Monday mornings are the worst. But imagine clocking in to find your co-workers have all turned into zombies, the elevators are dead, and the only way out is down — one infested floor at a time, armed with whatever the office supplies closet can offer.
That’s the gloriously petty premise of Corporate Rot, indie developer MetagameMike’s top-down zombie action roguelike for the Game Boy Color. The Kickstarter campaign — plus a playable public demo — launches tomorrow, Monday, October 26, 2026. First announced in September after development began in February, it’s built for Game Boy Color, Analogue Pocket, and PC.
You play a timid, hard-working office employee who discovers her building has been overrun by zombies. Her only route out is fighting down to the ground-floor lobby, clearing one infected floor at a time. And because corporate HR generally frowns on bringing broadswords to a cubicle, your arsenal is pure office: heavy CRT monitors, rolling chairs, and staplers, all pressed into service as zombie-bludgeoning tools. Even the breakroom piñata can be smashed open for leftover candy when a run goes sideways — possibly the most realistic depiction of office morale ever put on an 8-bit cartridge.
Between floors, micro-levels and breakroom vending machines dispense upgrades for the climb down — survive the floor, feed the machine, get stronger, descend again.
Here’s the part that makes my inner hardware nerd sit up: a fast-paced roguelike is a tall order for the Game Boy Color’s 8-bit Sharp LR35902 processor, and tomorrow’s demo will show how smoothly the screen handles a crowded room of shambling former co-workers.
The game comes from a developer who knows this hardware. MetagameMike — animator and illustrator Bedsole — built Corporate Rot with the homebrew toolset GB Studio, and he’s already shipped three smaller Game Boy projects: the browser-playable Birdie Bartender and Sushi Gun, plus Kero Kero Cowboy, a cartoony western platformer for Game Boy Color and Analogue Pocket, itself Kickstarter-crowdfunded, with a physical cartridge run and RetroAchievements support added October 7.
Corporate Rot lands in a busy season for Nintendo’s 1998 handheld, alongside Gumball in Trick-or-Treat Land and a new physical cartridge run for R-Type DX. Nothing in the coverage mentions generative AI in the game’s making — hand-built homebrew from an animator’s desk, which is exactly how we like it around here.
One honest note: the Kickstarter page is still in pre-launch as I write this, so tiers and pricing aren’t visible yet. Try the demo first — that’s what it’s for.
So: CRT monitor in hand, stapler in the other, and a whole building of former colleagues between you and the lobby. Are you clocking in tomorrow, or calling in undead?
Sources: Pants Pants Revolution — Game Boy Color roguelike Corporate Rot hits Kickstarter October 26 (Oct 22, 2026); Kickstarter — Corporate Rot pre-launch page