- IRIS GAMES AWARD AND COOP BUFF - 8 July 2026
I won Pictured: yours truly with my iconic methhead look This last weekend has been a bit intense for many reasons, but I'm back! During Friday and Saturday I had a stand at the Guadalindie event, and I was also nominated for the Iris Games' Tech-XR category. And I won! Those 5k will be immediately re-invested into my addictive vices. GUADALINDIE AND IRIS GAMES AWARDS This was my first venture doing some public demo'ing and it was exhausting. There weren't many other VR games being showcased (I saw one under a videogame school stand but sadly didn't have time to check it out). I guess that made Mandrillia stand out for the crowd, but it also meant I had to explain the basics of VR to many players that had never put on a VR headset before. Even the less experienced users got to have some fun at the firing range, with a surprising amount of people being able to play a good chunk of a Demo…
- SMALL QOL TWEAKS - 26 June 2026
Hello there! This update adds a bit of a "sample" of weaponry at the Firing Range. When no challenge is active, the Firing Range table will have a Gun, Carbine, HMG, Minigun, and ammunition for all Drone weapon systems. This means new players who go to the Firing Range for the first time won't need to use the Item Spawner right away. I also added some extra options for the DM Menu, including a button to cycle between all Match Presets. In other news, next week Escape from Mandrillia (and yours truly) will be at Guadalindie demoing the game to unsuspecting victims. And also within the Andalucía Play Fest, I got nominated for best "Tech-XR" game for the Iris Games Awards, so wish me luck! Have a nice day and see you soon!
- 1.1.0 - DM MENU AND MISC QOL - 18 May 2026
Hello there! Not much to see here, just a bunch of tiny things I didn't get to add on the 1.0 release that I've had time to play around with -including two easy to get achievements! The main addition is the "DM Menu" (enabled via the cheat DUNGMASTER) that allows the PC player to use the keyboard numpad 1/2/3 keys to open a set of menus from where you can quickly adjust settings for the VR player (including basic VR preferences like the height calibration, turn modes, basic match settings), some basic scene control (reset scene, go back to menu, start a match or go to the firing range) and also trigger a bunch of events on a match (like forcing an insectoid to spawn on the nearest corpse, setting off an alarm that shows the VR player's location to the Mandrillians, or blowing up the nearest barrel with line of sight to the Robot). One of the reasons I added this is for public showcases…
- SteamVR actions.json tweak - 21 January 2026
Hello there! This is one of these things that you should not notice unless something went horribly wrong (there is not even a build download) When I started developing Escape from Mandrillia, I used the old SteamVR plugin that had the actions.json manifest on the game's root folder. After updating it, the actions.json file moved to StreamingAssets (which is way tidier), but I completely forgot to update that change on Steamworks (which is a separate thing from the actual builds) Somehow, this went unnoticed because Steam must have some sort of automatic fallback. However, it seems that it can still be problematic in certain cases (with one example being a Linux user) After this change, everything should work in most environments. If after this update your hands stop tracking or you can't access the SteamVR binding screen (even after deleting and re-downloading the game as a last measure…
- 1.0.7 - FIX OF SHAME - 2 December 2025
Hello there! This one is me fixing a bug regression that caused Mandrillian Bots to straight out stop respawning when a certain set of conditions were met. HOPEFULLY I did not break anything else in the process (it was literally a single line of code)
- 1.0.6 - GRAPHICS! - 10 November 2025
Hello there! This one was a pain to fix, but it was all thanks to the investigative work and sharp eyesight of community user TheEvilThanos. Up until now, Mandrillia had forced FXAA for the VR player; this was due to a long-standing issue with the ancient Unity Post Processing stack I used. The only way to get rid of that was to fully disable PostFX for the VR player (which also removes the bloom effects and the gamma correction). After a bunch of attempts, I finally managed to hackily update the stack to a version that had the bug fixed, so now Mandrillia should feel way more crisp for the VR player. And the best thing is this image improvement will also give a tiny performance boost, so it's a win-win. Let me know what you think of it! But that's not all, I kept the PostFX toggle as a new setting on the menu. It makes the game kinda look like a Quest title but for weaker systems it mi…
- 1.0.5 - STEAMVR UPDATE, TURKISH BUG FIX, CHEATS, STUFF - 29 October 2025
Hello there! Hope you're having a spooky Halloween. STEAMVR PLUGIN UPDATE - TURKISH REGIONAL FORMAT BUG FIX This update could be a risky one, as I've upgraded the game's SteamVR unity plugin from the ancient one it was using to the most up-to-date available one. In theory, there shouldn't be a tangible difference, except maybe some marginal optimizations, a cleaner player.log file, and most importantly, a fix to an annoying bug that affected people with Turkish regional format on their OS. Just in case, I've added a new public branch called "1_0_4_old_steamvr_plugin" in case you find any problems with this latest update. That build also includes the latest included cheats, speaking of which... CHEATS FOR THE CHEAT SCREEN These are just some silly cheats in case you want to mess around. There might be more cheats coming, too... BOTTOMLESS gives you bottomless magazines for magazine-fed w…
- 1.0.3.1 - THE UNITY THING - 3 October 2025
No changes on this build, just re-built with the patched out Unity editor because of that vulnerability issue (you might start seeing many Unity games released between 2017 and now having small updates) HOPEFULLY nothing broke with the update.
- 1.0.3 - STOP HITTING YOURSELF - 28 September 2025
Some minor fixes and a fix for an embarrassing bug introduced in 1.0.1 a week ago: Fixed Mandrillian Bot armor upgrade being improperly tagged (unlike the rest of their upgrades), causing armored Mandrillian Bots to quite literally hit themselves when they tried to attack Fixed oversight that would stop the countdown timer after killing all Mandrillian Bots in "stop on clear" timed mode with still-living human-controlled Mandrillians on the level (the match would continue normally until you either killed all the human-controlled Mandrillians or escaped, just with a stopped timer) Fixed a tiny misalignment on the south east vent opening Tidied up some console logs regarding waypoint re-assignment when opening new areas
- 1.0.2 - 25 September 2025
Fixed "Mandrillian Bias" preset giving the Robot a Plasma Gun as a starter sidearm (doing that was not very Mandrillian-biased) Drones can now open lab lockers from within them, in case a MEAN Robot player decided to lock them in, like a BULLY Also, lab lockers now get visibly destroyed by the Mandrillian Self-Destruction explosions
- 1.0.1 - SMALL SENTRY FIX - 20 September 2025
I said I'd be back with some embarrassing hotfix and that was not a lie! Fixed Deployable Sentry Turret not being destroyed by the runaway forklift or the falling warehouse containers
- 1.0 - THIS IS IT - 15 September 2025
Well this is it. Escape from Mandrillia is no longer an Early Access title. While I will always think there is room for improvement, I'm quite happy with how the game turned out. When Early Access started, there was a list of things that I knew had to be in the final game, and another list of things that I wanted to implement but was less hopeful about. Looking back, I'm quite proud of getting most of them (NPC Mandrillians, the dreaded Split Audio system) -even the ones that didn't quite make it like the different Mandrillian Characters ended up somewhat implemented in the form of the Upgrade system. Pictured: early concept of the Mandrillian Mech, which ended up as the base for the Armor Upgrade. There's also been pleasant surprises: the Coop Mode, which I initially thought as something too crazy to try for the base game (originally it would have been post-release or DLC) ended up bei…
- TINY BUGFIX - 13 September 2025
Another small fix: Fixed corner case where doing a single dodge as a Mandrillian with full Stamina would not activate the stamina recovering after the recovering period. This might have gone under the radar for so long because on top of needing to be at 6/6 stamina, usually you'd do other things after a dodge (like attacking, or dodging again), and anything else that affected stamina (getting hit, powerups, etc) would get the system back to working normally. Besides that, everything seems to be all set up for the 15th release -also, last main branch for the Steam Client seems to have fixed all remote play problems, both in desktop and Steam Deck, so no need to go to beta anymore! Hope you all have a nice day there
- SOME FIXES AND A HEADS UP FOR REMOTE PLAY - 6 September 2025
Fixed sneaky bug that was making Mandrillian Bots un-gibbable by the "normal" damage type (while still working as intended for armor piercing, blast, blade, and blunt damage) Small heads up: Valve done gone goofed again with Remote Play (and Steam Link), so if you're having problems with it go into Steam Client Beta --hopefully them fixing it so fast on the beta branch means it will be back to normal on main pretty soon
- 0.9.9.4 - WAR CRIME FIX, BALANCE TWEAKS - 4 September 2025
Fixed bug that caused war crimes to kill human-controlled Mandrillians twice over before they touched the ground Tweaked some values for the decontamination chamber and its fun features Made it easier to get the DIRTY BOMB achievement (sadly that means stirring the disgusting toilet is less guaranteed to benefit your run) Spectator FPV now also shows UI overlays (damage, heals, flashbangs, etc) Reworked the Robot's UI to be semi-spherical, both to improve its look on the spectator FPV and to future-proof it for potential headsets with high FOV Reworked the FX shown on "blood heal" to actually look like blood splattering your screen Said blood splatter overlay will now always appear when a Mandrillian is gibbed near you (instead of only when using the "blood heal" health regen match modifier) On "STOP ON CLEAR" countdown mode, the timer will now stop immediately on the last kill instead…
- 0.9.9.3 - SMALL TWEAKS AND FIXES - 2 September 2025
Added the remaining items (Coop Drone munitions, Plasma Gun) to the Firing Range's item spawner Fixed "Invert Axis" setting not affecting Coop Drones or the Mandrillians' dynamic spawner camera Made the PC settings menu font quite a bit smaller, preventing potential overlaps with the minimap HUD for resolutions with very narrow aspect ratios
- 0.9.X - THE FINAL STRETCH - 1 September 2025
Hello there! This is an important one. The game is pretty much ready for the 1.0 launch barring some minor stuff (as those of you following the latest beta branch cycle know), and I finally have a release date: Escape from Mandrillia will leave Early Access on September 15th, 2025. Its been quite a run! I started this dumb little game as a learning experience (and it shows) - I never expected for people to actually play it, let alone like it. These 5 years have been... interesting, but in the end I'm deeply grateful for the experience. Now, let's check what's new in this final update. WHAT'S NEW NEW GAMEMODE: BRIEFCASE EXTRACTION For a long time, the gameplay loop in Mandrillia has been the "find keycards > use them on gate consoles > get higher clearance keycards > use them all on the final escape zone". It's a fine mode, tailor-made to work on the base versus multiplayer, but it could…
- 0.8.5 - NEW CHALLENGES, MANY FIXES - 12 August 2025
Hello there! This one's gonna be short. Been working hard getting 0.9 ready, but I thought there's enough content here to warrant a main branch update. My main goal right now is to add some variety to the challenges, as until very recently most followed the regular match rules (find magenta keycards, unlock gates, get yellow keycards, escape in the elevator). The addition of the extra zones spiced things up a little, and the Infestation solo challenge had the infected Mandrillian gimmick, but things were mostly the same at a base level. This update brings two new challenges (a solo one and a coop one) with some unique features. There's also a rework of the countdown mode, now being split in three modes: one requires you to escape to stop the countdown, another one lets you either escape or clear the area from enemies, and the final one actually gives the Robot a win if it survives until…
- 0.8.0.4 - HARD HAT - 2 August 2025
New cosmetic: HARD HAT This cosmetic is unlocked by getting the achievement CONTAINER INITIATIVE (I actually had this all set up for the Warehouse update, I just forgor about it until now)
- HOTFIX 2 - 1 August 2025
Fixed extremely embarrassing oversight that could cause Mandrillian Bots to get very confused if you entered an extra zone before the gates fully opened and then stayed there for a while
