When chimp-and-rat buddy horror adventure Animal Use Protocol was first announced late last year, I felt fear. Not the good kind that tiny South African indie outfit The Brotherhood had so well cultivated with their Stasis point-and-click adventure series, but worries that shifting to a real-time, first-person perspective would ruin the perfectly unpleasant vibes the pre-rendered art of the series was so well known for.
Judging by yesterday’s new gameplay trailer (rolled out during the Future Games Show Spring showcase), I’m no longer worried. About the art, that is. I am however absolutely creeped out by the gameplay that they’ve shown.
The wet, sticky, rusty environments of the Stasis series (a universe where corporations seem insistent on playing god in the most cartoonishly evil fashion possible) seem wonderfully replicated in Unreal Engine 5. Decayed human corpses practically melting into sludge while plant and fungal growths overtake abandoned super-science facilities. This is not a pleasant environment to be, and just looking at it makes me imagine how it must feel to touch. Not somewhere I’d go without a thick hazmat suit, let alone walking around naked like protagonists Penn, a bio-engineered chimpanzee, and his snippy rat companion Trip, a dynamic duo that feel like a nod to short but influential comic series We3.
This new trailer is the first time we’ve heard them talk. Penn sounds mostly human, with only the occasional missing word belying his simian brain. Trip, on the other hand, communicates through what looks to be some crude cybernetics built around a Tamagotchi-like toy. The rat is [[link]] able to speak but with limited intonation, leaving the machinery to spit out tonal prefaces like [WITH GROWING IMPATIENCE] before each sentence. A well-worn trope, perhaps, but one that feels like it’s working well here.
Just the few lines of dialogue we get between Penn and Trip in the trailer have me sold on their slightly antagonistic relationship (which will inevitably soften over time). And given the studio’s track record, the duo (and likely many of the other lab animals they meet along the way) are going to suffer terribly. The Stasis series is notoriously unkind to its protagonists, no matter how cute they are. We get to see Penn pelted with turret gunfire in the trailer, as well as falling foul to a giant chimeric monster, which seems to have a little bit of everything going on, including some vestigial human limbs and a pig’s head hidden within a secondary skull that splits open sideways. Ick.
The Brotherhood (named after the studio's co-founding Bischoff brothers, Nic and Chris) are well experienced in using fuzzy friends in order to yank at my heartstrings. The heart and soul of Stasis: [[link]] Bone Totem was a sapient robot teddy bear named Moses, whose awkward, naive dialogue frequently held things together when every other character was losing their shit as the game spiralled further into sci-fi hell. It feels like they’re doubling down on that, making the cute (or at least as cute as can exist in their horrible sci-fi universe) characters the stars of the show.
We also get a first look at the nuts and bolts of Animal Use Protocol’s gameplay here. While there’s standard stalker horror pursuit and hiding going on, we get to see Penn using an industrial gravity gun as both a problem-solving tool and defensive measure, blocking incoming gunfire with a crystal-encrusted office chair. The game doesn’t seem to be abandoning its classic point-and-click adventure roots either, with an expansive inventory full of gubbins ready to be mashed together into new items, like an incendiary bomb used to clear a path at one point. There’s also a mention that items required for puzzles cannot be wasted, while it seems that others are consumable resources, in classic survival horror style.
As a fan of the studio’s previous work, the only disappointment for me here is that Animal Use Protocol is still a long way from release, pencilled-in for some time in 2026, but you can wishlist it on Steam now. In the meantime, for any point-and-click adventurers with a strong stomach (no, seriously, it gets all kinds of squelchy), I highly recommend picking up its predecessor, Stasis: Bone Totem, which is currently going cheap on GOG and Humble. And [[link]] don’t worry, you don’t need to have played the earlier games to enjoy it.
