Liquid Swords is a new game studio founded by developers behind games like Just Cause, Mad Max, PayDay, and Battlefield, with their debut game, Samson: A Tyndalston Story, a grounded action-noir experience built around consequences.
The game was announced following the PC Gaming Show, with a planned launch on Steam and the Epic Games Store in early 2026. Liquid Swords founder Christofer Sundberg, is the founder and former chief operating officer of Avalanche Studios, the original creators of Just Cause.
Positioned as the studio’s first expression of its creative identity, Samson leans heavily into a gritty, systems-driven structure where every decision is permanent and every moment pushes the player closer to survival or collapse.
As Sundberg describes in a prepared announcement, the project represents a sharp, tightly focused direction for Liquid Swords after what he calls a “heavy cycle of change” within the industry.
Players take on the role of Samson McCray, an ordinary man crushed by a debt that grows every single day. The city of Tyndalston is a bleak, unforgiving metropolis, and functions as much more than just a backdrop. It’s an active system that tracks player choices, adjusts its attitude, and reacts to violence, failure, or hesitation. According to the press release, the city “pushes back at every turn,” creating a pressure loop where time and interest are constant enemies.
In practice, that tension is expressed through the game’s Action Points, a daily pool of resources that determines how much Samson can accomplish before the cost becomes too high. Every job, every fight, and every choice drains that meter. Moving slowly or indecisively isn’t an option because “standing still makes everything worse,” as the studio puts it.
Liquid Swords emphasizes that Samson is not a flashy power fantasy. Its combat is physical, dangerous, and intentionally unspectacular, treating violence as a last resort, not a spectacle. The design philosophy echoes the physicality of the team’s previous work but is recontextualized here to make every encounter meaningful. There are no resets, no rewinds, and no second chances. Once Samson commits to something, the ripple effects are permanent.
This approach aligns with the studio’s stated mission: delivering high-impact action games centered on agency and consequence rather than excess. Sundberg notes that the team has “sharpened every part of how we work,” focusing on intention and systemic depth instead of scale.
While Liquid Swords is a new studio (founded in 2020), its developers bring decades of experience in action-focused design, animation, and systemic worldbuilding. Backed by NetEase and private investors, the team aims to produce games that “hit hard, stay sharp, and never lose sight of the player at the center.”
Samson: A Tyndalston Story will be priced at $24.99 and will be the first test of that philosophy when it arrives in early 2026 on PC via Steam and the Epic Games Store. Check out the website for more details.