Stip lands on Steam Next Fest — the puzzle game hiding secrets in its own press release

Sam Agten has been making games that reward patience with a Belgian studio whose name, SixtyFour, is itself a number. After Midnight Protocol — a tactical hacking RPG that committed so fully to its keyboard-only conceit that it felt like actually running a terminal — Agten has turned to something that looks, on the surface, considerably simpler: a number puzzle game called Stip. The Dutch word for “dot.” That’s what you get. Dots. Numbers. Constraints. The Belgian Game Awards jury, which named Stip its Most Anticipated Game of 2026, evidently noticed that the surface was not the whole story.

On its face, Stip is a deduction puzzle: you assign numbers to dots inside a maze of interconnected rooms, working from constraints that narrow down which values are possible. The loop is assign, undo, deduce, repeat — satisfying enough as a pure logic problem, the kind that generates small dopamine hits when a deduction clicks. But Stip has been clear, from its earliest communications, that this description is incomplete. “There is more than meets the eye in Stip,” the announcement reads. It is not wrong.

Stip gameplay screenshot showing a hand holding a journal in a sketch-style puzzle room — Image: SixtyFour

What Agten has built belongs to a genre the community has started calling Metroidbrainia — games in the tradition of Outer Wilds, Tunic, and Animal Well, where the real discovery is the rules themselves. Players won’t enter Stip knowing how it works. They will find hidden puzzle rules, environmental clues, and items inside the maze rooms. They will notice when the game begins to misbehave. Stip — the entity, the voice that guides you through the game — reassures you: “Please ignore any odd behaviour, we’ll have that looked at.” That reassurance should be treated as a threat.

What makes Stip unusual even within this genre is the scope of its deception. The studio has confirmed that hidden codes exist not only inside the demo but in the official trailer — look for a code sequence near the end; in the demo, press C, input it, then hit Enter. The studio goes further, noting that “social media, trailers, real-life events, store pages and even the press releases” may contain clues. This means Stip started testing you before you clicked anything.

Stip gameplay screenshot showing a dark ominous room with chains and a glowing number — Image: SixtyFour

The demo is now available on Steam ahead of October’s Steam Next Fest. It’s the entry point SixtyFour recommends before anything else — the Belgian Game Awards jury evidently felt the same. The full game follows later in 2026, developed with support from the Flanders Audiovisual Fund. Wishlisting is open on Steam; Agten can be followed on Bluesky for further updates.

SixtyFour was founded by Agten around a core ambition: games with “innovative interaction, visual polish and a whallop of boardgame-inspired design.” Midnight Protocol proved the studio could make a game whose interface was the argument. Stip suggests Agten now wants that argument to extend beyond the game’s interface — into its trailers, its store page, its announcements, and apparently into the text of the announcement itself.

Tags: Steam Next Fest, indie games, Belgian Game Awards, puzzle games, Sam Agten, SixtyFour