Half-Life 2's Art Director Left Behind One Last Game

"A new world by Viktor Antonov. His final world. His final vision. His final game."

That's how the announcement trailer for Guns of Eschaton opens, and if you know anything about the man's body of work, those words carry real weight. Antonov was the art director who designed City 17 in Half-Life 2, who built the whale-oil-soaked streets of Dunwall in Dishonored, and who contributed visual work to Wolfenstein: The New Order, Prey, and DOOM. He died in February 2025 at the age of 53. Before his death, he co-founded Eschatology Entertainment in 2022 with Dmytro Kostiukevych, Fuad Kuliev, and Boris Nikolaev. Yesterday, the studio and publisher 4Divinity revealed what they'd been building together.

Guns of Eschaton bills itself as "the world's first Soulslike FPS," a claim that's going to get debated immediately. Valor Mortis, from the Ghostrunner developers, is chasing a similar pitch, and Remnant 2 has been blending third-person shooting with Souls-style design for years. But the approach here looks distinct enough to stand on its own terms. According to the game's Steam page, "This is not a fast-paced shooter where victory comes from reflexes alone. Every bullet matters. Every gun has its own character. Every monster has a weakness. You cannot rely on old shooter instincts; you will have to learn how to shoot all over again."

That's a bold promise, and I'm curious whether the studio can deliver on it. Soulslike melee combat works because the rhythm of attack, dodge, and punish has been refined across dozens of games over more than a decade. Translating that loop to first-person gunplay, where every weapon is modeled on 19th-century firearms with real mechanical limitations, is a design problem nobody has cleanly solved yet. Remnant got closest, but it still leaned heavily on third-person spatial awareness. Doing this in first person, with period-accurate guns that presumably reload slowly and fire imprecisely, is either going to feel revelatory or deeply frustrating.

Six Arms and a Dying America

The setting is what grabs me hardest. You play as a multi-armed gunslinger traveling across a supernatural version of the American Old South, described as "a haunted frontier of ruined settlements, mythic roads, impossible machines, monstrous factions, and historical figures caught between legend and damnation." The trailer shows sprawling prairies bleeding into massive industrial structures and brutalist architecture that could have been ripped straight from Antonov's Half-Life 2 concept art. One shot features what appears to be an evil locomotive serving as a boss encounter, which is the sort of thing that immediately sells me on a game's creative ambitions.

Antonov's visual DNA is unmistakable even in a setting this far removed from his previous work. The man had a gift for making architecture feel oppressive and alive at the same time, and the skyboxes in this trailer are absurdly good. Enormous, crumbling structures loom on horizons that stretch for miles. There's a particular shot of a town nestled beneath some kind of colossal mechanical apparatus that looks like it belongs in a painting, not a game still in development. Whatever else Guns of Eschaton turns out to be the world itself already looks like something special.

"We are incredibly honoured to be revealing Guns of Eschaton, the final project shaped by the extraordinary vision of Viktor Antonov," studio head Fuad Kuliev said in a press release. "From the earliest stages of development, I had the privilege of shaping this world together with Viktor: where ideas, themes, and concepts evolved through his talent into the world players will see today."

On the mechanical side, the game promises more than 20 unique weapons, specialized ammunition types that exploit enemy weaknesses catalogued in an in-game codex, and what Eschatology calls "flexible buildcrafting" through armor, talismans, consumables, and active and passive abilities. There's also a coin-shooting trick spotted in the trailer that looks pulled straight from Ultrakill, which is never a bad reference point. Full solo play is supported alongside co-op progression through the entire campaign, and some form of PvP invasion system is mentioned as well.

The Weight of a Legacy

I want to be careful about how much expectation gets loaded onto a debut game from a small studio, even one with Antonov's involvement. Swanky art direction doesn't guarantee good game feel, and soulslikes live or die on the precision of their combat systems. The "world's first Soulslike FPS" tagline is marketing, and the actual game will need to prove that first-person Souls combat with slow-firing revolvers and lever-action rifles can feel as tight and readable as a dodge roll past a greatsword swing.

But I'd be lying if I said this reveal didn't get under my skin. A dying, occult-infused American frontier designed by the person who made City 17 one of the most iconic game environments ever created, wrapped in a combat system that asks you to unlearn everything modern shooters have taught you? I want to play that game. I want to see if the studio can pull it off.

Guns of Eschaton is coming to PS5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC via Steam, where it's available to wishlist now. No release date has been announced, though the Steam page currently lists it as "coming soon."