He believes the game should have been given a different name, which might have helped it win over the public.
One of the strangest developments in the PC gaming world this year was the release of a new Painkiller that practically vanished as soon as it appeared. Anshar Studio’s reboot radically altered the franchise’s formula, turning People Can Fly’s single-player horde shooter into a Left 4 Dead-style cooperative shooter with movement reminiscent of DOOM Eternal.
The result was met with mixed reactions from those who even noticed Painkiller’s release. Based on just under 600 Steam reviews, the game landed in the “mixed” category. The reboot also failed to impress Painkiller creator Adrian Chmielarz. In an interview with PCGamesN, Chmielarz said he tried Anshar’s reboot during its beta phase and was far from impressed.
“I disagreed with everything they did. The people at Anshar Studios are great. They do a lot of outsourcing work, and from time to time they try to make their own games, which I really respect. But Painkiller is a skinwalker. It’s called Painkiller, yet it has nothing to do with Painkiller. I will never understand why you take an IP just to completely reshape it. What’s the point? You acquire the IP because you think it has something special, but there’s no trace of its DNA in your game. That feels strange to me.
Half of Painkiller was about atmosphere, and Painkiller took itself seriously. You can laugh at that, that’s fair. It wasn’t perfect, but at least it felt like the creators believed in it, believed in that world, and wanted to give you more of a horror experience rather than a silly game full of one-liners and explosions. If they had called it something else, they would have sold more copies and the reaction would have been far more positive”, said Chmielarz.
Chmielarz’s current project is Witchfire, a long-in-development RPG shooter that launched as an Epic Games Store exclusive in 2023 and entered early access on Steam last year. Its latest update, The Reckoning, was released last week, but the development team, The Astronauts, quickly revised it after the new World Corruption feature disrupted the game’s balance to such an extent that Chmielarz said it effectively changed the game’s genre.
Source: PCGamer, Steam, PCGamesN
