Shady Job is a co-op game about burying a body that refuses to stay buried

Most co-op games hand you an objective and a few obstacles between you and it. Shady Job hands you an objective that is actively trying to kill you and escape. That objective is a body bag.

Here’s the setup from GAZE IN GAMES. The mafia needs a body to disappear. You and up to three friends are the construction workers hired to make it happen. The job is simple on paper: carry the bag to the top of a skyscraper and bury it in concrete. The complication is that the body inside is not dead. It squirms, it breaks your structures, and it will happily shove a teammate off a ledge to get away.

The announcement trailer sells the tone immediately. It’s grim on premise and slapstick in execution, which is a hard balance to strike and exactly the note this kind of game lives or dies on.

The cargo is the antagonist

Most physics games treat the thing you’re moving as dead weight. Shady Job makes it a character. The bag struggles, escapes, breaks structures, and pushes players off ledges, and GAZE IN GAMES says it gets more aggressive the rougher you handle it.

That single idea is what separates this from a generic “carry the object” co-op game. You’re not just fighting gravity and bad level geometry. You’re managing a hostile passenger that reacts to your panic. Handle it gently and you move slowly. Get rough and you make it angry. That tension is a genuinely fresh spin on the haul-the-thing formula, assuming the bag’s behavior is as reactive in practice as the pitch claims.

Build your way up, then watch it fall apart

The vertical part is the other half. You don’t get a finished skyscraper to climb. You build the route as you go, stringing unstable bridges over deadly drops out of different building blocks, and one mistake can bring the whole structure down.

On top of that you’re working cranes and platforms to gain height, dodging traps, and using a Plunger Gun to climb walls, survive falls, and wrangle the bag back into place. Breaking walls and windows is part of the toolkit, and so is yanking a teammate back from the edge a half-second before they drop. It’s the kind of systems list that reads like pure chaos on paper, which is the point.

Worth a wishlist

Shady Job is the second physics-based co-op announcement worth flagging in as many days, right after Dear Passengers pitched its own falling-apart-airline chaos. The “friendslop” wave is clearly still cresting, and a premise this loud, four friends and a body bag that won’t quit, is built to travel on a clip.

The usual caveats apply, and maybe harder here. GAZE IN GAMES is self-publishing with no track record I can point to, there’s no release date beyond “coming soon,” no price, and reactive physics like a struggling bag are notoriously hard to make feel good rather than janky. A great trailer proves the concept photographs well, not that it plays well. That gap is where a lot of these games stumble.

Still, the hook is strong and the premise is genuinely funny, so it’s an easy one to keep an eye on. Wishlist it on Steam and wait for hands-on impressions before you get attached. If you need a group fix while you wait, our roundup of the best co-op indie games on Steam has plenty that are out right now.