Frontier Developments have announced that they will publish Lemnis Gate, an innovative time-loop multiplayer FPS coming from Canadian team Ratloop Games. Lemnis Gate will be out in Early 2021 for PC, PS4 and Xbox One. No word on PS5 and Xbox Series X, though the game will obviously work via backward compatibility.
The game has been in development for the last two years, winning a bunch of awards and nominations at indie game showcases and events in 2019. While it’s a first person shooter that presents itself to you, it’s also turn-based, which is just… well, it sounds like a massive contradiction.
The game will feature both 1v1 and 2v2 game modes, with its key hook a a 25-second timeloop during which players take control of one player at a time and plan out a set of actions in a battle for objectives across five rounds. Once the 25-second loop is over, everything is wound back in time, giving you a new deep space operative from your team and letting you add them and their actions to the battlefield. In doing so, you can kill a hero character that’s been placed in the past, letting a character that you placed even further in the past make it further along the path that they were intended to go anyway. Even crazier is that a character from round one could throw a predictive grenade that goes on to kill a character that isn’t placed until the final round! It’s a mad concept, but appeals to the hardcore sci-fi lover inside me.
The game is part of Frontier Developments’ burgeoning Frontier Foundry publishing arm. Frontier are best known for their park management sims, such as Planet Zoo, Planet Coaster and Jurassic World Evolution, as well as their ever-evolving space MMO Elite: Dangerous. Though they had self-published titles in the past, their real “go it alone” moment was with the crowdfunded Elite: Dangerous, which hopped onto Kickstarter in late 2012 and garnered no small amount of praise upon its full release in 2016. Since then they’ve gone from strength to strength, and have now sought to publish games like Lemnis Gate and freaky co-op platforming puzzler Struggling which came out for Switch and PC earlier this evening.
Source: Frontier
