“The work of Viktor was unique,” Guns of Eschaton art director Helene Giraud tells me. “He has really his own style, which cannot be imitated.” As many fans of the late artist know, Viktor Antonov’s work isn’t just fantastical, but practical. Each piece is built on underlying mechanics, a realistic underbelly that fuels a preposterous setting.
Antonov co-founded Eschatology Entertainment in 2022 alongside CEO Fuad Kuliev and others to create Guns of Eschaton, a first-person soulslike game in a western setting. “When we came to my home, we love to watch westerns, even before the game” Giraud tells us. “He was especially fascinated by a movie like Duel in the Sun, it’s an old movie from 1946 by King Vidor. He loved The Big Country by William Wyler. I remember Pat Garret & Billy the Kid, 1973… he loved the way the shots were composed.”
With Guns of Eschaton, Viktor’s enthralment in the Western genre is let loose, alongside his usual eye for the inner workings of a mechanical world. Antonov is one of the few great game artists to have been met with worldwide acclaim with his hands renowned for crafting Half-Life 2’s City 17 and Dishonored’s Dunwall.
Eschaton then serves to combine Antonov’s love of westerns—Giraud notes that he was “fascinated” by the genre and “the use of the light and the shadows”, as well as his practicality. “He used to say everything is a character,” she says. “Everything, when you put your eyes to it, you must believe it… for him, the world needs to have its own internal truth even beyond what the player can directly experience.”
Giraud met Viktor in 2003 when “he was starting a new life in Paris” while they were working on Christian Volckman’s 2006 sci-fi neo-noir animation film, Renaissance. In the decades since, the two became close friends. “When he passed away, I was very, very sad because he was maybe my best friend,” she tells us.
“He was a very intelligent man,” Giraud continues. “He’s one of the most intelligent men I’ve met in my life. He was brilliant. He was alone. He was someone who didn’t like to see too many people. He was in his own world, but he was very intense… when he was in the room, people were hypnotised in a way by him.”
“I started working with Viktor on the game in late 2022, and sadly he passed away in early 2025. So we worked together over two years. So what I can say is that most of the game design was already finished when he passed away. I mean this is really Viktor’s universe. I cannot say I am representing Viktor. We were working together, this is really his game.”
As the game’s art director, Giraud has worked with Viktor’s art and mind both prior to his passing and afterwards. They recall a point in the game’s development where Antonov tasked her with creating a centipede monster that players will fight at some point during the game. “It was a centipede monster that represented the nightmares of all the Native American men in the game,” she explains, adding that they jumped between organic and mechanical styles just to get ideas down.
Giraud explains that Viktor would bring her the background of a character, focusing on what emotions they want that character to serve, their place in the world, and what they mean. “That was the way we were working together,” she says. “Then after he was looking at my drawing, that was the funny part because he [would] say, ‘Okay, you see this creature, now can you do something? I want a head to come from the mouth.’… he liked to add strange and unexpected details… and it was very fun.”
In Guns of Eschaton, every enemy must also serve a gameplay purpose. As a first-person shooter, it’s quite unique, not just because of its soulslike format. In the game, each foe can be dispatched through a series of shots to weak spots—for example, shoot an enemy in the left leg and the right arm to dispatch them—and these can get more complicated with certain enemies. These weak spots are explained with an in-game codex, but they also have to be present in the design.
Creative director Fuad Kuliev recalls a time when he and Viktor were together at Boston Airport. “At that point, we was designing this huge golem or hulk-like creature and you [Helene] had sent him an update and Viktor showed it to me and says, ‘there’s not enough lore there. It’s just this hulking thing. So let’s discuss what’s happening.’”
“And there was a story about like the person who transformed into this creature, and he was a human person and he was dismembered and his body parts are grown like a cancer-like structure, and then it creates [this] exoskeleton for a dismembered person hidden inside of this creature. And then, basically, Viktor started to draw that as a sketch in terms of: ‘Okay, that’s a structure, that’s a person inside, and then after design his weak spots which most of them are the limbs of the original person connected to the body of the huge person.”
While Viktor Antonov created a lot of what’s in Guns of Eschaton, the game sadly has to reach the finish line without him. There are plans for sequels, more stories in this world, some of which Viktor crafted before his passing with the idea of the game’s wider world in mind, but the team carries the spirit of Viktor’s work with them.
“We never know exactly how our past experience will shape our future work,” Giraud tells us. “But I think I carry a little of Viktor with me into my next project, because we all draw inspiration from each other. I mean the work of Viktor was unique. He has really his own style which cannot be imitated, but there is a spirit and there is an approach because he was always thinking about not only design. He was thinking about the meaning of it. What’s behind the design? What are we going to give to the public that they’ve never seen before?”
Guns of Eschaton is scheduled to launch on December 8, 2026 for PC, PS5, and Xbox Series consoles. Right now, a demo for the game is available to download on Steam, but, be warned, it can be very challenging.
