Pit Panic Preview – Dig your way out of arcade disaster

Sometimes you just need that old-school arcade hit of pure, focused, fast-paced gaming. The team at Flying Rat Studio feel that too, and they’ve been working hard on their latest project, Pit Panic, reigniting that simple notion – you need to get to the top.

Pit Panic takes place in a pit. It may not take that much of a syntactical leap to also surmise that there may be some panic along the way too. This is an old-school arcade experience all the way, evoking memories of classics like Mr Driller, Dig Dug and Spelunky, while wrapping it in a thoroughly charming 2026 skin.

You’re an adventurer. You can immediately tell because you’ve got a backpack. This chirpy little chap presumably knows what he’s got himself into, as he’s already at the bottom of a pit, the Aztec temple crumbling above him, and he’s tooled up and ready to climb. First and foremost in your arsenal of tools is the Hook. This device can smash blocks at range, allows you to pick up items to throw, such as bombs and jars, and can grab pickups or keys to help you progress.

There’s some real risk and reward at work in Pit Panic, as you’re given the option of exchanging health for power-ups or by turning in the coins you’ve picked up from golden blocks. You can expand your moveset in this way, such as gaining a double jump to make it that much easier to climb higher, and while it opens things up in one way. Your diminutive adventurer is surprisingly spritely for a chap with a massive backpack and a mechanical grabber, but you’ll need every one of his tricks to keep your run going, and it becomes ever trickier and more frantic the further you go.

You have to make your own route by carefully choosing what blocks to smash, and which ones to leave alone. Some blocks are permanent, while others, like rickety crates, will break after a while and you have to wait for them to respawn. There are also much more dangerous blocks to avoid, whether they’re packed with explosives, or fall on you when you remove the block below them, instantly crushing you and sending you back to the beginning.

It can be a deceptively chilled experience at times. You can climb your way up, smashing your own route through the level. However, danger lurks! After accidentally setting off the temple – I was doing a fair bit of accidental everything during my first attempt – the area starts to fill up with water, forcing you to move much, much quicker as you try to outrun the climbing water. This would be the ‘panic’ from the title, wouldn’t it?

Everything here is handcrafted. The levels are not procedural, and the team have packed in an eye-watering 1100 stages to make your way through. When my first run ended in an ignominious flattening, I wanted to try again straight away, which feels like exactly what Flying Rat Studio want. Lucky for me, I could hop onto a Steam Deck while someone else tried out the PC version, and it felt perfectly at home on the handheld platform.

There’s four different biomes to clamber your way up through, and the bright and appealingly chunky visuals hide a stark challenge, forcing you to make split-second decisions that may, or may not, pan out. With daily leaderboards and future plans for a level editor that will put design tools straight into player’s hands, Flying Rat Studios are clearly hoping to create a thriving community around the game, one which it absolutely deserves.

Pit Panic is going to release on pretty much everything, with a demo arriving soon, leading up to the game’s full release this July. If you’re ready for an old-school hit of arcade goodness, Pit Panic is exactly what you need.

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