Every year we have a number of highly anticipated games. AAA titles that we have been waiting for years for, indies that arrive as a promise, and also titles that seem to come out of nowhere to steal the spotlight. For this 2025, everything points to the indie title REPO being the one that takes the palms, becoming a success in the Steam charts, and staying in the first places. However, for its creators, Semiwork, success was not something they expected.
REPO, an all or nothing for Semiwork
Their previous game, Voidigo, had taken six long years to develop and had fallen short of the team’s expectations. According to Pontus Sundström, Semiwork’s marketing manager, who recently provided a documentary on the creation of REPO, embarking on this new project was “a big risk to take, as Voidigo hadn’t been successful enough to guarantee a next step,” he said in a video.
Walter Tischkewitz, co-CEO, artist, and programmer at Semiwork, recalls the team’s mindset: “We can’t take this next step. Let’s just fail quickly this time. We took all the money from Voidigo and we put it all into this game REPO.”
This bold strategy paid off spectacularly. However, REPO was not always the game we know and enjoy today. It was originally conceived as a single-player clean-up game, with a multiplayer component added later. It was when the flaccid-headed characters were added that the developers felt they were on the right track. “We just played around with that and we realized this is pretty funny,” Tischkewitz recalls.
However, the cleaning mechanic didn’t quite work. Realizing that nothing was keeping players together, they decided to turn it into a movement game. From there, it evolved into a tax collection game where players had to enter haunted houses and work as a team to extract as many valuables as possible.
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