Curve Digital and Fallen Tree Games announced that American Fugitive is headed to the Xbox One, PS4, Nintendo Switch, and on Steam for PC at some point later in 2019.

The game is set in a flyover state in middle America during the 1980s, where a certain Will Riley is framed for the horrific murder of his father and is sent to prison for a crime he didn’t commit. Riley, discontent with rotting away in jail while the real perpetrators are free, he decides to break out of jail and track down the real culprit.

The game is very similar to Josef Fares’ No Way Out, but the hook for the game is that it’s a throwback to the original GTA, sporting an isometric top-down view where you can steal cars, rob people, and commit crimes in an open-world set in the countryside and sleepy towns as you attempt to track down the killer while avoiding cops who are on the lookout for Riley. You can get a glimpse at what the gameplay is like with the trailer below.

I have to say that indie developers are really stepping outside of the norm and trying some new things recently, which I really like to see.

Too often we’re bogged down with games that are just “me too” clones trying to recycle boring, tired, repetitive concepts without really trying to indulge in creative ingenuity. In the case of American Fugitive, the game isn’t just a linear straight-through action title, you’ll also have to attempt to unravel the mystery behind the murder of Riley’s father.

Lewis Boadle, the art director at Fallen Tree Games, explained in the press release…

“The project began life several years ago as an idea that just refused to go away: What would it be like to be on the run? Part open-world sandbox, part 80’s on-the-run thriller… ALL action! It’s a much larger vision than anything we’ve tackled before as a small indie team, but thankfully Curve Digital have proved to be the ideal publishing partner. We can’t wait to bust American Fugitive out of its cell and into the hands of gamers.”

American Fugitive looks like a pretty cool game, and it’s nice that we finally get a completely different setting than the typical settings of New York or San Francisco featured in most games.

So long as the gameplay pace is solid and the controls aren’t wonky, I think that American Fugitive could end up being a nice little open-world action title to keep an eye on when it launches later into 2019.

You can wishlist the game right now by heading on over to the Steam store page.