Facepunch Studios, best known as the creators of Garry’s Mod and Rust, are making a new sandbox playground titled S&box, or if you’re not beholden to bizarre stylisation, simply Sandbox. That’s an appropriate enough title, and many fans are wondering if this might just be the Garry’s Mod follow-up they’ve been waiting for.
Check out our list of the best sandbox games on PC.
So is this Garry’s Mod 2 in a different guise? Garry Newman tells PC Gamer “maybe,” but the direction of Sandbox remains up in the air. As it stands, it’s an Unreal Engine 4 mod that loads a C# layer over top, which will allow developers to avoid using C++, defeat the wait for things to compile, and never have to close the game during development. It could remain an in-house tool for Facepunch to develop their own games with, but with a public announcement it seems the studio is hedging their bets.
Sandbox isn’t beholden to Unreal, either. It started development in Source, and is intended to be easily portable to any number of other engines. At a minimum, I hope Garry has made at least one gun that shoots bicycles.
The biggest game from Facepunch in the past few years has been Rust, which is currently still in Early Access. Other projects have come and gone, most of which have remained in the prototype phase, but the VR rollercoaster-builder Chunks did make it out last year.