Viktor Antonov was a visionary art director behind creating striking worlds in timeless masterpieces like Half-Life 2 and Dishonored, and a visual style that has influenced many games, including this year's Thick as Thieves. Although he sadly passed away in early 2025, he left us with Guns of Eschaton, his final creation. While it might look like another first-person shooter, after spending more than an hour struggling in its opening level, it couldn't be more different than anything he had ever worked on.
As developer Eschatology Entertainment describes it, this is a first-person Soulslike shooter. That is to say you have campfires for checkpoints, enemies respawn, you have precious resources that you drop when you die, while combat is also deliberately slow and methodical. That's quite a few things that you probably wouldn't associate with a shooter. Rather than medieval dark fantasy, this is set in a weird, occult, and apocalyptic version of the 19th-century American West, so for western film influences, think El Topo rather than A Fistful of Dollars.
