Cockroach Simulation Review

Playing the Pest, Not the Exterminator

Cockroach Simulation is a small survival horror game from solo studio WIZWIN with a genuinely unusual premise: rather than hunting or fleeing an insect, the player becomes one, scurrying through the filthy, cluttered home of an "old hunter" in search of food scraps, delivery leftovers, and rotten trash while avoiding traps, hazards, and the ever-present threat of being crushed underfoot. The pitch leans hard into insect-scale body horror, framing every human footstep as a potential death sentence and every dropped crumb as a small victory, wrapped in a deliberately dirty, oppressive atmosphere meant to make a familiar domestic setting feel genuinely threatening from a few centimeters off the floor. A stamina bar governs sprinting, flying, and egg-laying alike, difficulty is said to escalate the longer a run continues, and the house itself reportedly hides "disturbing secrets" belonging to its owner for players willing to explore rather than just survive. It launched on Steam on September 9, 2026, priced at $6.99, with genre tags on the store page spanning everything from Action and RPG to Strategy, a sign of a very small, self-published team casting a wide net rather than a tightly defined pitch.

A Tiny, Sharply Divided Launch Pool

Cockroach Simulation launched to just 7 total reviews across all languages at the time of writing, 4 positive and 3 negative, too small a sample for Steam to assign anything beyond a bare percentage score, and too small, frankly, for sweeping claims about audience reception either way. What the pool does offer, unusually for a launch this size, is a genuinely international spread of reactions, with substantive reviews in Simplified and Traditional Chinese, Japanese, German, and English, giving a clearer than usual picture of both what's working and what specifically isn't, even if the sample size demands real caution about generalizing from it.

A Premise With Real Atmospheric Teeth

The reviewers on the positive side of the ledger are drawn in almost entirely by mood rather than mechanics. One writer credits the game's "scary sound effects" with making play genuinely tense, calling the overall structure and concept "really interesting" and singling out the surrounding environment as their favorite element for being "eerie and oppressive," language that lines up closely with the developer's own pitch of a dirty, threatening domestic space seen from insect height. A short Thai-language review simply describes it as an enjoyably tense game about fleeing a fat cat, suggesting the specific danger a given player encounters can vary session to session. Even a lukewarm Japanese review, which lands on the negative side overall, concedes the core concept is good, and a German reviewer who couldn't progress far still opens by noting real affection for cockroaches as a species and genuine curiosity about a game built entirely around one. Taken together, the positive-leaning material describes a premise that's landing as intended: a small, unglamorous creature made to feel exposed and vulnerable in a hostile, oversized world, with sound design doing real work to sell the tension.

A Punishing Stamina System, Bad Camera Work, and Not Much to Do

The critical reviews are more specific and more mechanical, and they converge on similar complaints from entirely different language communities, which lends them some weight despite the small numbers. A detailed Simplified Chinese review calls the growth curve poorly designed, noting that sprinting, flying, and even egg-laying all drain the same stamina bar, that each level-up adds only trivial, barely noticeable stat increases, and that after a full half hour of play, the reviewer's "occupation" of the house had not even reached 20%, with limited food sources and limited environments compounding the sense that there simply isn't much game here yet. A Japanese review is harsher on execution specifically, arguing the concept is let down by cheap-feeling game design that just "puts a cockroach skin" on generic mechanics, criticizing camera work severely enough to call the game hard to play, and noting that despite playing an insect, most of the places a real cockroach could plausibly go are simply inaccessible, leaving movement feeling more like a conventional character than a true insect-scale simulation; that reviewer suggests the current $6.99 price isn't justified by the polish on offer, though they'd reconsider at a fraction of the cost. A German reviewer reports being unable to progress at all, describing an early, hard progression wall without elaborating further, while a Traditional Chinese review dismisses the whole thing more bluntly as a disguised, grindy "soul-like" growth game rather than the horror-survival experience its marketing promises. Between them, these reviews sketch a game whose central hook, playing something small and helpless in a huge, hostile house, works in concept and in mood, but whose actual systems, camera, and content depth haven't yet caught up to that idea.

Verdict

Cockroach Simulation has a premise worth taking seriously: precious few games ask a player to feel genuinely small, vulnerable, and disposable, and the reviewers who connect with its dirty, oppressive sound design and atmosphere describe exactly that feeling working as intended. But this is a rough, very early launch by a tiny self-published team, and the critical reviews, drawn from four different languages, independently converge on the same underlying problems: a stamina system that gates nearly every action without rewarding patience, a camera that multiple reviewers call actively unpleasant to play with, level-ups that barely register, and an explorable house that, despite the insect conceit, doesn't yet let the player go where a real cockroach could. At $6.99 with only a handful of reviews to go on, this is a curiosity for horror fans specifically drawn to its unusual angle, not yet a confident recommendation at full price.