After becoming known for cinematic storytelling and heartbreaking realism through franchises such as The Last of Us and Uncharted, Neil Druckmann said his next video game would take place in the fantastical reaches of space, where a tattooed bounty hunter watches anime and drives a Porsche-branded rocket ship.
“The story is quite ambitious,” centering on a fictitious religion and “what happens when you put your faith in different institutions,” said Druckmann, studio head of Naughty Dog, a development company owned by Sony Interactive Entertainment. Druckmann has also written and directed episodes of HBO’s “The Last of Us,” which tells a story of grief and grudges in postapocalyptic America.
The new game, Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet, was announced on Thursday in a cryptic trailer at the Game Awards that showed a few seconds of gameplay in which the protagonist battles a hulking cyborg with swordlike weapons. The story is set in an alternative universe where space travel has significantly advanced by 1986.
Druckmann declined to share many details about Intergalactic, which is the first original story he and his team have created in almost 15 years and does not have a release date. But he said it was a return to Naughty Dog’s roots in the action-adventure genre that helped build the studio’s reputation with franchises like Crash Bandicoot. It takes inspiration, he said, from classic anime like the 1988 movie “Akira” and the 1990s series “Cowboy Bebop.”
Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, who have composed film scores for “Challengers” and “The Social Network,” wrote the soundtrack for Intergalactic. Tati Gabrielle (“Chilling Adventures of Sabrina”) will star as the bounty hunter, Jordan Mun, and Kumail Nanjiani (“Silicon Valley”) will play Colin Graves, one of her wanted men.
