A fire brigade usually has a straightforward hiring requirement: please do not deliberately increase the amount of fire. OCTOPinbs has neglected this vital screening question. Its octopus firefighters arrive to tackle an emergency, while squid saboteurs mingle among them and work toward the opposite outcome. Everybody looks busy. Unfortunately, looking busy is also the central qualification for secretly making a building substantially more flammable.
Developed by Lasengle and tri-Ace and published by Aniplex, OCTOPinbs launched for Windows through Steam on May 11, 2026, in Pacific time. It is an online-only multiplayer action game for three to ten people, combining social deduction with the urgent business of extinguishing a stage that refuses to stay extinguished. The Japanese release date reads May 12 because clocks enjoy making simple announcements complicated. The colleagues trying to destroy the premises are an entirely separate problem.
Reasons to look closer
The fire gives suspicion a visible, shared consequence. A suspicious movement is not just material for an accusation later; it may coincide with a room getting worse right now. That creates a strong reason to watch what people do while still doing your own job. OCTOPinbs offers the pleasure of reading a group under pressure, with a second, less glamorous obligation to stop the workplace collapsing during your investigation. Excellent detective work is difficult to celebrate from underneath the floor.
Two teams, one appalling incident report
Players receive one of two roles. Firefighters work to reduce the stage's incineration meter to zero, or incapacitate every infiltrator. The squid "artists" want that meter at its maximum, or every firefighter out of action. Calling the saboteurs artists is wonderfully evasive. It suggests the building is not burning because anyone has behaved irresponsibly. It is simply experiencing an ambitious change in creative direction.
Those competing goals give every attempt to help an interesting shadow. Extinguishing flames is productive, but so is identifying the person undoing that work. Chasing a suspect might solve the larger problem or leave an actual emergency unattended. The appeal lies in that division of attention. A team cannot spend the whole match conducting interviews while the building politely waits. The building has commitments of its own, most of them involving becoming a different state of matter.
Observe the room, distrust the room
Adjacent rooms can be monitored for suspicious behavior, and collapsing floors keep the physical situation changing. The result is a social-deduction premise tied to place. Where someone was matters; what happened in that space matters too. A plausible explanation has to survive contact with the environment, rather than merely sound confident enough to outlast everyone else's patience. Confidence, tragically, is a renewable resource for the wrong people.
For the saboteur, pretending to extinguish a fire provides cover for creating another one. That is a more specific fantasy than being generically evil in a lobby. You have an occupation to imitate and an opposing objective to advance. The useful question becomes how long apparently helpful behavior can conceal the actual plan. Friends who already excel at saying "I'm on it" while producing no detectable progress may discover a distressingly natural talent here.
Please place the suspect in the appropriate jar
Losing all your health does not immediately end your involvement. Your equipment breaks, leaving a vulnerable helmeted form that can seek a replacement body at the fire truck. That recovery route keeps a defeat from automatically becoming an extended period of watching everybody else have an argument. It also creates a window of danger. A second chance is available, but the route back to usefulness is not a declaration of diplomatic immunity.
Octojars turn that vulnerability into the game's decisive accusation. Capture a helmeted player and the jar reveals their identity while removing them from action. Catching the correct suspect can help the firefighters finish the job. Capturing an innocent colleague does the saboteurs' work for them. This is a wonderfully concrete form of accountability: you cannot merely claim someone was suspicious and move on. There is now a jar containing the evidence of your excellent or absolutely dreadful judgment.
The culprit has stopped pretending
Even exposure is not necessarily the end for an artist. Choosing to reveal their true form makes their location known but grants additional health, mobility, and abilities. Deception can therefore give way to a more direct attempt to force the outcome. That shift gives the role a second kind of decision: whether secrecy still serves the plan, or whether the moment has arrived to become a conspicuous problem with improved specifications.
Practice activities, tutorials, emotes, and adjustable match rules help frame OCTOPinbs as something for a group to learn and shape together. Its three-player minimum also makes the audience clear. This is a shared online evening, not a solo detective story with optional company. The right group will enjoy making observations, taking risks, and discovering that its trusted friend has approached fire safety as a negotiable philosophy. OCTOPinbs has an appealingly simple question underneath all that commotion: can you put out a disaster while correctly identifying who considers it a success?