OSM Games

A small studio in Vilnius

OSM Games is an independent studio founded in Vilnius, Lithuania, and its own About page is unusually direct about the route it took. Its first notable release was Kartuves, a mobile word game that reached the top of the Lithuanian App Store soon after launch and collected several awards. It is not a blockbuster, but it is a finished product that people actually used.

The same page is candid about what followed. Captain Badass was a vertical shooter built from miniature physical sets using real stop-motion animation, an approach that is slow and costly by design. OSM Games calls it ambitious, unusual and ultimately unsuccessful commercially. The studio says that experience pushed it to rethink scope and experimentation, the habit that has shaped everything since.

From stop-motion to VR experiments

After a quieter period the studio returned through a run of prototypes, most of them exploring interaction in virtual reality. Its site shows short clips of experiments named Wave Twisters, Hub Attack, Viarin, Pirates and an English Kitchen demo. None of these became commercial products, and the studio does not pretend otherwise. They were tests of physical interaction, spatial awareness and stripped-back visual environments.

Those tests became the design vocabulary for the studio's current project. OSM Games says it begins ideas as small playable experiments, prototyping mechanics and interaction models before committing to full production. The result is a team that talks about tactile, readable and surprising systems rather than about feature lists. Its stated preference is small teams, deliberate scope and ideas that improve through iteration.

What Shil is

Shil is a first-person puzzle game set inside an unfinished replica of the protagonist's own mind. The official site compresses the pitch into three lines: beautiful, bizarre, barely logical. Players move through a world drawn in a bold two-colour style, where each level is a new space and progress comes from seeing the world from the right angle rather than from force.

The premise gives the puzzles their logic. The mind is incomplete, so the geometry is unreliable, and what looks solid from one position resolves into something else from another. Shil is described as a silhouette-based game, meaning objects and paths read as flat shapes that only make sense once you move. OSM Games is applying that idea to a first-person camera rather than a side-on view.

How Shil plays

Perspective is the core mechanic and, according to the press material, also the weapon. Shifting your point of view reveals hidden paths and neutralises hostile creatures, some of them invisible from the wrong angle. The press kit lists invisible reptiles, human-sized pistols and invaders from space among the things you meet, alongside friendlier sights such as transparent whales. The tone slides between menace and absurdity on purpose.

An artificial intelligence that built this world acts as a companion and guide, and its motives stay hidden. The studio frames the story as a psychological tug of war in which you choose to trust the AI, resist it, or try to break it, and it promises multiple endings shaped by those choices. Shil is a single-player game, and the store pitch is about deduction and observation rather than action.

The release picture

Shil is in development for a 2027 release. The press kit lists a Q1 2027 window, Windows and Steam Deck as platforms, and Unity as the engine, with the rating still pending and the price to be announced. A press release dated 5 May 2026 and issued from Vilnius says Shil will come to PC and VR platforms in 2027.

VR is the part worth watching, because it is where the studio's prototypes live. The official site carries wishlist links for both Steam and the Meta Quest store, under the app name Shil. The press kit credits OSM Games and Nuostabus Zaidimai as developer, with OSM Games handling publishing. Beyond the window, no exact day or price has been given.

What to expect from a studio this size

OSM Games does not try to look bigger than it is. Every part of its public material stresses the small team, the deliberate scope and the lessons taken from a project that did not sell. That is not false modesty; it explains why Shil is a single-player puzzle game built on one strong visual idea rather than an open world. The two-colour style is also a production decision.

The risk is the familiar one for a small studio with a single bet. A perspective puzzle lives or dies on whether its levels keep finding new things to do with the same trick, and the studio has promised multiple endings and a branching relationship with its AI guide. Whether Shil delivers will be decided by the puzzles, not the trailers.

Games

• Shil

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