When a mysterious storm sweeps across your village, your only way to survive this terrible evil is to grab each other by the hand, or beard, and survive. Welcome to Shu, from Coatsink Software.

Shu is a 2.D platformer game where players must ban together with random, unusual villagers in a quest to survive an evil storm that has swept and destroyed their village. Each character, delicately hand-drawn into the game, has their own specific abilities unique to them. By banding together, abilities can be combined to survive the challenges set before the player in various and vastly different levels. There is a heavy emphasis on the simplicity of hand-drawn animations as they mesh into the world of 3D.

While the details are rather scare, the game seems to take on a different take of the 2.D side-scroller by implementing permadeath and a focus on the storm. The enemies in this game don’t appear to be small monsters but the actual storm that takes a hold of the world. In addition, if you lose your friends, they may not come back, as Tom Beardsmore suggests in his post on the PlayStation.Blog:

“Keep an eye out for the sinister storm, because if it catches you, it’ll snatch your companions away one at a time. You’ll then lose them and their abilities for good, so it’s wise to stay on your toes. Fortunately, there can be more than one way to survive. Can you outrun the end of the world?”

Shu will be release sometime in early 2015 for the PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4, and PlayStation Vita. Follow UK-based Coatsink Software on Facebook, Twitter, and Youtube along with their main page here.