ProbablyMonsters, an independent game company that raised a lot of money, pivoted to smaller games and now made the surprise announcement of the launch of its first game Storm Lancers during today’s Nintendo Direct broadcast.
The title is an action rogue-like game available today on the Nintendo eShop for Nintendo Switch. Storm Lancers combines retro 80’s aesthetics with intense combat, while introducing a new twist to the fan-favorite rogue-like genre: couch co-op.
In Storm Lancers, players crash land on a living planet built around a powerful source of reality magic. They believe they are facing their end. And yet, unexplainably, they have been brought back to life — and tasked with exploring this strange planet, traveling to its fractured core, and fixing all of reality before it collapses. Players will step into the world of Cryptica and master the art of frenetic combat, nimble evasions, and powerful augmentations as they defeat the Harvesters, an alien machine race that feeds on life, energy, and magic.
“Storm Lancers was a fun and exciting challenge for us as the team built something truly distinctive in the rogue-like genre — native couch co-op in the game’s DNA,” said ProbablyMonsters general manager and game lead for Storm Lancers Jim Veevaert, in a statement. “With colorful visuals and an easy-to-understand and challenging-to-master gameplay system, we can’t wait for players to step into the world of Cryptica together.”
How the company got here
The story of coming up with this game is as interesting as its debut. Founded by industry leader and former Bungie President and CEO Harold Ryan in 2016, ProbablyMonsters is an independent video game company committed to changing the way games are made.
By 2022, ProbablyMonsters raised $250 million to make its triple-A games. But the market changed in the past few years. Games with new intellectual property brands like Concord, which was started at the Firewalk Studio that ProbablyMonsters sold to Sony, didn’t take off. The funding and proceeds helped ProbablyMonsters go a long time before shipping a game — but in recent years, the company knew it had to ship something.
Pivoting from that lesson of Concord, ProbablyMonsters shifted to making smaller games (while still keeping some long-term plans in place) and announced in August it was launching Storm Lancers and Ire: A Prologue, a psychological horror experience arriving on Steam and Epic Games Store (coming out on October 28).
These are games that took a couple of years or less to make with relatively small teams. And they’re not what anyone expected when ProbablyMonsters raised $250 million in funding and built its teams up to hundreds of people. But these games do represent a pivot from the original plan, said Ryan in an interview with GamesBeat.
At first, Ryan said that the company, fresh from its Bungie roots, was focused on triple-A game development when it debuted in 2016 and then went public with its plans in 2019. But then came Concord.
Concord was sci-fi original game meant to be a live services game that lasted for years. But after seven years of development, it flopped. Concord began as one of the games that ProbablyMonsters was working on via its Firewalk Studios division. But then, in April 2023, ProbablyMonsters sold Firewalk Studios to Sony for an undisclosed price.
Concord debuted August 2024, and then Sony shut the game down and then closed Firewalk Studios in October, 2024. That stirred one of the biggest panics in gaming around triple-A games — the high costs, the unpredictable reactions and failure to deliver what gamers wanted.
That led ProbablyMonsters to rethink its plans, with a focus on smaller original games that could be made in a much shorter time with smaller teams. But it’s not exclusively working on smaller games. There are still plans for mid-size and large games as well, Ryan said.
More design details
Designed to keep the heart racing and reflexes sharpened, Storm Lancers gives players a sense of adventure constantly on the move. Players traverse five ever-shifting biomes where each leap, slash, and dash propels them deeper into a vibrant alien world — only to be met by even stronger and more challenging enemies.
Storm Lancers lets players shape their playstyle through the Storm Bindings system, which enhances characters in specific ways while introducing trade-offs in others. Each build unlocks distinct perks and synergies, especially when combined with powerful evasion techniques and a wide arsenal of more than a dozen weapon types. As players progress deeper toward the planet’s core, they’ll uncover new items, mechanics, and abilities transforming them into true legends of Cryptica.
Storm Lancers has an ESRB rating of E10+ and is available for $19.99 via the Nintendo eShop for Nintendo Switch.