The Astronauts, the creators of The Vanishing of Ethan Carter, have announced Witchfire, a new dark fantasy FPS at The Game Awards.
The fakeout in the video above is rather amusing, seeming to hint at the game being another walking simulator, before reminding you of the studio’s pedigree in visceral shooter experiences.
Here’s a blog post explaining why the studio is going with a shooter and not another narrative-adventure game:
Our first game was The Vanishing of Ethan Carter, a narrative game for PC and PS4 which won BAFTA’s Game Innovation award, and was nominated for GameSpot’s Best Game of the Year and IGN’s Best PC Game. To date, we have sold over 1 million copies of the game.
The obvious next step is to create another one like this, right? But we really, really want to make a shooter.
That change in direction isn’t anything new for the core team. The three co-owners of The Astronauts were also the co-owners of People Can Fly, as well as the creative leads behind shooters like Painkiller and Bulletstorm.
We love adventure games, and we’ve made some in the past, even before People Can Fly or our The Vanishing of Ethan Carter. Mystery of the Statuette, Teenagent, The Prince and the Coward – all adventure games. As I have already mentioned, we’ve also made a few shooters, Painkiller and Bulletstorm. We have reached for other genres, too. Katharsis was a 2D arcade shooter, Reflux was an RTS, and Gorky 17 was a strategy RPG. There was also a big action adventure called Come Midnight that People Can Fly was making for THQ over ten years ago …but let’s leave that story for another time.
One of the reasons we called the studio The Astronauts was to emphasize the journey to new places. After we made an innovative – we think – narrative game, now we want to make a shooter unlike anything we’ve done before. Can’t wait to bring you along on the ride with us!
According to The Astronauts, the game is still a long way from release, and they’re not announcing any other platforms than PC/Steam. We’ll keep you posted when more information becomes available.
