NECHTO: Infection Protocol Review

A Shared Screen, Private Phones, and a Table Full of Liars

NECHTO: Infection Protocol is a social-deduction card game built for 4 to 12 players gathered around one shared screen, with everyone's actual hand and role hidden away on their own phone. One player is secretly "The Thing," others may already be infected, and the rest of the table has to work out who's lying before it's too late. A PC or laptop runs the shared display and handles all the bookkeeping: roles, hands, turns, and rules, while players scan a QR code to join as private controllers on their phones, with no app, account, or registration required. The pitch is squarely in the Mafia and Werewolf tradition of hidden-role party games, filtered through a body-horror premise closer to Among Us and John Carpenter's The Thing, where mandatory card exchanges between players can quietly spread the infection without anyone at the table seeing exactly what changed hands. Developed and published by the small studio bigmeco, NECHTO left Steam Early Access and reached its 1.0 release on September 10, 2026, priced at $2.99 with a launch discount currently bringing it to $2.09, and supports both same-room play over a shared Wi-Fi network and remote groups connecting through separate Steam copies joined by a room code or Steam invitation.

The core structure keeps things simple by design: each round moves through phases of dealing, mandatory exchanges, and accusations, with different roles and unique decks layered on top to vary the shape of a given match. It's a cheap, accessible format built explicitly around getting a group of people bluffing to each other's faces rather than any single-player content, which puts nearly all of the weight of a review on how well that social mechanism actually plays out at a real table.

A Small, Mixed Launch Pool

NECHTO has drawn 11 reviews so far, with 8 positive and 3 negative for a 73% "Mostly Positive" approval rating, spanning English, Russian, and Japanese players. It's a genuinely tiny pool for a brand-new $2.99 release, but the reviews that exist are unusually detailed for their number, split fairly evenly between players who found exactly the party-game paranoia they were looking for and players who ran into specific, concrete problems getting the game to actually work.

The Paranoia Hook Lands When It Works

The positive reviews consistently describe the same thing: a fun, tense party card game that captures the specific flavor of not trusting anyone at the table. One English-language reviewer calls it "a really fun party card game with a clever corporate theme," praising how the different roles, unique decks, and player interactions add real strategy and chaos on top of rules that are easy to pick up. Another compares it favorably and directly to Mafia and Among Us while crediting its own twist inspired by The Thing, highlighting the simple setup where one player hosts on a laptop or TV and everyone else joins instantly by scanning a QR code from their phone, with no downloads or complicated account creation. A third reviewer jokes that after five minutes "you don't trust anyone, not even your cat or wife," and recommends it as exactly the kind of thing to pull out for an evening with friends. Russian-language reviewers echo the same appeal, with one calling it a pleasant callback to tabletop games from their youth and another simply noting how rare a proper board-game-style release is on Steam. Multiple reviewers specifically flag replayability, saying that even with a simple ruleset, every match feels different once accusations start flying and the group turns on each other.

AI Accusations, a Contested Origin, and Real Connectivity Bugs

The negative side of the pool raises sharper concerns than a typical party-game gripe. One detailed English-language review is unambiguously harsh, calling the game "vibe-coded," criticizing the sound design as "the peak of the AI sound design," and describing the art as "shameless AI art" while noting the developer didn't disclose any use of AI content despite what the reviewer characterizes as clear signs throughout. The same review goes further, accusing the developer of lifting the core concept from an existing tabletop game called "Stay Away!," a real card game built around a nearly identical hidden-infection premise, and describes the game as freezing outright when a player died mid-round. Separately, two Japanese-language reviewers ran into serious connectivity problems: one reports that a friend couldn't connect from outside the host's home Wi-Fi network at all, since the QR-code address is local to the host PC and can't be reached over a phone's 4G or 5G connection, a real limitation of the shared-screen-plus-local-network design rather than a minor bug. Another Japanese reviewer describes the game as effectively unplayable on Windows, saying its window refuses to yield focus and blocks switching to other applications entirely, and reports that even after getting it running on a MacBook, a connected iPhone couldn't get past typing in a username, leading them to request a refund; they add, notably, that the underlying concept still seems interesting if the execution improves. None of these are vague complaints. They're specific, reproducible failures, sound and art the reviewer explicitly frames as AI-generated and undisclosed, a contested originality claim against a named existing tabletop game, and networking and window-focus bugs that can make a $2.99 party game unplayable for the exact remote or cross-device groups its own store page advertises supporting.

Verdict

NECHTO: Infection Protocol is a cheap, hidden-role party card game whose core hook, mandatory card exchanges quietly spreading infection while the table argues over who's lying, clearly works for a meaningful share of the small group of players who've reviewed it so far, with genuine enthusiasm for its Mafia-and-The-Thing-flavored bluffing and its frictionless QR-code setup. But its 73% approval across just 11 reviews sits on top of some genuinely serious complaints for a 1.0 release: an explicit accusation of undisclosed AI-generated art and sound, a pointed claim that the entire concept was lifted from an existing tabletop game, and concrete connectivity and window-focus bugs that left at least two reviewers unable to actually play the remote or cross-platform sessions the store page promises. At $2.99 the downside risk is low, and for a group that gets it running smoothly the paranoia and bluffing clearly land, but anyone drawn in by the concept should go in aware that the origins of that concept, and the reliability of the software delivering it, are both under real dispute this early in its life.