Anomaly Company vs The Anomaly Project
Same developer, same genre, same price — different engine, maps and player count. Anomaly Company is Kekdot's second anomaly-hunting game: 1–4 players (down from 8), Unreal Engine 5, built as The Anomaly Project's updates quietly stopped in 2025. Full comparison below.
Type "Anomaly Company vs The Anomaly Project" into a search bar and you'll get one thread, one argument, two camps: "it's the same game twice" and "it's a sequel, chill". Both sides are arguing about real things. Here's the honest comparison.
The short version
Same genre, same pitch, same developer — Kekdot, working solo. The Anomaly Project (released November 21, 2024) is an 8-player anomaly-hunter with several chapters and event content through 2025. Anomaly Company (Early Access February 6, 2026; full release September 11, 2026) is a 1–4 player rebuild in Unreal Engine 5 with new maps, new anomaly pools and a big visual jump. Same idea, new chassis.
The facts, side by side
| The Anomaly Project | Anomaly Company | |
|---|---|---|
| Released | November 21, 2024 | February 6, 2026 (Early Access) · September 11, 2026 (1.0) |
| Players | Up to 8, online co-op | 1–4, online co-op |
| Price | $7.99 | $7.99 |
| Achievements / leaderboards | Yes | None listed |
| Latest content | Storage map and Barny's Playground Ch. 2 (early 2025) | 1.0 and the Asylum map (September 2026) |
| Steam reviews | 534 | 186 |
Official screenshot from the game's Steam page — a crew member working an office floor.
What actually changed
- Engine and presentation. Anomaly Company is built in Unreal Engine 5 — the biggest visible jump between the two games. Better lighting, denser set dressing, closer-to-photoreal corridors.
- The player count went down. Eight in The Anomaly Project, four here — a deliberate tightening, and one of the most-debated changes.
- New everything else. New maps (Office and Hotel), new anomaly pools, password-protected lobbies (added in the very first patch), and comfort sliders for breathing, camera shake and camera sway.
- A few things went missing. No Steam achievements and no leaderboards in Anomaly Company, even though The Anomaly Project has both. Check either store page and you'll see it.
The "it's a copy" argument, fairly stated
The complaint predates the release: a Steam discussion thread from October 2025 asked why a new game existed when The Anomaly Project "stopped receiving levels and updates", and it kept collecting replies into February 2026 — 13 in total, across both camps. The argument boils down to two lists:
- The case for "same game". Identical premise, identical loop, identical stakes: spot anomalies, commit to safe-or-purge, get reset to the start when you're wrong. The Anomaly Project's last map updates landed in early 2025 — so players who wanted more of that game were asked to buy a second $7.99 one instead. One thread reply even claims a Project level was "a ripoff of Labyrinthine, 1 for 1" — a claim we can't verify, and neither can you without playing both.
- The case for "new game". Different maps, different anomaly sets, different engine; the shared loop is just the genre, the way every racing game shares a starting grid. A solo developer can't keep retrofitting decade-old tech forever, and Kekdot's own posts treat the games as siblings — the 1.0 announcement still tells readers to go play The Anomaly Project.
Our read: Anomaly Company is less a sequel than a second take — a cleaner, clearer, four-player version of the same night shift, with better lighting and worse odds. Whether that's worth another $7.99 depends on which of those two things you were hoping to buy.
Which should you play?
- Want eight-player chaos, achievements and a bigger back catalogue? The Anomaly Project is still $7.99 on Steam — just don't expect new levels; its content cadence stopped in 2025.
- Want the game that's actually being worked on — Office, Hotel, and the update drama of September 2026? Anomaly Company. That's the one this site covers, anomaly lists and all.
