The New Flesh

The New Flesh released on Steam on June 1, 2025, a free walking simulator from Freshly Baked Games LLC built in collaboration with the psych-rock band Red Vox, fronted by Vinny "Vinesauce" Vinny. The premise, stated openly by the developers and echoed by nearly every reviewer, is unusual by design: it's essentially a playable discography, sending players wandering through a series of surreal, disconnected environments, each scored by a different Red Vox track, in search of hidden vinyl records, VHS tapes, and secrets. Its 2,214-review English pool sits at an Overwhelmingly Positive 98%, one of the strongest, most enthusiastic reception profiles found across this entire session.

Reviewers consistently frame the game as far more than a glorified music video, even while acknowledging that's exactly what it is at its core. One reviewer wrote that it's "essentially a surreal series of semi-interactive music videos loosely connected through game objectives and hidden secrets," adding that "it's almost baffling how many songs are in this game" and that the band even produced an entire additional album specifically for the post-launch content update — reportedly "much to the dev's surprise" that the game needed it. Another reviewer, a longtime Red Vox fan, called the game "such a dream," describing the environments as "a dirty, dark, and dingy New York City" carrying "great environmental storytelling detailing the criticisms of capitalism and anti-consumer practices."

For players discovering the band for the first time through the game, the soundtrack draws some of the pool's strongest praise. One reviewer wrote, "I went into this game not knowing anything about Red Vox, and I came out thinking I just discovered one of my new favorite bands," while another put it more bluntly: "this game has absolutely NO DAMN BUSINESS being FREE." A third reviewer, who went in expecting the game to be bad, called it "wildly entertaining, bizarre, eccentric, surreal," adding that even the game's admittedly rough graphics "somehow fit perfectly with what the game is trying to accomplish." The visual design draws its own specific praise, with multiple reviewers independently comparing its look to early-2000s PC games and PS1/PS2-era graphics, a style several called deliberately nostalgic rather than a technical limitation.

The pool's most consistent, corroborated criticism concerns pacing around the game's unskippable music sequences. One reviewer wrote they "didn't enjoy staring at a wall for 2 minutes every so often while an unskippable song played and was forced to watch [things] happen while being locked in the room with no way to escape," a frustration echoed independently by another reviewer who specifically flagged "3 unskippable songs" in the city area as "slightly obnoxious to backtrack" through while hunting for full completion. Both reviewers otherwise rated the game positively, framing this as a real but survivable annoyance rather than a dealbreaker. A separate, detailed account described a specific softlock: after collecting all vinyl records, the reviewer got stuck unable to trigger a required late-game interaction, ultimately concluding they'd need to delete their save and replay the entire game a fourth time to fix it — a frustrating bug worth flagging clearly to anyone chasing full completion.

Secret-hunting design is a genuine point of pride for many reviewers but also a fair point of friction for others. One reviewer praised the "surprising amount of secret hunting" and called the game "super replayable" as a result, while another noted appreciatively that finding everything required real effort, since "there's no way you would find most of them unless you interact with every single random wall." That same lack of guidance, however, tripped up at least one player entirely: the pool's shortest negative review reads simply, "got stuck in the first 5 minutes, no tutorial or instructions on what to do, deleted." A second negative review took direct aim at the game's core premise, arguing flatly, "this is an ad for a band. Cool visuals and atmosphere but not really a game" — a fair, if minority, perspective on a project that never hides its promotional purpose.

It's worth being upfront about one detail from the store page: the game's content descriptors mention "mild sexual imagery" alongside mature language and non-violent mild gore, tucked in among the game's stranger set-pieces (one reviewer's own summary of the game's content casually lists everything from "cute ducks" to a "skeleton peep-show"). Nothing in the review pool suggests this rises above the surreal, cartoonish tone the rest of the game maintains, but it's worth knowing going in for anyone sensitive to that kind of content in an otherwise free, all-ages-adjacent experience.

The developer's decision to release the game entirely free is worth dwelling on, since it changes how fairly some of the pool's criticisms should be weighed. A short, occasionally confusing walking simulator with no tutorial and a handful of pacing snags would be a much harder sell at a typical indie price point; here, several reviewers explicitly credited the zero-dollar cost as part of what made the experience feel generous rather than frustrating, framing any rough edges as more than forgivable for something that cost nothing to try. That calculus also extends to the substantial post-launch B-side content, which arrived as a free addition rather than paid DLC, reinforcing the sense reviewers described of a small team building out of genuine enthusiasm for the project rather than chasing revenue from it.

Taken as a whole, The New Flesh is a genuinely distinctive, free experience that earns its overwhelming reception through sheer creative commitment: a soundtrack strong enough to win over listeners with no prior interest in the band, visuals memorable enough to be worth screenshotting on their own, and enough hidden content to reward several hours of dedicated exploring. The unskippable song sequences and sparse onboarding are real, fair criticisms, and the reported softlock bug is worth knowing about before chasing 100% completion, but at a price of exactly nothing, this is an easy recommendation for anyone drawn to strange, atmospheric walking simulators or simply looking for new music.