Anyone who spent their school holidays on a Counter-Strike zombie server knows the feeling of getting bitten and wishing the round would hurry up and end. Disbond, a PvP (player versus player) zombie shooter built essentially by one developer, is designed so the infected side is worth playing, and its free demo is on Steam during Steam Next Fest until Monday 26 October 2026.
The full game is listed on Steam as “Coming soon” for Windows, with no price yet. That makes this week’s demo the easiest way to try it without spending anything. We didn’t play a review build: what follows comes from the written answers the studio sent us, and the developer’s own words are attributed to him.
A Zombie Game Where Nobody Wants to Be the Zombie
The studio behind Disbond is Bozz Studio, which is both developer and publisher on Steam. “At the core it’s just me,” Galin told us. He has worked in tech for about ten years, and around two years ago he decided to focus on Disbond. It started as a hobby project, and “then I got obsessed,” as he puts it. For the past year and a half, the game has had all of his free time.
His influences are the arena shooters many of us grew up on: Unreal Tournament, Doom, Quake and Counter-Strike 1.6 and Source. He wanted fun before realism, and the spark came from a specific memory of the Counter-Strike zombie mod. Galin told us “everyone hated being the zombie” because the loop was only run and infect. Everyone rushed for the round to end so they could be human again. Who wants a whole round of being the punchline?
Steam’s own pitch sets the scene: “A PvP multiplayer zombie shooter. 2 game modes. 8 classes. One of you’s already infected.” Disbond answers that old complaint by giving humans and zombies separate classes with different skills, so the infected side is “not just running and shooting,” in Galin’s words. It’s a whole game design built around fixing one bad memory from a mod.
The Classes
Galin walked us through a handful of them, and the zombie roster is where his answer to that old mod gets interesting.
- Grenade planter (human): has a dash, and hitting a zombie with the knife implants a grenade that explodes three seconds later
- Speedster-type human: moves fast, jumps higher and dashes, but pays for it in survivability
- Crawler (zombie): the zombie equivalent of the grenade planter
- Smasher (zombie): a tank that can grab other zombie players as a shield and throw them at people
- Demon (zombie): disguises itself as a human to get close and infect survivors
- Screecher (zombie): screams to blind humans in range for five seconds
- Forsaken (zombie): the newest class, which raises zombies from the ground to charge the nearest human, and can instantly swap places with them
The Demon is the one we’d jump into first. A zombie walking up looking like your teammate is the kind of paranoia that makes “one of you’s already infected” pay off, and Galin says “people loved that!” The Smasher comes a close second, mostly because using your own teammate as a meat shield and then as a projectile sounds like the funniest thing a lobby can do together.
What Players Surprised Him With
The biggest surprise was the Architect‘s disguise skill, which lets players disguise themselves as props or objects and make sneaky plays against zombies. Galin first put it in because he thought it was cool, and players loved it. That’s a nice reminder that a feature added on a whim can become the thing people talk about most.
Closed play sessions began four months ago, running two to three times a week for early-access players. Since then, Galin has revised most classes. The Smasher originally had a charge ability, later swapped for the grab and throw. Players find bugs and exploits, and they’re “my biggest source of feedback,” he told us, with community feedback shaping improvements every week.
That loop hasn’t stopped for Next Fest. When he wrote to us, the demo had been live for under 24 hours, and one player on Discord had already reported a specific bug, which he patched right away.
The demo captures the core loop with limited weapons and only 2 of the current 12 maps. Galin’s plan is to add 13 more maps for 25 in total before release, plus a map-building kit for players, though plans like these can shift as development goes on.
Freedom to Break the Game
Galin wants players to have plenty of freedom, even to “break” the game. That means secret rooms, hidden teleports and reaching odd corners by spawning props from the N (prop) menu and jumping on them. Bunnyhopping is in, and so are gimmick weapons like a greatsword and a chainsaw.
The maps are interconnected and vertical, with Dark Souls (the first one) as an influence. One example is a city where you move along streets, duck into buildings, jump across rooftops and drop into the sewers, with visible or secret shortcuts such as a hidden pipe. For a mode built on surviving and escaping, knowing that pipe exists is half the battle.
One Developer, a Lot of Friends
“Just me” still comes with plenty of help. Galin’s brother and his brother’s band made the trailer and game music, “heavily inspired by the oldschool classics.” A friend who is a UI/UX (user interface and user experience) designer did the menus, and his cousin helps with code and map building.
“It’s like building a house, you never truly build it alone!” Galin told us. There’s a sweet bit of history here, too: when they were young, he and his cousin built maps for a Counter-Strike zombie server, and those maps never made the roster. Years later, they’re building a whole zombie game of their own.
Grab the free Disbond demo on Steam before Next Fest wraps on Monday 26 October, play a round as the Demon, and if it clicks, wishlist the full game on its Steam store page so you’ll know when it lands!
Photos and Visuals courtesy of Disbond.
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