Project Athia is the next game by Final Fantasy 15 dev

In amongst the onslaught of PS5 news this morning, Sony unveiled a trailer for an untitled game currently referred to as Project Athia. The trailer shows little in the way of gameplay or story, but what little we get seems promising.

The trailer states that the protagonist’s “resolve will be tested” in “a world not her own”. She wears what looks like real-life AFK sneakers while looking out for strange creatures with glowing rib cages. That’s all the story we get for now. As to whether the sneakers will be running away, or kicking through those rib cages, only time will tell.

The gameplay we do see seems to involve jumping and ground-pounding across great distances, conjuring vines to fight monsters, and running through a very windy forest. Hopefully that last one’s not a recurring gameplay feature.

This will be the first proper game developed by Luminous Productions. The company was founded by some of the team behind Final Fantasy XV. Their only public works to date are FFXV’s final DLC episode and Stadia port, both released in 2019. Project Athia will (probably) be an original title that (probably) isn’t connected to Final Fantasy XV; however, both games will share the Luminous Studio game engine.

As someone who’s poured many hours into FFXV, I can spot some superficial similarities between the two. Project Athia’s environment design and cloth physics seem to hew very close to the 2016 game. The Luminous Studio engine can generate some amazing graphics, and hopefully it’ll be a good fit for the PlayStation 5.

Project Athia is coming out for the PS5. That’s about all we know. The release date is a mystery. As is the plot, the gameplay, and the g-dang name of the game. But if this trailer is a small taste of things to come, then maybe the mystery will be worth the wait. One thing we do know is, with the mix of pre-rendered and real time scenes in the trailer, Project Athia is definitely a Square Enix game.