Apico, Mudborne, and now Snacktorio — TNgineers have to be my favourite cosy game studio

TNgineers have (so far) developed three games, with three very different subjects (bees, frogs, and now monsters), and yet they all feel unmistakably like the same hand at work. Plenty of small studios find one cosy niche and stay there, but it’s rarer to watch a developer move from beekeeping to frog genetics to factory automation and keep the same look and feel intact each time.

Behind that studio is Ell (ellraiser), running things as a tiny UK-based indie operation with a passion for niche menu management sims. The studio started in 2020; Ell had always wanted to make video games, and, of all things, it was a COVID-era shift in working life that finally made room for it. Ell handles development and art, while their brother Jamie (metakitkat) works on design and writing for some of the games.

Apico came first, released in 2022. A Snacktorio demo followed in 2023, before Ell got pulled away to make Mudborne, a spiritual sequel of sorts to Apico, which released in early 2025. Only after that did work turn back to Snacktorio’s full release.

I've now got two of these games properly under my belt and a demo of the third, so I wanted to put down what each one's actually like to play, and why I keep coming back to this studio.

Apico: the one that started it all

Apico was my introduction to TNgineers. You inherit your family’s old apiary and spend the game crossbreeding bees, restoring habitats, and filling out an encyclopaedia of species that feels like a real accomplishment.

What surprised me was how much actual apiculture is baked into the systems. This isn’t just “cute bee reskin of a farming template”; the breeding logic draws on real genetics, and the studio donates a portion of profits to bee conservation charities (love).

If you’ve played it, you’ll know the loop: gather, craft, breed, repeat, but with just enough narrative and biome variety that it never strays into busywork. If you haven’t, and you’ve got any fondness for Stardew-adjacent management sims, it’s an easy recommend.

Mudborne: what if Apico, but frog?

Mudborne began life as “what if Apico but frog?” for the FletchFest 2023 game jam, and you can feel that DNA (sorry) throughout. But it’s not a reskin. Where Apico is about breeding and restoration, Mudborne leans so much harder into the puzzle logic: genetic keys unlock paths (or pools) between a waking world and a dreaming one, and getting a specific frog variant isn’t just satisfying, it’s often the only way to progress.

The tongue mechanic and the sheer number of tiny hopping variants makes the whole thing feel more alive than its beekeeping predecessor. The trade-off is that it asks waaaaayyy more of you, but there is a fantastic wiki which can help you along. The genetics puzzles have real teeth, and the menu management can get fiddly which occasionally undercuts the cosiness. I didn’t mind that; I liked having something to actually think about. But it’s worth knowing going in that Mudborne is Apico’s more demanding sibling, not just its amphibian cousin.

Same charitable model here too - a cut of sales goes toward amphibian and wetland conservation, which fits a game so clearly made by people who like frogs for reasons beyond how they look in pixel art.

Snacktorio: new for 2026

I’ve only played the demo so I’m not reviewing Snacktorio properly yet, just telling you what I’ve seen so far. It’s a real departure from the previous two games, with factory-cooking automation rather than nature management, casting you as one of the last chefs trying to feed a growing population of monsters before they consume everything. You build production lines, piping the ingredients around the kitchen (factory?), and cook dishes drawn from cuisines around the world, all with the same TNgineers instinct for turning a mundane job into a satisfying system.

There’s a puzzle-automation feel here that’s closer to something like Factorio than to their earlier work (hence the name, presumably), and the demo, which lets you carry progress into the full game, was enough to convince me the studio can do “systems game” as confidently as they do “nature sim.”

I do miss the natural world aspect, particularly the ambient sounds, which was such a huge part of my enjoyment of Mudborne. I'm not sure if this will affect my overall enjoyment of the game, but thanks to the wonderful Sey at Good Game Lobby, I now have a full copy of Snacktorio, so I'll be putting proper time in and reviewing it in full soon!

What I notice across all three is that TNgineers never treats “cosy” as a synonym for “shallow.” Every game has a system underneath the charm (genetics, ecology, production logic) and every game ties that system to something the studio actually seems to care about, whether that’s bee populations, wetland conservation, or (if the tone of Snacktorio’s marketing is anything to go by) not taking itself too seriously while still respecting the player’s intelligence!

I trust this studio to hand me something with real bones under the cute exterior. I’ll report back properly on Snacktorio once I’ve put real hours in.

And if you’re interested, the studio has donated $53,704.24 to charity to date. That’s bloody gorgeous.

You can buy all three games on Steam, and follow the studio here.