Ghost Town Games, the small team behind the beloved co-op game Overcooked, has returned with a new game called Stage Fright. The trailer for this upcoming cooperative game was revealed live at The Game Awards 2024 in Los Angeles.
The studio behind one of the most successful indie games of the last decade has come back with another game you can play with your friends. But this time, it has a magical and spooky setting, with chaotic gameplay elements similar to Overcooked mixed with escape room-style cooperation.
Although it’s very different from Ghost Town Games’ fast-paced cooking game, Stage Fright is like Overcooked meets Luigi’s Mansion with a charming story. Overcooked never had much of a tale to tell, but Stage Fright’s story is touching and has “real heart,” according to publisher Hello Games.
Hello Games, the developer behind No Man’s Sky, eagerly decided to hop onto the project due to the publisher’s close relationship with Ghost Town Games since the creation of Overcooked. Three people — Phil Duncan, Oli De-Vine, and Gemma Langford — were behind the initial creation of the chaotic cooking co-op game.
“Phil and Oli came to visit us for advice with the very earliest demo of Overcooked about 10 years ago,” Hello Games head of publishing Tim Woodley said in an email sent to Digital Trends. “We have such fond memories of the four founders of Hello playing that Overcooked demo, screaming at each other about onions — it was instantly obvious this was something special.”
Due to that history, Hello Games jumped at the opportunity to back Ghost Town Games’s next title. “Hello Games has a bunch of experience we can lend behind the scenes, support we can give, but if we’re honest, it really appeals to us to have fun working with a bunch of creative people we just love spending time with,” Woodley added. “When we played an early version of Stage Fright, we got the same buzz as we had with Overcooked all those years ago — it’s just something we wanted to be involved in.”
