Early access to Killer Inn was met with mixed reviews and less than 1,000 CCU

Killer Inn's early access period began earlier this week, but it seems it's not going too well as it's been met with mixed reviews and hasn't even reached 1,000 concurrent players on Steam.

As anyone who's been waiting for news on Kingdom Hearts 4 knows, Square Enix is in a bit of a weird place right now. Last year it announced it was changing strategies to focus more on its big Triple-A franchises, which basically left the company in somewhat of a reset state while it figured things out.

It announced a brand new IP, Killer Inn, at last year's Summer Game Fest. The Social Decay genre is very crowded these days and it's hard to break through, so this seemed like a very big risk on Square Enix's part and angered many fans after waiting to see updates to its other series. That risk doesn't seem to have paid off so far.

Killer Inn launches in early access to mixed reviews and a low CCU

“a mess”

Killer Inn's early access period started a few days ago on February 12, but it doesn't seem to have made much of an impact on release day. According to SteamDB, the game had a peak concurrent player count of just 813 players, down from as low as 237 earlier in the day.

Killer In is currently only available on Steam, so the player count is fully accurate once across the game's entire playerbase.

A character holding a gun in Killer Inn.

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Considering that Killer Inn is only a multiplayer game, those early player numbers aren't really a good sign for the game, especially in early access, when the game is cheap to get in and try out. Killer Inn's closed beta previously had over 1,000 concurrent players, so it's strange to see it drop when the doors are open to everyone.

It would be a little less worrisome if players were at least really digging into the killer and spreading some good word of mouth, but that's not the case either. At the time of writing, Killer Inn's Steam page sits with a “mixed” review score after 206 reviews, more than half of which are negative.

Based on these reviews, it seems that the main issue that many players have is that there is not much social cut in games, and very little communication, with some suggesting that region lock could help things. Combine that with connection issues, “boring” quests, and an unfair balance between Wolves and Lambs, and things aren't going so well for Killer Inn.