15 Players at Peak. Atari Still Won't Give Up on Samsara

Fifteen concurrent players. On Steam, that's the all-time peak for Adventure of Samsara, a metroidvania that Brazilian developer Ilex Games spent years building. The number isn't a mystery. The game launched on September 4, 2025, the same day as Hollow Knight: Silksong. Atari VP of games Ethan Stearns told Polygon he was standing on the Gamescom show floor when Team Cherry's release date dropped, and his reaction was immediate: "What are we going to do?"

The answer, seven months later, is a version 2.0 update that went live today across PlayStation 5, Xbox Series, PS4, Xbox One, Switch, and PC via Steam and GOG. Atari is framing it as a relaunch, and the patch notes back that up. This isn't a hotfix. It's a new optional boss called the Buzz Killer Swarm, new secret rooms, hidden pathways, an in-game bestiary, a full combat overhaul, boss rebalancing, PC input remapping, and a stack of bug fixes including resolved progression blockers.

I wrote about Karma Exorcist earlier this week as a game that could challenge Hollow Knight's throne. Samsara is the other side of that coin: a game that got crushed under Silksong's weight before anyone could even evaluate it on its own terms. Launching a side-scrolling metroidvania on the same day as the most anticipated metroidvania in a decade is about as unlucky as game releases get. Stearns acknowledged to Polygon that the 15-player peak "paints a grim but pretty accurate picture," and by the time Silksong's date was public, Atari had already locked Samsara into storefront schedules across every platform. Physical copies were pre-ordered. There was no way out.

Why Atari Didn't Walk Away

The easy corporate move would have been to write Samsara off. A 15-player peak on Steam, a launch window that guaranteed obscurity, and a genre already dominated by one of the most beloved indie franchises in existence. But Stearns was surprisingly candid about why Atari kept funding development. "I wish I had a really deep strategic business-y answer to that," he told Polygon. "But I think it was that it was not so financially difficult for us to make the update and we really cared and liked this game, liked the developer a lot and just wanted to give it another chance."

That kind of honesty from a publisher is rare, and I respect it more than some manufactured narrative about data-driven relaunch strategies. Ilex Games started compiling a wishlist of additions and fixes within weeks of launch, the kind of feature backlog every developer accumulates but rarely gets the budget to act on. The combat overhaul alone sounds substantial: movement and dashing have been refined for responsiveness, health potions are now usable during combat, and several bosses including Athalos, Dhar'klaw, and Doctor Gwar'udum have had their AI, attack patterns, and damage logic reworked.

The game's origin story adds context to why Atari stuck around. Ilex originally developed the project as Tower of Samsara, an independent pixel-art action game with no Atari connection. The studio struggled to secure funding until a GDC meeting brought them together with Atari, who saw an opportunity to connect the project to Adventure, the foundational Atari 2600 title widely considered one of gaming's earliest action-adventure games. Stearns described Samsara's feel as a "'90s Prince of Persia-esque sort of adventure title" with a visual identity that defies most modern interpretations of retro. Rather than forcing Ilex to abandon its aesthetic, Atari folded the indie project into its legacy catalog.

Nintendo Life gave the original release a 7/10, praising its varied biomes, parkour traversal, and boss encounters while noting the deliberately punishing difficulty. A 7 from a game that nobody played isn't a failure of quality. It's a failure of timing. Whether a 2.0 update can actually resurrect a game that peaked at 15 players is a open question, but Atari is at least giving it the right ammunition: real content additions, meaningful mechanical improvements, and specific patch notes that tell players exactly what changed. The update is available now on all platforms.