QUIET, the alien-duck horror demo topping Steam Scream Fest, turns your own voice against you

Co-op horror learned to listen a while ago. Phasmophobia let its ghosts hear what players said into their headsets, and Lethal Company turned proximity chat into a running joke about friends screaming as they vanished down a corridor. QUIET, the new co-op horror comedy from the Seoul publisher LINE Games, takes that idea to its logical end. Here the noise you make is not flavour or a side system. It is the whole game, and the ones making it are, for reasons that never need explaining, a flock of alien ducks.

That premise has found its audience fast. The game’s first demo climbed to the top of the Top Demos chart at Steam Scream Fest, Valve’s seasonal horror showcase, less than a day after the festival opened, according to the publisher. For a game still months from release, it is the clearest sign yet that the hook travels.

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The setup is farce dressed as a haunted house. The ship has crashed, the crew is stranded, and the parts needed to get home are scattered through an ordinary-looking house whose owner hears everything. In the screenshots she is a grandmother in a floral housedress with eyes that glow in the dark. Footsteps, a dropped object, anything knocked off a shelf: all of it carries. So does your real voice. A microphone is required, and what you say to your friends travels into the game world, where whatever lurks nearby can pick it up.

That is the design argument, and it is a sharp one. Horror comedy usually keeps the scare and the laugh in separate rooms; QUIET makes the laugh the failure state. The shriek when the homeowner rounds a corner, the giggle at a friend’s clumsy waddle, the urge to shout a warning: each is a mistake the game punishes. With up to four players, one noisy slip endangers the whole flock, so the game asks for the hardest thing a group of friends on voice chat can manage, which is silence.

There is a release valve. An Arcade Mode drops the pretence of teamwork altogether: the duck beside you becomes your rival, and the point is to knock friends down and steal their shot at winning. The demo includes a new four-player arcade stage called Duck Out, a redesigned spaceship-themed waiting room and Halloween content timed to the festival.

The momentum predates Scream Fest. LINE Games, a LINE Yahoo subsidiary that publishes action RPGs, narrative adventures and multiplayer games across PC, console and mobile, ran a first public playtest in August that drew more than 350,000 sign-ups and 271,132 players from 148 countries. The Steam listing names LINE Games as both developer and publisher.

The QUIET demo has been free on Steam and the Epic Games Store since October 22, and Steam Scream Fest runs until November 2. The full game is listed for the first quarter of 2027 on PC, and players can already add it to their Steam wishlist. Until then, the flock’s best advice stands: keep your bill shut.

Tags: game demos, co-op horror games, LINE Games, LINE Yahoo, QUIET (video game), Steam Scream Fest

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