"Have you ever wanted to just be a worm for a day?" asks Riley Neville, the creator of the wacky annelid simulator Wirm. To which my response is "Not until now." Crawling through the ground while pushing dirt through my pink and boneless body has, you'll be surprised to hear, never sounded like a fun time. But the adorable trailer for Neville's upcoming physics platformer has got me wondering whether I'm somehow missing out.
Wirm belongs to the same floppy family of games as Bennett Foddy's QWOP and Getting Over It, a 2D adventure about bypassing obstacles in a form ill-suited to navigating rough terrain. Yet where Foddy's games have an emphasis on challenge, Wirm appears to adopt a gentler approach—more about the low-key joys of being a worm than getting your ass kicked as one.
Wirm furnishes you with the full powers of a limbless invertebrate. Your peristaltic locomotion allows you to crawl over most obstacles, and those which cannot be overcome may be, er, undercome by digging through surrounding soil. Finally, you'll be able to embrace that most commonly understood annelid ability—flying through space.
I'm not joking. The trailer for Wirm mainly depicts said worm travelling through the undergrowth, digging through soil, bouncing on a mushroom, and chewing through some fruit like a certain very hungry invertebrate that's a bit like a worm but isn't one. But the very end of the trailer shows the worm ascending into the cosmos. Responding to comments about Wirm's trailer on Bluesky, Neville reveals this is more than just a visual flourish. "Not to spoil too much, but a decent chunk of this game is already set in space."
Have you ever wanted to just be a worm for a day? Then good news because we're announcing a new game! wirm is coming SOON! 🪱🪱🪱🪱🪱🪱🪱🪱🍎 Wishlist it on Steam! store.steampowered.com/app/1934870/...
— @riley.sbug.games (@riley.sbug.games.bsky.social) 2025-09-11T17:14:45.231Z
Wirm isn't out until later this year, but it already has its fans, not least Grim Fandango and Psychonauts creator Tim Schafer, who shared the trailer on Bluesky. "Okay, I know nothing about this worm game except that it looks super cute and fun," Schafer writes.
We do know that Neville has proven credentials making games about creepy-crawlies. The last game developed by his studio SBug games was Webbed, a physics-platformer about a spider. This proved a pretty big hit when it launched in 2021, and has garnered an 'Overwhelmingly Positive' Steam rating out of almost 13,000 reviews to date.
Wirm isn't the only impending physics platformer that's adopting a friendlier approach to Foddian gymnastics. Bennett Foddy's next game, Baby Steps, is due to release in just a couple of weeks. A 3D hiking sim in which you must guide a onesie-wearing manbaby up an enormous mountain, the main path of Baby Steps is designed to be a more accessible experience than Foddy's previous games. That said, Foddy has caveated this point by stating that Baby Steps' optional paths are "harder than Getting Over It by quite some distance".
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