Peekaboo

I'll be straight with you: I came to Peekaboo expecting a quick laugh and left with a complicated feeling about small-studio multiplayer games. This is Redaster Studio's take on the Prop Hunt formula, the mode that's been a beloved staple since its Garry's Mod days, and for a sub-five-dollar indie it actually has more going on than you'd expect at first glance. The core loop puts up to 16 players across two asymmetric roles. Props shift into environmental objects, anything from a piece of fast food to a barrel or a box, and then try to blend in while hunters sweep the map armed with special guns, a radar, bombs, and traps. The prop side has its own toolkit too: a brief invisibility window and the ability to spawn decoy doubles to confuse anyone closing in. When a prop gets found and shot, they flip sides and join the hunters, so nobody sits in a dead lobby waiting for the round to end. That design choice alone keeps the pacing tight. There are ten maps with a day, evening, and night time-of-day selector that genuinely changes readability, and object spawn positions rotate each round so hunters can not just memorize static layouts. From a shooter-mechanics standpoint, this is not the place to obsess over TTK tuning or movement tech. The hunter side plays like a simple third-person shooter, WASD and a gun, with none of the depth you'd find in a dedicated PvP title. The radar mechanic is the closest thing to a skill ceiling, learning when to trust it versus when a smart prop is baiting you with a decoy. Prop physics are physics-based and slightly floaty, which can be charming or maddening depending on your tolerance for jank. Netcode is serviceable but not something you'd brag about; on open public servers the experience varies considerably. Private lobbies with a group of friends is clearly where this game was designed to live. The honest ceiling here is content volume and long-term population. Ten maps and one core mode is thin for solo queue grinding. If you drop in expecting a game with a healthy matchmaking pool and competitive infrastructure, you will be disappointed fast. The Steam review score sits in the Very Positive range on the main version, which tells you the audience it found: casual groups, families, and people who already know what they're buying. The Lite cross-platform spin-off drew a more mixed reception partly due to paywall friction, which is a different product but worth noting when you're thinking about how much Redaster trusts this IP. Bottom line: go in with three or more friends on voice chat and Peekaboo delivers genuine fun per dollar. Solo-queue it on a random Tuesday night and you might stare at a lobby screen longer than you play. It is a party game wearing a multiplayer shooter's clothes, and once you accept that, most of the rough edges stop bothering you. Fred, Scout Team