Interdimensional Vending Machine is a zany SCP inspired Filipino-made game available on Steam

At first glance, Interdimensional Vending Machine sounds like a joke. The premise revolves around a homeless girl surviving in a distorted city by begging for coins and feeding herself from a vending machine that dispenses impossible food. Some items are harmless. Others alter the body, reshape reality, or push the player further away from being human. Every meal becomes a gamble between survival and transformation and it makes for quite the interesting game.

Released on Steam last June 10, the psychological horror title draws direct inspiration from SCP-261, the Pan-Dimensional Vending Machine, one of the most famous entries in the SCP Foundation universe. Players explore a surreal city, manage hunger and thirst, interact with other survivors, and slowly evolve based on what they consume. The game’s central loop revolves around begging, feeding, and discovery, with dozens of anomalies hidden behind the machine’s unpredictable rewards.

For Neuroticfly Games co-founder and Game Director Kenneth ‘Kenoma’ Versoza, the idea had been sitting in the back of his mind for years.

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“I’ve always liked SCP-261,” he said. “I’ve always been itching myself on creating some sort of game based from SCP-261.”

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The concept remained dormant until a trip to Japan changed things.

“It was only after our visit from Japan that I’ve finally gotten the creative urge to create the first prototype of the game,” he said. “There’s something addictive to Japanese vending machines that really got me good.”

That combination of SCP fiction and real-world inspiration became the foundation for the entire project.

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“The core part of the game is SCP-261, which everything else revolves on,” Kenoma explained. “Everything that we had to add to the game has to be connected to the vending machine.”

Before becoming a game developer, Kenoma spent years writing SCP stories and consuming horror fiction. His development career officially began in 2018 as part of a Computer Science thesis project. Among his gaming influences are Impossible Creatures, Minecraft, and Spore.

Ironically, when asked which games inspired Interdimensional Vending Machine, his answer was none.

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“To be honest, it’s none,” he said. “That’s why it was so hard to make and develop.”

Instead, the game’s DNA comes from SCP fiction, Japanese vending machine culture, and the works of H.P. Lovecraft. Kenoma cites The Shadow Out of Time as his favorite Lovecraft story and one he has reread multiple times since childhood.

That literary influence can be felt throughout the game’s approach to mystery. Rather than explaining every anomaly, Interdimensional Vending Machine leaves much of its world open to interpretation.

“The biggest challenge is the worldbuilding part,” Kenoma said. “We don’t want to spoon feed everything to still leave the players theorizing themselves, but we also don’t want to not tell anything and make everything too vague.”

The balancing act became one of the hardest parts of development. The team wanted players to uncover the world’s secrets without turning the experience into a collection of lore dumps.

Unexpectedly, another major challenge came from something much more practical.

“It’s the hunger system,” Kenoma said. “Never did I expect that a game based from getting food from a vending machine would be hard to design a hunger system that actually works in-game.”

The version players see today is not exactly the version Kenoma originally envisioned. He estimates the current game represents around 60 percent of his initial concept.

“We really stayed on the core anomaly and focused on what players liked the most: transformations.”

Those transformations have become one of the game’s defining features. As players consume increasingly bizarre food and drinks, their bodies begin to mutate in different directions. Community discussions, fan art, and gameplay videos have largely centered around discovering new forms and uncovering hidden outcomes.

One of the project’s biggest turning points came when horror YouTuber ManlyBadAssHero featured the game. The creator’s videos helped expose the title to a much larger audience and introduced many players to its unsettling blend of survival mechanics and body horror.

“At this moment, his video has 1.4 million views, so it’s a waste to really ignore that success,” Kenoma said.

Another milestone arrived when the team realized how quickly Steam wishlists were growing.

“It was when we’ve gotten 10,000-plus wishlists on Steam without us realizing.”

The numbers continued to climb. Earlier this month, Neuroticfly revealed that the game had surpassed 42,000 wishlists ahead of launch. According to Kenoma, the figure has since crossed 50,000.

For an independent studio, visibility remains one of the biggest obstacles.

“Mostly just exposure, since our social accounts have little followers,” he said.

Even player feedback has produced surprises. Of all the systems in the game, Kenoma did not expect one particular mechanic to resonate as strongly as it did.

“It’s really surprising that they somehow unusually like the begging part of the game.”

As for the strangest anomaly in the game, his answer came immediately.

“I suppose it’s the bottle of fetus that evolves every day.”

With Interdimensional Vending Machine now available on Steam, Neuroticfly is already looking ahead. The studio is working on a sequel while developing several new projects, including Aswang Hunter, Jeep Horror, and another SCP-inspired title called Bear Horror.

Looking back, Kenoma believes the game’s origin offers a lesson for aspiring developers.

“What ultimately inspired me to make this game is an actual real life experience, and it’s mundane. Simply just vending machines.”

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It’s an unlikely starting point for a horror game about reality-warping food, body mutations, and interdimensional anomalies. Yet it was enough to turn an old SCP obsession into one of the more distinctive indie horror releases of 2026.