PHOENIX POINT teaser trailer and new staff announcements

Julian Gollop, the creator of the original X-COM series of games (and an unofficial advisor on the modern XCOM reboots), is currently hard at work on Phoenix Point, a game that can be best described as "XCOM meets Lovecraft". He's now released the briefest of teaser trailers for the game:

The trailer suggests not much of the game exists, but in fact there was a playable build being shown off last summer and the game has an early-to-mid 2018 release date. I'm guessing this is the start of a more thorough marketing and release schedule to raise awareness of the game ahead of its launch in a year or so.

Gollop has also confirmed that composer John Broomhall is working on the new game. Broomhall previously wrote the music for the first three X-COM games (UFO Defence, Terror from the Deep and Apocalypse) and has since worked on the Forza and Railroad Tycoon franchises.

The game has also added Jonas Kyratzes as a writer. Kyratzes is a noted video game commentator, designer and writer, best-known for his work on cult hit The Talos Principle, as well as his own indie Lands of Dream series.

Phoenix Point is set in the near future when the world has been consumed by a strange mist (released from the Siberian permafrost) that has transformed vast numbers of people into monsters. The game features a detailed strategic layer in which players take control of a band of survivors and have to make alliances with other factions, recruiting soldiers and scientists whilst coordinating a defence against the mist and finding a way of dispersing it. The game also features turn-based combat against the monsters with detailed weapons customisation. Remarkably, as well as the game featuring procedural levels it will also feature procedural monsters, creating new mutant types out of hundreds of different body parts.