Canyons: piloting a metal colossus through the desert, in co-op, with moral choices

RedRuins Softworks made Breathedge. If you don't know it, it's a survival game in space with a particularly well-calibrated dark sense of humor: you're stuck in the debris of a spaceship with an immortal chicken under your arm, and you need to survive. It was weird, inventive, endearing. It wasn't another survival game clone.

Canyons has no chicken. But it has Crawlers.

What Canyons is

Third-person shooter, PvE, cooperative up to 4 players, procedurally generated world. On paper it's the shopping list of a dozen games released in the last five years. What differentiates Canyons starts with the Crawlers.

A Crawler is a colossal machine inherited from a past the game's world has largely forgotten. It's your mobile base. It's the mothership from which you set out on expeditions, come back to repair, upgrade between missions. You're its captain. The team you play with is its crew.

This concept of a moving hub fundamentally changes the looter shooter logic. You don't return to a menu between runs: you return somewhere. The Crawler has a geography, functional spaces, a presence in the world. It crosses the canyons while you sleep, while you craft, while you recruit NPCs to integrate into your crew.

The Haven and what you do there

Alongside the Crawler, you develop a Haven: a fixed base, a refuge, a place that belongs to you in a world actively trying to kill you. Workshops, quarters, defenses, a shipyard to build additional Crawlers, armory, mess hall. You recruit merchants, doctors, craftsmen. You manage resources. You defend what you've built against those who want to take it.

Base building in a looter shooter is often a disguised progression menu. What RedRuins describes sounds more organic: a space that exists in the game world, with NPCs who live there, needs to satisfy, consequences if you neglect defense. That remains to be verified over time, but the intention is there.

The Awakened and the Blood Pact

The main enemies are called the Awakened. They're hybrid entities, a fusion of living and inert matter, that have transformed the desert into hostile territory. The Order of the Double Cross, the game's central human faction, fights the Awakened while having developed a complex relationship with them built on ritual pacts.

That's where Canyons gets narratively interesting. The Blood Pact lets you forge alliances with extra-human forces, including the Awakened. You fight something you can also choose to invoke. This kind of moral tension in a looter shooter is rare. The question is whether these choices have real consequences or just amount to temporary buffs dressed up as narrative.

Moral choices

RedRuins insists on consequential decisions. The example they give: you cross a dying survivor begging for water. You can help them, bring them back to the Haven, rob them, leave them to the Awakened, or eat them yourself. Each option has ramifications.

This is the kind of system that can be deep or shallow depending on implementation. Breathedge had writing that took its ideas seriously without taking itself too seriously: the absurdist tone concealed real narrative coherence. If RedRuins applies the same rigor to Canyons, the moral choices could work as a genuine differentiator in the genre. If it's varnish on a classic looter shooter, it'll be forgotten after two hours.

The procedural world

The canyons are procedurally generated with a layer of handcrafted content to avoid the monotony of entirely random worlds. Sandstorms, burned ruins, heretic camps, unique events every expedition. Visually, it has a slight Mad Max air: the same hostile desert crossed by improbable machines, the same aesthetic of a civilization that collapsed and improvised its survival from the remains. The promise is runs that don't repeat themselves without losing the universe's coherence.

That's the hardest balance to find in this type of game. Hades does it well because the procedurality serves a fixed narrative structure. Remnant: From the Ashes does it correctly because the biomes have strong visual identities. Canyons bets on event density rather than biome variety, which can work if the events themselves are sufficiently written.

What we don't know yet

No release date announced. The game is in development at HypeTrain Digital. No confirmed Early Access, no precise window.

What we can't verify without playing: whether the Crawler genuinely feels like a living base or like a menu with a skin, whether moral choices have structural or cosmetic impact, whether the procedurality holds for 30 hours or burns out after 10, whether the third-person gunplay is satisfying or just functional.

The individual elements are promising. RedRuins proved with Breathedge they can build coherence between universe, tone and mechanic without one of the three sabotaging the other two. Canyons is more ambitious in scope: co-op, procedural open world, building, faction systems, moral choices. More elements to hold together.

But if anyone can hold it all together with real personality, it's a studio that managed to make an immortal chicken in space into an emotional object.

Waiting on the date.