An Anthem Original · Video Game · In Development
An open-world action RPG set in a New York City where magic never went away. You are a Lux Agent at LUMYS, working magical law enforcement on cases mundanes will never know happened.
Working title · Project Underlight
Game snapshot
Genre
Open-World Action RPG
Platforms
PC, PS5, Xbox Series
Budget
$45M USD
Target window
2029 – 2030
Why this game
A magic game that finally believes in its city.
Most magic worlds invent the city. Underlight inherits one. New York is already a stack of hidden floors, after-hours economies, and tunnels under tunnels. Underlight assumes all of it is true, and then asks who keeps it that way.
The premise
One city. Two layers. A seam that should not be slipping.
New York has always had two layers. The streets everyone walks, and the magic running through them. Sorcerers ride the same Subway. They share apartments with mundanes. They grab their coffee at the same bodega. The difference is that they can see the door behind the door, and they know which neighbor is not what they look like. For most of history, the line held. Lately it has started to slip.
LUMYS, Law Under MYStic, is the sorcerer government. You are a Lux Agent in its Magical Law Enforcement department. A federal-tier badge, a key to the elevator that goes ten stories below Lower Manhattan to LUMYS HQ, and an apartment in the Bronx that pays itself. The work is half investigation, half spellcraft, all city. You chase rogue casters through bodegas, negotiate with entities older than the boroughs, and try to keep the mundanes from filming any of it.
Then the magic starts spilling out in places it should not. A city bus drifts six feet above Broadway during the morning commute. A newspaper box in Midtown bites a tourist on the way to work. A pigeon coop in the Bronx wakes up speaking. LUMYS calls it the Anomaly: magical mishaps cracking through the seam, each one big enough to put the whole secret on the front page if anyone catches it on film. The pattern is too clean to be accident. Someone is doing this on purpose.
Design pillars
Four things the game has to feel like.
01 · The city is the magic
A real New York.
Manhattan rebuilt 1:1 at launch. Boroughs in DLC. Real streets, real bodegas, real Q train. The fantasy lives because the city is real.
02 · Magic as a workflow
Spellcraft, not loadouts.
You learn glyphs the way real sorcerers would. Combine them, draft them, mess them up. No skill tree pretending to be magic.
03 · Backed by LUMYS
A federal-tier magical badge.
The badge opens doors no civilian can touch. Take the case, drop the case, build a reputation, or burn one. LUMYS is the world you operate in, not a leash on how you play.
04 · The hidden side sees you back
NPCs with memory.
Reputation systems with covens, gangs, building supers, and the entities under the city. People remember what you did and what you broke.
Concept art
Visual direction.
Placeholders below. Final art replaces each slot as production proceeds.
Adjacent universes
Games that live in this neighborhood.
Not what we copy. What we share rooms with.
Tonally
Control
A federal agency with a building that should not exist, a protagonist who has authority but does not have all the answers, and a story told through case files. Underlight shares its straight-faced approach to weird.
Scope
Spider-Man (Insomniac)
A scoped-down open Manhattan, traversal that respects the geometry of the city, and a hero whose authority comes from outside the gameplay. Underlight uses the same density-over-size playbook.
Vibe
Hellblade II
A 25 to 35 hour campaign that prioritizes craft, audio, and performance capture over checklist content. Smaller scope, deeper feel.
Who it’s for
Built for the action-RPG audience that wants something modern.
Primary
Adults 18-34, action-RPG fans
The Cyberpunk, Witcher 3, Spider-Man, Control crowd. Players who want a single-player story with real combat depth and a world they can spend 30+ hours in.
Crossover
Urban fantasy readers
Fans of The Magicians, John Wick, Sandman, Harry Potter, and Pacific Rim. People who read urban fantasy on the subway and have been waiting for a game that takes the genre seriously.
Core
Open-world completionists
Players who buy these games for the city, not the campaign. The audience that explored every rooftop in Insomniac’s Manhattan and wants more reasons to come back.
Vertical slice plan
What we build first to prove the game.
Before full production, we deliver a playable two-hour slice covering Lower Manhattan, the core magic system, one full mission, and a combat encounter. It is what every publisher meeting needs to see.
Slice runtime
~2 hours
Playable area
Lower Manhattan
Vertical slice budget
$4.5M USD
Ready
Q2 2027
How the money is spent
Development budget
Comparable scope: A Plague Tale: Requiem (~$45M), Hellblade II (~$50M). Underlight uses the same density-over-size production model: a tight 75-person core, strategic outsourcing, and a scoped open world that grows after launch.
From green light to launch
Production timeline.
Four phases over roughly four-and-a-half years, sized to match the funded scope.
What we’re seeking
A partnership to ship Underlight.
01 · Funding
$45M production budget.
Publisher financing, platform-exclusivity deals, or co-development partnership. Open to milestone-based financing.
02 · Platform partner
Console or storefront.
PS5, Xbox Series, or Steam-first. We are open to a console marketing partnership in exchange for timed feature support.
03 · Studio team
Senior creatives.
Hiring a creative director, lead engineer, narrative lead, and combat designer. Reach out if your last shipped title was in this space.
From the creator
Want to talk about Project Underlight?
Publishers, platform partners, financiers, and senior game developers, the line is open. Request the full pitch deck, the vertical-slice spec, or just have a first conversation.