BioWare veterans’ new AAA RPG Exodus reveals Matthew McConaughey’s character and new bad guys way scarier than Mass Effect’s Reapers

Exodus, the new AAA sci-fi RPG from the industry veterans at Archetype Entertainment, was officially announced at The Game Awards last year and has been steadily teasing new details about its story and setting ever since. Today, the devs have published a new trailer introducing us to Matthew McConaughey’s character and a massive interstellar threat.

A character named C. C. Orlev narrates the new trailer, and while the devs don’t straight-up confirm this is McConaughey, there’s no mistaking that voice given that we already know he’s in the game. He describes a threat lurking in the darkness between the stars called the Mara-Yama. These creatures take the form of what I can only describe as planet-sized fleshy masses, seeking out tormented minds to add to their collective body horror. The trailer goes full Cronenberg at a massive scale, with the Mara-Yama reaching out an arm made up of distorted individual bodies to embrace a passing starship.

The notion of massive intergalactic creatures lurking in the unknown parts of space looking to harvest humans certainly feels similar to Mass Effect’s Reapers, but while the Reapers were spooky we never quite saw full body horror on screen. The parallel to Mass Effect is appropriate given the studio’s BioWare heritage. Studio head James Ohlen led many of BioWare’s most notable fantasy classics, and writer Drew Karpyshyn headed narrative work on the first two Mass Effect games.

Archetype Entertainment was founded back in 2019 underneath Wizards of the Coast, the Hasbro arm that publishes D&D and Magic: The Gathering. WOTC has been making some big investments in the video game industry in recent years, noting back in March that Baldur’s Gate 3 “proved for us that people really wanted great D&D games,” and it’s clear they’re embracing new IP, too.

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