Sometimes the best way out of prison isn’t fighting your way through it. Sometimes it’s watching a guard walk past your cell, listening for a door to close, and knowing exactly when to move.
QUICK SNAPSHOT
Developer: DELANIVO GAMES
Creator: Łukasz Twardowski
Genre: First-person stealth / psychological horror
Platform: PC (Steam)
Demo Length: Around 25 minutes officially, depending on how quickly you figure things out
Demo Available: Now on Steam
Full Release: November 12, 2026
Steam Next Fest: October 19 to 26, 2026
PROCEDURE ZERO is being developed by Łukasz Twardowski, a solo developer from Poland, under DELANIVO GAMES. The free demo contains the opening two missions, while the full game is currently scheduled for November 12.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
- Stealth rewards learning patrol routes instead of rushing through encounters.
- Sound became surprisingly useful for tracking guards without seeing them.
- Cigarettes double as currency, making getting caught hurt without completely stopping your progress.
- Focus helps with both navigation and quieter movement.
- The conspiracy underneath the prison gives the stealth a darker psychological-horror edge.
FIRST IMPRESSIONS
I went into the PROCEDURE ZERO demo expecting a fairly straightforward stealth experience. Get out of the cell, avoid the guards, find whatever I needed and move on.
That wasn’t quite how it played out.
Early on, I had to figure out how the guards actually behaved. Charging ahead wasn’t getting me anywhere, so I started watching their patrol patterns and paying attention to where they stopped, which doors they used and how much time I had before they came back around.
Once I started doing that, the game made a lot more sense.
The setup also gives the stealth some context beyond simply escaping a prison. You were an auditor who uncovered a second register during what should have been a routine job. Now you’re sitting in cell C-17, your file has been reduced to the designation ZERO, and someone appears to be erasing people from the system.
It’s a good foundation for a psychological horror game because the unsettling part isn’t just that you’re locked up. It’s that, officially, you barely exist.
THE GAMEPLAY LOOP
PROCEDURE ZERO is a first-person stealth game where observation matters considerably more than force.
There are no guns waiting around the corner to solve your problems. The game’s own description makes the philosophy pretty clear as you survive through deals, information and learning how the prison operates. Guards have patrols and sightlines, noise matters, and distractions can be used to move them away from where you need to go.
That matched my experience pretty well.
After getting caught a few times, I learned that being chased didn’t necessarily mean I was doomed. I could retreat to my own cell or slip inside another inmate’s cell, stay out of sight and wait for things to calm down.
That discovery changed how I approached the game. Suddenly, getting spotted wasn’t always an instant failure state. I could think about where I would retreat before making a risky move.
Focus was another mechanic I ended up appreciating. It lets you see your current objective, but it also slows your movement so you can move more quietly. I found myself using it as part navigation tool, part stealth tool.
I also learned how to throw objects to create distractions. That didn’t work particularly well for me when I tried using a cardboard box. I’m not sure whether I chose the wrong object, placed it poorly or just misunderstood what the game wanted from me, so I wouldn’t call the mechanic broken based on that attempt alone.
Still, it was one area where my plan definitely didn’t go as planned.
Cigarettes Are More Than Collectibles
One of the more interesting ideas in this prison stealth game is that cigarettes are currency.
Other prisoners have information, and information has a price. The official game description expands that idea into a larger system where deals, favors and alliances eventually become part of taking control of the prison sector by sector.
The demo gave me a pretty immediate lesson in why that matters.
I had collected cigarettes that I needed to trade for information. Then I got caught and lost them. Yeah…, that was frustrating.
But weirdly, I didn’t hate the mechanic.
Losing currency when a guard catches you makes sense within the rules of this particular world. It also gave being caught some actual consequences without forcing me to reload a save or repeat everything I’d already accomplished.
So I went back out and found at least three more.
That small cycle of sneak around, collect something valuable, get caught, recover and try again which made the prison feel more like a place I was learning to survive rather than a sequence of stealth rooms.
THE ATMOSPHERE
Visually, PROCEDURE ZERO keeps things appropriately bleak.
Concrete corridors, prison cells, security doors and dimly lit spaces do most of the work. It doesn’t need monsters, as the underlying story helps.
People are disappearing. Every so often, the lights go out. When they return, a bunk is empty. Meanwhile, you’ve effectively been erased from the paperwork yourself.
That conspiracy element is where the PROCEDURE ZERO game starts crossing from straightforward stealth into horror territory for me.
The prison isn’t simply somewhere you’re trapped.
There is something happening inside it, and you’re gradually trying to understand the system while also surviving it.
SOUND DESIGN
Sound ended up being more useful than I initially expected.
I started listening for doors.
Hearing one open or close gave me information about where a guard might be, whether somebody had moved into another area and whether I had enough time to make my next move.
There were situations where I wasn’t staring directly at a guard but could still use audio to judge whether moving was worth the risk.
For stealth, that’s exactly the kind of sound design I like.
It’s atmosphere layered over the gameplay that I can use.
Once I realized that, I started slowing down and listening before leaving cover into a hallway.
AI was used to help translate the language and with voices just to clarify.
WHEN IT CLICKS
The demo clicked for me once I started treating the guards’ behavior as information.
I watched the patrol, listened for the door, knew where I could hide, waited for an opening, and then moved.
My earlier attempts were more reactive. By the time I finished the demo, I developed a functional strategy.
That feels important because the developer describes a larger game where gathering evidence, making deals, manipulating guards and gradually taking over sections of the prison are central to progression.
The demo gave me a small taste of that mentality.
WHAT DIDN’T WORK
My main rough spot was object distraction.
I learned how to throw items, but when I tried throwing a cardboard box as a distraction, I couldn’t get the response I expected from the guard.
Again, that could have been me.
The game specifically supports distracting guards, including using environmental objects and other methods to pull them away from their patrols.
I’d just like a little more feedback when a thrown distraction fails. Did the guard not hear it? Was I too far away? Was the object simply not useful for that purpose?
A small audio or visual cue could make that easier to understand without removing the need to experiment.
Getting caught and losing cigarettes was also frustrating in the moment, but I wouldn’t really put that in the same category. Once I understood the economy, the punishment felt appropriate.
It made me more careful with something the prison itself considers valuable.
DEMO VERDICT
I liked my time with PROCEDURE ZERO.
More importantly, I liked it more once I understood how it wanted me to play.
Learning the guards’ patterns, finding safe places when pursued, using Focus to move carefully, trading cigarettes for information and listening to the environment all fed into the same idea of pay attention before you act.
That’s a solid foundation for stealth.
There’s also enough happening behind the prison walls to keep me interested in where the story goes next. Someone is disappearing prisoners. My character has effectively been erased from the system.
The deeper mechanics teased for the full release suggest that surviving this place eventually becomes something bigger than sneaking between cells.
The PROCEDURE ZERO demo makes you observant. For this kind of game, I’d rather have that.
I’m looking forward to seeing what happens when the rest of the prison opens up.
WATCH THE FULL PLAYTHROUGH
Want to see how my escape attempt actually went?
Watch my full PROCEDURE ZERO demo playthrough above
The free demo is available now on Steam, with the full game currently scheduled to release November 12, 2026.
Developed by DELANIVO GAMES / Łukasz Twardowski.
If PROCEDURE ZERO looks like your kind of stealth-horror experience, check out the demo and consider adding the full game to your Steam wishlist.
Other psychological horror you can check out is the rougelite EXCISA that card readings with occult horror, or you can explore the survival horror of the LITMUSTEST demo.
If you enjoy indie horror breakdowns like this, follow Gravenox Horror Gaming, and trust me to explore horror so you don’t have to.
Nero is a writer and lore researcher known for reviewing games on Steam. With years of experience playing horror games, uncovering hidden narrative patterns across indie and AAA titles, and publishing museum catalogs on ancient objects, he blends commentary with psychological horror theory. When he’s not unraveling storylines, he’s enjoying rock music, drawing, working in analytics or obviously playing video games. Check out his latest post to explore the furtive patterns hidden in game lore.
