Four feds sit down at a table. Each one picks a gun, a knife or a bomb. Somebody is lying, and only one of them is walking out.
That’s the pitch for Gun Knife Bomb, the new four-player horror game from Luke Piazza, a former Five Nights at Freddy’s developer and co-founder of XCathedra Games. The game calls itself a “deadly game of Rock, Paper, Scissors” for two to four players. The tagline gets to the point faster: “Four feds enter, only one leaves.”
If you’ve ever lost a friendship over a board game, you already get the appeal.
Lying is the whole game
Every round opens with each player choosing one of the three weapons in the title, then squaring off against someone else at the table. Winning comes down to talking, bluffing, cheating and blasting your opponents.
And dying doesn’t get you out of it. Get taken out and you come back as a disembodied voice, free to keep spreading lies from beyond the grave. (Your friends will love that.)
The weapons are only part of it. Items like headphones and speech jammers mess with who can hear what, which can flip a negotiation on its head mid-round. The studio calls the result “Social Chaos,” and that’s what decides how each match plays out.
Buckshot Roulette meets WarGames
The look borrows from two places: a recent indie hit and Cold War paranoia. Piazza laid out exactly where his head was at.
“I’d say our biggest inspiration for both the gameplay and visuals comes from the table-based horror party game Buckshot Roulette, particularly its gritty PSX-inspired aesthetic. We also drew heavily from the Cold War and films like WarGames to capture that tense, oppressive war-room atmosphere felt throughout the game. More than anything, we want players to look forward to the social chaos,” Piazza said.
That combination makes sense. Buckshot Roulette proved you can wring a lot of dread out of a single table and a few objects. WarGames supplies the bunker mood: dim rooms, high stakes and nobody trusting anybody.
Built for the group chat
Horror works two ways. Some people want a scary movie alone in the dark. Others want the haunted house with friends screaming next to them. Gun Knife Bomb is squarely in the second camp, and it looks tailor-made for streamers who need their co-stars yelling at each other.
The team behind it has the credentials. XCathedra Games is made up of industry veterans, IGF award nominees and former Five Nights and Fears to Fathom developers, and the studio’s focus is high-quality atmospheric horror. Gun Knife Bomb was also a finalist in the 2026 BigMode Game Jam.
The announcement trailer is out now, and the game is available to wishlist on Steam. XCathedra is also posting updates on X.
The real goal is the blame game
For Piazza, the weapons and the retro style are just the setup. What he’s chasing is the moment the table falls apart.
“Gun Knife Bomb is about bluffing, cheating, betraying your friends, and trying to outsmart each other, all while knowing that someone at the table might be lying to your face. Our hope is that players walk away with those hilarious, memorable moments where everyone is screaming, laughing, and blaming each other for what the heck just happened,” Piazza said.
