes reckless curiosity with immediate bodily destruction. Pick up a slimed barrack box without disarming the local laser grid first, and a chest monster attacks you on the spot.

The starship packs enough hazards to keep you saving your progress every two minutes. Surviving the biological infestation requires keeping track of several distinct threats across the deck:

• Rogue maintenance robots that shoot high-power lasers the moment you step across their patrol grid
• Shambling mutants and space zombies waiting in darkened bulkheads to trap unwary explorers
• Airborne alien contagions that infect your suit and rot your fingers to the bone before you can reach an air scrubber
• Trapped supply lockers and biological nests that detonate or release toxic slime if opened without proper tools

I always have room for an inventory puzzle game that respects the player enough to kill them instantly for doing something silly. Every screen works as a standalone logic puzzle where trial and error is part of the intended route forward rather than a failure state. You test an item, watch your suit melt, load your save, and try a smarter approach.

Jeff Canam rebuilt Infested DX around sixteen-bit horror and quicksaves

The original version debuted on itch.io in 2016 as a freeware download built with eight-bit graphics. This commercial release reworks the inventory puzzles, expands the floor plans with new rooms, and upgrades the art to detailed sixteen-bit pixel graphics with fresh dynamic animations.

You get expanded story content, new hazard types, full controller support, and a quicksave system so you don't have to restart from the title screen after every mistake. The user interface keeps a navigation tool in the bottom left to mark valid doorways, while your collected items sit lined up on the right side of the display screen. It delivers a pure Infested DX retro game feel, taking clear inspiration from classic MacVentures and ICOM Simulations titles like Shadowgate and Uninvited while cleaning up the clunky input limits of the era.

Developer GrahfMetal and publisher Komi Games have tuned the pacing so that death feels quick and instructional rather than frustrating. The updated presentation gives the alien infection room to breathe, even if that air happens to be full of lethal spore clouds.

Grab the Steam demo before the full starship unlocks on October 27

A free playable demo went up on Steam on October 8, giving you a quick taste of picking lock boxes on the Steam Deck or desktop PC. It gives you just enough room to test your survival instincts, solve a few door puzzles, and die four or five horrifying deaths before the title card drops.

The full PC release lands on Steam on October 27, 2026 for $9.99 USD. Wishlist the game today, play through the demo tonight, and make sure your quicksave key is mapped somewhere close to your thumb.