A new Perfect Dark game has been announced

We've been wondering for a while now what The Initiative, Microsoft's Santa Monica game studio that was founded back in 2018, was actually developing.

Now we know! At The Game Awards today, The Initiative announced Perfect Dark with the cinematic trailer you see above. It's described as "eco sci-fi" and a first-person shooter that's "not just about shooting." It's set in a futuristic world where corporations have developed new technology to combat ecological disasters, but as you might guess, it sounds like the corporations aren't really to be trusted. Welcome back, Agent Dark.

The original Perfect Dark was a first-person shooter developed by Rare in 2000 for the Nintendo 64. As in the original, you'll play "a female secret agent in a world of corporate crime" in the new Perfect Dark. Expect cool spy gadgets and guns, plus "sliding under things, jumping over things," and a focus on physicality that draws inspiration from bodycams and GoPro footage. Sounds like parkour. But will there be wall-running?

Perfect Dark is "still early in development" and no release date has been announced. It hasn't even been confirmed that it'll be on PC (but we assume so—Microsoft games all are, these days). There's a brief, official post here on the Xbox website, and a video of the developers talking about the game below. We'll let you know when we find out more.

Chris started playing PC games in the 1980s, started writing about them in the early 2000s, and (finally) started getting paid to write about them in the late 2000s. Following a few years as a regular freelancer, PC Gamer hired him in 2014, probably so he'd stop emailing them asking for more work. Chris has a love-hate relationship with survival games and an unhealthy fascination with the inner lives of NPCs. He's also a fan of offbeat simulation games, mods, and ignoring storylines in RPGs so he can make up his own.