Serenity Forge and Arbitrary Metric used today’s Secret Sauce Showcase to announce that Roman Sands RE:Build — their apocalyptic resort sim — arrives on September 16, 2026 across PC, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation, and Xbox. It launches alongside Paratopic: Overdub, a PC re-release that revives Arbitrary Metric’s award-winning 2018 liminal horror classic as a three-in-one remaster, remix, and sequel.
Roman Sands is a genre-bending thing that slips between two worlds: a stranded luxury resort in denial about the apocalypse, and a decaying zoological research station stuck in a time loop. It blends adventure games, visual novels, horror, simulation, and puzzle design into a story about trying to escape systems that feel impossible to get away from. That’s a lot to hold together — and Arbitrary Metric are exactly the sort of studio you’d bet on to try.
Two Worlds
A luxury resort at the edge of ecological collapse that refuses to acknowledge the end is coming. You work there. You serve guests who make endless demands. You climb the ranks, follow the strange rules, unlock new tools, and take on tasks that grow more surreal the further in you get.
Time is always slipping away.
A separate time loop inside a decaying zoological research station. You have a dead cow and a voice on the radio for company. A parasite has taken root in the station, and you have to decide whether to wipe it out to protect what work remains — even if doing so puts your own survival at risk.
The Genre Blend
All of it in service of what Arbitrary Metric describes as a liminal, unsettling story about trying to escape systems that feel inescapable. That’s a thematically loaded pitch for a game where you spend your time doing a job at a resort — and the fact that the job simulation is the horror is the most interesting thing about the premise.
The other half of today’s announcement. Paratopic: Overdub is a PC re-release of Arbitrary Metric’s award-winning 2018 liminal horror classic — but the framing is more ambitious than a standard remaster. Serenity Forge is calling it a twisting three-in-one: remaster, remix, and sequel to the original, all at once.
Paratopic built a real reputation in 2018 as a short, deeply strange first-person adventure that helped define what people mean when they say “liminal horror” in games. Bringing it back as something that’s simultaneously a remaster and a continuation is a genuinely unusual move — and it’s the kind of thing this particular studio has earned the right to attempt.
Arbitrary Metric describe themselves as an experimental development house making cathartic, transgressive games as a counterpoint to the alienation and malaise of modernity. Serenity Forge — the publisher behind To The Moon, Doki Doki Literature Club Plus!, and Fractured Blooms — has a long history of backing exactly this kind of work.
Both games launch September 16, 2026. Roman Sands RE:Build hits PC, Switch, PlayStation, and Xbox; Paratopic: Overdub is a PC release.
