When HoYoverse, then MiHoyo, first released Genshin Impact and launched itself into a big pit of covid-era gacha money that's snowballed into multiple lucrative games and many more projects in the works, much discussion was dominated by one sentiment: hey, this looks a lot like The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. HoYo confirmed that it did want to capture some of that Nintendo magic, and Genshin has since evolved into a more distinct flavor of open-world action RPG that I still enjoy today.
HoYoverse just announced yet another new game, on the heels of the cozy Animal Crossing-like Petit Planet and some unknown fantasy MMO, and my higher brain has failed to keep the following sentence contained: hey, this looks a lot like Control.
Varsapura is an open-world sci-fi action game set in a mysterious, psychic-tinted world where our collective human consciousness may manifest as bizarre breaks in reality and even fester into a hungry, corrupting Mindrot that can seemingly infect or even devour anyone or anything it touches. Psycho Pass, Persona 5, Scarlet Nexus, and Psychonauts come to mind, but the vibe is overwhelmingly of the third-person paranormal adventure Control, arguably developer Remedy Entertainment's finest work.
The impact of Control is everywhere in Varsapura's 31-minute gameplay demo, like fingerprints on glass. It's in SEAL, the secretive organization mitigating these psychological phenomena. It's in the flurry of paperwork that embellishes the attacks of one playable character, a SEAL office lady. It's in the ink-black humanoid being sporting a trilby hat, black umbrella, and black cat.
Starchy suits and crisp office cubicles bleed into liminal and non-euclidean spaces. Our playable agents float and fly and flutter around, dispatching shambling oddities. It's an intersection of espionage fashion and a brain folded inside-out. This is Control: HoYo Edition, and you know what, I'm not against the idea.
Varsapura, played here on PC (apparently one with an RTX 4090 GPU), looks superficially similar to Genshin Impact in that it seems you've got a party of three characters, each with normal attacks, a skill, an ultimate ability, and what looks to my eye like a special attack that triggers when you change your on-field character.
The apparent protagonist, a SEAL rookie looking to meet and hopefully live up to the agent who once saved her life, stealth kills enemies from behind, and less stealthily hovers and hacks away with a spectral umbrella. The aforementioned office lady swings and summons huge binders of files. Toward the end of the demo, a pink-haired girl with a massive flail manipulates gravity and triggers cascading explosions.
After squad-based action games like Genshin Impact and Zenless Zone Zero, this is all pretty HoYo-standard stuff. Varsapura stands out more outside of combat, not just in its aesthetic – still very anime, but smoother and more subdued, and grounded in a modern cityscape – but also in its gameplay. The world looks big and open as we cruise around it in a not-Volkswagen car, the demo player making a point to crash into destructible scenery and linger on flashy reflection tech in a really long driving segment.
It sure looks like an open-world action game. The main character can jump great heights, potentially enabling some exploration and platforming, and there's obviously a sizable space to explore on foot or in cars. Still, Varsapura seems more focused than the sprawling chaos of Ananta, better known as anime GTA.
Varsapura also seems to be the "paranormal" shooter first teased in HoYo job listings in 2021, then described as a "a brand new AAA open-world action-adventure game." That hiring wave was for HoYo's Montreal office, but that team would work with the company's global staff. Meanwhile, new Varsapura job listings on LinkedIn are for Shanghai, Singapore, and Los Angeles.
If Varsapura is indeed that mystery project, there's a lot less shooting involved than what I would've expected. Perhaps other unlockable characters are more gun-focused, or the development focus shifted toward melee given HoYo's strengths. That, or we are still waiting for that project to be confirmed, and HoYo is somehow making two separate paranormal open-world action games with vehicles and destruction systems. Surely not.
There are a lot of unknowns here – platforms, release date, a probable beta. My naive hope is that HoYo one day uses its bottomless gacha money to make non-gacha games that can just exist and breathe without live service baggage, but I've learned not to hold my breath on companies turning down potential profits. For now, we can only wait to learn more about how Varsapura is structured and monetized. That, and replay Control.
