Cybrlich and the Death Cult of Labor is the first great game we've played at GDC

Cybrlich and the Death Cult of Labor's hand-drawn art is a stylish vehicle for a weighty FPS

My favorite thing about attending GDC every year is the chance to be a fly on the wall as video game developers discuss the state of the industry and help one another navigate it. My second favorite thing about it is discovering some extremely rad games. The show has only just started and I’ve already gotten the latter, thanks to Cybrlich and the Death Cult of Labor.

I discovered the indie oddity at a Day of the Devs event that took place the night before GDC officially kicked off. There, hundreds of players gathered to check out a diverse array of demos for upcoming indie games. I played everything from a game about a tanuki delivering packages on a BMX bike to a deconstruction of Tetris where you turn blocks into tournament brackets, but Cybrlich caught my eye the moment I walked into the event.

Developed by Cybrlich Studios, the wild project is a hand-drawn boomer shooter that aims to marry the action of classic Doom with the vibe of an Adult Swim show. Unlike your typical Doomslayers, you play as a lowly barbarian who is fed up with how corporations are dehumanizing laborers. I mean that literally. The evil Lichcorp is run by an undead CEO who is turning workers into an army of skeletons. Our hero won’t stand for it, so they decide to shoot their way up the corporate ladder instead in order to reach the top of Lichcorp Tower and take out the company’s CEO.

That’s a wild enough premise on its own, but Cybrlich gets even more out of pocket with its first-person shooting. The very early demo I tried dropped me into a simple arena mode, where I just had to survive as long as I could in an office break room filled with skeletons. (The full game will have a story mode, which is what Cybrlich Studios is currently working on.) The fundamentals are easy enough to grasp: blast skeletons with a shotgun, a giant sword, and some grenades. That basic action is made particularly crunchy thanks to some excellent hand-drawn animation that shows my foes exploding into piles of bones.

That’s elevated by some gloriously goofy irreverence. My grenades are bottles of soda that I can shake up to cause a bigger explosion. I heal by eating giant, greasy hamburgers. The best detail, though, is that I also have a mental health bar to worry about. Shooting my shotgun drains some of that energy and I need to keep it topped off alongside my health. How do you replenish your mental energy? By lighting up a big, fat blunt, of course. Yes, Cybrlich might just be the only shooter that lets you smoke a joint while simultaneously shooting, and I love it for that.

Cybrlich is still in its very early stages of development, with its developer working towards creating a more complete demo soon. But the little chunk I played is already eye-catching enough to have my attention. The animation is impressive, the shooting already has the right weight to it, and the satirical premise is just right for a CEO-hating world. It’s pure punk rock, and I’ll welcome any art that proudly owns that spirit in 2026.

That’s just the tip of the iceberg for what’s sure to be a week full of creative games at GDC. I’ve already got a bunch of new games on my Steam wishlist, like Grindset T.V. and Twin Soul. I look forward to expanding that list even further as the brightest minds in gaming show us that the industry isn’t going down without a fight all week.