Left 4 Dead writer's new co-op shooter hits early access and Game Pass in January
The Anacrusis looks like an indie L4D, in space
The studio co-founded by former Valve writer Chet Faliszek and former Riot designer Kimberly Voll have announced an early access launch date for their first game, the cooperative first-person shooter The Anacrusis. On the 13th of January, we'll get to shoot sci-fi aliens on sci-fi spaceships with sci-fi weapons and sci-fi gadgets. It has a nice 60s spy-fi sorta vibe. And it'll be on Game Pass too.
The game will enter early access with three episodes which are feature-complete, but obvs not fully polished. They plan to be in early access for 9-12 months, adding new episodes and new modes, while responding to feedback from players.
In a new devblog video, Faliszek explained, "we want to be able to have these conversations with people in the community playing our game, getting real feedback, and trying some things. And that's really important, is we want to put content in early so that we can get feedback, so essentially beta content. Often what people do is make special beta servers to do that, but what that means is you only have the really hardcore playing it, not kind of the casual player, and we want to get everybody's feedback, and so to do that we thought early access was the best format."
I do think The Anacrusis suffers from its connection to Left 4 Dead. It's hard not to compare the two, but one was made by a far larger studio with far more time and money. And it's coming out so soon after Back 4 Blood, the co-op zombie-mashing 'em up made by L4D creators Turtle Rock with the financial backing of Warner Bros. The makers of The Anacrusis, Stray Bombay Company, are not of that scale. So while the L4D connection draws interest, it'll need to step out from that game's shadow. Though Game Pass is a good service for lowering expectations and demands, with people willing to explore and experiment without having to pay, so that might be helpful.
The Anacrusis is coming on January 13th to Steam, Epic Games Store, the Microsoft Store, and Xboxes. It'll also be on both PC Game Pass (the new, better name for Xbox Game Pass For PC) and Xbox Game Pass For Xbox.