7 Minutes in Hell is the latest co-op horror game on Steam that wants to get you screaming over proximity chat

When a videogame format works, videogame developers make sure we don't forget it: After hits like Phasmophobia and Lethal Company, four-player co-op horror games are the genre du jour—next to extraction shooters, at least—and we now get a new one about about as often as Tim Sweeney says the word "metaverse." The latest is 7 Minutes in Hell, which just released in early access on Steam and challenges up to four players to escape procedurally-generated death mazes with as much cash as they can pick up along the way.

With PC Gamer's Chris Livingston and Andy Chalk beside me, I braved 7 Minutes In Hell's labyrinths last week, and my early reaction is that it has good potential in the 'making your Discord friends laugh/scream' genre, but may need to better distinguish itself from its competition.

You and your friends are contestants in a deadly game show, and after buying supplies like extra battery juice for your flashlights, you charge into a maze with seven minutes to find the exit while avoiding traps like circular saws and, in our experience, bothersome spiders that are surprisingly resistant to being bashed on the head with sticks. (Things escalate the longer you play, and there are scarier-looking monsters than spiders in the screenshots on Steam.)

Acting on intrusive thoughts also proved dangerous: Chris jumped into a meat grinder which, as you'd expect, killed Chris. The good news is that the seven minute time limit means unrevivable players never have to wait around for long. It also might've generated some nice tension had we been competent enough to find the maze exit with time to spare. If we had, we could've run back into the labyrinth to search for more loot and cash, risking death by spider or saw or poison gas rather than counting our blessings and going back to the lobby.

One thing I look for in a game like this is immersive sim-like logic: If I combine two items in a way that should do something, does it do something? I didn't personally find any surprising interactions over my brief session with 7 Minutes in Hell—the best I did was pick up a boombox and walk around unhelpfully playing beats—but the developers say that anticipating the whims of players is part of their design philosophy. If you put rocks in that grinder instead of a Chris, for instance, it apparently spits out gems.

The dismissive term for games like these is "streamer bait," but even without hamming it up for a Twitch audience, I've had a lot of fun in Half-Dead 2, a 2019 game with similar premise, except heavily inspired by the movie Cube 2: Hypercube. After passing a certain bar for functionality and potential to surprise, a fun group of players can make any of these games a good time, however unrefined they may be.

Even in a genre known for crudeness, though, 7 Minutes in Hell is pretty bland-looking. It's hard to predict what's going to be a hit and what isn't, but my gut says that unless some big streamer gets it to blow up, this one will need to do more to distinguish itself from the other options out there, like Murky Divers, Phasmophobia, and SCP: Secret Laboratory.

Over the next few months, developer Gaggle Studios plans to add more items and objects to interact with, a new arena, more monsters, and mod support. The studio previously released Goose Goose Duck, a very Among Us-like game that did pretty well on Steam, where it has a "Very Positive" rating from users.