#OPEN ROADS ANNAPURNA PLUS#

If Lemoore hadn’t heard the “banger” comment (which was echoed elsewhere), he might have come across the commenter on the gameplay walkthrough trailer who wrote, “You had me at ‘Annapurna’” the dude on a different YouTube channel’s cast announcement who said, “I’m a simple guy-I see Annapurna … I purchase” the guy on Twitter who observed, “ Maquette is another Annapurna game so that’ll be ridiculously good probably” or any number of other potential players who expressed similar sentiments. Consequently, whenever Annapurna announces a new game or divulges new details about one that the public is already anticipating, people reply with some approximation of the Futurama “Shut up and take my money” meme. Even accounting for those caveats, though, the publisher is on a remarkable run. And not every game in its catalog was originally published by Annapurna: In some cases, the company has ported a game that was already well received (such as Flower, Gone Home, Journey, Kentucky Route Zero, and The Unfinished Swan) to another platform. Granted, Annapurna hasn’t developed the games it’s published, as have many of the other companies on the leaderboard above. GoldenEye, Perfect Dark, Banjo-Kazooie, Donkey Kong Country Grand Theft Auto, Red Dead Redemption, Max Payneįortnite, Gears of War, Unreal Tournament, Infinity BladeĪnomaly, This War of Mine, Moonlighter, Frostpunk What Remains of Edith Finch, Florence, Outer Wilds, Gorogoa Half-Life, Counter-Strike, Portal, Dota 2 Highest Average Metacritic Rating, Game Companies With >25 Releases (All Platforms) Companyĭiablo, Starcraft, World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Hearthstone The average Metacritic game rating is somewhere between 67 and 68, whereas even the worst-reviewed Annapurna game ( Katamari Damacy creator Keita Takahashi’s 2019 title, Wattam) scored in the low 70s. Prior to the release of Maquette, the average Metacritic score (83) of games published by Annapurna ranked near the top among all video game companies with more than 25 releases (counting each version of multi-platform titles separately), trailing only three storied developers whose histories date back to the early-to-mid-1990s. Less than five years after its formation, and less than four after its first game came out, Annapurna has attained a reputation reserved largely for a select few video game companies with much longer track records.

It’s the first title published by Annapurna this year, and the 19th in total since December 2016, when the video game division of Annapurna Pictures was officially founded.

#OPEN ROADS ANNAPURNA PLUS#

Maquette, a puzzle game paired with a love story, came out on Tuesday on PC, PlayStation 4, and PlayStation 5 (where it’s free during March for PS5-owning PlayStation Plus subscribers). When he heard that, Lemoore exhaled in a sort of semi-moan. “At this point, if it’s published by Annapurna it’s a guaranteed banger,” the commenter had written, referring to Maquette’s indie-oriented publisher, Annapurna Interactive. A few days before the world got its hands on Maquette, the game he began building more than a decade ago, Hanford Lemoore took in the top comment on a video reveal of its cast.

Open roads annapurna