A new Planet Of The Apes video game based on Fox’s reboot series is in development and scheduled to be released this fall, according to an announcement on IGN. Called Planet Of The Apes: Last Frontier, it’s the first project from a new London-based game studio named Imaginati, and it’s being published by the new games division within The Imaginarium, the production house and performance capture studio founded by Andy Serkis, who of course stars as Caesar in the new Apes movies. According to IGN, Serkis, whose prolific performance-capture career includes games like Heavenly Sword and Enslaved: Odyssey To The West, is executive producing Last Frontier, and all of the game’s performances are being recorded using The Imaginarium’s “world-class” facilities.
The game itself is a choose-your-own-adventure story, not unlike Telltale’s popular Walking Dead series, where players will watch cinematic scenes unfold and be given choices to make in hairy situations. IGN’s preview notes the developers have gone one step further and cut out everything from that Telltale mold but the story scenes, meaning the only input players will have are the things they choose to make their characters say and do. Imaginati aims to have one of those choices land “every 15-20 seconds” across the game’s movie-length runtime and hopes the many branching paths this structure presents will make players want to go through the story multiple times.
The Last Frontier is set between the events of Dawn Of The Planet Of The Apes and this year’s War For The Planet Of The Apes. It tells the story of an ape faction that’s splintered from the films’ main group and migrated to the Rocky Mountains to avoid the human-ape war. But an oncoming winter and a lack of resources pushes them into human territory, where they’re dragged into a conflict of their own. Players will see the events from both sides, alternating between control over ape and human characters who may or may not live through the story, depending on your decisions. The game is currently scheduled to release this fall on PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC.