A mysterious company named COR3CORP has released a trailer for an unnamed sci-fi FPS, with the video being titled “PRJRPNT_BLUEMARS_FO“. The trailer doesn’t reveal many details, aside from the fact that the title will include massive space stations around planet Mars and interplanetary travel. It ends by showing us the debris of a destroyed spaceship, along with several corpses floating in space. At the very end, it prompts us to visit what appears to be the project’s official website.
Interestingly, one of the developers behind this project is Nikita Buyanov—known for his work on PvPvE extraction shooter Escape From Tarkov as the head of Battlestate Games.
The mystery gets even deeper on the website, since it isn’t just a standard showcase of the unnamed game’s features or story. Rather, it is a full-fledged interactive narrative experience that puts players in the shoes of a “private investigator for ‘History Unfolded’” using a mysterious terminal that has several secrets hidden in password-protected folders. The website also offers a timeline to help you catch up to the backstory, which, among other things, involves an entire spaceship transporting weapons having disappeared somewhere near Venus (and ominously reappearing).
Digging deeper into the website, a “secret browser” provides some more details through a “partially declassified document” that documents humanity’s first steps into outer space in the year 2092. There are also magazine articles that further the story of how planets like Mars have been colonized over the years. The last document available without partaking in the puzzle-solving elements is a 2205 transcript of a “Perpetual Council Session” discussing mysterious events that take place on a drilling platform in the asteroid belt. No other details are readily available, however, aside from a pair of locked folders labelled Video and Documents.
This new project is the first one that Buyanov has worked on outside of Escape From Tarkov, which has been in development since 2012. It finally got its 1.0 release in November, and has already proven to be a successful launch with more than a million sales in just a month.
Despite strong commercial sales, however, the launch was rocky, prompting Buyanov to issue an apology. Shortly after the release, he noted that work had been progressing on updates that would tackle some of the game’s technical issues.
“Servers get full really fast, so we[‘re] adding more and more servers worldwide to cut matching times more,” wrote Buyanov on social media. “We are also fixing all of the incoming bugs, and as I said, we will continue to improve and fix the game for the next months.” He also addressed several legacy bugs from the extraction shooter’s days in alpha and beta testing.
“The release was rough for sure, sorry for that. But we are willing to continue fighting for everything good against bad. We will continue to provide you, actual fans of the game, with things that you will enjoy. We need to finally crack these performance problems, outdated stuff and legacy bugs which [are] left. Yes, a lot of things were fixed in the release version, but it’s not enough.”
Escape From Tarkov is available on PC. For more details, check out our review.
