Garfield: Escape from Monday is a collectathon platformer built on food nightmares and deadpan humor

Garfield: Escape from Monday is a 3D platformer from OSome Studio where the famously lazy cat gets trapped in a food-fueled nightmare and has to fight his way out. IGN went hands-on with an extended preview build, and the game is shaping up to be the most unhinged entry in Garfield's surprisingly long video game history.

The setup: Garfield eats a vegetable lasagna — a healthy one, made from a recipe by in-universe TV host Chef Monday — falls into a food coma, and wakes up in a surreal dream world crawling with food monsters and a taunting evil version of Chef Monday. Jon and Arlene show up as backup, but so do nightmare versions of familiar faces. The game spans multiple worlds that mash up food aesthetics with TV genre parody, and Garfield himself is far more agile here than his couch-potato reputation suggests — he can leap, dash, and navigate platforming set pieces with surprising grace. It leans into collectathon structure, meaning players need to hoover up food items and hidden lasagna portions to make progress. Costume-based power-ups work similarly to classic Super Mario Bros, granting Garfield abilities tuned to each stage. The game also leans hard into self-aware humor — Garfield cracks wise about platformer clichés, takes shots at his own kart-racing past, and at one point has to survive a Flappy Bird recreation.

Garfield has appeared in games across several decades, covering everything from home exploration and trivia party games to kart racers, but Escape from Monday is going for something more ambitious in tone and structure. OSome Studio is building it as a proper 3D platformer with a coherent comedic identity rather than a licensed cash-in, and the deadpan humor tracks closely with what made the original Jim Davis comics and the animated series work.

The preview build only covered stages where Garfield's power-up costumes were already unlocked, so the full progression system remains to be seen. No release date was confirmed in the preview, but the hands-on suggests the core platforming and humor are already in solid shape.