Stick It to the Stickman has spent the last year letting players kick a man out of a window and call it professional development. Developer Free Lives and publisher Devolver Digital have now confirmed the game is finally leaving the safety of Early Access. Version 1.0 lands on September 23, and if you’ve been putting off climbing the corporate ladder, this is probably your cue.
Punching Your Way Up the Ladder
For the uninitiated, Stick It to the Stickman is a physics based brawler with a premise so blunt it borders on admirable. You play as a minimum wage stickman fighting through an endless sea of red suited coworkers, using everything from staple guns to chainsaws to weaponized farts, all in pursuit of one goal…Becoming CEO.
It plays like Broforce’s chaos filtered through a corporate satire lens, which tracks, since Free Lives is the same studio behind Broforce, along with GORN and Genital Jousting. If you know those games, you already know roughly what kind of humor you’re signing up for.
What is 1.0 Adding?
What’s kept people playing for a year isn’t just the slapstick violence, it’s the structure underneath it. Each run has you battling up through different corporate departments, unlocking new business techniques and gear along the way, with 20 classes and four game modes already in the Early Access build. According to the official announcement, the full release is going even further than that.
Two new modes are being added, described only as Neurolink and something the press release keeps deliberately redacted, which will apparently wrap up the story of the game’s Founder and its Shareholders. There are also two new archetypes joining the roster, the Ninja and the Negotiator, alongside new passives, new bosses, and new level segments to fight through.
Building Your Own Company
The other big addition is a Level Builder with full Steam Workshop support, so players will be able to design and share their own custom companies for other people to brawl through. Given how much of this game’s appeal already comes from its community, that feels like the right call. Free Lives has leaned on player feedback throughout Early Access, and the studio has said the community will keep shaping things through its Discord and the Steam forums even after 1.0 ships.
How Players have Actually Responded
It’s also worth noting how well this has landed with players so far. The game currently sits at Overwhelmingly Positive across more than 8,000 reviews, with 96% of English language reviewers giving it a thumbs up, and recent reviews are trending Very Positive too. That’s not a small thing for an Early Access title that’s spent a year asking people to trust the process.