The timeless multiplayer FPS Lemnis Gate will not celebrate its second birthday. According to an update from Ratloop Games and Frontier Foundry posted yesterday (opens in new tab), the game will be discontinued on April 11, with a final shutdown of the multiplayer server on July 11.

According to an update from the developer, July 11 will be the last opportunity for PC players to play Lemnis Gate. Console players will apparently have "permanent access to local multiplayer and training mode," while PC players "will not be able to play after that date." Some players in the comments of the announcement (which opens in a new tab) plead with the developer to allow local play on PC after the game dies, but there is no sign of a response yet. If you have just recently bought the game, you are in for a tough time.

To be fair, it is actually quite unlikely that anyone has paid for "Lemnis Gate" in the last couple of months. The game was last sold at 60% off last October, and since then the number of simultaneous players has barely hit double digits. As of this writing, there are five players registered on SteamDB (opens in new tab). It's not hard to see why studios would want to pull the plug.

But it's a shame, though not a surprise, that Lemnis Gate is an interesting and innovative FPS, and when it was released in 2021, its core mechanic - using time shenanigans to disrupt your opponent's play in the previous round - felt so fresh, so strange It seemed so new and so strange. Robert Zack scored the game 84% in his PCG review of Lemnis Gate (opens in new tab) at the time, praising it especially for its "smart strategy" and "dexterous gunplay," but noting that even then the low player count made the game hard to find.

As for game closures in recent years, it was a bit of a bloodbath: Lemnis Gate moved to a nice farm upstate in the last year or so, with games like Hyperscape, Babylon's Fall, Fuser, and many others (opens in new tab) in the dubious I joined their ranks. Let's hope this is the one that finally stops the losing streak.