Open world crime game Samson had to be pared back mid-development, which led to its unusual structure: ‘It’s become more unique’

Every morning, Samson wakes up with an enormous problem pressing on his skull: a debt he can’t afford to pay back. Either he can take extreme measures to reduce the amount he owes—driving getaways, extorting businesses, taking down rival gangsters—or watch the total grow day by day. Should he ultimately fail to come up with the goods, he and his sister will pay in blood.

High stakes are common in the storytelling of open world crime sagas, and yet they rarely hand that pressure to the player to deal with. Samson, which will be out on Steam and EGS on April 8, is different. Each morning you’re given a financial target to meet, and a set number of action points with which to plan your day’s activities. Story missions battle for priority with lucrative jobs, and abandoning a gig might lead to debt collectors gathering by your car, ready to knock the cash out of you like a piñata.

It’s a rough-and-tumble, roguelike-adjacent structure I’ve never encountered in the genre before, and was created purely out of necessity. “The reality of the industry hit us about a year ago, and we laid off half the team,” says former Just Cause and Mad Max lead Christofer Sundberg. “We didn’t ‘restructure’, we didn’t do some ‘organisational optimisations’ or whatever everyone else called it, we laid off half the team. And those were our friends, and that hurt.”

Before that moment, Samson had been intended as a much bigger action RPG—but a newly limited team and budget forced Liquid Swords to take a butcher’s knife to its plans. “We just shelved those features and saved them for the next game, depending on the success of this,” Sundberg says. “So a lot of those more heavy RPG systems sit there waiting to get back into the game. Maybe for a sequel, or for post-launch—I don’t know, really.”

It’s during this rethinking of Samson that day-by-day debt reduction became the structure of the game. It’s something Sundberg largely credits to one of the project’s designers, Niklas Norin: “a huge fan of Elden Ring and those difficult games people my age can’t play”.

It has to be said that, though born from dire circumstances, Samson’s new form makes it a far more intriguing proposition. Its setting, the dilapidated and drug-ridden city of Tyndalston, was already an oppressive backdrop of tall buildings and tight corners; now its core loop matches the environment, and offers something new in a genre too often in thrall to GTA. “It’s become more unique,” Sundberg says. “The original game was a little bit more, I wouldn’t go as far as Led Zeppelin, but this is definitely the Sex Pistols.”

Fists over bullets

Originally, Samson’s skirmishes were built around both fistfights and ranged encounters. “But then when we had to down-scope the game, we took out gun combat, and that made it more interesting,” Sundberg says. “It’s really come out in a great way, because it allowed us to focus more on hand-to-hand. I think we’ve had enough running and gunning games where you just pull the bazooka out of your trench coat or tank top or whatever, and it makes things so easy. This game is not about making things easy.”

Liquid Swords invented its own gun laws for Tyndalston—which means that only the most dangerous gang enforcers and cops have access to them. “When someone pulls out a gun in the game, it’s trouble,” Sundberg says. “The best thing you can do is to run. I’ve found it quite fun actually, to run through the alleys of Tyndalston. It’s like a big maze, but you can climb any fence, run anywhere. It’s a good, strategic way to escape when you have to, and also a way to explore.”

When Samson’s recent trailer dropped, PC Gamer writer Rick Lane expressed some skepticism about the brawling, and the number of times enemies appeared to rely on the same attacks in sequence.

“There is depth, but it is repetitive at some point,” Sundberg admits. “It just came down to bandwidth. What I’ve found is you have to be really creative in the way you are using your combat moves and objects in the environment. When I get swarmed by a bunch of enemies, I always try to push my way backwards, sometimes to take painkillers, Max Payne style, but also to grab a bottle or a brick.” Lob something heavy at an opponent and they’ll be briefly stunned, leaving you an opening. “So yes, it is a bit repetitive, but the more you play, the less repetitive it gets, because you realise you have to strategise.”

Samson’s driving looks almost as pugilistic, as cars collide with intent and crumple during nasty collisions. It makes sense that there’s Avalanche DNA here—namely designer Alex Williams and programmer Josef Sundberg, who were “the leading people in the team that made the vehicle combat in Mad Max”.

“The part that we have allowed to slip in from Just Cause is that strange things can happen,” Christofer Sundberg says. “When you’re chasing someone, they’ll sometimes drive into a pillar and explode, and the mission is successful, and not because of you. Because your enemy made a mistake. That’s what I think makes open world games so much fun—that you can use the game’s flaws to make it fun.”

Inevitably, Samson has been dogged by comparisons to Grand Theft Auto. “There are times when you want to put GTA down and pick up something else,” Sundberg argues. “And so I see Samson as being like back in the day when action movies were 90 minutes long, not over two hours. I keep on going back to watching Die Hard and Ronin and First Blood and Rambo. I think there’s a space for us there, and that’s where I want to end up.”

It’s not just fans who’ve repeatedly brought up Los Santos in relation to Samson; potential backers have done so too.

“We’ve obviously tried to find a publisher for years, and we’ve always heard the GTA fear,” Sundberg says. “And then when we looked at the metrics of how much they’ve played the game, they’ve only played Samson for 20 minutes. It’s 10 minutes past the tutorial, almost. And they’re not going into every detail that we have that is unique to our game. It’s just, ‘Oh, because it’s set in a city and it’s an urban environment with cars and violence, then it has to be GTA.'”

One publisher rejected Liquid Swords on five occasions. “I bumped into their business development guy at DICE,” Sundberg chuckles. “And I asked if we could have a sixth meeting to be rejected once more before we reach the finish line.”

Samson is now approaching its April 8 launch at speed. But at times, Sundberg has the air of a man still discovering the joys of his own game. He talks happily about figuring out a way to ditch his beaten-up car during a chase in favour of a faster ride—which can be found reliably parked at Tyndalston’s gas stations. “It’s a fun balance that I don’t even think was deliberate,” he says. “But it’s good fun. It’s a diamond in the rough.”

Samson won’t be bug-free on release: “We’re making it the best it really can be, we can’t do more than that”. And despite the imminent deadline, Liquid Swords aren’t crunching. “We’re too old for that,” Sundberg says. “So we’re super effective during our work hours and then come back the next day. It’s like the game, almost.”

Nevertheless, there’s clearly a lot of pressure. “It’s more up here than anything else,” says Sundberg, pointing to his head. “I’ve never been this nervous for a game launch, ever, in 33 years. It’s too much at stake. I put my chin out pretty far for the studio and for this game. I made a promise to the team that I couldn’t keep a year ago, and now I made a new promise to the team that are just working their asses off to finish this game.” What was the new promise? “That we would get this game out.”

In the last year, Liquid Swords has taken on a mantra often attributed to the US Marines: improvise, adapt, overcome. “For me personally, it has never been an option just to shut the doors,” Sundberg says. “That money that we were asking for before we had to let go of everyone, it doesn’t exist anymore. We were asking for around $45 million, which in 2021 and 2022, post pandemic, was too little to ask for. But those days are definitely over.”

It’s not at all clear to me how things are going to go for Liquid Swords. “The rough ride is not over,” Sundberg tells me at one point. “So we’ll just hang in there and put chewing gum where the water leaks are in the hull.” But it’s worth considering that, during recent games industry volatility, thousands of developers have not only lost their jobs but watched their art, code and design vanish into vaults. Locked behind the NDAs of cancelled projects, their hard work will never be resurrected, shown off or appreciated. By making it to launch, the remaining Samson team has at least allowed that work to see the light of day.

“In this day and age, every game released is a victory,” Sundberg says. “And, not saying that we have the perfect recipe, but I wish that more developers in our situation could let go of their pride. Take what you have, and then just make the best out of it. If you’re being honest, then you will have the respect of the community as well.”