Last Pirates: Die Together is the co-op horror comedy your Discord group has been waiting for

There’s a very specific kind of game that only exists because four people on a Discord call will laugh at anything. Last Pirates: Die Together is that game with a pirate hat on, and it sailed into Steam Early Access on August 18 carrying more than 220,000 wishlists.

Made by RetroStyle Games, a small team in Kyiv that pays the bills doing game art outsourcing for other studios, it’s an online co-op horror comedy for one to four players. You’re a cursed crew with absurdly stretchy arms, sent to strip haunted pirate locations of every coin and candlestick that isn’t nailed down. The catch is the one every game in this genre uses. Only one of you has to make it back alive.

The studio pitches its own launch trailer as the answer to the question of what happens when a detachable rear end meets a guillotine, set to a piece of classical music you’ve definitely heard before. If that sentence made you close the tab, this game was never going to be for you. If it made you laugh, you already know whether you’re buying it.

The arms and the butts are the whole design

Two mechanics carry everything here. The first is the elastic arms, which let you stretch across a room to grab loot, yank a teammate out of a monster’s reach, throw furniture, or dismantle a door. Every object is fully physics simulated, which means every object is also a way to ruin a friend’s day.

The second is the body-part system, and yes, this is the part the studio has built its entire marketing around. When a crewmate goes down they come apart, and reviving them means recovering the pieces and hauling them back to safety, with the rear end as the centerpiece of the process. Slapping those rear ends is also a mechanic. The studio ran a community event around it during the demo and players logged more than 10 million slaps, which tells you everything about the audience this game found.

Wrap those two systems in proximity voice chat and you get the shape of the thing. Your friends are a bigger threat than the monsters, which is the entire appeal of the genre we covered in our 10 best friendslop games roundup.

What Early Access adds over the demo

This isn’t a demo with a price tag on it, which matters given how many Early Access launches are exactly that. The studio’s own launch notes lay out a genuinely large content jump.

• Two new chapters. The Ship is all cramped decks and creaking rigging. The Castle is bigger and colder, heavy with loot, and large enough that RetroStyle added elevators and funiculars to move you around it.
• Six new enemies. Ear is blind but hears everything. Anchorer is deaf but sharp-eyed, and it hooks you from range to reel you in and throw you. Snake pins you in a full-body squeeze. Crab steals loot and can drag you off. Parrot does no damage but one screech summons everything nearby. Sleeper will not lose your trail once you wake it. The rats got reworked too, complete with a king who takes theft personally.
• A Mimic that speaks in your friends’ voices. It calls you over with a familiar “hey, over here” before it takes your head off. It’s the standout addition, and it works.
• A monkey assistant who follows you with her own cart, grabbing small loot and running it back to the boat.
• Reworked cart physics, which now means the cart can knock you down and roll straight over you. There are upgrades for it, including a Cart Cannon.
• Things to do between screams. A bar, blackjack, a slot machine, air hockey, a trampoline, mast parkour, and a jacuzzi.
• Three playable instruments (piano, flute, guitar), which the studio cheerfully notes will alert every enemy on the map.
• A lighting and visual overhaul, a finished tutorial, and hundreds of closed issues. The studio also lists a streamer mode and in-game invites.

What players are singing about

The Mimic is the runaway favourite. Players keep posting variations of the same story, which is that they heard a friend’s voice call them over, walked into it, and then spent the next ten minutes accusing an innocent teammate of trolling them. When a horror mechanic generates that many anecdotes in its first week, it’s doing its job.

The lighting rework is the other thing demo veterans keep flagging. The demo was widely called too dark, RetroStyle rebuilt the whole visual pass for launch, and the reaction has been that it’s night and day. One reviewer put it best: they can finally see the thing that’s about to kill them.

Then there’s the sheer amount of stuff nobody expected. The bar, the slot machine, the air hockey table, the rat mafia guarding its king’s loot, the monkey trundling along behind you with her own cart. The recurring note in positive reviews is surprise at how much is packed in for the price, with one player calling it exactly how an Early Access launch is supposed to look.

It’s still Early Access, so expect the odd rough edge while the team patches. RetroStyle shipped fixes almost weekly through the entire demo period, and its Steam review score has been climbing since launch day as those patches land.

The numbers behind the launch

Last Pirates broke into the top 50 most-played demos at June’s Steam Next Fest, which is a real achievement in a festival that fields thousands of them. That week alone pulled 30,923 players onto the islands, 13,021 fresh wishlists, and a peak of 868 pirates online at the same time.

The momentum kept building from there. The wishlist count roughly doubled from 100,000 in mid-July to more than 220,000 by launch, and the studio says the demo drew north of 300,000 players in total before it closed in late July. The stat the team is proudest of is the one that matters most for a game called Die Together: roughly four in five demo sessions were played in a group.

Who it’s for

If you’ve got a Discord group that already burned through R.E.P.O. and Lethal Company and wants the next thing, this is an easy yes. At 6.39 dollars it costs less than lunch, there’s more content here than most Early Access launches ship with, and the physics comedy lands hardest with a full crew of four.

It’s built for groups, so bring people. Matchmaking and Quick Join will fill a lobby if you’re short a few hands, and the studio runs an active Discord for exactly that. Just don’t come looking for a solo campaign, because the whole design assumes someone is around to laugh at you.

Last Pirates: Die Together is out now on PC via Steam at 7.99 dollars, currently 20 percent off at 6.39 dollars until September 1. It supports one to four players online, has full controller support, and ships with 20 language options. Early Access is planned for at least six months, with the studio saying it’ll extend rather than rush 1.0, and the roadmap promises more locations, bosses, character customization, and deeper progression.

If you want more of the genre, our best co-op indie games on Steam in 2026 list has plenty more, and Peak’s 10 million copies is a reminder of how big this category gets when the chaos lands right.