PRESS RELEASE – Report For Your Anomaly Tracking Shift in Spectator 2 on May 25

May 14, 2025 – Neko Machine is issuing an open call for night shift staffers to man CCTV posts. Published in partnership with the indie platform indie.io, Spectator 2 puts players in the comfortable, but unenviable, job of monitoring live security footage in order to avert reality collapse as otherworldly anomalies begin their invasion. 

Now entering full release, the game features a rebuilt interface, a new story-driven single-player campaign, and all the fixes and improvements introduced during Early Access, building on its tense, co-op surveillance horror for up to four players.

Players are tasked with a deceptively simple job: Watch the closed-circuit TV cameras for anything out of the ordinary. The eponymous spectator then has to identify and classify such a breach of reality in order for it to be removed. To prevent exhaustion, every shift only lasts between midnight and 6:00 – but the night will drag on as the spectator nervously switches between views, peering closely at the screen and defending reality.

To ensure that no shift is ever the same, Spectator 2 randomizes each playthrough, selecting from a catalog of over 300 anomalies that range from mundane light malfunctions or phantom, duplicate objects to eldritch abominations and mutilated corpses suddenly appearing in the field of view. Each shift takes place at one of six different real-life locales, including a suburban fast food restaurant, a secret laboratory, and an arctic research base. Should too many anomalies accumulate in a given location, reality collapses, resulting in an instant game over.

Why does this happen? That is a mystery that will be answered with the 1.0 release. Among countless bug fixes, optimizations, and a full overhaul of the sound effect and ambient music systems, the full release includes a story mode linking the original six locations together into a seamless single-player campaign with completely new first-person exploration segments. These dig into the lore of the world of Spectator and the why of reality unraveling.

For the Polish development team, Neko Machine, Spectator 2 is the realization of their own personal ambitions, creating a game they wanted to play where dread, rather than jumpscares, fuel the tension and players can never quite trust their perception of the deceptively mundane environment. 

The ambition extended to reviving an ancient multiplayer mechanic: two players can play at the same time using a split-screen. Two pairs of eyes are better than one, as the old saying goes, but with half the screen to work with, it might be as much of a hazard as a benefit.

The functionality was coded just days before the demo launched ahead of its debut, in a night of ferocious coding and split-sleeping to implement a function that would become a core offering of the Spectator 2 experience.

“Somehow, we made it, just in time. That night is burned into our memories – taking turns sleeping, the nerves, the laughter – everything. But we wouldn’t trade it for anything,” said Artem S., the lead designer of Neko Machine, adding that “our superpower is passionate hyperfocus and innovative imagination.”

With its full release coming to PC on May 25, now’s the perfect time to wishlist Spectator 2. For development updates and behind-the-scenes peeks, join the Neko Machine community on Discord.

About Neko Machine   

Based out of Wrocław, Poland, Neko Machine is an independent duo of game creators, combining a love of the eerie and paranormal with an affinity for experimental gameplay and tight, self-contained gaming experiences. Despite the chosen company name, the developers share the studio with dogs and rats, which provide endless inspiration for gaming projects.

About Indie.Io

indie.io is home to hundreds of the world’s most innovative independent video games and developers. Founded in 2020 by Donovan Duncan and Ben Robinson – industry veterans with a collective 40 years of experience across the video game landscape – our mission is to provide support to independent developers and set the standard for gaming creation, management, and promotion.