TheRetroArcade
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Joined: Feb 2026
After "the reality of the industry hit," the studio pivoted to a new structure and fist-focused combat.
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Every morning, Samson wakes up with an enormous problem pressing on his skull: a debt he can't afford to pay back. Either he can take extreme measures to reduce the amount he owes—driving getaways, extorting businesses, taking down rival gangsters—or watch the total grow day by day. Should he ultimately fail to come up with the goods, he and his sister will pay in blood.
The reality of the industry hit us about a year ago, and we laid off half the team ... And those were our friends, and that hurt.
High stakes are common in the storytelling of open world crime sagas, and yet they rarely hand that pressure to the player to deal with. Samson, which will be out on Steam and EGS on April 8, is different. Each morning you're given a financial target to meet, and a set number of action points with which to plan your day's activities. Story missions battle for priority with lucrative jobs, and abandoning a gig might lead to debt collectors gathering by your car, ready to knock the cash out of you like a piñata.
It's a rough-and-tumble, roguelike-adjacent structure I've never encountered in the genre before, and was created purely out of necessity. "The reality of the industry hit us about a year ago, and we laid off half the team," says former Just Cause and Mad Max lead Christofer Sundberg. "We didn't 'restructure', we didn't do some 'organisational optimisations' or whatever everyone else called it, we laid off half the team. And those were our friends, and that hurt."
Before that moment, Samson had been intended as a much bigger action RPG—but a newly limited team and budget forced Liquid Swords to take a butcher's knife to its plans. "We just shelved those features and saved them for the next game, depending on the success of this," Sundberg says. "So a lot of those more heavy RPG systems sit there waiting to get back into the game. Maybe for a sequel, or for post-launch—I don't know, really."
It's during this rethinking of Samson that day-by-day debt reduction became the structure of the game. It's something Sundberg largely credits to one of the project...Read more: Full article on www.pcgamer.com
What do you think about this?
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Every Thursday
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From the creators of Edge: A weekly videogame industry newsletter with analysis from expert writers, guidance from professionals, and insight into what's on the horizon.
Every Thursday
The Setup
Hardware nerds unite, sign up to our free tech newsletter for a weekly digest of the hottest new tech, the latest gadgets on the test bench, and much more.
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Once a month
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Every morning, Samson wakes up with an enormous problem pressing on his skull: a debt he can't afford to pay back. Either he can take extreme measures to reduce the amount he owes—driving getaways, extorting businesses, taking down rival gangsters—or watch the total grow day by day. Should he ultimately fail to come up with the goods, he and his sister will pay in blood.
The reality of the industry hit us about a year ago, and we laid off half the team ... And those were our friends, and that hurt.
High stakes are common in the storytelling of open world crime sagas, and yet they rarely hand that pressure to the player to deal with. Samson, which will be out on Steam and EGS on April 8, is different. Each morning you're given a financial target to meet, and a set number of action points with which to plan your day's activities. Story missions battle for priority with lucrative jobs, and abandoning a gig might lead to debt collectors gathering by your car, ready to knock the cash out of you like a piñata.
It's a rough-and-tumble, roguelike-adjacent structure I've never encountered in the genre before, and was created purely out of necessity. "The reality of the industry hit us about a year ago, and we laid off half the team," says former Just Cause and Mad Max lead Christofer Sundberg. "We didn't 'restructure', we didn't do some 'organisational optimisations' or whatever everyone else called it, we laid off half the team. And those were our friends, and that hurt."
Before that moment, Samson had been intended as a much bigger action RPG—but a newly limited team and budget forced Liquid Swords to take a butcher's knife to its plans. "We just shelved those features and saved them for the next game, depending on the success of this," Sundberg says. "So a lot of those more heavy RPG systems sit there waiting to get back into the game. Maybe for a sequel, or for post-launch—I don't know, really."
It's during this rethinking of Samson that day-by-day debt reduction became the structure of the game. It's something Sundberg largely credits to one of the project...Read more: Full article on www.pcgamer.com
What do you think about this?