The Anacrusis cover
The Anacrusis screenshot
PC XONE Series X Steam Epic
Genre: Shooter, Adventure

The Anacrusis

Update 24: A Barry Small Update
This is a small update to fix the following barry minor issues with Update 23.

  • Solves an issue delivering the achievement for completing episode 1 with Barry
  • Fixes a crash that happened when players picked up Barry after a death that wiped out their inventory
  • Fixes some mysterious lighting issues in Episode 1
  • Adds Barry to the Episode 1 completion screen when that would be appropriate
  • Adds a secret Barry Achievement, bringing The Anacrusis up to to Barry 1.1 Compliance.


Update 23 - The Barry Update!
Dateline: Seattle, WA - December 20th, 2022.
With Update 23, are excited to announce we have reached full Barry Compliance months ahead of schedule!

This designation demonstrates our complete and full commitment to the safety, security, and Barry-ness of The Anacrusis.

With this update:

  • We have introduced 16 fully-functional Barry Achievements completely covering Episode 1
  • We have hand-crafted more than 15 puns!
  • We have designed variety of activities to challenge all players
  • (All of these achievements will be available on Xbox in a future update once we are fully SOC 2 compliant.)

This makes The Anacrusis the first Early Access title to ever achieve full Barry 1.0 Compliance.

To celebrate this momentous achievement (and the less-important upcoming holiday), we have also included a variety of holiday accessories for players to enjoy in the game, as well as a greatly increased selection of items available in the Steam Workshop. Find your holiday hats in the Loadout Menu in-game today.

We've also updated matchmaking to better work across all platforms, and restored Quick Play functionality.

Load The Anacrusis up and earn some Barry Achievements so your parents finally have a reason to be proud of you this holiday season!

Update 23 - The Barry Update!

Dateline: Seattle, WA - December 20th, 2022.
With Update 23, are excited to announce we have reached full Barry Compliance months ahead of schedule!

This designation demonstrates our complete and full commitment to the safety, security, and Barry-ness of The Anacrusis.

With this update:

  • We have introduced 16 fully-functional Barry Achievements completely covering Episode 1
  • We have hand-crafted more than 15 puns!
  • We have designed variety of activities to challenge all players
  • (All of these achievements will be available on Xbox in a future update once we are fully SOC 2 compliant.)

This makes The Anacrusis the first Early Access title to ever achieve full Barry 1.0 Compliance.

To celebrate this momentous achievement (and the less-important upcoming holiday), we have also included a variety of holiday accessories for players to enjoy in the game, as well as a greatly increased selection of items available in the Steam Workshop. Find your holiday hats in the Loadout Menu in-game today.

We've also updated matchmaking to better work across all platforms, and restored Quick Play functionality.

Load The Anacrusis up and earn some Barry Achievements so your parents finally have a reason to be proud of you this holiday season!

Update 22 - Cross-Play Matchmaking Is Back!
Update 22 should be live by the time you read this. It's a small patch that restores cross-platform matchmaking, adds controls for Steam Workshop downloads to the settings menu in the Microsoft Store version of the game, and adds the Quest Progress widget to the in-game loadout menu.

If you haven't in a moment, make sure you check out the Steam Workshop. There's a lot of great stuff up there, including a new campaign and a Holdout map, plus some very good cosmetic options.

We're currently testing fixes for the few remaining matchmaking bugs, and hope to have a patch restoring Quick Play up soon.

Update 21 - Quests are Back!
The progression is back! We've got the full Infinity Pass, as well as the associated Quests and rewards back in the game. Again, we apologize for the delay in your progression, but now everyone has the opportunity to have Lance do his *cough* dances again.

We've also added partial workshop support to the Microsoft Store version of the game. Players can see the cosmetic mods that other players have selected. What does partial support mean? Microsoft Store players aren't able to select or equip mods currently, nor can they play modded maps or campaigns. We'll be adding that in a future update, along with mod support on the Xbox One and Series consoles.

We've also fixed a few bugs and added a few new features to the game.

  • MC Re-rolls are working properly again. If you've earned them in the Infinity Pass, you'll see the option in the Matter Compiler screen to get a different set of options.
  • The Holographic Detonator is now available in regular campaign games.
  • Bots should be less likely to pick up modified weapons they find in the game now. Additionally, they should be less likely to pick up special weapons, healing items, or grenades. Thanks for the feedback on this, we're going to continue to work on tuning this based on comments from players.


We have another update that was just submitted to certification that will return the progression UI to the in-game menu on the Microsoft Store and Xbox versions of the game, so you can track your current quest progress in-game. That update also adds controls for mod options to the Microsoft Store version of the game.

Additionally, with this update, we're going to switch to a straight numbering scheme for updates, rather than a major version.minor version numbering scheme. By our count, this is the 21st update to The Anacrusis since we launched last January, so that's where we'll begin.

Devblog 21 - Steam Workshop Support!
Hey everybody, we've added Steam Workshop support to The Anacrusis! There are custom campaigns, custom holdout maps, new character skins, gun charms, and more in the Workshop now! Go grab them! All that plus the iterative design of Holdout, the introduction of Mr. Brute, and the real reason for the season.



Buy The Anacrusis on Steam: https://j.mp/theanacrusis or Xbox: https://j.mp/anacrusisXbox

Join the Stray Bombay Discord and help us test The Anacrusis: https://discord.gg/straybombay • We're recruiting our first wave of modders at https://forms.gle/6Dh5yww5PVf3YJbf9.

Update 6.1 - Hotfix
We're really thrilled at the reaction players have had to the new Steam Workshop support. There's a second user campaign in the Workshop now and we've seen more cosmetic items coming in too. We found a handful of bugs with the 6.1 patch, so we pushed a hotfix to Steam, Microsoft Store, and Xbox this morning to address them.

Here's the changelist:

Quality of Life Fixes



  • Headshot VFX redesign. The effects are more varied. We'd love to know what you think about them.
  • Steam Deck users now have more sane default settings. We're going to continue working on finding a good balance between performance and quality, but we don't recommend setting everything to Ultra on the Steam Deck
  • When you reset your settings, it won't reset your player's loadout anymore

Bug Fixes



  • We've fixed the infinite login bug that resulted in really long launch times for the game.
  • The game should not try to launch Steam VR or the Oculus app anymore
  • We've made a handful of fixes to the Steam Workshop support to fix bugs and optimize downloads
  • Fixed a bug that caused some gun charms to not show as expected
  • Reworked the LOD settings for the Brute and Horde
  • Fixed a bug that left the Microsoft Store version of the game running in the background indefinitely.

Update 6.1 - Enter Steam Workshop

Steam Workshop


Boy, we've got some exciting news to share today. We're rolling out our first pass Steam Workshop support with Update 6.1 That means we've now got an easy way for mod creators to share and test their work with the community. What that means for players is that if you visit the Workshop then you'll be able to subscribe to a variety of skins, maps, and other content for the game. When Steam players play in a game with people who have mod content installed, you'll see the skins they've chosen and they'll see the skins you've chosen.

As it is now, mods only work on the Steam version of the game. The Xbox and Microsoft Store versions of The Anacrusis will get more comprehensive mod support soon, but this release is primarily intended to give mod creators a way to solicit feedback for their content from the community.

Releasing this early is important to us so the modders who have been working on content for months can start collecting feedback. But this is the first pass of the feature, so it requires a bit more work for players than we're happy with long term. if you want to play a Workshop map, everyone in your party will need to be subscribed to the map in Steam Workshop and everyone needs to be playing on Steam. In the future, we'll make this entire process more straightforward and we'll make it work on all platforms.

Regarding other players' mods. If you don't want to see mod content from other players, you can go into the Options > Gameplay and scroll down until you see Download Filter in the Online section. You can set that to "Do not download any custom files" and you won't see any mod content.

Yes, we'd love feedback. If you want to give feedback to mod creators or sign up to get access to the mod tools, the place to do that is in the Stray Bombay Discord.

Slowdown on Common Hit


We've reduced the impact of the slowdown players experience when they take damage. We'd love feedback on this change. It should make it a little easier for players to get out of scrums of aliens.

Temporarily Disabled Quick Play


A bug with Quick Play was stranding players in instances all by themselves. We've temporarily disabled the Quick Play queue until we can fix the issues with it. In the meantime, if you start a public game in an episode, you'll get matched into groups playing the same episode and difficulty you select. We realize this is an imperfect solution and are working on fixing this ASAP.

70% Off On The Anacrusis!
We just kicked off our biggest sale ever for The Anacrusis! You can get the entire game for only $9 during the Steam Autumn Sale, which runs from 11/22 to 11/29 at 10AM PST.

We're eleven months into our Early Access period, and we've been busy. Since launch, we've added a Holdout Mode (designed with feedback from players), a bazillion new weapon variants using our modular weapon system, new special weapons, a beta of Episode 4, peer-to-peer server hosting (so folks in areas that were too far from our dedicated servers can play lag-free), mod support, a ton of performance and microstutter fixes, and a whole lot more. As always, we support full crossplay between Steam and other platforms, and we'll have more mod content coming soon.

Plus, we're Steam Deck certified now!

Hotfix for 11/18/2022
Small update to fix matchmaking on all platforms.
Newer posts Older posts