Stick It to the Stickman: Cape Town’s Free Lives klaps the corporate ladder

Cape Town has done it again. Free Lives, the local studio behind Broforce, GORN, Anger Foot and Terra Nil, is punching its way up the global charts with Stick It to the Stickman, a physics based roguelike brawler about climbing the corporate ladder by, well, beating the corporate ladder senseless. It is sitting on an Overwhelmingly Positive rating on Steam, with 96 percent of nearly 4,500 English reviews giving it the thumbs up.

What is it?

You are a stickman with a job application and a dream. Between you and the corner office stand heaps of red stickmen, and the only performance review that matters is how hard you hit. The game hands you hundreds of unique moves, from exploding heart punches to staple guns, chainsaws, jackhammers and weaponised farts, and lets you build your own combat machine one promotion at a time. Kicking colleagues out of windows is, officially, half the job.

There is 6 to 10 hours of base content with proper roguelite replayability on top, a level builder with Steam Workshop support so you can construct and share your own hostile work environment, and it plays solo or couch co-op, with Remote Play if your co-CEO lives in another city.

Early Access, priced to move

The game launched into Early Access in August 2025 under Devolver Digital and stays there into 2026, with Free Lives shipping monthly content updates and promising new departments still to come: manufacturing, marketing, a science centre and a doomsday bunker. The price goes up as content lands, so getting in early is the value play. There is also a free demo on Steam if you want to test your handshake technique first.

Stick It to the Stickman on Steam →

Sources: Free Lives and Steam.