The design director of Bully and Sleeping Dogs is working on a new horror game

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Mike Skupa – the co-designer of Rockstar’s 2006 classic, Bully – has revealed more details about his new indie studio Brass Token, and the untitled horror game that it’s currently working on in Vancouver, Canada. 

Skupa, who also worked as design director on United Front’s 2012 action title Sleeping Dogs (opens in new tab), recently spoke at length in an interview with Eurogamer (opens in new tab), discussing the past, present, and future of his already impressive career in games development. 

Most notably, however, Skupa had more to say about the upcoming untitled survival horror game (previously called The Chant) in the works at Brass Token, in which players step in the shoes of a woman facing her own inner turmoil amidst the backdrop of a new age retreat in the middle of nowhere.

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Bully 2 “existed” and “was playable” but it “never got off the ground”, say Rockstar sources (opens in new tab)

Skupa, who describes the game as “other-worldly”, explains that it’s “a story I wanted to tell that draws on a lot of things I’ve seen, or seen around me, and people I’ve met. [….] There are certain elements of my life I’ve brought into it.”

The experience will slowly veer into the realm of cosmic thriller as the main protagonist begins to lose her sense of self and sanity, according to Skupa, and Brass Token’s in-office motion capture suite has allowed the studio to create “a small cast of characters so that we can really focus on you meeting them when things start, and then as everything unravels, you can see them change.”

“We take things like crystals and sage, you can create these items to craft arcane weapons”, continues Skupa, which – incidentally – doesn’t sound too far off from the kind of parody that his former studio Rockstar went for with GTA 5 (opens in new tab)’s Epsilon cult missions. There’s no release attached to Brass Token’s first major project, but the studio is currently looking to bring it to PC and at least one console in the future, so stay tuned for more announcements over the coming months. 

Check out the biggest new games of 2019 (opens in new tab) still on the way, or watch the Release Radar video below for a guide to everything else out this week.