If the embed won’t play, the launch trailer is also here on YouTube.
S-GAME has released the launch trailer for its wuxia action RPG Phantom Blade Zero, a little over three minutes of swords, sparks and people being hurled through the scenery, ahead of its arrival on PS5 and on PC via Steam and the Epic Games Store. The game unlocks at 7pm Pacific time on 28 October, which in Britain means 2am on Thursday 29 October, and pre-loading opens two days earlier. Collectors will have to be patient, as the physical PS5 Standard, Deluxe and Ultimate editions won’t appear until 2027.
You play Soul, an elite assassin for a shadowy outfit known as the Order, who is framed for the death of his master and left with a ruined heart. A mysterious healer called the Flesh Sculptor patches him up, with the small catch that he now has 66 days to live, so he sets off across the rotting martial world of the Wulin to find out who stitched him up and whether there’s a cure. Devotees of noir will recognise the shape of Rudolph Maté’s D.O.A., in which a poisoned man spends his final days investigating his own murder. This version simply has more spears.
S-GAME calls its style “kungfupunk”, a word any self-respecting Hong Kong producer of the 1980s would have printed across a poster in letters six feet high. The idea is traditional wuxia storytelling crossed with machinery, folk horror and a dose of the supernatural, with fight choreography captured by motion capture and modelled on the golden age of Hong Kong action cinema. Donnie Yen has been consulting on the game since 2023 and appears in it as Mó Yuan, which is about the strongest credential a martial arts game could hope for. There are more than 30 weapons and over 20 secondary “Phantom Edges” to mix and match, and defeated bosses surrender their weapons and signature techniques, which is the Mega Man school of career development.
It has been a long road. The game first turned heads at a PlayStation Showcase in 2023 and has done the rounds of every trade show since. At The Game Awards last December it was dated for 9 September, before slipping seven weeks into Halloween week, and S-GAME declared development finished back in August. The obvious comparisons are Sekiro and Ninja Gaiden, and the trailer leans hard into the flowing, parry-heavy combat that has impressed the people who played the show demos. Whether the story can sustain 66 days of brooding remains to be seen, but if the game delivers even half the swagger of a Tsui Hark wire-fu epic, Soul’s short life should at least be a merry one.
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