GHOST EATER opens its playtest sign-ups on Steam

GHOST EATER plays out in black and white, with halftone screentones that make every fight look like a manga page in motion. Sign-ups for its autumn playtest are now open on Steam, following a teaser posted in mid-September. Behind this third-person hack and slash sits a developer working out of Brooklyn under the studio name Greenbullet. The build promises six bosses, twenty-four enemy types and arenas that mix scripted fights with randomised encounters. No release date has been set, and the Steam listing still reads to be announced.

At a glance

What GHOST EATER puts in its playtest

The Steam page now carries a request access button, with the usual line attached: the developer will get in touch once ready for more participants. The studio spells out what the test build holds and what it leaves aside. What it holds comes to twenty-four distinct enemy types, six bosses, one main weapon class with a five-hit combo and three secondary classes with three-hit combos.

The list of omissions is just as explicit: no dial-a-combo inputs, few cutscenes, no voice over. GHOST EATER therefore leans on the feel of its combat and on its art rather than on presentation. Arenas alternate between fights written in advance and encounters rolled at random, which pushes players to run the same spaces again and learn how each layout behaves under pressure. The game bills itself as an action adventure through a dense, interconnected sci-fi world, with a branching story tied to how you fight. That last point gets emphasis on the store page: combat decisions feed the narrative, which is unusual for a game built around combos.

GHOST EATER, a one-man project out of Brooklyn

The site 80.lv has followed the project since April 2024. Amber Rutherford described a Unity-powered game there, with Deus Ex and the NieR series as its stated references. Rita Hou, writing for the same outlet, identified Alex Epton as the developer, based in Brooklyn, and reported his method in April 2025: sketching levels on paper before modelling them. That piece also flagged the addition of projectile parrying, which changes how ranged enemies are handled. Greenbullet publishes the game itself, with the Steam listing simply reading self-published. That means no external funding visible on the project, and no publisher deadline pushing it towards a date.

Press coverage stays thin beyond that. Kotaku carries only a database entry, with no article attached. The playtest teaser went up on its author’s channel in mid-September, naming the autumn window this session takes its name from. Everything else known about the project comes from the store page and from those three 80.lv write-ups. A second video on a trailer channel shows a few minutes of fighting, enough to read the rhythm of the combos and the way enemies telegraph their moves. Readers who follow indie games with a strong visual identity will find the same drive in our piece on Knuckle Paradise and in our article on Whispers in the Fog.

A game still far from release

The Steam listing shows a release date to be announced, on Windows only, in English for now. Steam’s chart of the most wishlisted unreleased games had GHOST EATER sitting around 3,400th on Monday morning, out of more than five thousand entries, which places it well outside the titles the platform pushes on its front page. The studio has posted no announcements on its Steam page to date, which goes some way to explaining how quietly the project has travelled.

This playtest therefore exists to measure the combat against a wider audience than the handful of specialist writers who have tracked GHOST EATER so far. For a solo developer still drawing his maps by hand, it is the first real meeting with players. No end date has been announced for the session, and access arrives in waves rather than all at once.