Now that Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo have all played their E3 hand with their big press conferences, it’s that time of the show when smaller publishers get a chance to show off titles the public is less familiar with. One of those publishers, the German company TopWare Interactive, announced today at E3 that it will be releasing a new survival horror game called Sacrilegium. The game will be developed by TopWare’s in-house development team Reality Pump Studios. The studio is most known for the Two Worlds series.

Sacrilegium‘s developers state that they want to revive the survival horror genre, bringing back story and atmosphere. The game’s story features Alex, a beautiful female college student that also happens to be a martial artist. She will journey with friends “through the province of ‘Sacrilegium.'” Locations from San Francisco to Europe will be seen along the way, and Alex will battle with monsters including Moroi. TopWare describes Moroi as “a creature most resembling a vampire, but able to eat a vampire for breakfast.”

Sacrilegium will run on the Graphics Rendnition and Creation Engine (GRACE) 2, a game engine developed by Reality Pump. TopWare claims the improvements of GRACE 2 over GRACE, on which Two Worlds ran, will leave players “awestruck.”

“It pleased us that we succeeded [in developing] the GRACE 2 engine in a way that enables us to present models and landscapes that make photos look like charcoal drawings compared to the game.” said Miroslaw Dymek, CEO of Reality Pump Studios. “After all the years that we‘ve dealt with the appearance of medieval stories, it was time to pool the experience acquired and integrate that into a modern action adventure. We’ve definitely achieved that with Sacrilegium.”

The website for Sacrilegium promises to keep players constantly on-edge with feelings of tension, trepidation, and fear. Many of the claims TopWare has made at E3 about Sacrilegium are bold. It will be fun to see whether they can live up to the hype they are building an bring the survival horror genre back from the action-horror rut it has fallen into recently. Perhaps TopWare can take a cue from Frictional Games’ Amnesia: The Dark Descent and actually manage to scare gamers once again.