Everything Sony Showed At the October’s State of Play

By Kevin Fox and Paste Staff | October 28, 2021 | 4:00pm

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Everything Sony Showed At the October’s State of Play

Sony’s latest State of Play began with a first-look for Deathverse: Let It Die, a multiplayer melee arena fighter with a unique visual style and a somewhat unclear narrative premise. The video tells the audience that the game is an in-universe TV show and, judging by the fact that it’s a game based around murder, it’s a grisly one. Deathverse is the sequel to 2016’s Let It Die, an action roleplaying roguelike developed by Japanese studio Grasshopper Manufacture and published by GungHo Online Entertainment. That game received mixed to average reviews, but it will be interesting to see how the new gameplay formula works within Let It Die’s distinct aesthetic. The video featured a combination of actual gameplay and cutscenes to show new gameplay

This was followed by the video for We Are OFK, which broke the fourth wall a little bit. It was very tongue-and-cheek, beginning with a joking Fallout reference about the nature of war and “thick arms” as part of the members of indiepop band OFK preparing for the State of Play event in the animation style of the game. The game is going to be a five-episode musical biopic game with “dialog choices, texting, and flirting,” as well as a music video at the end of each episode—five songs off of their new EP. My favorite part of the video was singing a performer wearing a “Black Trans Lives Matter” shirt on stage. I wonder if there will be clothing customization options. The YouTube comments are surprisingly very bad as, evidently, people that play games don’t have a sense of humor. Who knew? The game is being developed and published by Team OFK.

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Bugsnax is getting a big, free update from developer Young Horses in “early 2022” called The Isle of Bigsnax. There are giant Bugsnax, and home building and customization that reminds me of Animal Crossing. The game looks really weird and fun.

Five Nights at Freddy’s: Security Breach, the 12th sequel or spinoff since the Chuck E. Cheese-inspired horror franchise began in 2014, is set to release on Dec. 16 of this year. After nearly three decades in the industry, franchise creator Scott Cawthon stepped away from the series and retired from game development this summer after his history of political donations to Republican candidates and support for anti-abortion legislation became public. The games take place in a family pizzeria arcade where the player must run and hide from haunted animatronic anthropomorphic animals and have been critically successful.

Death’s Door, a 3D action-roleplaying game with an isometric view, is one of Paste’s favorite games of the year so far. It finally comes to the PS4 and PS5 on Nov. 23. The game has a very cool visual style and may include some puzzle elements. It looks a bit like Tim Burton’s animation, and players appear to play as a crow with a flaming sword. The dungeons look cool and so do the magical enemies. The video is one of the shortest of the presentations, probably because the game is coming out very soon. Players outside of Japan who pre-order it will also get a copy of UK-based developer Acid Nerve’s Titan Souls. Publisher Devolver Digital seems to keep picking winners.

After that, there was a video for KartRider: Drift, the latest iteration of Nexon Korea’s extremely successful franchise. The game gives off strong Mario Kart vibes, though with apparently more customization options. This is due at least in part to the fact that they’re not drawing from Nintendo’s catalog for their character and vehicle models. Some of the cars even looked modeled off real vehicles. The game will be free to play and is currently in an open beta.

After that, Sony treated us to a new King of Fighters game, opening with a new playable character named Dolores, a Black woman with an all-black outfit, long braids, an acrobatic fighting style, and some sort of magic powers. King of Fighters XV will release in Feb. 2022, six years after King of Fighters XV. SNK’s brawler—which has loaned fighters to rivals Tekken, Fighting Days, and Super Smash Bros—has a global open beta test happening from Nov. 19 to Nov. 22.

Then, Niels—AKA Wtbrg—and Amalie—AKA Norstef—of developer Invisible Walls presented the voiceover for a gameplay trailer of social deduction game First Class Trouble. The two developers demonstrated the wacky gameplay of the resident-vs-’personoid’ (robot) gameplay where each side is working to an objective in opposition to the other. The game takes place on a floating space station in a sort of 1950s space age-inspired design. The game relies on sabotage, strategy, and reasoning. While the character model movement wasn’t the most stellar I’ve ever seen, it does look like a good time for fans of games like Last of Us, party games generally, or old-school sci-fi aesthetics. The game is coming to PS5 and PS4 Tuesday, Nov. 2. PlayStation Plus members will have the game included at no extra cost from Nov. 2 to Dec. 6.

The next game shown was a Square Enix action roleplaying game with real-time combat set in space. That’s right, there’s a new Star Ocean game. Star Ocean: The Divine Force has the customary melodramatic music and dialogue that ‘JRPG’ might inspire in your mind, and I mean that as a compliment. The protagonist reminded me just the slightest bit of Cloud Strife (he was blond, had a big sword, and baggy pants) and, for whatever reason, what little I could glean from the story reminded me of Legends of Galactic Heroes.

Little Devil Inside got probably the longest trailer of the presentation, and it was a great sell for the debut game by Seoul’s Neostream Interactive. Little Devil Inside has had an interesting path over the past six years, from the Unity Engine to the Unreal Engine, garnering investment through Kickstarter and Steam Greenlight. The action-adventure game uses an overhead map during travel that makes the characters look a bit like bobbleheads, but zooms in for dialogue, objectives, and combat. The design in this close-up realm is pretty intricate, though the character design style isn’t aimed toward hyperrealism. The protagonist, Billy, looks every part the adventurer, with a sword and a hiking travel bag on his back. The trailer shows how he can throw enemies with his sword and depend on survival skills like fishing and camping. The game appears to have a kind of dark whimsy in a 19th-century-inspired world, fighting Hydra-like monsters and animated machines. The trailer did not include a release date.