Surprise! A Painkiller remake is coming later this year, but it’ll be slightly different from how you remember it
Tonight’s Future Games Show obviously wasn’t about any one game or studio in particular, but funnily enough, it did open and close with games from (technically) one developer. The show started things off with a look at Lost Rift, a supernatural, survival, PvPvE extraction game – that’s a lot of things – from People Can Fly. In case you were wondering, this is what became of Project Victoria which was shelved only three months ago. Weirdly enough, the show then ended with the series that put PCF on the map: Painkiller. Or, a remake of it anyway.
When I say that these two announcements were technically from one developer, I mostly do mean it in that PCF made the original gory, hellish first-person shooter, whereas this remake is being made by Anshar Studios, a studio mostly known for assisting other developers – it’s helped out on games like Baldur’s Gate 3, Silent Hill 2, and even People Can Fly’s poorly received Outriders.
The Painkiller remake looks like it’ll still have plenty of enemies to mow down in increasingly brutal ways, you’d expect that of a game with a name like that, but there’s some key changes here that make it more than just a fresh lick of paint. For one, there’ll be four characters to play as, each with their own passive ability, and more notably, co-op will be a bigger component this time around. Makes sense with the different playable characters, though I’m normally hesitant about remakes at the best of times, so I’m curious how that emphasis will go down. There’s also tarot cards that grant buffs, currencies to earn, skins to unlock, all stuff that mostly just sounds like padding, truth be told.
Painkiller doesn’t have a precise release date just yet, but it’s currently slated to come out sometime Fall 2025, and it’s already available to wishlist on Steam. I guess Doom: The Dark Ages isn’t guaranteed to be the biggest medieavally, gothicy boomer shooter this year after all.