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Pillow Champ brings fluffy fighting with a story by El Paso, Elsewhere's director in 2024

Frosty Pop is working with Strange Scaffold's Xalavier Nelson Jr. to bring a soft-hitting melee that harkens back to Street Fighter 2.

TJ Denzer

November 14, 2023 6:00 AM

Image via Frosty Pop

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It would seem we’ll have an indie addition to the fighting game circuit in early 2024. Indie studio Frosty Pop, in collaboration with Strange Scaffold’s Xalavier Nelson Jr., have announced Pillow Champ. It’s a fighting game that’s inspired by and leans into the vibes of Street Fighter 2 with a twist: characters are rocking each other’s socks off in pillow fights.

Frosty Pop announced Pillow Champ with a teaser trailer on its YouTube channel, as well as listing the game on Steam this week. The game will feature eight brawlers with cultures and styles from around the world as they do battle with pillows in a genre-subverting melee. What’s more, the game will feature a narrative penned by Xalavier Nelson Jr., lead of Strange Scaffold and director of the recently successful El Paso, Elsewhere, along many other titles (we particularly liked Sunshine Shuffle). Pillow Champ is currently planned for release on Nintendo Switch, PC, and Netflix Games sometime in early 2024.

Frosty Pop itself has made quite a few indie games. The crew put out The Pinball Wizard in late 2022, which is a dungeon crawler mixed with pinball mechanics that earned some praise from the community. They also released Deck ‘Em in 2023, which mixes boxing with Solitaire. Clearly the studio has fun with mixing and bending genres, and Pillow Champ looks like it’s going to do that, too. Besides having eight fighters to play and a vibrantly colorful-looking art style, the developers are also looking to include offline single player with a career mode, as well as local and online multiplayer with rollback netcode.

Pillow Champ looks like it could be a quirky addition to the indie fighting game scene. With only an early 2024 release window on PC, Switch, and Netflix Games at the moment, we’ll look forward to learning more about the game next year. Until then, stay tuned for updates here at Shacknews.

TJ Denzer

Senior News Editor

TJ Denzer is a player and writer with a passion for games that has dominated a lifetime. He found his way to the Shacknews roster in late 2019 and has worked his way to Senior News Editor since. Between news coverage, he also aides notably in livestream projects like the indie game-focused Indie-licious, the Shacknews Stimulus Games, and the Shacknews Dump. You can reach him at tj.denzer@shacknews.com and also find him on Twitter @JohnnyChugs.