Mr. Magpie’s Harmless Card Game demo turns Minesweeper into a corporate horror shift

Corporate horror runs on a reliable engine: the cheerful institution that refuses to admit anything is wrong. Mr. Magpie’s Harmless Card Game builds its entire design on that refusal. Giant Light Studios’ deckbuilder seats you across a card table from a stitched puppet in a red cardigan who runs the company, sets your quota and insists, with a fixed grin, that nothing here is dangerous. The studio has now released an expanded, reworked demo on Steam, and its biggest change is that you are finally allowed to get up from the table.

Underneath the dread, the game is Minesweeper rewired as office politics. Each round lays out a grid of face-down cards; flipping them pays out cash and multipliers, while hint cards narrow down where the JERRY cards are hiding. Turn over the wrong one and the run collapses. The tension is the gambler’s oldest question, when to cash out, layered on a roguelike deck you fill with perks and strange synergies as you climb the company ladder.

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The new build reads as a shift from pitch to place. Alongside reworked narrative framing and more time with Mr. Magpie himself, it adds a SHARES system, a revamped Strategy selection and a smoother first session for newcomers. The headline addition is what the studio calls Walkabout: employees can stand up and explore the boss’s office, an early look at the exploration planned for the full game. Earlier footage, shown when the publishing deal was revealed at the PC Gaming Show, kept the player pinned inside a lift with the puppet. The new screenshots open onto a dim, wood-panelled office with a lone desk under a single ceiling lamp.

The tone lives in the fine print. In the announcement, the studio promises that the puppet host ensures “no employees are accidentally murdered or injured enough to interfere with their key responsibilities.” That line is the joke and the design brief at once: a game about chasing ridiculous multipliers, set inside a company that measures your worth purely in output. The office décor finishes the thought, with a framed commandment warning you not to take the name of the JERRY in vain, and some of the hint cards on the table openly labelled as lies.

The publishing arrangement shows how seriously that pitch is being taken. Behaviour Interactive, the Montréal company behind Dead by Daylight, co-publishes alongside Gambit Digital, and the partnership arrived with Mr. Magpie-themed rewards inside Dead by Daylight itself. For Giant Light Studios, with Matthew Brelsford as project lead, that is a very large horror audience to borrow.

The updated demo is available now as a free download on Steam, ahead of Steam Next Fest, which runs from October 19 to 26, 2026. The build also adds Simplified Chinese localization along with general polish and fixes. The full game is in development for PC via Steam, and no release date has been announced yet.

Every corporate horror story eventually asks what lies behind the boss’s door. This demo is the first time Mr. Magpie has let anyone take a look.

Tags: Steam Next Fest, game demos, Behaviour Interactive, Gambit Digital, Giant Light Studios, Mr. Magpie's Harmless Card Game

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