Shanghai indie TiGames arrived at Gamescom 2026 with one thing rarer than a sequel: a real style reinvention. The studio that constructed F.I.S.T.: Solid in Shadow Torch — one of the crucial acclaimed 2D Metroidvanias of the 2020s — has deserted the interconnected side-scrolling map that made its title and rebuilt Torch Metropolis from scratch as a full 3D motion RPG. The result’s Zoopunk, whose Gamescom Opening Night Live trailer on August 25 gave the clearest look but at how dramatically the sport departs from its predecessor, and why that departure issues for anybody watching Chinese language indie studios compete for a slot alongside the style’s established names.
The five-minute gameplay video that adopted on the IGN Present the following day answered the query the preliminary reveal had left open: Zoopunk is not simply F.I.S.T. with a digital camera pullback. It is a completely different type of motion recreation, constructed round three distinct fight identities that play nothing alike — with a fourth ready within the wings.
Torch Metropolis Earlier than the Fall: What Zoopunk Is Truly About
Zoopunk is ready many years earlier than F.I.S.T., on the daybreak of the First Torch Conflict. The story begins with a discovery: a mysterious vitality supply referred to as the Spark, an influence that transmits by means of an enormous planetary community and transforms no matter it touches. The Spark accelerated Torch Metropolis’s industrial progress at a tempo its builders could not management, finally awakening discarded mechanical particles into self-aware battle machines. These machines turned on their creators, constructed a mechanical empire, and set the stage for the battle that F.I.S.T. gamers skilled as settled historical past.
Gamers tackle the function of three animal heroes pressed into an uneasy alliance, tasked with infiltrating an enemy stronghold and seizing the Spark earlier than the mechanical empire’s grip on Torch Metropolis turns into everlasting. The battle runs deeper than animals versus machines: rival animal factions, shifting alliances, and opposing philosophies concerning the nature of the soul all pull on the coalition from inside. Animals consider the soul is innate — one thing life produces and machines can’t replicate. The Machine Legion disagrees, believing consciousness might be copied, discovered, and reproduced. That disagreement is not simply philosophical backdrop; it is the ideological fault line the battle runs alongside.
The tone is dirty and purposeful. That is Torch Metropolis earlier than its cynical equilibrium — rawer, extra fractured, and philosophically angrier than the world F.I.S.T. gamers already know.
From Metroidvania to Character-Motion: Why the Style Change Is the Actual Story
F.I.S.T.: Solid in Shadow Torch was a 2D side-scroller with classic Metroidvania design principles: a single interconnected map, development locked behind capacity upgrades, a lone rabbit navigating corridors with a mechanical fist strapped to his again. By early 2025, over 2,200 games shared that structural template on Steam alone. Zoopunk is just not certainly one of them.
The shift to 3D third-person motion RPG is not a beauty improve — it is an architectural substitute. The place Metroidvania design organizes area as a 2D map the participant learns to learn and re-read, character-action design organizes area as a sequence of fight arenas every character navigates otherwise based mostly on their motion system. The exploration construction that outlined F.I.S.T.’s pacing is gone. As an alternative: fluid combo chains, character-specific mechanics, and the type of stylistic variety related to Satan Could Cry or Nier: Automata relatively than Hole Knight or Lifeless Cells.
TiGames rebuilt on Unreal Engine 5 to help this shift. UE5’s Nanite virtualized geometry and Lumen dynamic lighting are what make the trailer’s fur rendering and environmental constancy doable on the scale Zoopunk is working — forests, airships, volcanic fortresses, and crumbling citadels that could not exist as detailed 2D environments.
For a studio that spent years mastering one style’s design language, constructing a second from scratch — with a number of simultaneous playable characters — is the biggest artistic danger TiGames has taken since its founding. That it is trying it with Tencent Games backing at Gamescom, with media demos working in Corridor 4.2 throughout the present’s full run, suggests the studio is assured sufficient in what it has constructed to place it in entrance of critics.
Three Fighters, Three Fight Languages
TiGames designed every of Zoopunk’s playable characters round what their animal biology implies for combating — and the outcomes are distinct sufficient that the characters really feel like they belong to completely different video games.
Rayton the Rabbit returns from F.I.S.T. because the quickest and most cell of the three. His fight facilities on aerial combos constructing electrical cost earlier than releasing it in devastating strikes — a momentum-based system that rewards aggressive repositioning and punishes standing nonetheless. F.I.S.T. followers will discover him acquainted, although the 3D area opens dimensions of his speed-focused brawling {that a} 2D hall could not accommodate.
Braton the Rhino is the workforce’s frontline anchor: a powerhouse brawler with large chainsaw and highly effective defensive capabilities — deliberate, high-damage, constructed to soak up hits and maintain floor whereas his allies work the perimeters. His defensive capabilities counsel a design supposed for gamers who wish to really feel the burden of every strike relatively than chain aerial combos.
Trixie the Chipmunk is the hit-and-run specialist: nimble and exact, combining stylized gun-fu with acrobatic positioning and ammo administration. Her fashion mirrors the sunshine, flanking character class present in titles like Nier: Automata — excessive mobility, decrease uncooked harm, depending on angles and timing relatively than brute power.
What unifies the three is not a shared fight id however a shared enemy downside: the Machine Legion, which the Gamescom trailer reveals fielding each mechanical enemies and — in a notable departure from F.I.S.T. — first animal bosses in Zoopunk. The animal bosses sign that the battle in Zoopunk is messier and extra morally sophisticated than the clear machine-versus-animal framing the sequence began with.
Who Is the Serval?
The Gamescom trailer saved its largest query for its ultimate seconds: a short glimpse of a thriller serval fourth protagonist revealed, whose id, talents, and function within the story TiGames has not revealed. The looks establishes that the introduced trio is just not the whole roster — at minimal, there’s a fourth playable character. Whether or not there are extra, what narrative perform the serval serves, and the way they match into the animal faction dynamics of the First Torch Conflict stay open.
TiGames has indicated further particulars will probably be introduced “within the close to future.”
TiGames: From Shanghai Startup to International Contender
The studio behind Zoopunk was founded by Zhang Tao in 2016, a former worker of each Epic Video games and Tencent’s Utilized Analysis Middle, who recruited longtime colleagues — together with lead designer Track Xuedong and lead programmer Yuan Shuangji — to begin recent. Their first recreation, an Historic Amuletor VR title, was well-reviewed however offered poorly. The pivot to F.I.S.T. — a extra accessible, commercially oriented design constructed on Unreal Engine 4 — saved the studio.
F.I.S.T.: Solid in Shadow Torch scored above 80 on Metacritic for its PlayStation 5 and PC releases, carried an roughly 90% constructive score on Steam, and have become the primary Chinese language buy-to-play PS5 title. It finally reached over 10 million gamers by means of a mix of direct gross sales, free distribution by way of the Epic Video games Retailer, Xbox Recreation Move, and PlayStation Community. Feng Ji — the director of Black Fable: Wukong — publicly praised the sport on Weibo throughout its growth.
These outcomes gave TiGames the sources to broaden to round 50 workers from its unique roughly 20 members, and to aim one thing structurally extra formidable. Zoopunk is the studio’s reply to what comes after a profitable Metroidvania: not one other one, however a wager on a style with broader industrial attain, larger manufacturing calls for, and a extra aggressive international subject.
The studio is just not alone in making that wager. Chinese language video games earned $20.45 billion overseas in 2025, the sixth consecutive 12 months the determine surpassed $14 billion. Zoopunk’s Gamescom ONL trailer look — on one of many gaming business’s most-watched showcases — and the concurrent Tencent-backed press demos working by means of August 30 place TiGames explicitly on this internationalizing wave, alongside Phantom Blade Zero, Showa American Story, and the studios that adopted Black Fable: Wukong’s 2024 breakthrough.
TiGames’ artistic DNA carries a particular Chinese language literary affect: CEO Zhang Tao has cited Water Margin as Zoopunk’s inspiration — the traditional Chinese language novel about 108 outlaws who unite regardless of their variations — as an inspiration for Zoopunk’s team-of-rivals construction. Idea artist Su Jian, who lately joined TiGames, had beforehand constructed an artbook reimagining Water Margin’s heroes as animal warriors in a post-apocalyptic world — a imaginative and prescient the studio has successfully adopted as Zoopunk’s conceptual basis.
Is Zoopunk Utilizing AI?
When Zoopunk’s first reveal trailer debuted on the Xbox Accomplice Preview on November 21, 2025, it drew speedy scrutiny from followers who had observed an earlier NVIDIA-produced video — initially listed, then set to “unlisted” on the sport’s YouTube channel — demonstrating Stable Diffusion AI asset tools utilizing Zoopunk’s property.
In that January 2025 NVIDIA demonstration, a developer drew easy tools designs that have been remodeled into in-game fashions by AI. A separate part confirmed gamers speaking to NPCs via voice to customise a spaceship’s look utilizing NVIDIA ACE voice instructions — an integration with NVIDIA’s ACE (Avatar Cloud Engine) generative AI platform.
TiGames responded to the backlash on November 21, 2025, issuing statements to Kotaku confirming human-made artwork: “All our works are unique creations and the fruits of our artists’ onerous work and dedication. AI will solely be used to help gamers in producing user-generated content material (UGC) at a decrease value, equivalent to car skins, clothes shade schemes, and related gadgets. In different phrases, AI serves as a instrument to help gamers in secondary creations and in sustaining the mod neighborhood.”
The excellence the studio is drawing is restricted: the sport’s personal artwork and property have been made by human artists; AI instruments are being supplied to gamers for creating their very own customized content material inside the recreation, to not the event workforce as a manufacturing instrument. The NVIDIA ACE integration — permitting gamers to talk to NPCs and customise car appearances — is player-facing, not a behind-the-scenes growth shortcut. Whether or not that distinction satisfies skeptics in an business nonetheless understanding the ethics of AI’s function will probably be one of many conversations that follows Zoopunk to launch.
Platforms and What Comes Subsequent
Zoopunk is confirmed for PS5 and Xbox Collection X|S, and PC by way of Steam, the Epic Video games Retailer, and the Microsoft Retailer, with PS5 Professional help confirmed. No launch date has been introduced. A 2027 window has been reported, although TiGames has not formally confirmed a launch 12 months.
Press demos of the present construct are working at Gamescom’s enterprise space by means of August 30. TiGames has indicated that extra particulars will probably be shared “within the close to future” — which, given the Gamescom momentum and the fourth character thriller nonetheless unresolved, is a sign that the studio has extra to indicate earlier than 12 months’s finish.
For gamers who have not performed F.I.S.T.: Solid in Shadow Torch, it stays out there on PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, PC, Xbox Collection X|S, and Nintendo Change — and it has appeared on each Xbox Recreation Move and PlayStation Community. Moving into earlier than Zoopunk arrives is just not a prerequisite, however it’s a method to perceive precisely how far TiGames is reaching.
Continuously Requested Questions
Is Zoopunk a sequel to F.I.S.T.: Solid in Shadow Torch?
Zoopunk is a prequel, not a sequel. It’s set many years earlier than the occasions of F.I.S.T. and depicts the origins of Torch Metropolis in the course of the First Torch Conflict — the battle that formed the world gamers encounter within the unique recreation. Gamers who’ve completed F.I.S.T. will encounter acquainted locations and characters in a rawer, earlier kind; gamers new to the sequence can observe Zoopunk with out prior data of F.I.S.T., although the prequel relationship will add context.
What platforms is Zoopunk coming to, and when does it launch?
Zoopunk is confirmed for PlayStation 5 (with PS5 Professional help), Xbox Collection X|S, and PC by way of Steam, the Epic Video games Retailer, and the Microsoft Retailer. No official launch date has been introduced as of August 27, 2026. A 2027 window has been reported, although TiGames has not confirmed a particular 12 months or date.
Did TiGames use AI to make Zoopunk?
TiGames has acknowledged that Zoopunk’s artwork and property are fully human-made. The one AI options within the recreation are player-facing instruments — integrations that permit gamers customise car skins, clothes shade schemes, and related in-game content material utilizing AI help. The priority initially arose from a January 2025 NVIDIA demonstration that used Zoopunk’s property to showcase generative AI instruments, however TiGames confirmed these instruments are supposed for gamers creating their very own content material, not for the studio’s personal growth pipeline.
Why is TiGames switching from a Metroidvania to a 3D motion RPG?
The shift is architectural, not incidental. F.I.S.T. was constructed round a 2D interconnected map the place exploration and talent unlocks drove the expertise — the usual Metroidvania template. Zoopunk replaces that construction with a 3D third-person motion RPG design centered on distinct character fight identities and arena-based encounters, a design sample nearer to Satan Could Cry or Nier: Automata. TiGames has cited a deliberate objective of letting gamers “craft their very own signature fight expertise” by means of character selection — a design philosophy that does not match the single-protagonist, exploration-locked Metroidvania format. The studio rebuilt on Unreal Engine 5 to help the visible and structural calls for of the brand new strategy.