Devolver Digital and Behaviour Interactive, the studio behind Dead By Daylight, have announced Serious Sam: Shatterverse, a co-op roguelite FPS launching this year on PC, PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S. Revealed during the Xbox Partner Preview showcase, the game arrives in the same year that Serious Sam: The First Encounter celebrates its 25th anniversary, pulling the franchise's run-and-gun DNA into a five-player multiplayer structure built around shifting universes and procedurally generated runs.
Up to five players take on the role of Sam "Serious" Stone, or rather, multiple versions of him pulled from different dimensions. The arsenal mixes classic Serious Sam weapons with new additions designed for one thing: clearing arenas when hundreds of enemies are just the warm-up. Runs push through hand-crafted arenas set across previously unexplored worlds, with players stacking boons and applying run modifiers that reshape how each attempt plays out. Unstable anomalies and hidden portals offer high-risk opportunities that can supercharge a run or end it on the spot. Death feeds back into the loop in standard roguelite fashion, each failed attempt opening new strategies and permanent upgrades that expand what's possible on the next go.
Behaviour Interactive is best known for Dead By Daylight, an asymmetric horror game that sits in a very different space from Serious Sam's arena chaos. This marks the first time a studio other than series creators Croteam has developed a Serious Sam game, though Croteam co-creator Davor Hunski has given the project his public endorsement, calling it "bold, fresh and different" within the universe his team built over two and a half decades. Behaviour's Nic Duchesne has said the team's goal was to respect the series' legacy while presenting it in a way unlike anything the franchise has done before.
The premise hinges on a villain called Uber Mental, whose actions have fractured the walls between universes. Sams from multiple dimensions now fight the same war as part of the Serious Program, a multidimensional force opposing him. Mental has been hunting Sam across realities, and in many timelines he's already won. The path forward runs through his five lieutenants, each a boss engineered for total annihilation, standing between the players and any hope of repairing the Shatterverse.
The enemy roster pulls from classic Serious Sam creatures alongside new monsters, all under Mental's control, all built to overwhelm in numbers. The game leans hard into arcade energy: big battlefields, constant pressure, and the kind of escalating destruction where the question isn't whether things will go wrong but how spectacularly. Procedurally shifting runs across those hand-crafted arenas keep the terrain unpredictable even as the tone stays locked to what Serious Sam has always been: explosive, loud, and delivered with a one-liner when everything's on fire.