The Headliners

I have a soft spot for games that hand you the worst possible job in the apocalypse and then make you love every second of it. The Headliners gives you a camera instead of a gun, a press card instead of body armour, and a city crawling with creatures that very much want you dead. The loop is almost cartoonishly simple on paper: drop into a map, snap spectacular photos before the ten-minute timer runs out, extract, and hope your shots are worth enough points to keep your press cards topped up. Lose all three and your run is done. That tension, that little roguelite countdown ticking under every decision, is where the game quietly earns its keep. What makes it click is how the scoring pushes you toward danger rather than away from it. Duplicate photos from the same angle won't count toward your team total, which means four players crowded around the same monster shot are actively hurting each other's score. Everyone has to split up, get creative, and get closer than is sensible. The result is a co-op game that generates its best moments not from scripted setpieces but from the chaos of six people screaming across proximity chat while a Cloverfield-scale creature called the Velociralien levels a city block. Fallen teammates can still contribute by letting a squadmate photograph their death scene for bonus points, which is both grotesque and genuinely funny in the way only good co-op horror can be. The gore is detailed enough to surprise you, with limb removal and explosive deaths doubling as scoring opportunities rather than just spectacle. The rough edges are real and worth knowing about. Character models are basic compared to the genuinely impressive monster designs and environments. The point-scoring system can feel arbitrary, rewarding a near-empty frame while ignoring an alien ripping someone apart at close range. Solo play is rough, the balance tilting hard against a lone journalist. There are also enough lingering bugs, glitches, and occasional lobby issues to remind you this is a small studio still finding its footing post-launch. The developers at KAFI have been active with updates, expanding lobbies from four to eight players and adding new maps and alien types after release, so the trajectory is encouraging even if the current content pool feels thin after extended play. For the right crowd, none of that dims the experience much. This sits alongside Content Warning and Lethal Company in the emerging genre of co-op games that weaponise your occupation against you, but The Headliners adds enough of its own flavour, its first-person-only perspective, the proximity chat lip-sync, the Cloverfield-horror aesthetic, to justify its place in the lineup. It knows exactly what it is: a short, sharp, funny, occasionally terrifying party game that generates stories you will want to retell. Depth-seekers and solo players should look elsewhere. Everyone else with a group of three willing to scream at their screens for an hour will find something genuinely enjoyable here.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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