Ex-BioWare Devs Set a Paranormal Mystery in Small-Town Canada

Three ex-BioWare devs have done the thing a lot of laid-off game workers only talk about over beers: they left one of Canada's best-known studios and opened their own. Studio Reset, founded by Kaelin Lavallée, Kris Schoneberg and Francis Lacuna, surfaced publicly in May 2026. On July 29 it pulled the cover off its first project, a neon-noir supernatural mystery called The Eventide.

Here's the detail that should stop a Canadian reader mid-scroll. The game isn't set in a fictional New York, a rain-soaked Tokyo or some invented European capital. It takes place in a small made-up Canadian city. After two decades of Edmonton studios exporting elves, space marines and alien war councils to the world, three of the people who helped build those worlds are finally setting a ghost story somewhere that looks like home.

Between them, the founders have credits on Mass Effect 2, Mass Effect 3, Dragon Age: Origins, Dragon Age 2, Dragon Age: Inquisition, Mass Effect: Andromeda and Anthem. That's the run of releases that put Alberta on the map for role-playing games. Now they're working at a scale where one bad month is a genuine problem rather than a line item in a quarterly report.

Who Are These Ex-BioWare Devs?

The three founders cover design, level building and art between them, which is roughly the minimum you need to make a story game without hiring a hundred people. Studio Reset has also brought in colleagues who worked at Inflexion Games and Timbre Games, and on the Canadian survival hit The Long Dark. It's a small, deliberately Canadian roster.

Kaelin Lavallée, from level design to lead writer

Lavallée started as a level designer on Dragon Age: Origins and Dragon Age 2, then moved into narrative, serving as lead narrative designer on Dragon Age: Inquisition and Mass Effect: Andromeda. That's the rare career path that touches both how a space feels to walk through and what the characters say once you're in it.

Kris Schoneberg, intern to senior designer

Schoneberg's arc is the one industry people find remarkable: he started as an intern on the original Mass Effect and Dragon Age: Origins, worked as a level designer on Mass Effect 2 and Mass Effect 3, and rose to senior level designer on Inquisition and Anthem. He stayed through the studio's best years and its hardest one.

Francis Lacuna, 14 years on the art side

Lacuna spent roughly 14 years as an artist at BioWare, spread across the Mass Effect and Dragon Age lines. That kind of tenure buys visual consistency, which matters enormously for a game whose whole pitch is a specific mood rather than a specific mechanic.

What The Eventide Actually Asks You to Do

You run a team of specialists working paranormal cases. The twist is that your agents aren't interchangeable. Each one carries a worldview, a history and a set of beliefs, and those shape what they notice at a scene. The studio calls it Parallax Deduction: hand the same evidence to two different agents and they can walk away with two genuinely different conclusions.

GamesRadar+ described the feel as Dispatch meets The X-Files, which is a fair shorthand for a talky, choice-driven case game with something inexplicable underneath. Schoneberg has said a good mystery should leave you feeling clever rather than confused, and that line is doing a lot of quiet work: plenty of detective games hide the answer instead of letting you earn it.

Why Setting It in Canada Is the Real Surprise

Canada has one of the largest game development workforces on earth, spread across Montreal, Vancouver, Toronto and Edmonton, and yet the country almost never appears in games as itself. It plays Chicago, it plays Seattle, it plays nowhere in particular. A stylized small Canadian city — the strip malls, the long winters, the specific loneliness of a place with one main street — is close to untouched territory for a mystery game.

The Quiet Exodus From Big-Budget Studios

Context the announcement skips: 2025 was brutal at BioWare. EA restructured the Edmonton studio after Dragon Age: The Veilguard shipped in October 2024, moving staff onto other EA projects and narrowing what remained around the next Mass Effect. The studio EA bought in 2007 is a fraction of what it was.

We are not trying to recreate blockbuster development at a smaller scale.

That's Lavallée, and it's the whole thesis. The failure mode for ex-BioWare devs going indie is building a 40-hour epic with eight people and running out of money in year three. Saying it out loud at announcement time suggests they've watched that happen to someone else.

What to Watch For Before It Ships

No publisher, platforms or release window have been announced, which usually means the team is either self-funding or still negotiating. Watch for three signals: a Steam page going live, any mention of provincial interactive-media tax credits or Canada Media Fund support, and whether they show real gameplay rather than cinematics. A mystery game lives or dies on its interface, and nobody has seen The Eventide's yet.

If the pitch appeals to you, the single most useful thing you can do is wishlist it the day the store page appears. For a team this size, early wishlist counts are the number publishers and platform holders actually look at, and they're often what decides whether a game like this gets a second year of funding or quietly disappears.