Hellcouch gets you off the couch.

Hellcouch — Your butt releases demons trapped in a couch

Of all the things I saw at the Game Developers Conference this week, Hellcouch was the weirdest. A lot of thought has gone into this game, which uses your butt, or maybe the couch, as an input device.

I gave it about 12 seconds before I had to move on to my next appointment. You can look at it in the video. In Hellcouch, you have to use your butt to free a demon from the couch.

You have to shuffle where you sit with a couple of other players, and they move from spot to spot to exorcise the couch. It was the brain child of Carol Mertz and Francesca Carletto-Leon, who attend the NYU Game Center program. Their interest was to make strangers feel silly together. They used Arduino and Unity to put it together.

I would have liked to have sat on the couch and just lay there. I didn’t really have much energy after walking 31.9 miles over five days at GDC 2019. Maybe next year, when Hellcouch 2.0 arrives.

Dean Takahashi

Dean Takahashi is editorial director for GamesBeat at VentureBeat. He has been a tech journalist since 1988, and he has covered games as a beat since 1996. He was lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat from 2008 to April 2025. Prior to that, he wrote for the San Jose Mercury News, the Red Herring, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the Dallas Times-Herald. He is the author of two books, "Opening the Xbox" and "The Xbox 360 Uncloaked." He organizes the annual GamesBeat Next, GamesBeat Summit and GamesBeat Insider Series: Hollywood and Games conferences and is a frequent speaker at gaming and tech events. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.