As you’re reading this, Winnie-the-Pooh: Black Honey is stepping into the spotlight. The Steam page is live, the trailer is out, and the wider internet is about to react.

It looks built for virality: an open-world horror game where childhood nostalgia curdles into slapstick terror — banana peels, falling pianos, and the creeping dread of a twisted Hundred Acre Wood. But whether it goes viral or not, what makes it interesting is the two developers behind it — still making games after fourteen years of losses, because they can’t stop creating.

This Frontline ties in with today’s announcement, giving you the deeper story behind Black Honey: why they chose Winnie, how slapstick becomes survival, and what drives them to keep building even when the odds say stop. Wishlist it if you want to see whether the hype holds when the game finally launches — but for now, here’s what makes this project worth paying attention to.

Justin is blunt about it: choosing Winnie wasn’t purely a creative epiphany. “The marketer in me has one motivation, while the creative has another,” he admits. The recent wave of twisted childhood icons made it clear there was viral potential — but that alone wasn’t enough to sustain a two-man team through years of development.

The real engine is passion. For Justin, games are

A blend of writing, art, music, design, and interactivity that he can’t walk away from. He’s been making them for fourteen years, and every single one has lost him money. By any rational measure, he should have stopped.

What keeps him going is the same stubborn creative drive that had him writing poetry as a kid, half-joking that he’d grow up to be “a homeless writer.” He knew even then that the arts aren’t built for financial stability. Yet here he is, older, wiser, and still creating — not because it pays, but because he can’t imagine not doing it.

That tension — between virality and passion — is what makes Black Honey more than a cynical cash-in. It’s what gives this absurd premise its strange sincerity.

Winnie-the-Pooh has become public-domain prey. In the last few years he’s been hacked apart, drenched in blood, and paraded across screens as the latest cheap shot at childhood nostalgia. Blood and Honey painted him as a slasher villain. Other knock-offs rushed in behind it, all gunning for the same viral moment: take something pure, smear it in gore, and wait for the internet to snicker.

That’s the cultural backdrop Black Honey is walking into. And it’s why Justin and Bjørn took a different path. Instead of cashing in on the meme, they went backwards — to A.A. Milne’s original 1926 map.

The rivers carved out natural divisions for their open world. The homes of the characters anchored its landmarks. Eeyore’s swamp was reborn as its own brooding biome. Even the voices were cast deliberately British, rooting the absurdity in the soil it came from.

It’s not parody. It’s reconstruction. Where other projects leaned on shock value, Black Honey layers worldbuilding, tone, and design on top of the absurd hook. By caring about the bones of the original, Justin and Bjørn manage to reshape nostalgia into something that feels twisted but alive.

Justin grew up on Looney Tunes gags — anvils, tunnels painted on walls, characters slipping into chaos on a stray peel. In Black Honey, those same jokes are survival tools.

You’re being hunted through the Hundred Acre Wood, heart pounding, and your best chance to escape isn’t a gun — it’s a banana. Drop it at the right moment and Winnie hits the ground, buying you just enough time to breathe. But with only a few slots in your inventory, every peel is a decision: carry comedy, or risk your life without it?

The piano is even crueler. It’s funny in concept, yes — but in practice it’s an elaborate trap that demands planning and guts. Drag it into place, lure Winnie underneath, and drop it with a crunch. It’s ridiculous. It’s horrifying. And it works.

Then there’s the honey. The one thing that ties it all together. Sweet enough to heal, dangerous enough to destroy — your choice is whether Pooh ends as a monster redeemed, or a monster crushed.

This is the tightrope Black Honey walks: comedy that makes you laugh, horror that makes you tense, and mechanics that force you to take both seriously. It isn’t just parody. It’s a punchline that can kill you.

Surviving in horror games is one thing. Surviving in indie development is another. For Justin and Bjørn, the trick has been learning to share the weight.

They started working together in 2014, both inexperienced, both unsure how to finish what they started. Their first commercial release — a sci-fi roguelite shooter — taught them how quickly ambition can outrun reality. By the time they built Tower of Madness, they’d found their voice: smaller in scope, heavier on atmosphere, more honest to what they enjoyed making.

That shift wasn’t just creative. It was personal. Justin, recently diagnosed with ADHD, learned that constantly swapping hats — coding one day, marketing the next — wasn’t a weakness but a rhythm that kept him engaged. Tracking his hours turned guilt into proof: if he’d logged the work, he could let himself rest.

Bjørn brought the same grounding on the creative side, shaping the world with influences like Milne’s 1926 map. Between them, the balance clicked. They’d burned out once, but they knew how to avoid it now.

Black Honey is the product of that survival instinct. A game born not just from an idea, but from two developers who figured out how to keep each other creating, even when the odds weren’t kind.

The internet has a short memory. Viral trends flare up, burn out, and leave behind a trail of half-finished knock-offs. Black Honey could easily be lumped in with them — another twisted childhood gag, another quick laugh.

But what makes this one different is the intent behind it. Two developers who’ve been at this for over a decade, refining their voice through trial and burnout. A game that doesn’t just dress Pooh in gore, but rebuilds the Hundred Acre Wood with slapstick mechanics that double as survival choices. And a project fuelled not by guaranteed success — there’s never been any — but by the stubborn belief that games are worth making anyway.

That’s the tension at the heart of Black Honey: it might go viral, it might vanish, but either way it’s real. A mix of comedy, horror, and sincerity stitched together by two creators who won’t stop, even when the odds say they should.

“We had fun developing this project almost immediately, which was a big sign it was worth pursuing,” Justin says. “Other projects sometimes felt endless, without a clear finish line. With Winnie, there are defined deadlines, features, and story beats we know we want to hit, which makes it feel achievable and exciting. Long term, we also like that it’s building foundational mechanics we can reuse in future horror games.”

It’s a telling perspective. Success here isn’t measured in wishlists, views, or whether Black Honey ends up as the next viral headline. The measure is whether the work felt worth doing — whether it pushed them forward, whether they learned something, whether they want to keep creating.

And that’s the quiet message for developers watching: don’t stop making things. Hits and flops come and go. What matters is that each project leaves you stronger for the next one.

The Steam page is live now. Wishlist it if you want to see whether this strange, twisted vision delivers on its promise — or flames out like so many before it. Either way, you’ll be watching a story unfold in real time.

The Indieformer Team

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