Alexandre Amancio, the studio head at Studio Ellipsis, has had a storied career. At Ubisoft, he was the art director on Far Cry 2, followed by the creative director on Assassin’s Creed Revelations and Unity. Then in 2016, he founded Reflector Entertainment, which is now a subsidiary of Bandai Namco and is the studio behind 2024’s Unknown 9: Awakening. Amancio left in 2022, but is credited as having created the adventure game’s world.
Now? He’s using his experience to approach video game development in an entirely new way.
“I went from like 80 people in the studio, maybe 15 to 30 people on my team, to 3,500 at the studio, which grew to 5,000,” Amancio told me in a private room in Studio Ellipsis’ central Lisbon office. “I missed those days where we were a small, scrappy team… When industries grow very fast, things become impersonal and people forget why they got into it in the first place, and sometimes you lose that sacred fire. I wanted to create a place where people wanted to be here.”
Studio Ellipsis was founded in late 2024. While the team has a side project in the form of Cradle of the Gods, a pirate fantasy-themed comic series, Nightholme is its first video game in development. It takes plenty of inspiration from extraction games, but it has a heavy focus on horror, with MOBA-inspired match-by-match progression, and it strongly encourages stealth gameplay, lest you’re swarmed by Lovecraftian-esque monsters known as grimspawn. The evening before this interview, I was one of the first in the world to play, and you can read my game-specific thoughts in Polygon’s Nightholme preview here.
Plenty of games have promised a unique blend of those that inspired it only to fall at the first hurdle though: attracting players. I asked Amancio what Nightholme needs for him to consider the game successful: “We need a strong community of people that think our game is awesome. I’d rather have a reasonably sized community of people that think we’re onto something, that this is a game they want to play because it’s giving them something other games don’t. Having millions of people rush in and seeing the numbers go up means they inevitably go down and you get measured by that, which destroys the long run.
“With Nightholme, we’re playing the long game, we know this can grow into something amazing. The first iteration of the game will be the core experience. We know where it’s going to go, we need enough people to like that to allow us to continue building the game so that in two or three years, we’ve built the scope of the game that we want.”
