Animal Use Protocol asks: what if we put a happy little rat on Half Life 2’s gravity gun and gave it to a chimpanzee?

When they’re not doing environmental art for projects like Wasteland 3, The Brotherhood have a history making enticingly odd games. Sin very nearly liked Stasis: Bone Totem, landing positive despite giving up after several hours. That’s also my experience with Beautiful Desolation – an isometric RPG I got a real kick out of the art for before also stopping one day and just accidentally never playing it again. This might be a coincidence, but whatever else can be said about these projects, one thing is for certain: when compared to upcoming horror FPS Animal Use Protocol, they both featured considerably less monke.

The Steam page describes it as a “first-person, narrative-focused survival horror” (you’ve got a bad thing chasing you, one of those), but I also would have accepted “Grimdark Ape Out”, which sound facetious but is actually one heck of a sell. Your very smart monke, Penn, is escaping from a lab with a bunch of other test animals, including a little rat mate named Trip who lives on your gravity gun and does a little jump whenever you fire it.

The trailer shows off a similar sort of grimy, unnerving tech to Brotherhood’s previous games. This is good. It also does that horror game trailer thing where it has a bunch of kids singing the Barney The Dinosaur theme really slowly. This is bad and stupid. It’s got a massive tortoise in it. It also contains potassium benzoate etc. Most bad-ly of all, it’s not actually out until 2026. So why am I writing about it now?!

Monke.

Or Chimp, I suppose, although if you were about to type a comment along those lines, I would first suggest you make sure you know your phylum and genus from your ligma. Feel free to ask about that last one. Here are some more deets:

In this 3D first-person, narrative-focused survival horror game, you play as Penn, a hyper-intelligent chimpanzee leading the desperate escape of lab animals from a nightmarish facility, where every corner hides new terror. Armed only with your wits, a gravity manipulation tool, and accompanied by your scrappy rat companion Trip, you’ll stealthily navigate the dystopian Anchorage Station, relentlessly stalked by a monstrous chimera of experiments gone wrong.

There is, by the looks of it, also no arachnophobia toggle.