The Astronauts Finally Share Some Info on Witchfire

The Astronauts, the small Polish outfit responsible for The Vanishing of Ethan Carter, have finally decided to break the silence on their next project. We’ve known for a year it’s an FPS called Witchfire, in which you’ll play a witch hunter, but other than that, there’s wasn’t much to go on. That is slowly beginning to change – they’ve unveiled some more info, and pledged to publish weekly development updates from now on.

If you haven’t played The Vanishing of Ethan Carter, you should know it’s an exploration game in which you play a detective trying to piece together the events that lead to the game’s world being eerily empty. Witchfire will have none of that. It’s a straight up shooter – you’re the hand of the Church, and you’re there to punish heathens. It’s not all that surprising, considering The Astronauts is now home to some of the developers that worked on the Painkiller series, as well as Bulletstorm.

According to the blog post, it’s a game “focused on challenge and mastery” instead of story. There won’t be any cutscenes in it, but it will have “lore to discover and decipher” (the first person to mention Dark Souls gets a kick in the shin).

We also know Witchfire will be using the same photogrammetry tech that made Ethan Carter look so nice. Work is progressing slowly but steadily, and the team of eight hopes they’ll be able to release it in 2020. In the meantime, they’ll publish blog posts every Wednesday, revealing tiny morsels about the game. It’s going to cover all kinds of topics, from design ideas to how-the-sausage-is-made stuff, like “why it took us a day to have a functional gun, but three months to have a great feeling one”. If you want to see the game in action, there are several high quality gifs embedded in the blog post.