CYBRLICH and Death Cult of Labor: The Game Where Your Boss and His Middle Managers Are Dead to the World — Literally

In most offices, the boss is just a person who has managed to climb the workplace ladder somehow. At CYBRLICH Studios, the boss is a lich — a soulless, undead spellcaster who has achieved immortality through dark magic and, apparently, a corner office. Middle managers are vampires. And you, the worker, are the only one left with a pulse.

That’s the premise of CYBRLICH and the Death Cult of Labor, the debut title from CYBRLICH Studios. The game is part satirical horror, part 2.5D boomer shooter, and entirely the kind of thing that makes certain people very uncomfortable, which is, in some ways, the point.

“We have been accused of being socialist, anti-capitalist, and anti-religion,” says co-founder Peter Larson Schmidt with the candor of someone who has heard all this before. “But anyone who has ever worked in an office can probably relate.”

Dead Labor and Dark Magic

The studio’s name is itself a layered joke. In fantasy role-playing games, a lich is a powerful character: highly intelligent, deeply sinister, and very hard to kill. CYBRLICH transposes this figure into the corporate world, drawing on a line from Karl Marx: “Capital is dead labor, which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labor.” Playing, then, is a way of working through that particular Monday-morning feeling of dread.

The game was born in December 2023, when Peter and co-founder Clipper Arnold began developing the concept together. Eric Knittel, who brings a decade of video game development experience to the team, joined shortly thereafter. All three share a deep love of Dungeons & Dragons, indie developer communities, and the specifically surreal humor of surviving a workplace that seems designed to drain your will to live.

The game has two modes. In story mode, players navigate narrative and office horror in something closer to a dark adventure. In arena mode, things take a turn for the violent in the Doom and Quake tradition. Both modes are designed to unlock content based on player performance, and both, the team insists, have their distinct pleasures.

From 20GB to 1GB: The Engineering Behind the Chaos

Building a game while holding down day jobs is less a romantic indie narrative and more a logistical puzzle with no obvious solution. Still, the team has made significant technical progress. Eric, the studio’s engineering anchor, managed to optimize the game’s build size from 20 gigabytes down to one — a compression ratio that reflects both considerable skill and a genuine obsession with making the game accessible across hardware types. The team has wrestled with a question familiar to anyone shipping games outside AAA budgets: do you optimize for the six-thousand-dollar gaming rig, or the old desktop that most people actually own? They’ve been trying to make it work for both.

The animation pipeline has presented its own challenges. They note that game animation differs meaningfully from traditional animation, but the process still demands care and coordination. The team has tested CYBRLICH at gaming conventions, where it has found its audience: enthusiastic, maybe a little weird in the best way, and very ready to shoot a vampire middle manager.

Business Know-How

The team’s decision to join the GDFL was, in their telling, straightforward. “We are weirdos,” they say. “We need the gravitas of the Game Development Future Lab behind us.”

That self-aware framing points to something important: The GDFL’s value isn’t just in mentorship or desk space, it’s the credibility that comes from institutional backing, particularly for a studio whose politics guarantee that some doors won’t open easily. The team is also candid about wanting to learn the business side of the industry (admittedly not always where artistic “weirdos” feel most at home).

CYBRLICH Studios’ founders are working part-time for now, but their momentum is real. The game is playable, the audience exists, and the boomer shooter genre is in the middle of a genuine renaissance, driven by nostalgia for 1990s first-person shooters.

A Game That Hopes to Become a Relic

What does CYBRLICH Studios want its future to look like? The answer: “We want it to be a relic one day — when work conditions are good for everyone.”

In the meantime, they have other games in them. The team imagines that the name of the studio will eventually represent a broader range of titles — not all of them necessarily featuring undead middle management, though the market research suggests that one has legs.

For now, CYBRLICH and the Death Cult of Labor is exactly what the times seem to call for: a horror-comedy about the workplace, built by people who own what they make, take obvious pleasure in making it, and are eager for you to eradicate the Lich.