From PC to PlayStation, Xbox and Switch: Bringing PEPPERED to Consoles

What happens when an existential platformer leaves the PC?

It gets a new life on consoles. PEPPERED: An Existential Platformer, developed by Mostly Games, launched on PC in April 2025 and reached PlayStation, Xbox and Nintendo Switch in April 2026. We are proud to have been the team behind that journey, and this is the story of how it worked.

PEPPERED is not a typical platformer, and that is the whole point. Porting it meant protecting a very specific kind of personality: the weird humor, the branching story, and the feeling that every choice and every failure counts.

A game that gives you one shot

You have ONE SHOT at everything.

The premise of PEPPERED is simple and unusual. An office intern decides to save the world from an approaching apocalypse while everyone else shrugs it off, and the world responds by sending the police, an angry mob and a media cycle that brands the hero a terrorist.

What makes the game stand out is how seriously it takes consequences. Choices change characters, scenes and endings. Failures lead to unique locations with their own characters and mechanics. Boss fights are one-shot: lose, and the game does not reset or hand you a second attempt. The story simply carries on with your failure built into it.

Mechanics like these are a gift to players and a careful design constraint for anyone porting the game. Anything that quietly breaks that promise, whether a save that restores the wrong state or a build that crashes in the middle of a boss, does more damage than it would in a conventional platformer.

Branching stories and save data

Remembering everything, on every platform.

A branching narrative with multiple endings is, under the hood, a large pile of state: which choices you made, which fights you lost, which secret you found. All of it has to be written, restored and kept consistent on each console, and each console has its own rules about how that is allowed to happen.

That is where platform integration earns its keep. Every platform handles saving, cloud sync, profile changes and suspending a game differently, and platform holders check those behaviours during certification. We covered the details of why this matters in our glossary entries on save data compliance and system suspend. For a game built around lasting consequences, getting them right is not a checkbox, it is part of the experience.

The Xbox edition shows what that looks like in practice: it is optimized for Xbox Series X|S, supports Smart Delivery, and includes Xbox Achievements and cloud saves, so progress and rewards follow the player the way Xbox players expect.

One-shot fights on a controller

Same game. New way to play.

A one-shot boss fight only works if the controls are dependable. On PC, the game could lean on keyboard precision. On consoles, the same fights, stealth sections and platforming had to feel natural on a gamepad, because there is no second try waiting to forgive a sluggish input.

Controller support is more than remapping buttons. It means tuning how inputs are read so jumps and timing behave as players expect, and handling the unglamorous edge cases that console players run into every day, such as a controller disconnecting mid-fight. In a game where one failure can change the story, those edge cases deserve extra attention. We cover the broader design side of this in UX/UI on consoles.

Keeping the weirdness intact

Personality is the hardest thing to port.

PEPPERED has a deliberately strange sense of humor. There are random escapes, corporate absurdity and the kind of jokes that depend on timing and on the text being readable. Moving to a TV screen, and to a handheld screen on Nintendo Switch, changes how that text and UI read.

The goal on a project like this is invisible work. Dialogue boxes, menus and prompts should behave the way the original designers intended, on a big living-room display and on a small portable one. When a port is done well, nobody notices it. The player just notices that the game is funny, and that they can still spin on the office chair.

Three ecosystems, one game

Five hardware targets, one experience.

PEPPERED did not arrive on one new console, it arrived on three families at once: PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5, Xbox One and Xbox Series X|S, and Nintendo Switch. That means supporting both the previous and the current generation on two of those platforms, plus a console that plays both docked and handheld.

Every one of those targets has its own performance profile, its own store requirements and its own conventions for achievements, saves and system features. Keeping the experience consistent means treating feature parity as a goal and making deliberate decisions where hardware differs, rather than shipping five slightly different games. You can read how we approach each platform on our PlayStation, Xbox and Nintendo Switch pages.

QA and certification

The part players never see.

A game with branching paths and multiple endings creates a lot of ground to cover in testing. Every route, every failure state and every ending has to be reachable and stable, on every platform, and a bug in a rare branch is just as visible to the player who finds it as a bug in the opening level.

That is why quality assurance runs alongside the technical work instead of at the end of it. Careful regression testing and compatibility testing keep fixes from reopening old problems, and console certification then verifies the build against each platform holder's requirements before the game can ship. If you want to see where ports tend to go wrong, we wrote about the biggest mistakes in porting a game, and the lessons apply here as well.

The result

One game. Three console ecosystems. A whole lot of existential dread.

PEPPERED is now available on PlayStation 4 and 5, Xbox One and Xbox Series X|S, and Nintendo Switch. The original PC release was a success on its own terms, and the console versions give the game a whole new audience without taking away what made it special.

Congratulations to the Mostly Games team, and thank you for trusting LYNXBYTE GAMES with the porting journey. You can see the PEPPERED case study in our portfolio, along with more of our work, including Trail Out on PlayStation 5 and The Cub on Xbox.

If you have a game you want to bring to consoles, get a free estimate and we will walk you through what the process would look like for your title.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is PEPPERED: An Existential Platformer?

It is a narrative-driven 2D platformer developed by Mostly Games. You have one shot at everything: choices and failures change the story, bosses can only be fought once, and the game has multiple endings, stealth sections and a distinctly weird sense of humor.

Which platforms is PEPPERED available on?

PC, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S and Nintendo Switch. The PC version launched in April 2025 and the console versions followed in April 2026.

Who developed and who published the console versions of PEPPERED?

Mostly Games developed the game. The console versions are published by LYNXBYTE GAMES, which also handled the port, including platform integration, optimization, controller support, QA and certification.

What makes a branching, one-shot game harder to port to console?

Its state matters more than usual. Save data, cloud sync and suspend and resume have to preserve every choice and failure correctly on each platform, controls have to be dependable in fights you only get once, and testing has to cover every branch and ending.

Does the Xbox version support Xbox-specific features?

Yes. The Xbox edition is optimized for Xbox Series X|S and supports Smart Delivery, Xbox Achievements and Xbox cloud saves.