Evolve-like shooter Project Spectrum brings back one of Nintendo’s scariest features

As you’d expect from the development arm of the world’s most prolific investor in video game companies, checking out a new TiMi game is rarely dull.

Though the modern battle for consumer attention means no online game is sure of success, the Tencent-owned games group, known for Honor of Kings, Pokémon Unite, and Delta Force, has more resources and expertise than most to keep coming with its own unique contenders, at a time when most other triple-A game publishers appear to be on fire.

Project Spectrum, developed by TiMi’s Team Jade (Delta Force), is the firm’s latest launch in the squad-based shooter genre. Powered by Unreal Engine 5, Spectrum is a free-to-play asymmetric FPS set in a paranormal world. Think Stranger Things meets Call of Cthulhu, with heavy doses of the Alex Garland movie Annihilation.

The game takes place in a world transformed by a strange luminous anomaly known as ‘Ember’, a phenomenon that appeared without warning, altering everything it touches from the landscape to life itself.

The Ember-infested areas, known as Zones, are slowly spreading across the planet, distorting nature in unknowable ways. As an Operator, the player leads high-risk missions into the Zones, recruiting and managing Agents as they search for intel to uncover the truth behind the Ember.

A brief hands-off demonstration of Project Spectrum, shown to VGC, again suggested clear and numerous inspirations, such as Hunt: Showdown, Stalker, The Division, and Evolve (more on that later). However, combined, these parts look like they could make for a genuinely unique fusion of ideas.

Spectrum’s demo gameplay started with two players exploring creepy woodland, crafting gear and traps from trash scavenged from the environment, dispatching the occasional zombie-like monster, before a tense investigation scene in which they used a special camera item to locate an “anomaly point” in the environment.

The anomaly leads the players to a decrepit house, once owned by a mad scientist, who, expectedly, soon comes smashing into the scene in the form of a ghoul corrupted by Ember, swiftly downing our teammate. The boss, called ‘The Masqued One’, is able to blink around the room and attack with supernatural powers, before eventually morphing into a supernatural ball of twisted limbs and scrambling towards escape across the roof of the building.

Project Spectrum’s big twist comes when, in the corner of our demo room, the game’s director, Basil Wang, then stepped from behind a screen to reveal that the boss character was actually controlled by him the entire time.

Similar to 2K’s 2015 asymmetric shooter Evolve, the big foes in Project Spectrum – known as Executioners – are actually other players tasked with obstructing the human teams’ mission. The gameplay we watched suggested Executioner players will have a suite of powers, like the ability to climb rooftops and leap across scenery, and track human foes through walls.

It’s not yet clear exactly how the asymmetric gameplay will work: Wang told us that players will be able to control Executioners “under certain conditions” and that specific criteria have to be met, suggesting that Spectrum won’t offer a clear-cut divide between choosing either to play as an Operator or as their monster foes.

However, the director suggests that character customization and some form of progression system will empower players to alter their play style. The game will feature a roster of human Agents, with distinct archetypes and combat roles, and the ability to allocate attributes and choose skills.

“Similar to 2K’s 2015 asymmetric shooter Evolve, the big foes in Project Spectrum – known as Executioners – are actually other players tasked with obstructing the human teams’ mission”

“You can customize Executioners as well, and they can progress and become stronger over time,” he said. “What you saw in our demo today is one form of its many types in this game, and we are also designing future Executioners in different forms as well. Our end goal is to make sure that we keep gameplay as diverse and fun as possible.”

Team Jade isn’t revealing details on how the player-vs-Executioner ecosystem will work either, other than that the latter’s goal is to prevent human players’ objectives and make sure that the Ember zones stay undisturbed. Meanwhile, agents can take down Executioners, but Wang says they will be encouraged to use more than just firepower, such as by leveraging the environment and utilising the aforementioned traps that can be crafted.

Another significant borrowed idea that could make Project Spectrum stand out is its Sanity system – a concept famously introduced in Nintendo’s 2002 horror game Eternal Darkness. The system worked by having players lose sanity every time they encountered a monster, with certain ‘insanity effects’ manipulating the player when the meter drained too low, such as by putting hallucinations on screen or pretending the game had crashed.

Nintendo’s patent on the concept recently expired and entered the public domain, potentially allowing other developers to utilize and expand on a great idea that has understandably been underutilized in the past two decades.

Though Project Spectrum’s director claims to be totally unaware of Eternal Darkness and its sanity system – making me feel very old in the process – his game’s take on the idea sounds like it works similarly, with enemy encounters wearing down the player’s sanity meter and eventually resulting in vivid hallucinations. In contrast, friendly activities such as reviving a downed player will restore it.

One key differentiator is that, according to Wang, players will be able to create human Operator builds that actually perform better when their sanity is low.

“When your sanity is lower, you’ll start to suffer from certain symptoms, like you notice an illusion in the game, or maybe it will affect your mobility, or your ability to aim and shoot,” he said. “But if your player archetype is built on low sanity, maybe you will be able to say, find secret rooms or passages.”