OCTOPinbs Review: The Party Game From Non-Party People

When OCTOPinbs was announced, we had our eyebrows raised with cautious optimism. The developers were Tri-Ace, the studio behind Star Ocean and Valkyrie Profile, teaming up with Lasengle, the developer of Fate/Grand Order and Melty Blood: Type Lumina, and published by Aniplex - an unusual combination of veterans taking on a genre outside of their pedigree. Given the developers and the weight of the publisher, we expected a fun, polished game, if not revolutionary, given that the developers have never done any casual party games before.

What we got is something else. Not bad, exactly, but an unshakeable feeling that the game is incomplete.

There's A Squid Artist Among Us

OCTOPinbs is a 3-to-10 player online social deduction game where most players take on the role of octopus firefighters trying to put out the fire in a burning building, while one or more sneaky squid artists hide among them, fueling the flames instead. Firefighters win by extinguishing the fire or catching all the artists in Octojars. Artists win by maxing out the fire gauge before they're caught, or eliminating the firefighters themselves if they're feeling feisty.

That's the pitch, which by itself is compelling. There have been countless games that attempted to replicate the success of Among Us, but not a lot of them even attempted to bring something original to the table. At least for OCTOPinbs, there are unique elements in its gameplay that they integrated in a way that don't feel out of place.

However, the inexperience in making games like this is already apparent the moment the game drops you straight into multiplayer without any meaningful onboarding. There's no tutorial mode, no single-player option, no offline scaffolding to get your hands wet. What you get instead is a barrage of tooltip-style message boxes that appear during your first match, a manual-like set of texts that you'll have to trudge through to understand the game's mechanics. They are nowhere near enough to explain how the systems actually interact, especially since the game is supposed to be a social game. Our first few rounds were spent collectively trying to figure out what we were supposed to be doing, with Squids purposely revealing themselves so we could explore the mechanics together. This is a tough sell for a game that depends on players communicating clearly under pressure, especially if you're someone testing the game by yourself and hoping to hook your friends in later on.

It's hard enough to convince your play group to collectively buy the same game on Steam, it's harder to do that if you try the game yourself and left frustrated by the lack of help the devs give to beginners.

We received ten review codes for OCTOPinbs and played extensively, settling in around 6-7 players as the optimal group size. Five players felt thin, and ten started to lose the social deduction tension entirely. The game offers two maps with three size variants each, and we played through all of them.

When the Game Clicks

Once your group figures out the mechanics, OCTOPinbs does have moments where it works. The standout feature is the Artist transformation: when a squid artist is caught in a corner, cornered by suspicion, or simply ready to cause chaos, they can willingly reveal themselves and transform into a monstrous form. This unlocks abilities that help them to cause bigger fires or to extinguish the life out of the firefighters eyes directly, but it reveals their identity and puts a target on their backs. It's a last-ditch chaos mechanic that no other social deduction game I've played executes quite like this, and when it lands, it's thrilling. It's genuinely fun to hear my friends squeal in disbelief when a Squid Artist finally reveals itself, and it's what social deduction games like this aim for their players to experience, so the devs achieved their objective here.

The best round we played illustrated it perfectly. We were mid-game, battling a boss encounter, when one of two artists in the lobby suddenly transformed in the middle of the fight. The other artist decided to stay hidden. We pivoted hard, focusing all our attention on the transformed threat, but the damage was already done by the time we managed to stuff them in an Octojar. By the time the second artist revealed themselves, the firefighters were too depleted to put up a fight. Match over. It was clean, dramatic, and exactly the kind of story this game is designed to generate.

The problem is that those moments are the exception. More often, rounds end without anyone being ejected at all. The firefighters either succeed or fail, and the social deduction layer never really activates. Unlike Among Us or other genre staples, OCTOPinbs never forces the group into a discussion-and-vote moment. You can play entire matches without anyone formally accusing anyone. The deduction is supposed to happen organically through observation while you fight fires, but the game doesn't give you enough downtime or enough information to actually piece things together. This is most felt in large maps, where the firefighters have to spread out to manage the fires, which also means the frequency of being in the same place as other players is lessened. The result is that the "social deduction" half of the pitch ends up underdeveloped at best, an afterthought at worst.

Balance, RNG, and the Modifier Cop-Out

Right from the get-go, we already figured out that the default balance is off. Matches frequently feel tilted on the side of the firefighters, so much so that the Squid Artists feel helpless, discouraging them from transforming, and leading to wins where the firefighters simply put out the fire. It feels like the devs are aware of this because the game actually gives the host a lot of power over game balance. The host has access to a robust set of modifiers to tune the experience themselves. That's a useful feature in balancing, especially if the lobby feels like playing the game a certain way, but it functions more like a cop-out than a design choice. The underbaked UI of these modifiers also makes it feel like a last-second feature that they only added as a response to gameplay imbalance, rather than a full-fledged feature they really intended to add from the beginning. It feels like the developers knew the default ruleset wasn't optimal, so they offloaded the tuning to the players for them to figure out. That's not what you want from a $9.99 launch product.

The randomness also felt off in ways that could honestly be just a statistical fluke or might be a real problem. Across two separate sessions, the game paired the same two players as Squid Artists multiple times in a row. That's a low-probability event happening multiple times in a row, across multiple sessions, which either means we were unlucky or the role assignment isn't as random as it should be.

Presentation Sells It, Optimization Stalls It

Visually and aurally, OCTOPinbs holds up. The art direction is colorful and whimsical, fitting the absurdity of octopus firefighters battling squid arsonists. The music is upbeat and energetic, and the sound design supports the chaos well. Proximity chat is built in and is the right call for this kind of game - overhearing snippets of conversation as you move through a burning building is exactly the kind of friction social deduction thrives on, especially for such a noisy and chaotic game as this.

The catch is performance. The game runs poorly on mid-range hardware, with noticeable optimization issues that don't feel justified by what's on screen. For a game this stylized and this contained in scope, the technical state at launch is disappointing. This is also not the ideal way to sell a game that requires a party of gamers to work. The devs should strive to make the game as accessible as possible, and for this genre of casual party games, you are targeting non-hardcore gamers who probably don't have the best PC builds when playing.

A Launch That Feels Like Early Access

The deeper issue is content volume. Launching on May 11 earlier this month, the game only has two maps, one game mode, limited enemy variety, no narrative or character context to invest in, slow and sluggish movement that lacks variety in how it can be obstructed, and stamina that drains too quickly. OCTOPinbs feels like a game that should have launched as Early Access with a public roadmap. It's honestly hard to vouch for a game at this state for $9.99 when the market is teeming with cheaper casual party games that are just as fun and not as demanding to the hardware.

It's also jarring that there are already cosmetic DLC on sale, when the game also has a battle pass that could have been the best way to distribute these cosmetics for free to build a community. Instead, some cosmetics are locked behind a paywall right away, which could have been an easy way for the devs to earn the loyalty of their players. That said, the game actually recently received free cosmetic DLC as well, but it doesn't negate the fact that it launched with paid DLC right away.

Furthermore, a single-player campaign, even a short one, would do wonders here. Give us an opening cinematic. Make us care about the octopi and the squids. Add bosses, side objectives, more enemy variety, and more location-specific activities so the maps feel distinct beyond their aesthetic. The bones are here for a much richer experience. The launch product is just a thin slice of what this could become, which is ultimately what makes me feel that an Early Access launch would have served the game better.

The aforementioned battle pass - which is free, to the game's credit - doesn't help. Leveling it up is tedious, and the rewards are underwhelming, capped at stickers and emotes for the in-game emote wheel, at least for its first few levels. For a game already struggling with content volume, a thin progression system is the last thing it needed.

Are Octopi And Squids Endangered Species?

Practical note: don't buy OCTOPinbs hoping to drop into public lobbies. The player base is currently small, to the point that the game's community managers are manually scheduling play sessions to encourage gameplay. Right now, matchmaking is inconsistent, and you'll spend more time waiting than playing if you go in solo. This is a game you bring friends to, or you don't play at all. At minimum, you'll want a group of five willing to commit to a few sessions to actually see what the game can do.

Verdict

OCTOPinbs has a genuinely good idea at its core, anchored by an Artist transformation mechanic that the social deduction genre could learn from. Its charming art style and whimsical nature can surely encourage casual players to at least consider it. But it launched in a state that feels closer to Early Access than to a finished product, with thin content, off-balance default rules, no onboarding, optimization issues, and a publisher pedigree that frankly raises the bar it's failing to meet. Tri-Ace and Lasengle have made some excellent games. Casual party design doesn't appear to be in their wheelhouse yet.

There's a better version of this game six months from now if the team keeps building. The version that launched earlier this month is a glimpse of potential, not a fulfillment of it.

Score: 6/10

GameDaily received ten review units of OCTOPinbs from Stride PR on behalf of Aniplex for this review.

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This story was originally published May 25, 2026 at 6:46 AM.