Pill Bug Interactive has dated the demo of Captain Contraption’s Safari Park, the pixel-art run-based park management sim from the two-person Welsh studio behind Captain Contraption’s Chocolate Factory. The free playable slice unlocks on Steam on November 5, 2026 and is listed at $0.00 USD, with no embargo on coverage.
The date arrives just as the public playtest closes. In an announcement on the game’s Steam page, the developers say the ideas and feedback gathered during that test have been worked into the demo build, which also brings new creatures to clone. Players who wishlist the game will be notified the moment it goes live, and the announcement, demo page and trailer are all linked below.
The premise leans hard into how little control a park manager usually gets. You play a robot historian piecing extinct humanity back together from a hard drive, cloning the creatures you find and selling tickets to robot visitors. There are no fences and no enclosures. Herbivores graze and breed while predators hunt them, populations rise and fall on their own, and lions share the grounds with medieval knights and sentient trucks. None of it is scripted, so no two runs unfold the same way.
Everything runs on a mysterious green goop. Feed it to a cloning vat and you get a creature, feed it to a field and you get wheat, and when something dies a recycler robot turns it back into goop before anything else eats it. Starve the park of goop, or of the money to buy more, and the whole thing collapses. Guide buildings use distinct colors so it is easy to see which path your visitors are taking past the chaos.
Pill Bug Interactive has not announced a price for the full game, which Steam lists with a planned release in 2027. Until then, the demo, the announcement, the trailer and the main Steam page are the best places to follow along.
Dan Kowalski reviews games by listening to what they do before believing what they promise. He cares about responsive combat, purposeful sound design, satisfying movement, and whether a game respects the player’s time. Dan will forgive technical roughness when the underlying experience is exceptional. He will forgive almost anything for a brilliant combat system—but never a tutorial that refuses to stop talking.
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