Hazard Pay Launches in June for PS5, Switch, and PC - News
by William D'Angelo , posted on 12 March 2026 / 1,655 Views
Publisher NumskulL Games and developer Smitner Studio announced the pixel-art dystopian block-pushing puzzler, Hazard Pay, will launch for the PlayStation 5, Nintendo Switch, and PC via Steam in June.
View a trailer of the game below:
Read details on the game below:
It’s 1982 and you’ve been beckoned to a secretive research facility in an authoritarian Cold War-era state. Hazard Pay puts you in the shoes of a government cleanup specialist dispatched after a catastrophic containment breach. The mission seems simple: destroy evidence, restore order, and collect your hazard pay. But inside the facility, the truth behind the experiments quickly begins to surface, and reality is far more sinister.
The Officials Want Silence, Not Survivors
Inside the Institut für Proteintherapie (IPT), a government program intended to solve a national food crisis has spiralled into a biological horror. Resident scientists who were attempting to synthesise artificial proteins have created horrific ███████████████ that now ████ ██████ around the facility. Navigate laboratories, dormitories, and experimental chambers while encountering the terrifying results of these experiments.
You’ll cross paths with PRS-86, a blind predator that tracks blood with lethal precision, and The Collector, an evolving organism that has grown beyond the control of its creators.
As the clean-up specialist, you are only one of many expendable workers sent in to contain the situation. If you die, another will replace you.
Choose Your Own Nightmare
Hazard Pay blends stealth, survival horror, and narrative choice in a tense facility-wide clean-up operation.
Players must:
- Navigate across sectors of the research facility.
- Avoid deadly bio-organisms that hunt through scent and sound.
- Decide the fate of trapped scientists.
Will you become just another disposable tool of the system, or be the one to finally expose the crimes hidden inside the facility?
Features:
- Ingenious, compact, handcrafted push / pull puzzle levels.
- Unique clean-up mechanics—erase blood trails, destroy evidence, and hide the truth.
- Branching narrative choices that affect alliances, trust, and endings.
- Environmental storytelling, uncovering the secrets of the facility.
A life-long and avid gamer, William D'Angelo was first introduced to VGChartz in 2007. After years of supporting the site, he was brought on in 2010 as a junior analyst, working his way up to lead analyst in 2012 and taking over the hardware estimates in 2017. He has expanded his involvement in the gaming community by producing content on his own YouTube channel and Twitch channel. You can follow the author on Bluesky.
