Samson Studio Liquid Swords Has Gone Bankrupt

Liquid Swords – the studio behind Samson: A Tyndalston Story – has filed for bankruptcy. According to Breakit, this means that all of the studio’s nearly thirty employees will be eligible for state support. The report has also noted that the studio hadn’t paid its employees for months. With the state support process underway, the bankruptcy trustee for the studio is now looking for a new buyer.

The bankruptcy comes just a few months after the studio released Samson – its only game under the Liquid Swords banner. The title came out to mixed reviews, with many criticizing its various bugs, game design decisions, and other issues. As one Steam reviewer explains it, “It’s shocking that this game was released in 2026; this would make more sense if it were 2010, maybe.”

In our review from back when Samson first came out, we gave it a score of 7 out of 10, praising the richly detailed city of Tyndalston and satisfying hand-to-hand combat. However, we criticized its overly familiar mission designs, stiff NPCs, and basic enemy AI, along with a host of technical issues.

Following the game’s release, Liquid Swords started releasing updates hoping to address technical and performance issues. The first of these came out just days after Samson’s release and focused on fixing a variety of visual and AI-related bugs. Progression blockers in missions where NPCs could die of fall damage were also addressed.

In a roadmap, Liquid Swords confirmed that it would continue to work on more updates to iron out all of the game’s various issues. Along with this, the studio said that it was taking player feedback into account as it worked on these updates.

Following the PC release, Samson would make its way to PS5 and Xbox Series X/S on September 21st. At the time, studio boss Christofer Sundberg spoke about how the team had continued supporting Samson after its release with seven updates focusing on bug fixes as well as a couple of content drops.

Back in February, Sundberg had spoken about the current state of the games industry and called it “cowardly.” Discussing his experience in working on games for three decades, he said that the industry is currently in a “desperate, cowardly (they call it ‘risk averse’) and confused state”.

Samson puts players in the shoes of the eponymous Samson McCray – a man born and raised in the town of Tyndalston who has also dabbled in the shadier aspects of the world around him by working as a getaway driver. Following the events of a job that ends up with Samson taking all of the blame and being sent to prison, the character is now saddled with a massive debt that he has to pay back with interest. This leads him to return to Tyndalston to find work, and over the course of the game, he discovers a sinister plot brewing in the city’s streets and alleys.

The core gameplay of Samson blends an open world with several missions that players can take on to try and make the money needed to fulfil his debt’s interest payments.