About This Game

Octbuster is a cozy organization game about closing up an 80s video rental store after hours as an octopus. Somebody left over 10,000 tapes on the floor. You've got tentacles, a cart buddy, a bunch of kittens, and all night. Every movie in the store was made by code I wrote, no generative AI. Put it back together however you want.

Don't worry, you have 8 arms

Grabbing 10,000 tapes one at a time would take forever, so you don't. Each tentacle is a real arm you aim and reach with, so you scoop a whole pile at once, dump it in your cart, and slide tapes home while the shelf shuffles over to make room. Plop, plop, plop. You start with four carrying arms and earn more. The rest are legs, so every new arm costs you a leg. You can climb the walls too, you're an octopus.

Kittens. So many kittens.

Earn a whole kitten army as you go. They wander the store, sit on the props you place, and once you put them to work they carry tapes all the way to the right shelf. Play some music and they dance. You can pet every one of them, as many times as you want, even with your arms full.

Streamers: let your chat into the store

Full Twitch integration with chat commands and channel points. You pick which ones are on and what they cost.

• !kitten A kitten wearing the viewer's name moves into your store.

• !kittensayhi Their kittens run over and say hi to the octopus.

• !grump / !grumpyarmy One grumpy cat, or a whole gang of them, goes after your tapes. Petting stops them.

• !party Disco lights and a random cassette on the PA until the song ends.

• !tape A tape in your store takes the viewer's name as its title.

• !cart The cart does a backflip and spills everything.

• !drop Every tape you're holding pops up in the air.

• !dance The octopus drops everything and dances.

Every cover is made by code. No generative AI.

There are 600 movies across 16 genres, all generated from open-source word banks by a pipeline I built from scratch. Same seed, same store, every time. There's an in-game tape editor too, so you can retitle any movie you want.

10,000 tapes sounds like a lot. It isn't scary.

You can tell the genres apart at a glance, so you don't have to read every title unless you want to. The cart sweeps up whole piles and hands back just the genre you're working on. You're never running laps looking for the one tape you misplaced, and if a tape ever falls somewhere you can't reach, it turns up in the Lost and Found. The upgrades don't sort for you, they just make sorting more fun.

Pick your store when you start: Sorted, where every series already has a row waiting for it, or Unsorted, where any tape on any shelf counts and the layout is all yours.

The store comes back to life as you go

• One-of-a-kind display copies are hidden in the piles. Pick one up and it lights up and flies to its spot on the wall. There are 600 to find.

• Finish a genre and your reward goes up under spotlights in that genre's color.

• Clear the dark patches on the floor and see what turns up. Sort more of the store and the arcade powers on, with little minigames to play.

• Find tokens in the piles and spend them on a real claw machine full of tiny versions of decorations you haven't found yet. No rigged claw: line it up right and it holds.

• Cassettes under the mess add songs to the store's speakers. Or play your own music, turn on party mode, and watch the lights sync to it.

• Achievements print as posters you hang on the walls, stamped with your stats from the run.

• Dig props out of the piles and place them anywhere. Your posters and decorations carry over to every new store.

Upgrades that change how you play

More arms, more tapes per arm, a roomier cart. Floor Sort turns a sweep into neat little piles by genre. Shelf Sense makes the right shelf glow. Juggler's Hands sorts your armful alphabetically. And there's a whole section of the upgrade page labelled "Curios - these do not help," like giant googly eyes for your cart.

Mods and Workshop Support

Browse and add Steam Workshop packs right from the main menu. There are already official packs up: funny patent drawings, dusty old sports and western photos, animals drawn by people who have never seen them, and real NASA photos that run across the Sci-Fi spines, so a finished row shows the whole picture.

Made so anyone can play it

Plays great on mouse and keyboard or a controller. Genres are told apart by shape and brightness, not just color, so the game stays readable for every kind of color vision. You can tune the size and font of the text (including a dyslexia-friendly font), and every single sound has its own volume slider, so turn the plops way up and the music way down, whatever your ears want. There are comfort options for motion and screen effects too.

Speedrunners

A built-in split timer with personal bests and gold splits, plus Steam leaderboards.

The demo is out now if you want to try it first. Take as long as you want. The tapes aren't going anywhere.

Have fun!