Fullbright, the studio behind Gone Home and Tacoma—in name, at least—has dropped a surprise new horror game on Steam called Toilet Spiders. In case the title leaves any doubt, this is one you'll definitely want to stay away from if you have a thing about spiders.
I say it comes from the studio "in name" because it's essentially a solo project from Fullbright co-founder Steve Gaynor, who split from the rest of the team in 2023 in the wake of allegations of a "toxic culture" at the studio a couple years earlier. Open Roads, the game the studio was working on when the allegations came to light, was eventually released by the Open Roads Team, while Gaynor carried on with the Fullbright name as a solo developer.
Toilet Spiders is the first game to come from Fullbright after that split, and it's definitely something different. You play as a "volunteer" sent by a vaguely Eastern European government to a decrepit, abandoned government facility; you are equipped with absolutely nothing to help you accomplish your mission, which is fine because you also have no idea what your mission is. Getting out seems like the best idea, but unfortunately many doors are locked and the keys have for some reason been hidden in some of the facility's many, many crappers—which, for the record, are in dire need of a good scrub.
The toilets are disgusting, but this is not the worst problem. The worst problem would be the giant, radioactive, murderous spiders that have also taken up residence in some of them. Most toilets hold nothing, a few have keys you need to progress, and a few house SURPRISE SPIDERS that will leap out at you in various forms, leading to your immediate demise. You have three volunteers for each session, and if they all die before you do whatever it is you're here to do, items and spiders are randomized and off you go to try again.
The mechanics are very simple—everything is controlled with a left-click—and after a while the spider attacks become less startling and more just mildly unpleasant, because hey, they do look pretty creepy. That led one user on Steam to ask if Toilet Spiders is a "real game" or some kind of joke.
"It's absolutely real," Fullbright wrote in response. "It was made as a solo project by the writer and lead designer of Gone Home and Tacoma. It's the first in a planned anthology series of small, lo-fi games all with different subjects and gameplay. This first one was an idea from my five-year-old daughter, so... it's a bit weird.
"But yes, Toilet Spiders is a real, comedy-horror, short (if you can complete it), challenge-based game about trying to avoid spiders that jump out of toilets at you. But hey, it's in first-person, and it has notes to find—and there's toilets! Just like every other Fullbright game."
The Steam page says "you must learn to judge your odds and manage your resources to avoid or scare off the giant radioactive spiders laying in in wait inside filthy toilets," which suggests to me that there's some kind of system in play that smart people can use to maximize their odds of getting through in one piece.
That may or may not be the case; for myself, I can only admit that it took me a couple runs before I figured out that I didn't have to open every damn pisspot in the place—it's enough to find keys and then move on, leaving undiscovered spiders in peace. (I also haven't figured out how to properly use the flashbang grenade, although I can report that if you pull the pin and then hold onto it until it explodes in your face, the spider will still be scared off.)
Toilet Spiders is out now in early access, and is "a fairly polished, stable version of the base game, with room for improvement and expansion." The early access period is expected to last about three months, during which it will get "balance and tuning improvements, possibly additional features and content, more and better localization, with the community's support."
Despite Toilet Spiders' one-trick nature (at least, in what I've seen of it so far), I'm curious enough to want to go back. There's a weirdness about it that I dig, and the "something's gone very wrong" narrative that unfolds across notes and books is thin but enough to have me wondering what's next and how it's all going to wind up. Whether that's enough for you to justify the $5 price tag I cannot say, but I can say—again and with emphasis—that arachnophobes definitely need not apply.
