Chair Chase Preview — To Hell With Friendship, Catch the Chairs!

You can feel however you want about the "friendslop" genre, but one thing is undeniable: in recent times it has firmly settled into the gaming market, periodically topping the charts and offering players unusual multiplayer time-killers.

Chair Chase is a multiplayer arcade game from indie studio Babs Games, set to release in 2027. The project is built around the popular party game "musical chairs" — with a twist: the furniture here has a will of its own and refuses to settle for being a piece of interior decor. Players have to chase it down, get in each other's way, and rack up winning points. I checked out a short demo and will tell you whether the developers managed to make a fun, addictive party game.

The rules of classic musical chairs are turned upside down in Chair Chase: instead of running around motionless furniture, players go on the hunt for living chairs roaming the house.

While the music plays, players chase their targets, navigate obstacles, and look for the right moment to intercept. The chairs themselves aren't going to make it easy: they dodge pursuers, hide, and use the environment to put distance between themselves and their hunters. The closer a player gets, the harder the target tries to slip away.

A simple speed race turns into a peculiar game of cat and mouse. Just running straight ahead isn't enough: you have to read the chair's trajectory, pick a path, and try to predict its next move.

Movement is an important part of the gameplay. Your character can run, jump, dash, and shove opponents. Using these moves correctly creates small tactical advantages over other players.

Another layer of tactics comes from pickable items. At the start, players only have their bare fists. But if you manage to catch one of the chairs (and stay seated on it), you get a special key. It unlocks a matching colored chest hidden somewhere on the level, rewarding you with a special item that can help in confrontations. The demo featured only two items: a glue gun that temporarily immobilizes other players and fleeing chairs, and a jetpack that makes it easy to reach hard-to-access parts of the level. The item system works through cards — a character can carry up to four items at once. Regular items have a limited number of uses, but there are also upgraded golden versions that can be used indefinitely. Another way to get useful gadgets is the shop between rounds.

The main feature of Chair Chase is that catching a chair doesn't guarantee instant points. Once a player reaches the target, a short balance-holding contest begins: the chair tries to throw off its "attacker," while the player has to press movement keys opposite to its maneuvers to stay "in the saddle."

While a participant tries to hold their spot, everyone else can jump in and knock them off. So even a successful chase can turn into a failure at the very last moment: you need to seal the deal and keep rivals from stealing a well-earned reward. This should look especially interesting in matches with a lot of players — Chair Chase supports up to 8 participants per match. Successfully catching a chair, on top of the key mentioned above, also rewards winning points. Another way to earn points is by completing the parkour routes on the map. Players control goofy ragdoll-like avatars, and each level is made up of the rooms of a house, packed with jumping sections and vertical routes.

The match winner is decided over three rounds (the full version is supposed to raise that to seven) — losing one opportunity doesn't necessarily mean losing the whole match. The points leader can mess with rivals by destroying the boomboxes scattered around the level, which shortens the round and helps protect their lead. By release, Chair Chase is expected to get a leveling system and a global leaderboard. Rounds can be run either with a group of friends or with random players thanks to the public lobby system.

The key question that comes up after trying the demo is how well this kind of gameplay can keep players coming back for more. If the locations, chair behavior, and in-match situations end up feeling too similar, the initial novelty of the gameplay will wear off quickly, and the experience risks becoming repetitive.

The game's core mechanic is also a source of friction: you need to hold on to a chair for about ten seconds, and the whole time the player is practically defenseless, with almost no way to guard against potential "attackers," since even a basic punch is enough to knock you out of the "saddle." As a result, matches can end up with players focusing on sabotaging each other instead of catching chairs. A cooldown on punching could fix the problem, forcing players to use it more deliberately and rely more on other tools.

Chair Chase is a project trying to squeeze the most out of one simple idea. Chasing living furniture is amusing on its own, but the developers don't stop at a single "visual joke" — they bring in parkour, tools for fighting back, a balance-holding contest, and a point-scoring system, trying to build a cohesive gameplay loop out of simple but exciting rules. The limits of the available demo don't allow for firm conclusions about the game. On one hand, it has the potential to become a decent party pick for short sessions with friends. On the other, its long-term appeal directly depends on how varied the in-match situations turn out to be, how good the netcode is, and how well the players' abilities end up balanced.