Demidoff Corp Pico squeezes the Crossout studio’s Ural metroidvania into a free PICO-8 prologue

There is an honesty in shrinking a world before you build it out. Targem Games, the Yekaterinburg studio behind Crossout and Ex Machina, has spent its upcoming metroidvania Demidoff Corp mining the folklore of its own backyard: the Urals, their malachite, their factory smoke and the industrialist dynasty whose name the game borrows. Now it is offering a way into that world through the narrowest door imaginable, a free prologue built inside the self-imposed walls of a fantasy console.

Demidoff Corp Pico casts players as the same fluffy retired royal agent who leads the full game, and tells the part of the story that comes before it. According to its Steam page, the Tsar has reinstated the exiled agent for a single mission: find the industrialist Demidov and bring him back, dead or alive. The guards at his estate read the royal decree, decide there is no such thing as too many workers, and send the agent down the mines to dig malachite instead. Deeper underground, the miners are gone, replaced by what the studio calls their sick imitations.

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The format is the argument. PICO-8, the fantasy console made by Lexaloffle, imposes a 128×128 pixel screen and a fixed 16-colour palette, and Targem has built the whole prologue within those limits to recreate the feel of 1980s sprite games. The screenshots bear it out: cramped cave rooms ringed with fire, a pickaxe on a stone ledge, an inventory of keys and skills, a branching map. It is the same toolset that produced Celeste Classic, the PICO-8 game that grew into Celeste, and it suits a story about a hero who cannot see much further than the next tunnel.

Mechanically, it is a miniature of the genre’s promise. Players grab a pickaxe, mine malachite and push through the underground while fending off crazed miners, unlocking new abilities, uncovering hidden passages and, in the studio’s own phrasing, going back to move forward. That last line is the metroidvania creed, and here it has to fit on a screen just 128 pixels wide.

What waits after the prologue is a far richer canvas. Demidoff Corp is a 2D metroidvania rooted in Ural folk tales: animals losing their minds, mines crawling with creatures, factories smoking day and night while an ancient evil stirs. Its store page promises icy mining tunnels, underground lakes, forest trails and, for the lucky, a look inside the Malachite Palace and Demidov’s Tower. Targem opened a playtest for it in October, and its painterly pixel art makes the contrast with Pico’s sixteen colours the point.

It is also a homecoming of sorts. The Demidovs were the real dynasty whose ironworks and mines industrialised the Urals under the tsars, and the miners’ lore of the region is the soil Pavel Bazhov drew on for The Malachite Casket. A studio founded in Yekaterinburg in 2002, with more than 20 games behind it across PC, consoles, VR and mobile, is making its most local project yet.

Demidoff Corp Pico arrives free on Steam for Windows PC on December 14, 2026, and can already be wishlisted there. The full Demidoff Corp does not have a release date yet; the studio says players who finish the retro prologue can then follow the story into the main game.

Tags: metroidvanias, Demidoff Corp, Demidoff Corp Pico, free-to-play games, PICO-8, Targem Games

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