Normally, releasing a game is a cause for celebration for a developer, but two months after launch, Wreckreation studio Three Fields Entertainment is facing some hard times. According to a post from its CEO on LinkedIn (which we learned about thanks to GamesIndustry.biz), the entire studio's staff is currently "on notice for redundancy." 

"Today I am having to share one of the hardest messages of my career," CEO Fiona Sperry's post reads. "After twelve years of building and nurturing Three Fields Entertainment, I am forced into the situation of today placing our entire team on notice of redundancy."

 

The post goes on to detail the company's financial status. Despite the game being published by THQ Nordic, Sperry claims the studio has had to self-fund "most of this year and all of the post launch content," and after doing so for months, leadership "simply cannot sustain the studio in its current form." As a result, the post is both a public announcement of the redundancies and a call to potential business partners that can help fund the studio as it finds its footing.

"My hope is that by showing this work publicly, someone out there might also see that potential and perhaps an opportunity could still emerge," Sperry's post continues. "But even if that hope does not materialise, we want this to stand as a testament to our vision and to the strength, passion, and skill of our tiny team. I truly believe in the potential of this game and in the brilliance of the people who built it."

Three Fields Entertainment was founded in 2014 by former developers of the Burnout series. Since then, it's developed games like Dangerous Golf, Lethal VR, Danger Zone 1 and 2, and Dangerous Driving. Its latest game, Wreckreation, launched on October 28 to a relatively lukewarm response, sitting at a 62 on Metacritic. If you want to check it out for yourself, you can pick it up on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, or PC.

Platform: PC
Publisher: Chaos Manufacturing
Developer: Chaos Manufacturing

Developer Chaos Manufacturing curiously describes its debut action RPG, SOL Shogunate, as a “samurai space opera.” When I ask CEO Guy Costantini and game director Leszek Szczepanski what inspired this theme, they cite a plethora of intriguing influences. The pair rattles off video games such as Metal Gear Rising and Final Fantasy XVI, film and TV series like Dune and The Man in the High Castle, and even anime like Attack on Titan and Knights of Sidonia. But the biggest inspiration for this upcoming sci-fi adventure, surprisingly, is music.

Revealed during today's PC Gaming Show: Most Wanted, SOL Shogunate takes place in a future where humanity colonized the solar system and has culturally adopted the Japanese feudal system and culture. Like the best samurai tales, the game is a revenge quest centering on Yuzuki, the once-heir to a powerful Tennoji samurai clan that was wiped out by the rival Karasuma Clan. Yuzuki will enact her vengeance as an outlaw ronin across a sprawling metropolis on Earth’s moon; players will battle within its glass-domed cities, each inspired by different eras of Japanese history, as well as on the lunar surface itself.

“It's what we would call a Moon that has been essentially developed,” Costantini explains. “It's the gateway to the solar system. It's been developed for around 150 years. So we have these large, rotating cities called lunar glasses that are built inside of a lunar crater. And essentially, these cities allow people to have simulated gravity, allow them to have biomes that are fully explorable.” 

These domed cities feature architecture and other elements inspired by eras. For example, one city called Shin Edo is inspired by Feudal-era Japan, while another city, Tenkyo, draws inspiration from the late Showa-era of the 1980s. Of course, each city is heavily futuristic  

Szczepanski and Costantini are industry veterans; Szczepanski has worked for Konami on series like Metal Gear and Castlevania, as well as with Guerrilla Games on the Horizon franchise; Costantini has tenure at Riot Games, CD Projekt Red, and Skydance. Both are massive action game fans from opposite spectrums of the genre, with Szczepanski professing his love of Platinum Games, the studio behind Bayonetta and Metal Gear Rising, while Costantini is an enthusiast of Elden Ring and Dark Souls masterminds From Software. 

Despite being the yin to the other’s yang, SOL Shogunate is a visceral yet rhythmic, stylish action experience. “‘Samurai Space Opera’ is both figurative, because this is an epic adventure in space, but also is very literal,” Szczepanski says. “This is a musical adventure in space.” While not actually a rhythm game, Szczepanski says music is intimately woven into the experience; the soundtrack is being carefully curated – so far, we know Japanese rock act AliA is involved with the project – to provide a soundscape that emphasizes the thrills of gameplay to the highest degree so that every major battle or setpiece feels like an adrenaline-pumping, sensory-overloading music video. 

“In many ways, my process of trying to figure out what this game is supposed to be, it was spending embarrassing amounts of time just browsing through YouTube and Spotify and other places, and just jumping from band to band and band and seeing what makes me feel the strongest, and finding a way to convey these like plethora of different feelings of these songs managed to make me feel to the players was the driving force behind all this,” Szczepanski tells me.

Combat is a slick and fast-paced affair, with players using a katana (one of several weapons the team will reveal later) to slice apart foes, while parrying incoming attacks. Strategy revolves around exploiting opponents’ elemental weaknesses players must discover during combat, a system dubbed the Vulnerability Matrix. Weapons can be equipped with various elemental properties, such as electricity, and other active abilities to create optimal loadouts against certain threats. Although you can’t be prepared for everything, SOL Shogunate will challenge players to study adversaries and learn how to adjust during the dynamic, ever-changing battles. Costantini also teases a gene-splicing mechanic for gaining and even combining powers, but is keeping details under wraps for now. 

Chaos Manufacturing is also considering the setting by always posing the question: how would a samurai fight on the Moon? For one, Yuzuki wears a bio-ceramic skin that acts as the sci-fi evolution of traditional samurai armor, allowing her to survive exposure to space and augmenting her natural talents to superhuman levels. This armor is not only practical, but it also represents another piece of world-building, as it’s a symbol of Yuzuki’s ascension to the top of her clan.

Yuzuki is also equipped with Gravity Assist Gear, which, among other tools such as back thrusters, includes grappling hooks used to navigate areas, like pulling herself up platforms. This tool is also crucial to combat. Hooking onto enemies can either yank them towards Yuzuki or vice versa, and you can also use this tool to send enemies into environmental hazards. You can even weave electricity into your grapple attacks. 

 

“[There are] a lot of combinations that will effectively be a rabbit hole for people to explore so they can decide, 'hey, I'm this kind of space samurai,’” says Costantini. “‘I like this kind of weapon, I like this kind of augmentation, I like this way of moving around the battlefield.’” And the reason we did it that way is because we can't wait to see what players will surprise us with as they mix these genes together and discover some of the stuff we hid there.”

SOL Shogunate is not an open-world game, but players can veer off the beaten path to complete optional tasks designed to add additional context to the world’s lore. But the adventure is very much centered on the primary story. Yuzuki can even mount a robotic horse, which draws from Szczepanski’s previous work on Sony’s Horizon series, but it’s unclear what else this mechanical steed can do. However, it helps reinforce this culture's romanticization of its past and how it cherry-picks the most desirable aspects to bring into the future, regardless of practicality.

“If you were in power, and you were idolizing a specific time period, and you had access to all the technology possible, you would give yourself the fantasy that you and your peers want. And that is why we felt that the samurai would totally create a mechanical horse,” says Costantini. 

We won’t be playing SOL Shogunate until 2027 at the earliest, but it currently has no release window as the game is very early in development. Additionally, PC is the only confirmed platform for now. Still, Chaos Manufacturing has created a fascinating world and a mouth-watering gameplay premise. Hopefully, it lives up to its astronomical potential, and by channeling the studios’ love of the action genre, Japanese culture, and music, it has a real shot of making a big splash. 

“SOL Shogunate is very much a product of all our individual passions,” says Szczepanski. “We are all in love with Japan and its culture, and we wanted to kind of share some of that love with the world. And we also wanted to embed this game with other things we are deeply passionate about.”

Sony Interactive Entertainment has announced that it will publish an unannounced cooperative shooter in development at JJ Abrams' Bad Robot Games studio. The unannounced game is a "four-player, cooperative shooter" that's being directed by Left 4 Dead creator and designer Mike Booth, and it's set to launch on PlayStation 5 and PC sometime in the future.

JJ Abrams announced in 2018 that his film production company, Bad Robot, was expanding to create a video game studio called Bad Robot Games. At the time, Bad Robot Games entered into a partnership with Chinese conglomerate Tencent for the venture, with Mortal Kombat publisher WB Games involved as a minority stakeholder, but it's unclear if those two companies are involved in this Booth-directed game. 

"We're greatly impressed with the talent Bad Robot Games has assembled at their studio, and are thrilled to partner with them to help produce and publish their upcoming game," vice president and head of SIE 2P/3P Content Ventures and Strategic Initiatives Christian Svensson writes in a press release. "Their unique creative voice and passion for innovating across all forms of interactive entertainment perfectly aligns with SIE's mission to craft experiences that resonate deeply with players. We can't wait for gamers to step into the world they've been building." 

Bad Robot Games is a division of Bad Robot, which is a movie production company behind the Mission: Impossible series, the Star Wars sequels, the 2010s Star Trek movies, and more. It is "a dedicated game studio working on new and existing transmedia franchises" and is fully remote. 

What do you hope to see of Booth's cooperative shooter game? Let us know in the comments below!

Update, 12/03/25 5:22 PM:
The Humble store has since re-listed Horses on its platform, making it available for purchase once again. The headline and body of the original story has been amended below to affect these changes. After the game's reinstatement, developer Santa Ragione provided IGN the following statement:

In short, their team saw the press coverage and temporarily delisted Horses to reevaluate it. After a full review they determined that while the content is heavy, nothing in the game warrants removal from their store.
We are grateful to Humble for having reconsidered and for taking the time to check out the game, although I wish they had informed us that this process was ongoing! We are happy that it has been resolved with the game being back on the store, and we wish Steam and Epic would also reconsider their stance based on the actual game contents.

The original story continues below.

Horses, a disturbing indie horror game, was set to launch yesterday on several digital storefronts, but in the past week, many of those retailers have refused to list it, including Steam, the Epic Games Store, and the Humble Store, though the latter platform has since reversed the decision. It's a move that has sparked controversy online, with many decrying it as unjust censorship of the game’s adult themes. But what, exactly, is in this game that makes it so offensive? Each platform has released its own statement, but in an interview with IGN, Pietro Righi Riva, co-founder of Horses developer Santa Ragione (which previously created titles like Saturnalia and Wheels of Aurelia), explained what he thinks happened.

The titular horses are not, in fact horses – the game's primary disturbing element is that the farm the player visits has a population of enslaved, nude humans wearing horse masks. The controversy is not solely related to the nudity or enslavement, but about a character's young daughter and her proximity to the "horses."

"The daughter wants to ride one of the horses (in the game the ‘horses’ are humans wearing a horse mask) and gets to pick which one," Riva told IGN. "What followed was an interactive dialogue sequence where the player is leading, by a lead as if they were a horse, a naked adult woman with a young girl on her shoulders. The scene is not sexual in any way, but it is possible that the juxtaposition is what triggered the flag." 

Horses was rejected by Steam when it was submitted for review in 2023. Riva claims Steam never gave him a specific moment to explain the rejection, but the rejection message included a line that read, "Regardless of a developer’s intentions with their product, we will not distribute content that appears, in our judgment, to depict sexual conduct involving a minor." Assuming the issue was with the daughter character, they raised her age.

"We have since changed the character in the scene to be a twenty-something woman, both to avoid the juxtaposition and more importantly because the dialogue delivered in that scene, which deals with the societal structure in the world of Horses, works much better when delivered by an older character," Riva's statement continues. Despite the adjustment, Steam has not changed course. Reportedly, even after repeated contact between Riva and various representatives at Steam, he hasn't even received confirmation of what scene or element of the game caused the ban in the first place.

Yesterday, the ban expanded when the Epic Games Store, which had been set to sell Horses, reversed course at the last minute. Despite reportedly approving the game earlier in the year, the game was rejected 24 hours before its planned launch. The game has a store page and everything, and at the time of writing, Horses is still listed as "coming soon." Developer Santa Ragione received the following statement from the Epic Games Store, and a representative from Epic later confirmed to IGN that the statement was accurate:

We are unable to distribute Horses on the Epic Games Store because our review found violations of the Epic Games Store Content Guidelines, specifically the ‘Inappropriate Content’ and ‘Hateful or Abusive Content’ policies. The ‘Inappropriate Content’ policy prohibits content which “contains explicit or frequent depictions of sexual behavior or not appropriately labeled, rated, or age-gated.” The ‘Hateful or Abusive Content’ policy prohibits content that promotes abuse and animal abuse. This content is prohibited by our Guidelines and cannot be distributed on the Epic Games Store. Additionally, when we [Epic] filled out the IARC Questionnaire based on the content that we reviewed, it received an Adult Only (AO) rating. Products with AO ratings cannot be distributed on the Epic Games Store (the only exception is for products in cases where an AO rating was applied solely due to the usage of blockchain or NFT technology). You have some options on how to move forward: 1. You can make updates to your product to ensure compliance and resubmit it for review. 2. If you believe we made a mistake, you also have the ability to appeal this decision. You can appeal by replying to this email or creating a private discussion on our Developer Support site. Select "Epic Games Store" as the topic. 3. You cannot change the title or content to repurpose it for another game. If you choose not to move forward, we'll refund your submission fee for this product.

Riva has since claimed that the ban is more likely due to the increased media attention following the news that Steam would not be listing the game, but Epic has not confirmed this fact. Riva has also said that the studio filled out its own IARC questionnaire – a form which evaluates the rating of your game for PEGI, ESRB, and other video game content rating authorities – and unlike Epic's AO rating, Santa Ragione saw its game marked as rated M for Mature.

Earlier today, the game was unavailable on the Humble games store as well, but it has since been reinstated. You can read the developer's full statement regarding the Humble Store above, but the it claims the storefront merely temporarily delisted the game for further review.

Meanwhile, Horses has remained available on itch.io and GOG. It probably goes without saying, but the game contains adult and potentially objectionable content, so proceed to those links with caution. It's currently one of the best-selling games on GOG, as its bans have shone a spotlight on it that it might not have otherwise received. 

Sources: IGN [1, 2], PC Gamer

Horses, a disturbing indie horror game, was set to launch yesterday on several digital storefronts, but in the past week, many of those retailers have refused to list it, including Steam, the Epic Games Store, and most recently, the Humble Store. It's a move that has sparked controversy online, with many decrying it as unjust censorship of the game’s adult themes. But what, exactly, is in this game that makes it so offensive? Each platform has released its own statement, but in an interview with IGN, Pietro Righi Riva, co-founder of Horses developer Santa Ragione (which previously created titles like Saturnalia and Wheels of Aurelia), explained what he thinks happened.

The titular horses are not, in fact horses – the game's primary disturbing element is that the farm the player visits has a population of enslaved, nude humans wearing horse masks. The controversy is not solely related to the nudity or enslavement, but about a character's young daughter and her proximity to the "horses."

"The daughter wants to ride one of the horses (in the game the ‘horses’ are humans wearing a horse mask) and gets to pick which one," Riva told IGN. "What followed was an interactive dialogue sequence where the player is leading, by a lead as if they were a horse, a naked adult woman with a young girl on her shoulders. The scene is not sexual in any way, but it is possible that the juxtaposition is what triggered the flag." 

Horses was rejected by Steam when it was submitted for review in 2023. Riva claims Steam never gave him a specific moment to explain the rejection, but the rejection message included a line that read, "Regardless of a developer’s intentions with their product, we will not distribute content that appears, in our judgment, to depict sexual conduct involving a minor." Assuming the issue was with the daughter character, they raised her age.

"We have since changed the character in the scene to be a twenty-something woman, both to avoid the juxtaposition and more importantly because the dialogue delivered in that scene, which deals with the societal structure in the world of Horses, works much better when delivered by an older character," Riva's statement continues. Despite the adjustment, Steam has not changed course. Reportedly, even after repeated contact between Riva and various representatives at Steam, he hasn't even received confirmation of what scene or element of the game caused the ban in the first place.

Yesterday, the ban expanded when the Epic Games Store, which had been set to sell Horses, reversed course at the last minute. Despite reportedly approving the game earlier in the year, the game was rejected 24 hours before its planned launch. The game has a store page and everything, and at the time of writing, Horses is still listed as "coming soon." Developer Santa Ragione received the following statement from the Epic Games Store, and a representative from Epic later confirmed to IGN that the statement was accurate:

We are unable to distribute Horses on the Epic Games Store because our review found violations of the Epic Games Store Content Guidelines, specifically the ‘Inappropriate Content’ and ‘Hateful or Abusive Content’ policies. The ‘Inappropriate Content’ policy prohibits content which “contains explicit or frequent depictions of sexual behavior or not appropriately labeled, rated, or age-gated.” The ‘Hateful or Abusive Content’ policy prohibits content that promotes abuse and animal abuse. This content is prohibited by our Guidelines and cannot be distributed on the Epic Games Store. Additionally, when we [Epic] filled out the IARC Questionnaire based on the content that we reviewed, it received an Adult Only (AO) rating. Products with AO ratings cannot be distributed on the Epic Games Store (the only exception is for products in cases where an AO rating was applied solely due to the usage of blockchain or NFT technology). You have some options on how to move forward: 1. You can make updates to your product to ensure compliance and resubmit it for review. 2. If you believe we made a mistake, you also have the ability to appeal this decision. You can appeal by replying to this email or creating a private discussion on our Developer Support site. Select "Epic Games Store" as the topic. 3. You cannot change the title or content to repurpose it for another game. If you choose not to move forward, we'll refund your submission fee for this product.

Riva has since claimed that the ban is more likely due to the increased media attention following the news that Steam would not be listing the game, but Epic has not confirmed this fact. Riva has also said that the studio filled out its own IARC questionnaire – a form which evaluates the rating of your game for PEGI, ESRB, and other video game content rating authorities – and unlike Epic's AO rating, Santa Ragione saw its game marked as rated M for Mature.

As of today, IGN reports the Humble Store has banned the game as well, and accessing the link the game was previously listed at, humblebundle.com/store/horses, prompts an error message in the right corner of the screen that reads, "HORSES is no longer available for purchase." PC Gamer reports that a representative from Santa Ragione confirmed the game's removal, but at the time of writing, has not received a response from Humble.

Horses is still available on itch.io and GOG. It probably goes without saying, but the game contains adult and potentially objectionable content, so proceed to those links with caution. It's currently one of the best-selling games on GOG, as its bans have shone a spotlight on it that it might not have otherwise received. 

Sources: IGN [1, 2], PC Gamer