This 'brinepunk' 4-player co-op shooter has some of the coolest guns I've seen in ages, and its first alpha test starts Friday

If you're looking for a new cooperative shooter to sink your friend group's collective teeth into, you might want to check out Abyssus—and you'll get that chance, well, tomorrow, as revealed in today's trailer in The PC Gaming Show: Most Wanted.

The short features a group of ironclad deep sea divers jumping through a portal to blast away hordes of ancient robots, but the stars of the show are the guns. There doesn't seem to be anything standard about Abyssus' arsenal, what with its rotary cannons, hails of glowing orbs, and laser-spewing rifles. We also got what seems to be a look at the game's mutations, which slap various modifiers onto those guns for different effects.

It's all getting cooked up by former Coffee Stain devs who founded their own studio, DoubleMoose Games, as well as publisher The Arcade Crew. Abyssus is a mite more ambitious than DoubleMoose's debut game, a riff on Happy Wheels starring a bug-eyed chicken, and I’m already eager to explore its sunken ruins. Both of the year’s biggest cooperative shooters, Helldivers 2 and Space Marine 2, involve fighting giant bugs in space on behalf of an uncaring interplanetary empire, so unearthing otherworldly horrors in search of forgotten technology sounds like a nice change of pace.

Beyond the offbeat atmosphere, Abyssus seems eager to embrace what's so fun about a good roguelike shooter. High customizability, shiny toys to play with, and a flood of mindless goons to waste. Time will tell just how deep the gun-modding well goes, but not that much time; alpha starts only a day after today’s show, on December 6. It's the first of three timed alpha playtests and it runs until December 9, with the next two running from December 13-16 and December 20-23.

Players can follow the game as it approaches its 2025 release on X and wishlist it on Steam.