There’s something inherently cathartic about turning workplace frustration into pixelated chaos. Monday Syndrome takes that idea and runs with it — hard.
Instead of running with the theme of most rouglites with slow starts and runs taking a while to take off. Monday Syndrome throws you into chaos from the get-go. As soon as players reach their designated floor, hop out the elevator they have to be ready for the havoc. Devilish co-workers, destruction and projectiles.
Great premise
Think Hotline Miami within the rouglite genre and taking place in a office from hell. Players in between the chaos will unlock stationary, chairs or anything else one could potentially find in the aforementioned setting. As well as unlocking the weapons, players will use their collected wages to unlock traits and modifiers that can be slapped onto their weapon of choice to make them even more powerful. Sometimes very game breaking.
During the runs there are to bars players will fill up, and exp bar and ‘boons’ bar. Quite self explanatory the exp bar will reward skill points that can be distributed into a variety of passive bonuses. Boons however will pop up when ready and give players a choice of three traits alongside their flaws that can cause some interesting synergies.
All of this sounds like a perfect game to hop on for a run or two to relax and slowly unlock more and more gear, unfortunately the premise is far greater than the execution.
Just like the in game traits.. everything has a flaw attached
Monday Syndrome ‘officially’ left early access and fully released on February 9th 2026. Yet upon launching the game, the version number still reads v0.7. A small detail that immediately raises eyebrows. More concerning is how much of the structure still feels like an early access build.
Systems appear partially gated in ways that suggest unfinished implementation. More critically, progression doesn’t consistently function as expected. You can unlock new weapons and invest in upgrades, but the game frequently fails to acknowledge those changes until you fully restart it. In a genre built around tight iteration loops — die, upgrade, jump straight back feeling stronger — this kind of friction is deeply disruptive.
There is only one skill tree as the other 3 are ‘unavailable in early access’ and every floor feels the same. Enemies do not scale meaning by floor 5 the player is un-killable, to top it off when you get to the boss… it the same TV every time, which also doesn’t scale in difficulty.
My Conclusion
There is a genuinely good game underneath these issues. The combat works. The progression ideas are solid. The random boon system introduces meaningful variety. The concept is clever and thematically cohesive.
But releasing under a 1.0 banner while still displaying a early access restriction and lack of polish makes it difficult to recommend at this moment. Not because the core design is flawed, but because the experience doesn’t yet feel complete.
Monday Syndrome is fun. It’s chaotic. It’s cathartic. The foundation is there. The price tag doesn’t ask much but once again that’s not the issue. Once the developers bring this title up to what has been promised I’d be happy to change my score but for now, I say give it a miss.
