This unsettling horror game asks what would happen if AI replaced game devs

It’s another dehumanising day in your corporate-slogan-covered apartment. The birds are chirping, your phone is buzzing, and your coffee is texting you to demand you drink it.

This dark apartment serves as the setting of Drink Human Beans (and yes, that is the actual name), a brand-new indie horror game released on December 17, 2025. It envisions what a game from a world without human game developers would look like. It’s timely, grim, and deeply unnerving.

Turning players into products

Drink Human Beans is both a psychological indie horror game and a first-person adventure game. 

It doesn’t scare you with animatronic bears or literature club presidents like other indie horror games, but instead relies on clinical art direction and deliberatively restrictive gameplay.

Your constantly dark and dystopian apartment is a simulation created by the all-powerful Y.AI Corp, and your day-to-day life living inside is all part of your job application process. 

You can try to disobey the AI programs in your phone telling you what to do each day, but it’s hard not to comply when you’re living in an apartment ruled by the very machine you’re trying to subvert. 

Those who try to break free from this control won’t feel like they’re the ones playing the game at all. Drink Human Beans feels designed to play itself, pressuring you into following orders to do mundane tasks like cleaning food trays and collecting coffee beans.

Your reward for completing these objectives isn’t emancipation, but more of the same mundane tasks to complete. The game doesn’t treat you like a player; it treats you like a product. This is creepy, upsetting, and very much the point. 

Consumer-friendly experiences

These experiences are designed to be straightforward and unavoidable, with punishments and setbacks awaiting those who disobey. 

Cries for help you can send out on your phone become censored with fake messages expressing your satisfaction, and looping gameplay segments set you back to make your resistance feel futile.

The stimulation may occasionally blackmail you into committing some “violence-based stress relief” by handing you a gun and targets to shoot at, but complying doesn’t reward you with more freedom. 

This continuous reduction of player agency is embedded within the game’s structure itself. You’re left only with the chilling feeling that you’re successfully being manipulated by corporate greed, and that’s what makes it truly terrifying.

Profit over people

Drink Human Beans has one final ace up its sleeve. In addition to building an uncanny horrorscape, the title directly confronts what could well be an AI-induced worst-case scenario for the Video Games Industry.

Corporations in the video games industry have a poor track record when it comes to putting profit ahead of people. This tendency drives ongoing concerns that these companies will use (or continue to use) AI as a vector to produce products at cheaper rates, lay off workers, and increase profit margins. 

Drink Human Beans is in itself a satire of this process. This is thanks to its sanitized art direction, which includes many small but noticeable elements made using generative AI. 

The AI-generated profile photos, the jingles of your coffee machine, and the descriptions of the coffee you drink each have an uncanny valley quality to them. The game doesn’t try to disguise them or hide them in plain sight. It forces you to stare directly into the AI abyss. 

A human made it first

Thankfully, this soulless style was exactly what the human developer behind Drink Human Beans, Last Dissent, intended to achieve. 

According to the game’s Steam Page, the developers “wanted to depict a future in which the soul of the world has been killed by AI.” This is achieved not just by depicting a world that is willing to be ruled by an AI, but by making you feel like you are being willingly controlled in the same way.

After seeing AI-generated Coca-Cola adverts filled with fake Christmas cheer and hearing Arc Raiders try to play down its use of AI-generated voicelines, playing Drink Human Beans made for a gratifying experience. 

Drink Human Beans is a radical and uncomfortable take on the future of AI in video game development. If you want to feel the biting discomfort of this new technological frontier first-hand, then this fascinating indie horror gem is well worth a look. 

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