Freefall '95 Is Coming To Steam On Monday, And It's Weirder Than It Sounds

Melbourne indie studio S-Bend Games is closing in on launch day. The studio's debut title Freefall '95 hits Steam on Monday, June 1. The pitch is straightforward on the surface: you're a survivor of a mid-air airplane disaster, falling toward Earth, and you need to pull off tricks to score points before the inevitable. Talk about making the best out of an awful situation.

The game is built around a time loop. Every time you hit the ground, you wake back up on the plane, still mid-disaster, and do it again. Between runs, you interact with other passengers, spend coins on upgrades, and slowly piece together what's actually causing all of this. The combo system lets you do tricks mid-air, rack up points, and gain currency that helps you unravel the mystery of both the disaster and the time loop, giving you more reasons to keep falling.

Tricks, Items, Bullet Hell, Time Loops

The tricks combo system is the core of Freefall '95. The scoring system rewards aggression. Grabbing items mid-fall, whether broken aircraft parts, passenger luggage, or snakes (yes, there are snakes in this plane), and chaining them with tricks like backflips, somersaults, and the Worm, builds massive combo multipliers. Different items you can grab, like the Electromagnet that pulls collectibles toward you or the Repulsor that clears your path, can be combined to make more absurd items like a spinning orbit of debris around your body that falls as you do. It is the kind of chaos that thrives in looping games like this that will surely burn a lot of your hours, saying, "just one more run."

The game escalates sharply as you unlock new stages (yes, there are stages). Clear skies give way to stormy mountains, erupting volcanoes, and environments that introduce zone-specific hazards like ice blasts, lightning, and flaming projectiles. In later levels, Freefall '95 is close to feeling like a bullet hell game masquerading as a casual arcade scorefest game. S-Bend cites classic '90s extreme sports games as the inspiration, and the nostalgic art style and soundtrack back that up. You'll surely see the inspirations when you play the game: Tony Hawk's, VMX, the works.

Freefall '95 ships with five levels reimagined across three difficulty tiers for 15 total stages, plus dozens of arcade-style Challenge Levels designed for quick score-attack runs. The Roguelike Gauntlet mode chains 3, 5, or 7 levels back-to-back on a single health bar, with three-option reward drafts at milestones. Friends-only and worldwide leaderboards track scores across every level.

There's also a demo available on Steam right now if you want to feel the fall ahead of the launch on Monday.

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This story was originally published May 27, 2026 at 3:25 PM.