Title: Don’t Go Live Demo
Developer: Lake On Fire
Publisher: Lake On Fire
Demo Release Date: April 29, 2026
Full Game Release Date: TBA
Platforms: PC
Reviewed on: PC
Price: TBA

Author’s Note: A key was provided for this game by Lake On Fire.

Don’t Go Live is a first-person paranormal horror game where you play as a streamer participating in urbex (urban exploration) in abandoned spots. In the demo, we’re given a single location to investigate with our stream’s chat. The game’s core function revolves around integrating your real Twitch chat into the world. Audience reactions influence the environment and the entity after you. If you don’t have a Twitch account or active chat, don’t worry. You can choose to play without one!

Going Solo

In Don’t Go Live, you’re given two options in the beginning. You can connect your own Twitch channel to experience the game with a real chat or go solo and play with a simulated chat. For the demo, I decided to go for the latter as I don’t have access to any chat that would influence my game in the way it’s intended to. Most people might find themselves choosing the second option for the same reasons. Though, once the game fully releases, I’m excited to join as a chatter for another player with a big enough audience.

Gameplay

Once you start the demo, you’re walking into a haunted mansion, playing as a streamer who faces the camera while walking around. The goal of the game is clear. You’re meant to get reactions from the chat, gain a certain amount of subscribers, and try not to lose engagement from the live audience. Without an active Twitch chat, I found that I didn’t lose the experience that a real chat would have provided. The simulated chat reacts to what you encounter and it’s pretty realistic to how an average Twitch chat behaves.

Presentation

As you explore the mansion, you can interact with multiple rooms and the objects within them. The entity after you reacts to sound and the stream activity. As you gain more viewers, the paranormal activity gets worse. A touch I personally loved were the dynamic facial expressions that the streamer flipped through on their robotic mask. I liked that there was incentive to run straight towards paranormal happenings. In a normal situation, you’d run away, but in order to keep the chat engaged and the views up, you have to keep the camera pointed at anomalies all while you stay clear of a monster chasing you. The creepiness of it all is executed well. I did get scared a few times and besides the floating objects, the activity varied throughout the house.

Final Score (3.5 out of 5 Stars)

Don’t Go Live has a lot of potential. While playing the demo, I can tell it has a good framework for the full game at large. There’s bound to be more maps, entities, and other ways the stream affects the gameplay. With a real chat connected to the game, I imagine it opens the door for replayability from an unpredictable chat. Once the full game comes out, I hope the locations have a cohesive story that players are able to unravel paired with the primary goal of getting the views up.

Featured Image: Lake On Fire

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