Giving an enemy a bigger health bar does not make a shooter a Soulslike. It just makes you spend more ammunition. Guns of Eschaton, which bills itself on its Steam page as the “world’s first Soulslike FPS”, takes a harder route: every foe has specific weak points, and you have to hit them in the right sequence.
Shoot an enemy anywhere and you chip away a little damage. Hit a weak point, marked in-world by makeshift bandages wrapped around various limbs, and the damage jumps sharply. The catch is that the order matters, and both the order and the weak points themselves differ for every enemy type. Eduard Malykh, head of game design at developer Eschatology Entertainment, calls the result “reactive gameplay”.
“We wanted to approach that as what it means to be reactive in a shooter, where you don’t shoot enemies on sight,” Malykh told Polygon. “Instead, you see somebody, think, then understand where to shoot, and wait for a proper moment to shoot.”
To keep all of that straight you carry a codex, a leather-bound journal of handwritten notes and sketches covering the creatures you meet and how they break. You will often have it equipped in one hand while the other holds a revolver. The Western setting does the rest of the work: weapons are slow and manual, so there is no mowing down a room with an assault rifle.
Around the combat sits a familiar Soulslike skeleton, transplanted into first person:
- Campfires serve as heal points, upgrade stations and enemy respawn triggers
- Semi-linear levels rather than an open world, with branching paths and shortcuts to unlock
- Solo, co-op and PvP are all listed on the game’s Steam page
Polygon’s 20-minute hands-on at Gamescom 2026 covered the tutorial and the first couple of encounters, and the verdict was that missing a shot hurts. A controller made precision a struggle, while mouse and keyboard players coming from competitive shooters should have an easier time.
Malykh is insistent about one point of framing. The game is not post-apocalyptic, the way most of the genre is. “Narratively, eschaton is a process of when something is reborn from the apocalypse,” he explained. “And our game happens during the apocalypses. So you are not playing in a post-apocalyptic Western. You are literally playing when the apocalypse is happening.”
The look belongs to Viktor Antonov, art director on Half-Life 2 and Dishonored, who co-founded Eschatology Entertainment in 2022 and passed away in February 2025. Studio CEO, creative director and founder Fuad Kuliev pitched him the concept and, by Malykh’s account, Antonov was “hooked”. As Malykh puts it, “the whole world vision and the art you see is created by Viktor and his team”.
Announced in June 2026 and published by 4Divinity, Guns of Eschaton is due to be released before the end of 2026 for PlayStation 5, Windows PC and Xbox Series X.
