Worst Class Ever Takes Indie Co-op Back to School

One player is a teacher. Seven others are delinquents hiding among a classroom of obedient NPCs, and the lesson is the hunting ground. Worst Class Ever is an asymmetrical multiplayer game set in a bright modern Japanese high school, from developer Elegoose Games and publisher 2P Games.

The misbehaving half wins by doing small forbidden things without being clocked: eating at the desk, passing notes, dropping banana skins, playing on a phone. The teacher’s job is to work out which of the kids in the room are actually players. The map list runs across the timetable, from computer labs to gym tracks to stepped lecture theatres. The listing is already up on Steam, with no release date attached to it yet.

The art direction is where it gets strange. The male teacher grins constantly, some lessons take place in the dark, students carry smoke grenades, and staff are allowed to punch pupils and tie them to wooden posts. Rock Paper Shotgun described it as one texture pack away from a sociable Little Nightmares, which is a fair read of the screenshots even though nothing here is pitched as horror.

It also arrives pre-loaded with a genre argument. The reveal describes itself as a don’t-call-it-friendslop game, borrowing the label coined in March 2025 as an insult for cheap social co-op and since half-reclaimed by the people making them. PEAK’s developer Nick Kaman has argued that these games skip polished graphics and story on purpose, because they are built to deliver one specific experience rather than compete for awards.

“it’s mainly just fun to be a hater”

— Nick Kaman

PEAK is the measuring stick for everything in this space. It started as a four-week game jam, sold more than 10 million copies, and its studios have been clear that it was never designed to run forever as a live service. Kaman has also pointed out what follows a hit, which is a wave of fast follows and low-effort copies crowding the storefront until the whole category looks disposable. Every asymmetrical or social co-op game revealed since has been read against that arc, including the ones that deserve better.

The other recent breakout came out of Kyiv. Dear Passengers, the physics co-op game where one player flies a failing budget airline while the rest work the cabin, cleared 700,000 Steam wishlists in under two days on a premise you can say in one sentence. That is the actual pattern behind the hits, and Worst Class Ever has the same property: teacher versus hidden troublemakers needs no explanation.

What separates it from the airline game is where the pressure comes from. Dear Passengers escalates until the plane is a ragdoll blender, which is the chaos-timer energy I bounce off. A room where the danger is another human slowly narrowing down who moved is closer to social deduction, and that is a shape I will sit through a whole evening of.

The risk is on the teacher’s side. Asymmetrical games live or die on whether the single-player role is fun when it is losing, and seven mischief-makers against one pair of eyes is a steep ratio before you add NPCs who behave correctly and waste the teacher’s attention. Among Us solved this by making the crew’s job boring on purpose. Worst Class Ever is promising a classroom busy enough that the teacher has to actually read behaviour.

There is no word yet on price, session length, or whether the teacher role rotates between rounds. The trailer shows a smoke grenade without explaining who gets one or why. I would also like to know how many NPC students fill a room, because that number decides whether hiding is a skill or a coin flip.

What exists right now is a Steam page, a trailer and a premise that explains itself. In a genre where most entries are a haunted house with a different skin on it, a Japanese classroom and a grinning adult looking for the one kid eating sweets behind a textbook is at least a setting nobody else is using.