8 years after The Last Guardian and almost 20 since Shadow of the Colossus, Fumito Ueda's new game is finally announced—and it's sci-fi this time

Way back in March 2020—a month in which we all, collectively, were a bit preoccupied—Epic Games announced a trio of big publishing deals with game studios Remedy, Playdead, and GenDesign. It's been a long wait to see what Playdead and GenDesign were cooking, but the latter debuted at tonight's Game Awards, a follow-up to The Last Guardian nearly a decade in the making. Japanese game designer Fumito Ueda's next game is diverging from his previous fantasy settings into something that looks a lot more sci-fi.

In the Game Awards trailer, the apparently still untitled game involves a cloaked figure standing on the shoulder of a giant robot while a destructive shockwave heads in their direction. We're sure this one's going to get plenty of microscopic analysis in the days to come.

With Epic's backing, this release will mark the first time one of Ueda's games has been released on PC. Despite being one of the most famed game directors of the past 2000s and 2010s, Ueda's career has been notably sparse. He released the influential puzzle-platformer Ico in 2001, and followed it with the mournful masterpiece Shadow of the Colossus in 2005, then spent more than a decade working on that game's successor, The Last Guardian. After years of that game seeming dead, missing the PlayStation 3 generation altogether, it arrived on the PS4 in late 2016.

Ueda's new game, then, has likely been gestating for nearly that long.