Swedish game developer/publisher Thunderful has announced that their third-person action adventure title The Gunk will be exclusive to the Xbox Series X, Xbox One as well as Windows PC. The game is slated for release in the fall of 2021.
Watch The Gunk’s Reveal Trailer:
Thunderful’s Image & Form team, the developers behind the acclaimed SteamWorld franchise, have been hard at work for some time on their next game, The Gunk. As opposed to the SteamWorld games, The Gunk is developed in full 3D using Unreal Engine – and this time the protagonists aren’t robots.
“New IP, new heroes, a new development engine and an extra dimension,” reflects Thunderful CEO Brjann Sigurgeirsson. “We’ve had to keep this close to our chests for quite some time, and as always it’s a relief to announce to the world what we’re working on. We’re of course very excited.”
The Gunk stars a duo of gritty space haulers, struggling to make a buck as they chance upon an untouched planet brimming with life. They’ve come to gather alien plants and other valuable resources, and it looks like they’ve hit the jackpot… As they start uncovering dormant secrets of a shattered civilization, however, they must save the planet from the curse of a corruptive gunk parasite while desperately keeping from getting caught in a spiral of festering mistrust.
The Image & Form team focuses mainly on highly refined gameplay mechanics, and prides itself on a process of ‘excessive iterative polish’. Whereas previous games from the team have been released on multiple platforms, The Gunk will be exclusive to Xbox Series X, Xbox One and Windows PC when it releases next fall, whereas new SteamWorld games are also in the making.
“A bit into the development process it became obvious that The Gunk would be very hardware-demanding,” says Brjann Sigurgeirsson. “We’ve always managed to keep our games lean, but The Gunk is all bells and whistles about to explode spectacularly. We had to make a choice: either we quiet it down considerably, or we go talk to the guys with the most powerful hardware. We decided to go talk to the guys with the most powerful hardware.”