From former Valve writer Chet Faliszek comes The Anacrusis, a first-person shooter that mixes a space-themed environment with gameplay similar to the survival horror classic Left 4 Dead. The game offers a 4-player cooperative experience as a team of stylish space explorers attempt to fight off an alien race aboard a spaceship. The Anacrusis will have plenty of weapons and items for players to use while fighting back the alien menace, and Xbox players with Game Pass will have access to this title when it launches this fall.
The Anacrusis will be an Xbox exclusive, but it will also feature cross-play with PC. The game will reportedly include few cutscenes in favor of a more fluid, gameplay-focused storytelling approach. Faliszek is the founder of The Anacrusis developer Stray Bombay and has taken inspiration from his time at Valve and applied it to the team's work on The Anacrusis. One of the key inspirations Valve fans may recognize when the game drops is its version of The Director, an AI program called The Driver. The program alters encounters as they progress and is used in both Left 4 Dead and its spiritual successor, Back 4 Blood.
Today, during Summer Games Fest 2021, The Anacrusis made its debut with a gameplay trailer showing off the first-person shooter action. The trailer features playable characters Nessa, Guion, Liu, and Lance throwing out humorous quips as they fight off hordes of what look like humanoid aliens with tentacles sprouting from their heads.
The fast-paced gameplay makes The Anacrusis look like an excellent co-op game for Xbox Game Pass subscribers who want an easy way to get some friends together and fight aliens in space. It should also be able to reach a wider audience than more violent co-op shooters out right now, and Faliszek states that Stray Bombay is intentionally trying not to be “over the top with gore.” Part of this is also due to some action animations still in the development process, as Stray Bombay wanted to avoid any crunch time for employees.
The Anacrusis will also aim to support modders immediately upon launch. The PC version of the game on Steam will include some community-created mods and will have a specific Discord set up for gamers who might want to create mods for the game. Inventive mods often draw other gamers in to survey a game’s creation possibilities, and this might help The Anacrusis set itself apart from the sea of other indie co-op games out right now.
The Anacrusis will release for PC, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X|S in the fall of 2021.