My immediate reaction to Animal Use Protocol, elicited through an image of a grim-looking monkey holding a mouse, was what you might expect: Why is that monkey holding a mouse? I was curious, as the saying goes—but after learning the game is being developed by The Brotherhood, very suddenly I was interested.

The Brotherhood is an indie studio based in South Africa whose previous releases include Stasis, Stasis: Bone Totem, and Beautiful Desolation—all of them isometric point-and-click adventures, decidedly strange and more than a little creepy. The Stasis games (and the free prequel chapter, Cayne) are straight-up horror affairs, while Beautiful Desolation is something of a departure—not so much unpleasant as just balls-out weird. None of them have been breakout hits but I dig their vibe, and so when I saw The Brotherhood was taking a shot at a first-person game, I wanted to know more.

Animal Use Protocol is an entirely new thing for The Brotherhood, unconnected to any of its past work, but it does have one thing in common with those earlier games: It looks weird. You play as Penn, a super-intelligent chimpanzee armed with a “gravity manipulation device” who’s leading a lab animal jailbreak; your pal is not a mouse but actually a rat named Trip. It’s not clear whether Trip is also super-smart, but he seems to be wearing a Tamagotchi on his ass, which—entirely speculatively—I could see being used as a communications device.

Superficially it sounds like the basis for a cute Disney production—The Big Adventures of Bongo and Mr Nibbles—but Animal Use Protocol is not some kind of Madagascarian do-over. The game is set in a “nightmarish facility” where things have gone very, very wrong, and “every corner hides new terror.” And not everyone wants to escape, as it turns out: As you try to find your way to freedom, you’ll be “relentlessly stalked by a monstrous chimera of experiments gone wrong.”

It’s a weird one, right? It’s obviously too far out to make any judgments as to whether Animal Use Protocol will be good—it’s not due until sometime in 2026, on Steam and GOG—but I am undeniably intrigued. I’m also just a small, tiny bit worried that something absolutely awful is going to happen to those little baby penguins. Oh, I do hope not.

(Oh, and for the record: Trip is definitely wearing a Tamagotchi on his ass.)