Plungeez, the 16-Bit Plumbing Metroidvania, Gets an August 13 Release Date

Here is a sentence I did not expect to write: there is a new Metroidvania where you actually do the plumbing. Plungeez, from the Brazilian studio Team Zeroth and published by QUByte Interactive, has a release date. It arrives August 13, 2026, on Switch, PC, PlayStation, and Xbox, all on the same day.

The pitch is the kind of thing a retro site is contractually obligated to love. It looks like a lost 16-bit game, all crisp pixel art and interconnected corridors, but it throws out the one thing every Metroidvania since Super Metroid has kept: combat. There are no enemies to shoot, no bosses to pattern out. What you get instead is a plunger. You stick it to walls to climb, you fix broken pipes and coax old boilers back to life, and you pick up new tools (a wrench, a diving suit) that open the doors you walked past an hour ago. It is Metroidvania traversal and backtracking with the fighting swapped out for problem-solving.

I appreciate the joke buried in the premise, whether or not the developers meant it. Gaming’s most famous character is a plumber who, across four decades and a hundred games, has essentially never once plumbed. Plungeez calls the bluff. You play as Bôni, a water-treatment worker who falls into a maze of tunnels under the historic center of Salvador, and the puzzles are the actual work: pipes, pressure, water, the guts of a city. The labyrinth is drawn from real sewers in Salvador, Bahia, which is a detail that would read as a knock on any other game and here lands as a selling point.

QUByte publishing it is a small tell too. This is a label retro players know from a long run of re-releases and collections, so a brand-new game built to look and move like a Mega Drive title is squarely in its wheelhouse. There is a demo up on Steam now if you want to try the pipes before August. I think I will.