Anime-inspired beat ’em up game Aeon Must Die! will launch for PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Switch, and PC via Steam in 2021, publisher Focus Home Interactive and developer Limestone Games announced.
Here is an overview of the game, via its official website:
About
Aeon Must Die! turns the beat-em-up genre on its head introducing breakneck risk-reward gameplay, innovative tactical fighting favoring brains over reflexes, and an RPG alignment system that tracks how you behave as a warrior and changes the challenge and story accordingly. The ruthless, grim but colorful world looks and feels like that ridiculous action-packed anime VHS tape your parents heavily disapproved of. Go on a violent journey with a disgraced symbiotic emperor, a fuel-blooded amnesiac with a hole in his head and a sentient hoverbike.
Key Features
- Play as both the hero and the villain fighting for control over a single body.
- Every dialogue choice you make and every punch you throw affects the enemy AI and the path taking you to one of the five endings.
- The enemy adapts to your strategies after every brawl. Stay creative with your approach or face the consequences.
- Destroy, subdue or befriend the biker gangs of galactic highways to eventually take on a powerful assassin stalking you like a predator throughout the game.
- A completely new battle system that ditches all UI to let you focus on the action.
- The story-based death/sanity system will make the game as hard or as easy as you want, but remember that evil preys on the weak-minded.
Watch the trailer below.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gDAZv9vPfNs
Update 6:50 p.m.: Developer Limestone Games has retweeted the following tweet from its official Twitter account:
All Aeon Must Die! devs quit the studio this week due to crunch and lack of payments, and the trailer was outsourced to artists without contracts.
This trailer was created with abuse, manipulation, theft.
Find out the truth about the development of this game here.
People who have worked on every shot of this are no longer with the company holding IP rights.
Some were not even paid for their work.
This trailer has a pending conflict of IP.
The real IP for the game was stolen from the creators via foul play.
Final reaction of the publisher to this information remains to be seen.
Update 08/07/20 at 10:58 a.m.: Aeon Must Die! publisher has issued a statement in response to the allegations of Limestone Games employees:
Focus Home Interactive has always praised and supported all our partner studios and the developers who compose the creative teams. We pride ourselves on treating our own employees and third-party developers fairly and respectfully, and this will not change.
Focus Home Interactive was informed of serious allegations raised by some of the developers at Limestone who have worked on the creation of the video game Aeon Must Die!
These grievances are directed at Limestone, their direct employer.
As the publisher of this video game, Focus is carefully looking into these allegations and will draw the necessary conclusions if they are proved to be well-founded, and then take all appropriate measures.
No further comment will be shared until we have a clearer and complete view on this matter.