Plushie Party gives the Fall Guys game show a shredder, and the losers become stuffing

Every party game hides a small cruelty under its candy colours: someone has to lose, and the fun is watching it happen to a friend. Fall Guys made that cruelty the format, a mock game show where the losers simply tumble out of the round. Mana Brigade, an independent studio from Skövde, the Swedish town that has built a games scene around its university, is asking what happens when losing has a cost. Its answer is Plushie Party, a game show for battered plush toys in which the winner is restored and adopted, and everyone else is fed to a shredder.

The premise does the design work. The show runs in the dark of an abandoned arcade hall, hosted by a red-feathered parrot called Party Party Parrot, and the rounds take place inside the old retro cabinets themselves, with floors that give way and traps that end a run on the spot. In the announcement, the studio puts the rule bluntly: there is no second place. A plushie either earns a full refurbishment and a loving home, or it drops into the shredder below.

A losing plushie is torn apart in the glowing shredder in Plushie Party, stuffing flying in a red-lit chamber — Image: Mana Brigade

What makes that more than a gag is that the elimination is physical. Plushie Party is built on Gemu, an engine from a Swedish startup of the same name that is still in closed early access and is pitched at small teams who want voxel worlds that break apart. Heavy hits tear seams, and a beaten plushie bursts into loose stuffing rather than fading from a scoreboard. The Steam screenshots show the look that results: chunky, blocky toys under neon light, a prize wheel at the edge of the stage, and a red-lit shredder throwing sparks and fluff into the air. It is a game about soft things being torn apart, made with a tool designed to tear things apart.

The studio is promising more than 15 arcade mini-games for two to six players online, framed around fast elimination rounds and instant rematches. One of the rounds visible on the store page puts the plushies in bumper cars on a neon arena floor; another sends thread spools racing across the lid of a giant butter-cookie tin. The engine handles the soft-body destruction, the bouncy environmental physics and the online play.

Plushies drive bumper cars across a neon arena in the Empowered Drift mini-game of Plushie Party — Image: Mana Brigade

The line-up is not closed yet. To mark the reveal, Mana Brigade has set Steam wishlist milestones that unlock new mini-games before launch, and players can join the game’s official Discord server to help the developers choose future rounds.

Plushie Party is coming to Steam, where its store page lists Windows, macOS and Linux versions, controller support and a release window in the first quarter of 2027. No price has been announced.

The oldest fear in the toy box is the toy nobody picks. Plushie Party turns that fear into a rule set, and then hands the lever to your friends.

Tags: indie games, Fall Guys, Gemu Engine, Mana Brigade, party games, Plushie Party