Vanran, a fast-paced soulslike action game with Shadow of the Colossus-sized boss battles, is getting a playable demo later this month. Check out the new trailer above, and the reveal trailer below.

If this is your first time hearing about Vanran, it's an indie-developed, faster-paced-than-usual soulslike that features random dungeons, and whose developers at Becuzus describe its fantasy world as such: "Vanran is a dark fantasy action RPG where a fallen human slave wields a sealed blade to spark rebellion. Players walk a brutal path toward freedom in a world of despair."

A playable demo will be available on Steam from January 23-30, and you can wishlist it on Steam if you're interested.

Ryan McCaffrey is IGN's executive editor of previews and host of both IGN's weekly Xbox show, Podcast Unlocked, as well as our monthly(-ish) interview show, IGN Unfiltered. He's a North Jersey guy, so it's "Taylor ham," not "pork roll." Debate it with him on Twitter at @DMC_Ryan.

You can’t always describe Goichi Suda and Grasshopper Manufacture’s games, but you know them when you see them. Examples like Let It Die and Lollipop Chainsaw might not resemble each other on paper, but spend any length of time with them and their specific high energy, off-the-wall style, brash tone, and script that's just wall-to-wall one-liners and you'll see that could really only ever come from one place. Just a few minutes with their latest slasher, Romeo Is a Dead Man, and yeah the boys are definitely back in town. But after playing the first two chapters, the latest mad science experiment of an action game helmed by Suda51, it clearly takes some big steps forward in art design and presentation that really raises the “Wow I didn’t see that coming” bar. Even the action, though not revolutionary, feels like a real commitment has been made to evolve the studio’s image from “crazy fun games to watch clips from” to “crazy fun games to spend countless hours with.”

There are a lot of Grasshopper-style things that are to be expected in Romeo Is a Dead Man: relentless absurdist humor, gore galore, killing the past, etc. But the signature erratic tone set as far back as Killer7 feels turned up to 11 here. The breakneck pace at which exposition gets sort of vomited at you, scenes change from focused narration to chaotic combat, and more is pretty intense. It’s not necessarily hard to follow, but more than once in my two or so hours with the game did I have to take a minute or two to simply digest what the hell was going on.

You play as the titular Romeo, who does have himself a Juliet, but the only way this game showed any resemblance to your favorite play from high school is that both of them die. Romeo is a deputy sheriff who gets his face ripped off by an interdimensional zombie ghoul and is transformed into a sort of Space Sheriff Gavan-style superhero that keeps him in a state of undeath and is drafted in to a sort of space time division of the FBI to hunt the sort of monsters that tried to kill him. Juliet, who arrived in Romeo’s little Appalachian town through mysterious circumstances, is actually some kind of extradimensional being who seems to keep popping up in people’s dimensions and mucking up the place, and is one of Romeo’s first targets.

That’s the simple version, completely glossing over things like the fact that the guy who saved Romeo is allegedly his time-traveling grandfather – who is also killed by face eaters but now just lives in a patch on Romeo’s jacket, for starters. Romeo Is a Dead Man’s story might be among the most ridiculous and far flung of Suda and Co.’s gameography, but it holds tightly to its fourth wall-breaking sense of humor and over the top characters that define the studio. It’s relatively easy to follow, and told in such a way to purposefully cast doubt on if what you’re attempting to decipher is even real. But it is engaging, if not always well-written or acted. And even then, it's told through a collage of mixed media that really kept me enthralled.

The opening sequence is a flyover of a tilt-shifted, handmade diorama. From there, we transition into a standard cutscene rendered in full 3D as one would expect, and the next scene might be a vividly detailed comic strip. Inside levels, small televisions appear with pixelated animations on them that serve as portals transporting you to spaces that look more like the Street Fighter training room with a stock jungle image in the background. When teleporting to your FBI HQ – a ship called The Last Night – you navigate it like a top-down 32-bit Sega Genesis-style RPG. When you die, the “game over” screen is an FMV of a human-like prosthetic face getting melted off. It’s all jarring, and frankly, pretty awesome.

Grasshopper games have a bit of a reputation for having stories and presentation given texture through tons of references to pop culture, classic literature, and raucous music, but not having the same sort of depth when it comes time to beat ass, the misunderstood Killer Is Dead excluded. Romeo Is a Dead Man isn’t Devil May Cry, but it has a lot of layered systems that create a combat experience that I really came to like quite a bit. You have basic light and heavy attacks with their own attack strings that can be stopped early but not canceled out with a dodge or something like that, so every swing is a commitment. When surrounded by enemies, even the simple cannon fodder basic zombies, it can be tough to make it out unscathed since these attacks don't stun enemies very reliably, meaning they're often free to slap as you slap them. I spent a lot of my time trying to stay outside of mobs, picking away at the edges with melee attacks or shots with guns at range and avoiding getting overwhelmed until I built enough of my blood meter through my attacks to use a special Bloody Summer attack for big damage.

This pretty simple loop was a bit of a let down for me early on, as Chapter 1 lacked attack and enemy variety, or really any challenge or pushback at all. And if I would have stopped my time after slaying the pretty straightforward end-level boss, a towering giant spawned after a Juliet clone ripped off her own head and threw it into a campfire, I would have missed the metric ton of new stuff that drops right after that gives Romeo so many more toys to work with. After flying back to HQ to report a job well done, I could buy more and different weapons – all which add their own sort of approach to regular combat – and could be swapped between in the field. I don’t think the melee weapons forced me to change my playstyle in the way a heavy greatsword, set of robot gauntlets, and spear that split into dual blades should, but the ranged weapons did. The pistol, shotgun, rocket launcher, and machine gun all forced me to work around their strengths way differently, if I was going to choose to lean on them.

Romeo is a Dead Man’s weirdest and best feature, though, are bastards – zombies that you can grow like plants that have special abilities that you can equip to use in battle, like one that spits poison or one that blows itself up on enemies. This gives you so many more ways to control crowds and keep your offense effective against a cohort of bad guys that also grow more deadly. Basic foes with guns (at least on the 3 out of 4 difficulty I was playing on) provided a significant jump in danger when they repeatedly shot at me while being tucked behind hordes of zombies. Mix that with the spicier sort of mutants that ram you with their giant tomato heads or scorpion-shaped bomb lobbers that leave toxic trails, and any given scenario could become a death trap. Even the second boss, a giant mutant head you fight between two floors of a mall food court, is a huge step up in quality from the first.

It’s a pretty old-school action game. There aren’t a lot of nuanced mechanics like dodges cancels. There's not even a parry or a block – at least in the beginning. But I enjoyed the relatively simple push and pull of each stage with the systems that exist quite a lot, even if the camera became a monster on its own. With everything properly in frame things still get very busy on screen very quickly, mostly due to the truly egregious levels of blood and particle effects that come off of enemies as you slash them up. Mix that with the text bubbles that pop up from characters trying to give you some unvoiced dialogue usually fight in the middle of combat and it can be hard to focus on the task at hand.

Sometimes despite itself, Romeo Is a Dead Man is shaping up to be a frantic action romp worthy of the Grasshopper Manufacture pedigree. Its somewhat traditional action mechanics don’t really test your reflexes and make an underwhelming first impression, but does pay off patience when rewarding good positioning and smart use of your bastard skills to get a leg up on the more eccentric enemies past the first chapter. It’s crazy throughout, using strong humor and marvelous art direction at a breakneck speed to make its truly bonkers space-traveling love story one worth patiently waiting until February 11 for.

The opening area of the campaign for Styx: Blades of Greed shows promise and the potential for creative stealth gameplay as a tiny but mighty creature in spaces designed for much larger beings. Extinguishing torches to create safe passages, cutting chandelier chains to crush groups of guards, and popping out of goblin-sized tunnels to assassinate enemies from behind is just kind of Styx’s thing. And now, the third entry in the series has sharpened its blades considerably. If you already liked Styx: Master of Shadows, Styx: Shards of Darkness, or any of the series’ obvious inspirations – such as Thief, Dishonored, Assassin’s Creed, et cetera – you’re in for a treat when Styx: Blades of Greed launches on February 19 for PC, PS5, and Xbox Series.

Before we get into the nitty-gritty of goblin life, it’s worth noting that the preview session ran through a cloud streaming service, which, unfortunately, experienced considerable latency issues that made the caliber of precision platforming necessary to progress through Styx: Blades of Greed feel more like piloting a drone on another continent than stepping into the boots of a little green fellow. Split-second timing defines Styx's gameplay loop, making input delay a serious obstacle when it appears. Fortunately, after massively downgrading bitrate settings to get this zeppelin flying, the early areas uncovered a beautiful and compelling high-fantasy world with plenty of nooks and crannies to explore.

On first boot, there’s an initial accessibility menu with thoughtful implementation, which is always nice to see. Options for deuteranopia, protanopia, and tritanopia colorblindness modes appear alongside adjustable color vision deficiency severity, color spectrum shifting, and controller vibration settings. It takes less than a second to skip through, but matters enormously to players who need it.

After a decently paced and informative opening cutscene, a subsequent tutorial layers in movement mechanics gradually. Running, jumping, double-jumping, and power sliding are all properly introduced and explained as the playable zone starts opening up, which is great because the tutorial itself doesn’t overstay its welcome. The B button executes a slide that allows players to slip under obstacles or cover ground quickly, while pressing RB after a jump triggers a cool little dash that propels Styx upward along walls. The preview build also included advanced saves that showcased grappling hook and glider mechanics in the Turquoise Dawn environment, which are available later on in the campaign. That said, our session focused primarily on the opening hours centered around The Wall, a sprawling human settlement built on the side of a mountain.

Styx: Blades of Greed commits earnestly to its high-fantasy roots, and its environments carry substantial detail to help players establish a sense of place in its immersive world. For instance, its opening zone features ornate dwarven architecture covered in ramshackle human structures and detritus, illuminated by atmospheric lighting that casts long shadows across vast industrial spaces. You’ll also travel between even larger locations on a sweet zeppelin in classic Warhammer or World of Warcraft fashion. A deep level of consideration went into the way this world functions, and playing as a goblin within it provides a distinct perspective that makes Styx both unique and interesting.

You’ll find zeppelin crewmates like the dark elf Djarak and human pilot Helledrin to be well-written, which adds dimensionality. Meanwhile, the world is sprinkled with fun side-interactions throughout. Random guards can be overheard making offhand comments about eating goblins and turning them into pies, which would be darkly humorous if they weren't actively trying to murder our boy Styx. Besides some minor NPCs that sound like they're reading lines off scripts, using jarring modern American accents that clash with this vibrant fantasy setting, Styx: Blades of Greed’s voice acting broadly delivers solid performances, particularly during the cutscenes that act as connective tissue between the first few playable areas.

Dead Zeppelin

Styx: Blades of Greed is one of those games where trial and error are key gameplay elements, and you’ll probably die a lot while figuring out the best strategy to get through each challenge. Falling too far will kill you instantly. Likewise, walking into environmental traps like energy-spewing fissures, laser grids, and explosive vents will end your runs immediately. If you find yourself caught in direct combat, enemies kill in two or three hits. Death physics can, at times, create unintentionally comedic moments that add to the fun. For instance, when Styx flops around like a ragdoll after a mistimed jump sends him plummeting off a ledge.

That’s all perfectly fine because autosaves are extremely frequent, and death here is almost overly forgiving. Respawns rarely throw players back more than a minute or two, meaning death is more of a teaching tool than a setback. Each failure reveals something about enemy patrol patterns, environmental hazard placement, or ability limitations. In this way, Styx encourages methodical approaches and keeps everything good and fun, keeping its pacing steady even during some of its harder encounters.

What became clear after the first hour is that Styx: Blades of Greed rewards patience and observation in addition to twitch reflexes. There’s a solid selection of abilities to unlock as well, including Invisibility, which is activated by holding RT and pressing A and can prove invaluable when slipping past large groups of enemies. The climbing mechanics do sometimes feel janky, which could be a side effect of those aforementioned cloud streaming service issues – but animations also look unnatural, moving Styx up surfaces faster than what seems physically plausible.

Still, the stealth systems show a clearer mix of promise and limitations. On a positive note, light and shadow both matter significantly. Enemies spot Styx more easily in illuminated areas, while darkness provides cover. Players can extinguish torches with the Y button, creating safe passages through otherwise dangerous zones. Silent kills require careful positioning – like approaching from behind or above – but when executed properly, stealth is mechanically rewarding. Styx: Blades of Greed’s satisfying death animations convey a brutal elegance to grabbing an enemy, bringing them to their knees, and ending them with a quick throat stab, goblin-style.

Even so, the enemy AI typically often came up short in intelligence in the preview build. Guards sometimes get stuck on geometry or fail to react logically to obvious threats. In one notable instance, an enemy watched Styx kill his companion, then promptly turned around and stood facing a door, waiting to receive a knife in his gullet. This inconsistency in tone and mechanical depth is disappointing at times, undermining the tension Styx works so hard to establish with its thick atmosphere, slick stealth action, and excellent worldbuilding. There are times when enemy guards feel genuinely threatening, using ranged weapons with alarming accuracy even when Styx hides in supposedly safe spots like rooftops, or easily scrounging him out of simpler hiding places like cupboards and barrels. And then there are times they seem to forget they’re guards altogether, making it way easier to simply walk to the next zone like Boromir would walk into Mordor if he were a real Son of Gondor.

Stick 'em Wiv Knives

Direct combat in Styx: Blades of Greed feels deliberately awkward, which makes thematic sense: Styx is a small goblin, not a warrior. But this creates frustrating moments when stealth fails. To fight, you must manually draw your dagger by pressing into the right stick, which feels incredibly clunky, creating vulnerable moments during frantic situations. Enemies can much more easily block your attacks, interrupt strikes, and deal significant damage, slaying you in just a few hits; by the time combat starts, you’re basically already dead unless you can run elsewhere and hide.

There is a dodge mechanic here, and enemies do telegraph attacks with a blue flash before striking – but timing feels inconsistent, especially when fighting multiple opponents in confined spaces. The camera compounds these issues by obscuring key details in tight quarters, frequently clipping through geometry while players attempt to track Styx and the enemies he’s trying to fight off. This game clearly wants its problems solved through stealth, not brute force. This would be fine if some of the challenges didn’t end up feeling more punitive than strategic, with far too many enemies to outsmart and not enough breathing room to outmaneuver them.

It’s good, then, that each area typically includes at least one scripted environmental interaction that allows real creativity if you manage to weave it into your strategy. In one tavern, you can cut chandelier chains to crush the group of enemies waiting below, but you’ll need to have already snuck past or incapacitated a whole other group of foes to use this opportunity efficiently. Most of the time, there are opportunities to lure guards into explosive barrels or turn off lights to make an easier path for yourself. These moments highlight what Styx does well: rewarding clever observation and planning over reflexes and combat skill.

About an hour into the session, Styx’s seemingly robust progression systems started becoming available, giving the moment-to-moment gameplay a sense of depth that rewarded exploration beyond surviving to the next story beat. There’s a decent system for item crafting in the field. This feels similar to A Plague Tale in that you’ll collect raw materials in the environment that enable the instant creation of distractions and limited-use weapons. Craftable glass bottles break on impact and distract nearby enemies. Whistles lure guards toward specific locations. Acid traps eliminate both enemies and their bodies, removing evidence quickly and efficiently – a real boon if you can’t find enough time to hide a body in a nearby container before a passing guard catches up to you. Bolts provide ranged silent kills, though the physics feel janky and slow since bolts fly in straight lines and enemies slump over in basic ragdoll animations that lack the cinematic flair the rest of the game strives for.

Styx can equip up to four of these items at once in his quick slots, creating opportunities to switch up loadouts depending upon the situation. The crafting system requires gathering uncommon materials such as iron ore and cloth scraps scattered throughout each level.

Speaking of progression, it’s cool to see experience points accumulate from exploration and successful encounters, eventually unlocking skills in two categories: Amber skills, which lean defensive, and Quartz skills, which feel more aggressive. During the preview session, there were eight unlockable skills visible in the character menu. We only got a chance to try Invisibility and Clone Decoy, but the in-game menu shows some intriguing options that open up further into the story. A few that stood out included Time Shift for super-speed movement, Mind Control for possessing enemies, and Flux Blast for sending out waves of energy and knocking back enemies. The Clone Decoy move is particularly versatile; you throw it down at a location of your choosing, and it makes noise to distract enemies. It seems like with upgrades, multiple clones can remain active simultaneously, making it worthwhile to pump extra points into it if that’s your thing.

Granted, this framework suggests meaningful customization over the course of Styx’s estimated 20-hour campaign. Being able to specialize Styx's abilities based on preferred playstyle – whether that be pure stealth, aggressive elimination of key targets, or a hybrid approach – could add some decent replay value if the system is ultimately as robust as it feels during these early hours.

We spent roughly two hours with Styx: Blades of Greed, and it already looks like a potentially great high-fantasy stealth action game that understands what made the first two entries in its franchise work while expanding upon their scope. The Wall is a breathtaking zone, demonstrating Styx’s impressive environmental storytelling. Standing upon rooftop vantage points and looking outward, you can see the rolling mass of buildings clinging to the mountainside connected by precarious bridges, fires dotting the darkness below, creating a sense of lived-in verticality that excites us for the rest of the campaign.

Even in its current state, though, significant questions remain. Particularly around whether the enemy AI improves beyond its early inconsistencies, whether the grappling hook and glider feel good in later zones, or whether the narrative delivers on its setup as Styx leads a zeppelin crew in pursuit of valuable Quartz and away from the pursuing Inquisition that’s set out to hunt him down. The technical rough edges and combat frustrations can't be ignored, but they also don’t obscure the feat that Blades of Greed attempts and largely seems to nail.

Simply put, we’re excited for the rest of it. This is already shaping up to be a memorable third entry to cap off the Styx trilogy, and hopefully it will become the next great methodical stealth game in the vein of classic Thief and Dishonored.