Coal Duty entered Early Access on Steam on 27 October 2026. Information status: CONFIRMED, as the launch is confirmed by the press release republished by The Gaming Ground and by the game's Steam page.
The game is a co-op extraction horror-comedy for 1 to 5 players, developed by Corecrew Games, a five-person independent studio based in Istanbul, Türkiye, and published with indie.io. It is the team's debut title.
Each shift, the crew descends into a procedurally generated mine with a single order from the State: meet the coal quota. Delivered coal earns tickets, spent at the hub workshop between shifts. But there is a second goal: escape. Between descents, players can visit forbidden zones, deal with a smuggler in a restricted area and build an escape plan shift by shift — and not every way out ends in the same place.
Proximity voice chat is central to the game: a plan is heard clearly only by whoever is close by — including whatever is waiting in the next tunnel. The mines span several biomes and three difficulty floors, and dozens of creatures live in the tunnels.
Early Access already includes the full extraction loop, the persistent hub with a shop and progression, and two complete endings. According to the studio, the first ending takes about five hours, and the second rewards crews who dig deeper or take the other way out. The earlier demo offered six trips on a single floor and two quotas; Early Access adds the Easy and Hard floors, mines across several biomes, the full creature roster and the escape machine the demo kept back.
The price is $8.99, with a 20% discount for the first two weeks, through 10 November. Corecrew Games expects to stay in Early Access for 12 to 18 months, and says the price will not rise when the game leaves Early Access. The roadmap includes new escape routes and endings, new creatures, new biomes, more hub activities and new tools and items, with priorities set by community feedback. The game launches in 13 languages, including Brazilian Portuguese.
Image credit: Coal Duty artwork showing two miners, released by Corecrew Games.
Sources: press release at The Gaming Ground, Capsule Computers and Coal Duty on Steam.
Transparency: this article was produced with the help of artificial intelligence, based on public posts and the internet sources cited below. Check the original sources to confirm the details.
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