RedRuins Softworks, the creators of Breathedge, has revealed major changes to Canyons, a third-person action survival game. The developers say the game keeps its core loop of short runs into a dangerous post-apocalyptic world, but almost everything else has been rebuilt.

At heart, Canyons still asks you to explore a procedural world, finish missions, grab loot, and haul it back to your settlement. Each outing can be short or stretch on much longer depending on how far you push it. The deeper you go, the tougher the threats, but also the better the rewards.

Where the project diverged from its earlier idea is in tone and lore. The old zombie crawler concept was scrapped in favor of a faction driven by religion and ritual. That faction is the Order of the Divided Cross. Members of the Order are crusader like figures who form ritual pacts with entities called the Awakened. Those pacts give power, but they ask for a price. The new lore frames much of the game as a clash over who controls the force that animates the world.

The Awakened are objects and corpses made alive by a different plane of existence. They appear as everything from small prank like creatures to massive, dangerous beings. Some Awakened are bound by pacts and serve people. Others appear uncontrolled. The result is a world where even a cactus or a house can become a threat and where human corpses fused with scrap create particularly nasty enemies called the Defiled.

Crawlers remain a core feature, but they have been reworked. The idea is a mobile home that players rely on for crafting, storage, healing, and long range travel. The studio says it built a custom system to let multiple players walk around and fight on a moving platform without resorting to common tricks that break immersion. The crawler links to a guardian Awakened named Ka’dorrul, who acts as both companion and a safety net that can drag the team back if things go wrong.

The team highlights a custom enemy system that runs many fully simulated foes at once with their own physics and behavior. That includes limb loss, explosions, climbing, and crowd reactions to gunfire. There are also boss like Awakened created through cursed pacts that demand whole team efforts to put down.

Many weapons are improvised, but the rare finds are artifacts that themselves can be Awakened. Artifact gear often comes with conditions players must meet to use it. Some relics tie back to the ancient Holy Captains and may carry unique powers and grim backstories.

The game also introduces a ritual language called Karaskan. It is meant to appear across art, sound, and world text, and it draws on Latin and other ancient tongues for flavor. That is part of how the Order’s religious identity is shown in the world design.

Canyons will be playable solo or with up to four players, either offline or in co-op via a peer-to-peer system. NPC crew members can also join expeditions depending on your crawler’s size and upgrades.

The developers revealed that they will soon share 15 minutes of gameplay footage, which should provide a better look at what we can expect from the game. In the meantime, here’s the new trailer.