Seven reviews. Four hundred and forty-three concurrent players. In a new-release batch where most titles are fighting for double digits, Harmonia Games and Aiolos Studios have a legitimate launch-day outlier on their hands.

Don’t Panic! It is Just Turbulence is a two-player co-op puzzle game in the vein of Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes — one player sits in the cockpit, the other acts as air traffic control, and both scramble to decrypt failing instruments before the plane meets a mountain. The concept is immediately streamable. One player fights for survival while their friend, safe on the ground, frantically flips through manuals. The comedy writes itself.

And that appears to be exactly what’s happening. One Steam reviewer notes they received the game for free from a streamer friend who wasn’t interested, then played it for three hours with another friend while broadcasting on Twitch. That’s the full viral loop in a single sentence: creator passes copy → player picks it up → player streams it → viewers see the chaos and buy in.

The $6.39 launch discount (20% off the $7.99 base price) keeps the barrier to entry low enough that impulse purchases after a funny clip aren’t a hard sell. The Guardian previewed it back in March alongside four other indie standouts from Steam Next Fest, calling it “both hysterically funny and panic-inducing” — early press that likely seeded wishlists ahead of today’s release.

Six of seven user reviews are positive. The top-rated one simply reads: “it’s so fun really.” Another paints a vivid picture of flying into a storm while the cockpit flashes “like a Christmas tree having a breakdown” and the air traffic controller — who claimed to know what they were doing — watches safely from the ground.

The sample size is tiny. The numbers, relative to its indie cohort, are not. If Harmonia Games can keep the Twitch momentum going, this one might have legs well past launch week.

Sources