Fire
No ammunition and no reloads. Every Vanguard fires without limit, so the fight is about where you stand.
A DarkWater Studios game / In development
The Vanguard AccordsLast Stand
Deepwell is still transmitting.
No one inside is answering. Four Vanguards are sent down to find the missing crews.
Playable demoA Windows PC demo of Last Stand is available. Site artwork remains visual development art, not captured gameplay. Genesis is in active development in Unreal Engine 5.
01 / The descent
The mine is not empty.
The upper works are silent. The equipment is still running. The emergency beacon is still active.
Beacon active.No response.
The power is on. The lifts are dead. The only open route goes down.
Personnel channels / silentMotion / confirmed
Deepwell / Signal unstable
02 / Combat
Hold the line. Then push deeper.
Side-on squad combat with fully 3D characters. Fight across three lanes of depth while the tunnels fill from every direction.
Four operators.
One fight.Choose a Vanguard and bring the squad, or play locally with up to three friends. The available Windows demo supports same-screen multiplayer.
One fight.Choose a Vanguard and bring the squad, or play locally with up to three friends. The available Windows demo supports same-screen multiplayer.
Move
Jump, mantle and ride moving platforms through tunnels that climb as often as they fall.
Evolve
Five weapon paths per operator, three-charge specials, and three permanent evolutions that change how each Vanguard fights.
The full game is planned with online multiplayer for PC, console, and mobile. The available Windows demo supports up to four players on one screen; it does not include online play or console and mobile versions.
03 / The squad
Meet the Vanguard.
Gideon Rook / Bastion
Bastion
He checks the team, not himself.
Gideon commands the rescue. He has led Sable, Tomas, and Iona for years and knows what each of them can handle. He took the Deepwell call because people were missing and someone had to go get them.
SpecialHold Fast
04 / Deepwell
Every level changes the rules.
The deeper the rescue goes, the less Deepwell resembles a mine.
Depth 01
Survey Crown
Depth 02
Flooded Works
Depth 03
Fossil Seam
Depth 06
Vent Cathedral
Motion detected / lower works
Every footstep carries.
The Veyrketh do not speak or use tools. They hunt through vibration and scent, they move fast, even the largest of them, and walls and ceilings do not slow them down.
Also from DarkWater Studios
The Vanguard Accords: Genesis
Fight on foot. Dominate the battlefield in a war machine. Take command of a capital ship and tear through the stars. The Vanguard Accords: Genesis puts every scale of war in your hands: one soldier, one galaxy, and a conflict that changes with every choice you make.
The premise
Every scale of war
A firefight in the streets can become a mech assault across the district, and end with you commanding a fleet above the planet.
Genesis is being built so each scale belongs to the same war, the same world, and the same player. You walk a street, climb into a frame, and rise to a carrier deck without a single cut.
The setting
The Warrens
The Warrens was never meant to become a city. Its concrete towers were abandoned before the walls and windows were finished, and people moved in anyway. Families built homes out of cargo containers, salvage, tarps and stolen power. Rain pours straight through the open skeleton and disappears into the tunnels below.
Beneath the streets lies another city: flooded chambers, forgotten service roads, drainage tunnels and vertical shafts connecting the lowest sewers to the highest rooftops. When the war reaches the Warrens, every level of it becomes a battlefield.
Swipe
One war, three ways to fight
Soldier / Mech / Vessel
What you learn on foot carries into every scale of the fight. Screens fail, plating breaks, structure gives, and damage behaves the same way whether you are on foot, in a frame, or aboard a warship.
Swipe
Tier 01
Personnel
Fight on foot through the streets and the tunnels beneath them. Break through screens and plating, get at what they were protecting, and control the fight before heavier forces arrive.
Tier 02
Frames
Eighteen-metre war machines designed for district-scale traversal, combining heavy firepower with boost and heat management.
Tier 03
Vessels
Take command of a crewed capital ship and carry the war beyond the planet, directing fleet-scale combat where a single order decides the fate of thousands.
DefencesScreens / plating / structureDamageOne modelControlsThe same at every scale
Missions
Every mission moves the war
Rescue a collapsing evacuation. Strip technology from a drifting wreck. Board a capital ship before its crew brings the guns back online. What you save, destroy or abandon changes what comes next.
Swipe
Boarding
Hullbreaker
The battleship is crippled, but its crew is still aboard and working to bring the hangar back online. Get inside and reach it before they finish.
Extraction
Last Light
The evacuation is coming apart around you. The medical frigate is still out there, and reaching it is the whole job.
Salvage
Who Gets The Wreck
One intact blueprint core is still inside the wreck. A rival crew is already aboard looking for the same thing. Get to it first.
Combined arms
Break The Sovereignty Hub
An enemy settlement holds because a single control hub anchors it. Reach that hub and put it out of action.
Sabotage
Cut The Shield Bus
The whole position runs off one shared power bus. Cut it, with patrols closing in around you the entire time.
Crisis
Unmoored Prize
An armed prize vessel is rotating into Dock 19. Stop it, and stop it without setting off a war between crews.
Exploration
The Silent Gate
The observatory has gone dark, and there is a Choir machine inside it that nobody can account for. Find out why.
Survival
No Command Ship
The command ship is gone. The debris field it left behind is still burning, and you still have to cross it.
Beyond the Warrens
The wider setting
The Warrens is only the beginning. Beyond its atmosphere, six human powers compete for territory, technology and control of what humanity becomes.
Six powers, risen from the wreck of the same empire. Each inherited the same debt from that collapse, and each did something very different with it. Read the six blocs. Something else reached the Frontier first: the Veyrketh.
Swipe
Earth orbit
Terran Concord
Working families inside an orbital arcology, the industrial heart the Accords were written to hold together.
Owner-operators
Centauri
Ships owned by the crews that fly them, repaired in the berth by the people who depend on them.
Mixed-origin modules
Sirius Free Port
A market grown from whatever docked and never left. Every module a different hand, bolted to the last.
Forge stations
Eridani
Housing, canteen and foundry on one circulation loop, because the shift never really ends.
Frames and pilots
The Seven Sisters
A culture built around the machine, the person inside it, and the crew that gets both back.
Garden berths
Ceti Lucid
Where the fleet is quiet and the dock is planted. A different answer to the same hard problem.
The long history
2070 to 3278
Twelve centuries brought humanity back together. They did not teach humanity how to forgive.
Swipe
2070s
Corporate Charters
Charters replace failing governments, and private security assumes public authority.
2070s
The War On The Rich
Citizens seize a corporate-held water and power utility as private security closes in.
late 2070s
The War On Resources
A civilian water convoy is caught between rival corporate-state patrols.
2091
The First Exchange
Evacuees watch the first limited nuclear exchange from a closing shelter. No side is identified as firing first.
2094
The Full Exchange
Colony lifeboats leave Sol: private, unequal and incomplete, as the exchange devastates Earth.
2094 to 2170
The Long Winter
Bunker survivors endure nuclear winter, a damaged atmosphere and failing infrastructure.
early 2100s
Surface Run
Survivors race an exposed facility for the bunker hatch through an extinction-grade solar storm.
early 2100s
Alpha Centauri
Humanity's first extrasolar colonists begin the habitat settlement.
c. 2150 to 2170
The Free Cities
Survivor enclaves cooperate without surrendering local rule.
2200s
Reclamation
Free City engineers restore water, soil, wetland and forest before the colonies ever return.
2270s
TRAPPIST-1
The furthest and best-armed colonial wave reaches the tightly packed worlds.
2278
Return To Earth
Colonial return ships find that Earth survived and rebuilt without them.
2300s
The Generational Fleet
An aging sublight fleet arrives after decades in transit to find newer infrastructure waiting.
early 2400s
Jump Gates
Both sides of the Reckoning discover jump-gate technology within the same period.
2528
Terran Ascendancy
Terran forces achieve effective control of every human-settled system.
2528 to 2900
Sisters' Independence
The Seven Sisters declare independence and fight the occupation.
fragmentation
The Forge Worlds Break
Eridani workers halt the line and refuse further Terran shipments. Independence without a shot.
fragmentation
The Quiet Secession
Ceti engineers disconnect the last Terran administrative link. Local systems never falter.
Ascendancy collapse
Sirius Free Port
Terran withdrawal leaves a neutral vacuum; traders and breakaway powers make a port of it.
before 3278
First Contact
Vherai, Choir and Kaeth sightings move from rumour to confirmed fact.
Visual development, not final gameplay. The images on this page are concept and pre-production art produced to establish the look and feel of the setting. They are not captured from a playable build, and the final game will differ.
DarkWater / In development
Unannounced
More when it is ready.
Project 03
The studio
The DarkWater Studios
DarkWater Studios is an independent St. Louis studio building ambitious, players-first worlds through focused development and responsible growth. It expands around proven need, so every role it creates is one it can keep.
Two Vanguard Accords games are in active development in Unreal Engine 5: Last Stand, set at Deepwell, and Genesis, set in the Warrens. About the studio
- Founded
- 2025
- Engine
- Unreal Engine 5
- In development
- Last Stand / Genesis
- Release
- Complete, no live service
Join the Vanguard
Be there when it opens
Development updates, early looks at Deepwell and the Warrens, and first access to playtests.
We email when there is something real to show, and never sell the list. Press kit