BOOMER Horror Game Preview: Co-op Hot Potato With a Bomb

What BOOMER is

Wumbo Workshop's pitch is short: "A chaotic co-op horror game for up to 6 players." You play Wumpets, puppets from a show that went off the air, stuck in The Understage, "a scary place where discarded Wumpets get forgotten". You scavenge, then decide whether to "feed your loot to a hungry steam engine" to reach the next station or bank it as money for Telemachus, the shopkeeper. Meanwhile, the fog is coming.

The date moved a little. The studio's October Bluesky posts said "Curtains open for BOOMER, November 3rd!!!", and the Next Fest trailer ends on "BOOMER WILL RELEASE ON 11/3", but the Steam page now lists November 5. Trust the store.

Screenshot: BOOMER Steam store page (Wumbo Workshop)

The bomb is the whole design

Boomer is "an anxious little fella", per the store page: "if you don't pass him off to a new person before his fuse reaches its bottom he'll explode", and then he flies off to find a new friend. The Next Fest trailer plays it like an employee safety video. At 0:07 a card warns that "BEING HELD BY ANY ONE EMPLOYEE CONTINUOUSLY MAY CAUSE DISCOMFORT" over a fireball, and the sections that follow are titled Managing Boomer, The Train, Working Together and, at 0:40, "LIABILITY (and our lack thereof)".

The clever part is what that rule does to a group. Co-op horror games usually fall apart when everyone wanders off alone. One demo player spotted the fix: "Boomer himself keeps you with your friends", and the same review liked "a decision to make about feeding the train vs getting money" (Steam review). That's the loop. Stay close enough to pass the bomb, spend loot on fuel or save it for upgrades, and keep moving ahead of the fog.

Screenshot: frame at 0:13 of the Next Fest trailer on Steam (Wumbo Workshop)

What the trailers show

The 74-second reveal trailer on the studio's YouTube channel opens on a voice saying "I think Boomer's going to blow up", and it's mostly real voice chat over play. At 0:33 a player holds Boomer, a red bird with a yellow feather crest and googly eyes, while browsing a shelf where a "Backpack Charm" costs $127. From 0:45 to 0:51 things explode. In the Next Fest trailer, the scene at 0:46 is pure friendslop: a red pickup truck rolls down the rails into a crowd of puppets.

The look is felt and fur under harsh colored light, which the store's content note sums up as "brutalized puppet like creatures". It's silly until it isn't. One player admitted they thought it "looked kinda silly", then had to "log off 15 minutes in after I got jumpscared by Dastard" (Steam review). Wumbo also says it does "not make any art using AI", and the frames back up a handmade, slightly off-model feel.

What demo players say

The BOOMER horror game demo has 22 Steam reviews, all positive. Read that kindly but carefully: 18 of them landed in the first week after the August 25 launch, and most list an hour or less of play. That's what an enthusiastic early audience looks like, not proof of a long game.

What they praise is specific, though. Deaths don't bench you for long: "you'll generally be back in the game within 5 minutes" (Steam review). Another player listed the comedy tools, including carrying a friend's body, "the funeral parlor to revive them, the hungry train" (Steam review). The comparisons are the obvious ones. "If you like R.E.P.O. you should definitely try BOOMER!" says one (Steam review), and another wrote that "If you are a fan of lethal company, this game is right up your alley!" (Steam review).

Screenshot: BOOMER Steam store page (Wumbo Workshop)

The studio and the unknowns

This isn't Wumbo Workshop's first horror game. BURN, "a short zero-gravity horror game", came out in February 2025, and the free Uh Oh!, three VHS tapes of horror, followed in December 2025 with a Very Positive rating on Steam. BOOMER is the studio's first game built around a co-op loop you replay, and the player tags (procedural generation, perma death) point that way, along with a new biome, Nana's Basement, announced for launch.

What we can't tell you yet is the price, how many areas the full game has, or how well the solo mode works. The store lists single-player, but every word of the pitch is about a group. Your PC is unlikely to be the problem: the minimum spec is a GTX 560 and 8 GB of RAM, and Macs on Apple M1 are listed.

Verdict

Who it suits: a friend group that already plays co-op horror for the chaos and wants something new after R.E.P.O. or Lethal Company. Download the demo, play it together, and you'll know in one session.

Who should wait: solo players, until someone reports on the single-player mode at launch, and anyone who needs to know the length first, since nothing official says how long a full run or the whole game takes.

We'd grab the demo tonight. For more festival picks, see the Next Fest October 2026 horror demos and co-op demos, and check whether Next Fest demos expire. If you want something out now, our best co-op games of September 2026 and the cheaper indie co-op picks are ready, Pratfall and Frog Sqwad scratch a similar chaotic itch, and Fears to Fathom Scratch Creek suits a pair who want scares over slapstick.

How we checked this

This is a sponsored preview: Wumbo Workshop paid for the placement and sent a Steam key, and did not see or approve the text. On October 21, 2026 we read the Steam store page, all 22 demo reviews, the studio's Bluesky posts and its earlier games' store pages, and stepped through the Next Fest trailer and the reveal trailer (the timestamps above are from those). We haven't played BOOMER or its demo yet, so there's no score and no hands-on claim here.

References

• BOOMER on Steam
• BOOMER reveal trailer, official channel
• Wumbo Workshop on Bluesky
• BURN on Steam