Harebrained Schemes’ First Game Since The Lamplighters League Flopped Could Reinvent the Studio
The developer of Shadowrun Trilogy is rebuilding itself piece by piece.
Harebrained Schemes is best known for Battletech and Shadowrun Trilogy, both of which are excellent RPGs set in sci-fi dystopias. This week, the developer announced Graft, another gritty-as-hell dystopian sci-fi game — but this time it’s taking cues from survival horror instead of turn-based tactics. Making it even more of a departure, Graft is the first Harebrained Schemes game since the studio’s messy split from publisher Paradox Interactive late last year.
Graft is the only game I can remember ever getting a press release for that starts by talking about the Ship of Theseus, which already makes it pretty interesting in my book. As it turns out, Harebrained Schemes isn’t just offering a Philosophy 101 refresher. Graft will play with the question of whether a ship remains meaningfully the same after every part of it has been replaced, except in this case, the ship is a human body.
Set on a space station called the Arc, Graft takes place in the ruins of a fallen civilization, putting players in control of a scavenger who steals parts from their defeated foes to enhance their own abilities. But with each acquisition, you also replace parts of your personality and memory with that of the body part’s former owner. Players will, according to Harebrained Schemes, need to choose when it’s worth it to chip away at the self to gain a better chance of survival.
Story-wise, Graft seems inspired in part by the cyberpunk story of the Shadowrun games, and to some extent, Battletech. The Shadowrun series in particular focuses on characters who replace their flesh with enhanced machine parts, at the cost of some of their humanity. As fascinating as that concept is, it’s also a bit of a minefield that can easily tip into some pretty ugly statements about disability, prosthetics, and other forms of bodily transformation. Whether Harebrained Schemes can navigate that treacherous territory successfully will be an interesting question to explore as the game progresses.
But where Graft fits perfectly into its developer’s history in story terms, it’s a major change when it comes to gameplay. As seen in the trailer, Graft features real-time action, which Harebrained Schemes refers to as “survival horror combat.” There’s definitely a bit of a Signalis vibe to the action in the trailer, though Graft’s combat seems considerably more involved. The developer has dipped its toes into real-time combat before, notably with 2016’s Necropolis, so it’s not totally new genre, but it’s certainly a change of pace from the games that fans associate with Harebrained Schemes.
Another way Graft stands out from Harebrained Schemes’ recent releases is that it’s the first game to be released without publisher Paradox Interactive since 2018. That year, Paradox acquired Harebrained Schemes for $7.5 million, bucking the developer’s trend of funding its development through Kickstarter campaigns. Since its acquisition, Harebrained Schemes has only released one game — 2023’s The Lamplighters League. An interesting but flawed tactics game, The Lamplighters League failed to live up to Paradox’s sales expectations, and Harebrained Schemes suffered a major wave of layoffs as a result. Within a month, the two companies announced that they had mutually decided to part ways.
In that context, Graft feels like even more of a shakeup for Harebrained Schemes. One game doesn’t make a pattern, but it will be interesting to see whether the developer celebrates its return to independence by branching out a bit more in the future or sticks to the turn-based tactics games it already does exceptionally well. Whatever the future holds for Harebrained Schemes, its post-Paradox era is off to an intriguing start with Graft.
