Description

The Anacrusis is a four-player, cooperative first-person shooter set aboard a massive starship stranded at the edge of explored space. Team up with your friends in an infinitely-replayable fight against alien hordes to unlock perks, weapons, and new ways to play that you can share with your team!

History

Starting with a small team of 6 in 2019, The Anacrusis has always been about players working together for a shared goal. Constant playtesting and iterating on user feedback has been the foundation of building out the game and adding features. The Anacrusis is the meeting of modern co-op game design with the vibe of late 60s and early 70s sci-fi television shows and movies. The Anacrusis embraces the optimism represented by the design of that era—smooth curves and crisp line art—despite the apocalyptic setting of a massive alien attack. The design of The Anacrusis is co-op first, meaning every player action in the game is designed to foster cooperation among the players, no matter how diverse their skill or experience level is.

Features

  • The Anacrusis is a 1-8 player cooperative first-person shooter set aboard a massive starship stranded at the edge of explored space. Team up with your friends in an infinitely-replayable fight against alien hordes to unlock perks, weapons, and new ways to play that you can share with your team!
  • The Anacrusis tells the story of four unlikely survivors - Nessa, Guion, Liu, and Lance - who are unwilling combatants in the battle to defend humanity from the alien menace. Play more and unlock more of the unfolding mystery of the alien attack.
  • The core of The Anacrusis is a new breed of AI Director. The AI Director monitors players’ status and ability, then uses its control over enemy, weapon, health, and ammo spawns to dynamically change the state of the game—pushing players right to the edge of their capabilities, before letting off and giving them time to recover. By creating the peaks and valleys necessary to build alternating feelings of dread, excitement, and relief in players, The Director makes every session exciting!
  • Asymmetrical Versus mode in The Anacrusis lets players take on the role of the Special aliens, working together to prevent the human Survivors from reaching their goals. Because of its asymmetrical nature, we like to think of it as a form of sanctioned griefing—teams basically take turns being mean to each other. Versus is tuned to allow from 1-8 players to play, with our AI bots taking on unfilled roles. That means you can play a Versus game with any size group of friends, you don’t need to get 8 players together to have a compelling game. Additionally, our full bot support lets players practice as the aliens in solo mode against human AI.
  • The Anacrusis has full Steam Workshop support for player skins, cosmetic items, gun charms, emotes, and even custom campaigns. With several complete campaigns, as well as dozens of cosmetic items, the beta period of the Modkit has been hugely successful. We expect to roll out a public version of the mod tools in early 2024.
  • The Anacrusis is available on Steam, Xbox Series S|X, Xbox One, and Microsoft Store. It supports full cross-play between all platforms, so players can play with their friends wherever they may be.

Videos

The Anacrusis 1.0 Launch TrailerYouTube

Images

Widgets

About Stray Bombay

Boilerplate
We're a small studio making big games. With a focus on social and cooperative game design, we're building the types of places that people want to inhabit, not just play in. We think now is the time to change the culture of game development, by making everyone equals, not just in their impact on a project, but in how we divide the rewards from our success.
More information
More information on Stray Bombay, our logo & relevant media are available here.

The Anacrusis Credits

Chet Faliszek
CEO + Co-Founder