Hazard Pay: Cold War Cleanup Puzzle Game Out Now

The job sounds simple: destroy the evidence, restore order, collect your hazard pay. That's the pitch Hazard Pay opens with — and it takes about one contaminated room to realize the job is neither simple nor clean. Smitner Studio's grim little puzzler drops you into the Institut für Proteintherapie, a 1982 research facility in an authoritarian Cold War state where an attempt to synthesize artificial proteins has curdled into biological horror. You're the cleanup specialist. You're also expendable — if you die, the game just registers you as "Delisted" and sends in the next worker.

What hooked me first was how little the game holds your hand. It tells you what to do — mop the floor, erase the blood trail, destroy the evidence — but almost never how. At first that annoyed me. Then I solved one myself, and the annoyance flipped into the whole appeal: every solution feels like something you cracked, not something you were walked through. This isn't a bag of disconnected brain-teasers, either. It's a progressing story with puzzles that sharpen as you go, and the pull isn't just solving them — it's the curiosity of what's behind the next door.

Then it sinks the hook in. Every single step counts toward your score, and there are global and friends leaderboards, so a level I'd already "beaten" I'd restart — and restart — hunting the cleanest run just to see my name land at #1. The moment-to-moment feel will click instantly if you've played top-down "move a character around a facility doing tasks" games like Among Us, just far grimmer. I played on PS5 on a big screen, but it plays like a handheld — PSP or Nintendo DS energy — and the overworld, where you climb out and drive the van, is pure old TMNT NES game with a darker coat of paint.

The atmosphere is what seals it. There's a morbid streak here that never goes over the top; the game leaves most of the dark comedy to you. I fumbled straight into a vat of acid more than once, and I spent way too long trying to figure out how to save a scientist after I'd already finished the level with them dead — which, it turns out, is the point. Spoiler — tap to revealDeciding whether to save trapped scientists or leave them behind shifts alliances, trust, and which ending you get. The "puzzle gore" and the environmental storytelling are the best parts.

It's not flawless. The movement is smooth, sometimes too smooth — in a game that counts every step, sliding onto an extra block mid-maneuver actually stings, and a couple of those slips cost me the top spot. And it badly wants a tutorial: there's a rewind-steps option and a start-over, but the game never really signposts them, so you stumble onto tools you should've been handed up front.

Solving a level is entertaining. Solving it in the fewest steps is what's genuinely engaging — the "one more try" loop that quietly turns into an addiction. So here's my verdict: an 8/10, if you're into challenging, curiosity-driven puzzle-solving with a real story underneath it. If you hate puzzles, this isn't the game that converts you — but if that "what's next?" pull is your thing, the hazardous workplace is worth clocking into.