Titan Isles aims to make its mark with a new co-op VR action adventure, and we recently interviewed Psytec Games to learn more.
Seven years on from Windlands 2, it’s been over a month since Psytec lifted the curtain on Titan Isles, and you can see the parallels between them. Whether you’re playing alone or in co-op with four people, both games involve exploring a ruined world as you fight various titans throughout the campaign. A few similarities, yet there are key differences that distinguish these games.
“Titan Isles is quite a different game to the Windlands series,” advised Jon Hibbins, CEO of Psytec Games, during an interview with UploadVR at Reboot Develop 2025.
Though he’s certainly proud of what Psytec achieved with Windlands 2, Hibbins considers this the direction he and the studio were always heading in, describing the core gameplay as “not hugely dissimilar” to Windlands. He’s always wanted to create a game that was “more full on” with the action that’s “more like a Returnal bullet hell type game.”
Acknowledging there’s been a demand for a Windlands 3 across the years, Psytec believes that wouldn’t have been the right call.
“Windlands is rooted in calmness, even when it gets quite intense. The music’s designed to be chill, the world is meant to be beautiful and serene. It felt completely wrong to take Windlands in a more action direction and away from exploration, we didn’t want to ruin the direction of the Windlands IP. So, we made a new IP that gave us the freedom to fit the game properly around what our vision is, what games we want to make as a studio.”
Hibbins noted his love of shooters and states there’s a lot of inspiration from this genre in Titan Isles, which puts it at odds with Windlands. He’s also looking to make games that require quick moment by moment thinking without this becoming a fitness workout, an idea inspired by more challenging flatscreen titles like Elden Ring.
A core element of Titan Isles’ gameplay are the four Exo Suits, each of which offers a unique traversal method and its own weapon that can’t be switched between suits. Storm is “basically Iron Man”, Blink has a triple jump, Hunter uses grappling hooks, while Goliath comes with a cannon and shield. Psytec considered a “mix and match” approach to abilities and weapons, but this idea was dropped.
“There was a point in the development cycle where we wanted to let you use any weapon, any locomotion style, mix and match different things to make a suit that you could go out and explore with. But with game design, if you trim it down and make it play really well, you don’t end up with a mess. So we ended up implementing four specific suits.”
Hibbins explained the team learned a lot from Windlands 2 here and that Titan Isles has a suit that’s very similar to the older game’s character with improvements. Each suit also comes with 15 skill upgrades, offering abilities like increasing an arrow’s speed.
“You basically hook anything in Titan Isles on that character, which makes it a lot easier, but also it’s a much faster action game. Because of the bullet hell, you need to be able to hook everything because you haven’t got time to think.”
Titan Isles is currently confirmed for Quest and PC VR, and Psytec previously avoided committing to other platforms due to “technical and logistical” hurdles. Even still, can we eventually expect a PlayStation VR2 edition?
“We love PlayStation VR2,” Hibbins told me, and it’s not being ruled out. However, the PS VR2 port for Windlands 2 that launched last July hasn’t been profitable yet.
“Windlands 2 didn’t do very well on PlayStation VR2. It was late in the cycle which didn’t help, the game’s been out elsewhere since 2018, and we’ve not yet recouped the cost of that port.”
Given the game’s heavy focus on co-op, did Psytec look at going free-to-play given the model’s increasing prevalence on Quest? This was considered and while the studio won’t rule out doing free-to-play on future projects, making Titan Isles a paid game was ultimately the better approach.
“[Free-to-play] can start to ruin the quality of the game if it’s not done well. We believe it’s more important to have a really good quality game that you pay for once and you can play forever. For Titan Isles, free-to-play didn’t feel right.”
Titan Isles will launch later this year on Steam and the Meta Quest platform.
