Rescue Drone Simulator: Second Chance is how the Chernobylite studio makes disaster response feel personal

The survival genre has understood for years that the best disasters are containers for human stories — Chernobylite made that argument by building its horror inside a photogrammetry-scanned Chernobyl Exclusion Zone and centering it on grief and regret rather than survival alone. Rescue Drone Simulator: Second Chance, announced by Warsaw publisher Anraga Studios alongside Gliwice developer The Farm 51, makes the same wager in a very different genre: that a simulator built around machines can still anchor its weight in the people operating them.

The drone in Second Chance is not a flying camera. It is a physical machine governed by mass, inertia, thrust, aerodynamics, battery state, weather, and real-time damage — wind shifts the flight path, additional payload changes how controls respond, and the configuration assembled in the workshop between missions has direct consequences once the operation begins. Two control modes frame the experience: Simulator maps inputs the way real UAV pilots fly, with realistic stick behavior and unforgiving physics, while Arcade adds flight assistance for players new to drone handling. The game’s four-drone arsenal — rescue, firefighting, police, and interceptor — each demands a different tactical read.

Drone operations in a disaster zone in Rescue Drone Simulator: Second Chance — Image: Anraga Studios / The Farm 51

The title Second Chance carries the game’s central proposition. The unit at the heart of the campaign is staffed by experienced rescue specialists — firefighters, search-and-rescue personnel — who, through injury, age, illness, or trauma, can no longer work in the field in the conventional sense. Technology returns them to service, letting them lead operations from a safe distance and reach environments no human can safely enter. In the announcement, Radosław Kalisz, CEO of Anraga Studios, frames this as the game’s deeper question: not what automation takes from people, but what it can restore.

Visual and audio direction come from Wojciech Pazdur, CEO and co-founder of The Farm 51 and a co-creator of Painkiller, who serves here as art director and is composing the game’s score. Despite the near-future setting, Second Chance deliberately resists a sterile science-fiction look — drawing instead on the industrial spaces, analog control panels, and physical equipment of the 1980s and 1990s. Story is written by Artur Fojcik, Game Director at The Farm 51, whose credits include Chernobylite and Get Even, the studio’s psychological thriller nominated for a BAFTA Games Award.

The campaign runs approximately ten to fifteen hours across four acts, with missions set across forest trails, coastal zones, city centers, and industrial districts. Changing weather — including full winter conditions — can alter the dynamics of a familiar operation. Rescue Drone Simulator: Second Chance is targeting a Q1 2027 launch on PC via Steam, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X|S, with Anraga Studios confirming a simultaneous release across all three platforms.

For a studio that built its name inside the landscape of a real disaster — Chernobylite’s photorealistic Exclusion Zone is one of the most thorough environmental reconstructions in games — the move to fictional near-future emergencies reads less as a departure than a change of coordinates: the same instinct for place, the same belief that catastrophe is only interesting when the people inside it are.

Tags: Action Games, simulation games, Anraga Studios, Artur Fojcik, Rescue Drone Simulator: Second Chance, The Farm 51