A Virus Named TOM: Puzzle Hacking, Enemy Mazes and Four-Player Co-op

A Virus Named TOM is a 2012 release from Misfits Attic, developed and published by the studio and available on Windows, macOS and Linux. Steam catalogs it under action, indie and strategy, and the official description gives the reason that combination makes sense: the player hacks through brain-scrambling puzzles while maneuvering through a thumb-cramping maze of enemies.

The premise frames the puzzle work. Dr. X is the brilliant mind behind a perfect place — a city without traffic, a dog that doesn't poop — until the mad scientist is fired by a giant corporation, and the player controls TOM, a virus created for one purpose: revenge. That motive sits behind every hacked puzzle and every enemy-dodging route, and the game presents it through an animated tale full of dark humor, malfunctioning robots and screaming little girls.

The Core Loop: Hacking While You Maneuver

The official description is compact but it sets the shape of play precisely: hack your way through brain scrambling puzzles while maneuvering through a thumb cramping maze of enemies. The word "while" carries the design weight. Hacking and maneuvering are presented as concurrent demands, not two modes the player moves between, and the maze is defined by its enemies rather than as empty space to cross.

Read against the genre labels, the loop splits into two kinds of thinking. The strategy side is the hacking puzzle: reading an arrangement and deciding a solution. The action side is the thumb-cramping maze, where the player's hands must keep TOM moving among enemies. A brain-scrambling puzzle rewards deliberation; a thumb-cramping maze punishes it. Holding both at once is the game's central tension, and it is why the description treats the two not as separate features but as one sentence.

Single-Player Structure: Six Areas, More Than Fifty Levels

The solo campaign is laid out as more than fifty levels across six distinct areas. The area structure matters because it gives the level count a shape: the content is not one undifferentiated run but a progression through named stretches of the game, with the solo set standing on its own before the cooperative levels are added on top.

Across those levels, evolving mechanics ratchet the difficulty from lollipop to soul crushing. That phrasing is the publisher's own scale, and it describes escalation rather than a fixed setting: what the game asks of a player changes as the levels proceed. The same escalating structure is attached to the wider content set, so a player who starts at the lollipop end is being prepared for the soul-crushing end.

Co-op for Four: Over Fifty Additional Levels

Cooperative mode supports up to four players and adds over fifty levels beyond the solo set. The publisher's own framing is that these are levels in which "friendships will be destroyed" — a joke, but a pointed one, since it tells a group that sharing the hacking and the maze will generate friction as well as teamwork. Team up through over fifty cooperative levels is the instruction, and MMGN's quoted line, "The most addictive co-op game we've played since Portal 2," is carried in the same description.

Because the cooperative stages are additional levels rather than a separate ruleset, the same concurrency of puzzle-solving and enemy-dodging carries into group play. The difference is social: where a solo player absorbs a mistake alone, a four-player group has to agree on routes and solutions while the maze keeps moving. The "friendships will be destroyed" billing makes that coordination pressure an advertised part of the mode rather than an accident.

Battle Mode: Settling Who Is the Supreme Virus

When the over-100-level content is not enough, the description offers a second multiplayer outlet: players and their friends can destroy each other again and again in battle mode to determine just who is the supreme virus. The phrase "again and again" makes battle a repeated contest rather than a single match, and the stated prize is a title among the group — supreme virus-itude — decided by battling friends. It is the competitive counterpart to the cooperative stages, using the same cast of players for a different question.

The overall package therefore reads as three destinations built on one core vocabulary. Solo play works through more than fifty levels across six distinct areas; co-op adds more than fifty more for up to four players; and battle mode turns the group against one another. Evolving mechanics and the lollipop-to-soul-crushing difficulty scale run through the content, so the pressure rises whichever destination a player chooses.

How to Approach the Puzzles

The description's own wording suggests the sensible order of priorities for a new player. "Brain scrambling" flags that the hacking puzzles are meant to be reasoned through rather than mashed, while "thumb cramping" flags that the maze will keep the hands busy regardless. Starting with the solo levels and the lollipop end of the difficulty scale gives a player room to learn the puzzle logic before the same logic has to be executed under the heavier pressure the soul-crushing end implies.

For groups, the cooperative levels are the advertised shared challenge and battle mode is the adversarial one, so a four-player session has a natural two-part rhythm: work through cooperative stages together, then settle the supreme-virus question in battle. The publisher promises escalation in either case, so expecting the later cooperative levels to demand more than the early ones is consistent with how the difficulty is described.

Design Character: Dark Humor Around a Tense Loop

The presentation is pitched as an animated tale full of dark humor, malfunctioning robots and little girl screams — a comic frame around a description that otherwise emphasizes mental strain and thumb strain. The joke about a perfect city and a dog that doesn't poop belongs to the same tone, and Dr. X's firing-turned-revenge gives the mayhem a motive. The design character, in other words, is deliberately at odds with itself: cheerful dystopia on the surface, brain-scrambling pressure underneath.

Editions, Platforms and Access

The documented listing is the original 2012 Misfits Attic release, developed and published by the studio, with Windows, macOS and Linux named as the platforms. No port, remake or separate edition is documented in the supplied material, so the game described here is the one the publisher's own store description covers. The official store page is the current access point referenced by this feature.

First published Oct 26, 2026.