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A surprising highlight of this year’s PAX East 2026 expo floor was the return of falsework’s Spider Lily. This indie platformer about a skeleton trying to guide and protect a blind fish through the afterlife has made a tremendous amount of progress in the past year. Last year, I mentioned Spider Lily in my article about promising demos at PAX East 2025. At the time, the game had very little other than a proof-of-concept demo where the player could pick up a fish and walk around a small area. Despite the game not having much to it, the developers were clearly passionate about the project, and it stayed in the minds of those who saw it. This year, I am more than happy to report that over the course of the past year, the game has had some major developments, and a full demo was playable at PAX East 2026. Was this demo a good showcase of what this game will be? Let’s break it down piece by piece and make the decision for ourselves.
The demo on display allowed players to play through a full tutorial stage and allowed us to grasp what type of game Spider Lily will actually be. At the start of the game, the player will be introduced to the fish they will need to protect, which they can pick up with the simple push of a button. When carrying the fish, the player must be swift as they carry it from pond to pond around the world. This is because the fish has a limited amount of oxygen when outside of the water. Holding onto the fish for too long will cause their oxygen meter to deplete and lead to a game over.
This creates a good sense of pacing as you are always running from pool to pool within the stage to keep your fish companion safe. This makes progression from set piece to set piece flow naturally, as you are always headed toward where you can see the next pool of water.
Of course, your fish friend is more than just an object that you have to carry around. He’s also your main tool of progression, as you will frequently need to place him onto statues, which act as weighted switches when the fish is placed on them, as well as checkpoint pools, which will save your progress each time the fish is placed on them.
Another fish-related mechanic featured in the demo is the ability to pull out a small drum to make noise and direct the fish to your location while it swims through the water. This allows you to guide the fish through areas with larger pools of water without needing to carry it the whole way. One area in particular had the player hop along rock platforms surrounded by water as you guide the fish next to you.
While the demo was relatively short, the amount of creativity on display for what kind of situations the player will have to guide their fish friend through left me impressed. From needing to platform on your own to get the fish back from a crow who stole it to using your drum to direct the fish through a maze of walls, no puzzle was similar to the last.
Now, this demo is by no means perfect and did have several issues that became apparent when I was playing. The largest of these issues was the inconsistent framerate, which would fluctuate and frequently drop. This was most prominent during the first minute of the demo, which ran significantly slower than the rest. I sincerely hope this issue can be fixed soon.
Of course, gameplay isn’t the only thing worth talking about with Spider Lily. As this was a game developed around the lead artist’s work, we must spend some time talking about the amazing visual aesthetics and design of the game. While this game isn’t the most graphically impressive on the planet, the aesthetics on display for both its world and main character are sublime.
The world and game design of Spider Lily have an aesthetic that is, according to the developers, a combination of the Buddhist cycle of rebirth and Wastewater Treatment Plants. In this world, souls are cleansed slowly in the same way that water is. Everywhere the player goes in the demo, they will encounter old stone buildings that have water pipes piercing through them that lead to large basins to store it.
Keeping this Wastewater Treatment metaphor in mind, the water you will be seeing and placing the blind fish in throughout the game will also change while you play. As the player makes their way through the game, the wastewater will change color to show their progress. At the beginning of the demo, it starts as a deep red, but slowly becomes lighter shades such as orange as you progress, before finally turning into a clear blue.
This is an incredible piece of storytelling that occurs without any dialogue being spoken. Even if the player is unfamiliar with the Buddhist reincarnation aspect of the story, just seeing a stage become more comforting as you’re placing your fish into clear water instead of dark red sludge makes it feel like you’re doing a good deed.
The main character of the game, The Lost Soul, has a design that is both very simple and very striking. Despite not having a mouth or eyes, one can see both sadness and curiosity on this character’s face at all times. Seeing the art of this skeleton dressed in red on the booth again after a year is actually how I found Spider Lily’s demo this year, and I wasn’t at all shocked to learn from the developers that many people who visited this year wanted the stickers of The Lost Soul that the team was giving away.
To take a brief aside from talking about the demo to talk about the team behind it and their presence at PAX, I would just like to spend a few paragraphs talking about how passionate the team behind Spider Lily was and how impressed I was with their devotion to this project.
According to one of the developers who was present at PAX, their plans for the game have been completely rescoped and redesigned since the original 2025 presentation. While I do not have a full scope on how different the game has become from those original plans, I am quite pleased with what was on display this year.
Alongside the main demo, falseworks also had a demake version of the game on display at their PAX East 2026 booth. According to the developers, this demake was developed by an intern who impressed the team in GB Studio. Sadly, there isn’t much to talk about with this demake version, as it is only about two minutes long and only includes the first puzzle of the main game’s demo.
At the booth, the developers also assured me that no AI was used at any point during the creation of the game’s art or code, which is always a positive in this current era, where a lot of developers have been throwing away their integrity to chase a technological trend.
The small 6-person development team at falsework is currently looking for a publisher to assist with Spider Lily. Despite this, the game is currently slated for a release date of 2027. As I stated at the beginning of the article, I am extremely impressed by the team’s progress in the past year and will be keeping my eye on future Spider Lily-related news. For now, I would heavily encourage that anyone reading this to wishlist the game on Steam.
