The Anacrusis is a four-player, cooperative first-person shooter set aboard a massive starship stranded at the edge of explored space. Team up with your friends in an infinitely-replayable fight against alien hordes to unlock perks, weapons, and new ways to play that you can share with your team!

In the distant future, mighty corporations have carried humanity to the fringes of the galaxy. After expanding unfettered across tens of thousands of systems--all devoid of intelligent life--humanity has grown complacent, until disaster strikes. Work together and survive the alien hordes!

In The Anacrusis, the AI Driver controls every aspect of the game. It spawns every enemy, directs each boss, and places every weapon, gadget, and health kit. No matter your skill level, you'll find the perfect level of challenge. More than that, the AI Driver creates the kinds of video game moments that you can’t wait to tell your friends about.

Battle the alien menace using an astounding arsenal of classic sci-fi weapons. Buy yourself some time with a stasis grenade, toss a shield grenade to provide instant cover while you pop off a heal, and bring your friends back to life using the Respawner. Or throw caution to the wind and burn friend and foe alike with the laser rifle.

Matter compilers spread throughout the game give you access to dozens of perks that will change the way you play. Stack all of your upgrades to power up the last-resort pistol or boost your defense by supercharging your shield pulse. Unlock new perks as you play, and share your unlocks with everyone on your team!

The first season of The Anacrusis tells the story of four unlikely survivors--Nessa, Guion, Liu, and Lance--who are unwilling combatants in the battle to defend humanity from the alien menace. Play more and unlock more of the unfolding mystery of the alien attack.

The Anacrusis is now available on PC (Steam Early Access, Epic Games Store and Microsoft Store), Xbox One and Xbox Series X|S as an Early Access / Game Preview title at $29.99.

This launch into Early Access and Game Preview serves as Season Zero for The Anacrusis, introducing players to the first four survivors of the alien attack across the first three episodes of the game’s story. In this first act, teams of four players explore The Isolode, a massive luxury starship stranded at the edge of explored space and infested with fearsome aliens with a far-out fashion sense. 

Stray Bombay is excited to share that more than 200,000 players have battled through over a combined 1 billion hostile aliens, including 3,264,650 special aliens killed, from safe zone to safe zone in the first week of Early Access/Game Preview on PC and Xbox.

Seeing the community jump feet first into the Anacrusis in this first week has been fantastic. We’ve seen a huge surge in players from Game Pass and lots of positive responses from PC fans as well. We’ve got a lot of work ahead of us and all the feedback that’s come in has been hugely appreciated. We’re continuing to create more game content and refine what’s there as we work on new features like mod support and the upcoming Challenge Track.”  - Chet Faliszek, Stray Bombay Co-Founder

“Everyone on the Stray Bombay team has had a blast watching The Anacrusis streams since launch. We’ve enjoyed chatting with fans, getting feedback from players, and occasionally even joining in the fun! We want to highlight the amazing streamers and YouTubers who are having a blast with The Anacrusis, so we’ve begun a bi-weekly highlights series to put a spotlight on some of the best moments people have been having with our game." - Will Smith, Stray Bombay Communications Director.

Stray Bombay plans to have The Anacrusis exit Early Access/Game Preview in the later half of 2022, using the next few months to fix bugs, make quality-of-life improvements, and add weekly challenges, additional episodes, new fantastical weapons, more thrilling modes, and more.

Update 1.2 Hotfix (Now Available)

• Episode 1 Finale Fix: The Game Instructor will now properly identify and highlight the memory card that players need to collect at the end of the Episode 1 finale. It wasn't our intent to ship an infinite holdout at launch, but we did appreciate the people who managed to survive in the finale for 10+ minutes.
• AZERTY Keyboard Fix: Players who use the AZERTY keyboard layout will be able to select perks from Matter Compilers using their keyboards.
• First-Play Story Fix: If you're in a group with a player who hasn't played the episode before, you should now get first-time story exposition in airlocks, as well as some prompts that should help players understand core mechanics, like the Pulse.
• Director Increases Difficulty When It Should Decrease It: We identified a bug that caused the Director to increase the difficulty after a wipe when it should be decreasing it. If you tried and failed, and then got stomped when you tried again, we're really sorry and we believe that it shouldn't happen again.
• User Interface Bugs: The user interface bug that displays the player as dead, ammo or health at 999, or other unexpected behaviors has been fixed.
• Camera Low W/ No Vertical Control: Fixed the issue where pressing multiple buttons at the same time could cause the camer to get stuck in an unusual position.
• Placing a Ping Marker in the World Doesn't Make a Sound: Now pinging the world will make a sound for you and other players. You can help your fellow survivors know which way they should be carrying the alien matter in the Episode 2 gauntlet.
• Login Issues With the Microsoft Store/PC Game Pass Build: This log-in issue has been fixed.
• Anti-Virus Blocks or Deletes Anacrusis.exe: We've signed the executable appropriately and have submitted it to all of the anti-virus vendors we're aware of. If you're still having problems after the patch releases, please submit a bug at our support site.
• Bots Getting Stuck: We expect to continue working on the bots indefinitely, but they should be less likely to get stuck now.

Update 2

Update 2 consists of bigger changes to player experience that we felt required too much testing to get out in the Update 1.2 Hotfix. We are actively working on Update 2 at this time, so changes listed here may or make the actual release in February. As we get closer, we'll post a more-accurate list of changes.

• A first-pass solution for griefing players/reporting bad players
• A new perk + fixes for broken perks
• A prompt to configure voice settings the first time you start the game
• Players getting stuck in the elevators

Even Longer Term

Once we're through the launch phase, we're going to continue working on Episode 4 and 5 until they're ready for beta testing. Both episodes are playable internally today, but there are large sections that are still in greybox (they haven't received the art pass that will turn them from untextured shapes into something that looks like the inside of the Isolode).

We're also committed to rolling out mod tools that will make it easier for modders to create new content for the game during the Early Access/Game Preview period.

And as always, we plan to continue with our core Stray Bombay ethos of building, testing, and iterating new weapons, enemies, game modes, and more during the Early Access/Game Preview period. This is more vague than we'd like, but we want to let the dust from the launch settle so we can start collecting feedback from players and make more informed decisions about the longer-term roadmap.

We expect to leave the Early Access/Game Preview period in the second half of 2022, when Season 0 is completed and we move on to the creating the next season of The Anacrusis.

Key Features:

• Four-player Cooperative Fun - Team up with your friends in an infinitely-replayable fight against alien hordes to unlock perks, weapons, and new ways to play that you can share with your team!
• A Fight For Survival Is Just the Beginning - The first season of The Anacrusis tells the story of four unlikely survivors - Nessa, Guion, Liu, and Lance - who are unwilling combatants in the battle to defend humanity from the alien menace. Unlock more of the unfolding mystery of the alien attack.
• Fight Aliens Using Fantastical Weapons - Battle the alien menace using an astounding arsenal of classic sci-fi weapons. Buy yourself some time with a stasis grenade, toss a shield grenade to provide instant cover while you pop off a heal, and bring your friends back to life using the Respawner. Or throw caution to the wind and burn friend and foe alike with the laser rifle.
• Earn New Perks and Change the Way You Play - Matter compilers spread throughout the game give you access to dozens of perks that will change the way you play. Stack all of your upgrades to power up the last-resort pistol or boost your defense by supercharging your shield pulse. Unlock new perks as you play, and share your unlocks with everyone on your team!
• Never Fight the Same Battle Twice - In The Anacrusis, the AI Director 2.0 controls every aspect of the game. It spawns every enemy, directs each boss, and places every weapon, gadget, and health kit. No matter your skill level, you'll find the perfect level of challenge. More than that, the Director 2.0 creates the kinds of video game moments that you can’t wait to tell your friends about.
• PC Friends, Meet Console Friends - The Anacrusis supports full cross-play between all platforms at launch, so players can play with their friends across all supported platforms.

The Anacrusis is coming to Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One, PC (Steam + Epic Games Store) and Xbox Game Pass in 2022.