Buried by Silksong, Atari's Adventure of Samsara gets 'relaunch' update

Adventure of Samsara is a 2025 hidden gem vying to be a 2026 breakout

There are bad times to release a video game and then there’s Sept. 4, 2025, the day Atari launched Adventure of Samsara directly into the maw of Hollow Knight: Silksong.

Miraculously, in the face of disaster, the publisher isn’t giving up on what it believes is a truly great game. On Monday, the company announced a major update for Adventure of Samsara, which it considers a resurrection moment for the objectively overlooked title.

Silksong’s release date, announced only a month before launch by Team Cherry, triggered a full-scale evacuation plan by nimble publishers. But at that point, Atari had locked Adventure of Samsara into storefront schedules across Nintendo, Xbox, PlayStation, and PC. Physical copies (a big part of Atari’s business) were pre-ordered. There was no escape hatch.

Atari VP of games Ethan Stearns was at Gamescom when he learned the news. "I was standing on the floor," he recalls to Polygon, "and we were like, 'What are we going to do?'"

His terrible gut feeling wasn’t just about a packed release weekend. Adventure of Samsara was itself a side-scrolling metroidvania, one with years of work behind it and a distinct visual identity. Atari was deeply invested in how Brazilian developer Ilex Games had fused its own retro vision with the 1980 Adventure IP. This was a big deal. SteamDB would later show the game peaking at just 15 concurrent players on Steam — a number Stearns acknowledges paints a grim but pretty accurate picture.

Still, internally, the game wasn’t treated as DOA and ready for burial. Instead, Atari doubled down. Since Adventure of Samsara’s launch last September, Brazilian developer Ilex Games has been working on a major update that adds a new optional boss, secret rooms, an in-game bestiary, combat improvements, traversal tweaks, and broader balancing changes that the team had wanted to implement around launch but couldn’t fully realize in time.

"The goal in so many words is to relaunch the game and give it another opportunity to be found," Stearns says.

Ilex didn’t conceive Adventure of Samsara as a reimagining of Adventure — the project began life as Tower of Samsara. But after years of development on its pixel-art gameplay and fluid combat style, the Brazilian studio struggled to secure funding to finish the thing. A visit to GDC saw divine intervention; Stearns said the project was an outlier for Atari from the moment the company encountered it.

"We met with the team and saw their work and we’re like, 'Wow, this feels very connected to what we were trying to do around innovative retro,'" he says.

Atari eventually saw an opportunity to connect the project to Adventure, the foundational Atari 2600 release widely considered one of gaming’s earliest action-adventure games. Rather than forcing Ilex to abandon its identity, Atari folded the indie project into its legacy catalog while letting the studio retain its aesthetic sensibilities, which Stearns thinks defies most modern interpretations of "retro" games.

"To me, [Samsara] plays like a '90s Prince of Persia-esque sort of adventure title," he says. "Its presentation and look feels so original and contemporary, but also feels very connected to a nostalgic era of gaming that we don’t see a lot of in these contemporary retro releases."

The post-launch update emerged organically from the team’s disappointment around the original release. According to Stearns, Ilex began compiling a wishlist of additions and fixes within weeks of launch — the sort of feature backlog that accumulates on nearly every shipped game.

"I think every game developer, when they launch a title, there are things that they wish they could have gotten in at the end," he said. "There's always stuff on the cutting room floor."

Under different circumstances, Atari could have simply moved on. So what made Samsara a financial bet worth gambling on again? Stearns openly admits there wasn't some grand corporate strategy behind funding the update.

"I wish I had a really deep strategic business-y answer to that," he said. "But I think it was that it was not so financially difficult for us to make the update and […] we really cared and liked this game, liked the developer a lot and just wanted to give it another chance.2

That investment extended beyond the game itself. One of the biggest outcomes of the project was Atari's growing relationship with Ilex Games, which Stearns says is already contributing to additional Atari projects. "Ilex now is part of our proven collection of developers that we trust and we like working with," he says.

Now Atari is hoping Adventure of Samsara gets something it never really had the first time around: oxygen. But Stearns understands it’s not suddenly less competitive out there.

"That's the thing — all the times are busy now. There's not a slow period anymore."