Sony dropped a string of indie announcements for PS5 and PS4 today, including the final release date for Disco Elysium: The Final Cut.
PlayStation Indies head and former Sony Interactive Entertainment president Shuhei Yoshida announced the lineup this morning. "Work with a friend to solve complex puzzles, make your own path in a surreal adventure, and experiment with sounds and colors in unexpected ways," he says. "The games in today’s announcements bring such a variety of aesthetics and gameplay, I’m confident that everyone will find something to capture their imagination."
Here are all the games shown today.
Operation: Tango - coming PS5 and PS4 this spring
An asymmetric co-op game of espionage and puzzle-solving, Operation: Tango challenges you and a buddy to share information and guide each other through heist-style infiltrations. One of you will play as the agent in the real world while the other watches over the virtual world as a hacker, and the focus is on how the two interact. It sounds a bit like Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons meets Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes. Developer Clever Plays Studio says you have to rely " solely on verbal communication to relay what you are seeing to your partner," so expect a lot of frantic chatter as you plan out your next moves.
Chicory: A Colorful Tale - coming to PS5 and PS4 this spring
Chicory: A Colorful Tale keeps the puzzle-solving going but takes it in a totally different, profoundly zen direction. Beyond solving puzzles with the power of color, Chicory is also a game about decorating the world as you see fit, using a mixture of paint, plants, and collectibles to make your ideal space and bring life back to the greyscale landscape. "Some players come for the adventure, and love discovering new places and solving tough puzzles," writes director Greg Lobanov of developer Finji. "Other players soak into the cozy, laid-back world and take their time painting things without worrying too much about what their next task is." We're getting some comfy arts and crafts vibes from this one, and the art style is just lovely.
Nour - coming to PS5 this summer
As weird as it is, Nour is surprisingly easy to sum up: it's a food rhythm game with delicious sound and playful visuals. This interactive food sim has been kicking around for a few years, and now developer Terrifying Jellyfish is ready to serve it up. The order is simple: play with your food to mess with the beat. "The music heats up, cools down, rises, mixes, and melts," explains audio emotion engineer Maximillian C Mueller. "What you hear is a unique combination of ingredients cooked per ever-changing specifications set by the way you play; no two play-throughs will sound the same. Wreak havoc, show restraint, and so too will the audio." Nour also has some cool DualSense features, letting you blow or sing into the mic to add yet more flavor to the chaos on screen.
Where the Heart Leads - coming to PS5 and PS4 July 13
While searching for his lost family dog, protagonist Whit Anderson somehow slips through time. Bombarded by visions of the past, present, and future, Whit reflects on his role in it all and finds himself entangled in seemingly endless choices. So begins Where the Heart Leads, a trippy adventure game that puts you in the middle of countless branching stories and tells you to craft your own. "With thousands of choices and dozens of endings, the story is very much yours to write," says Todd Keller of developer Armature Studio. "Along the way, maybe we can learn something about each other."
Puzzling Places - coming to PSVR winter 2021
The first PSVR game among today's announcements, Puzzling Places may well be the most ambitious jigsaw puzzle ever made. Developer Realities.io used photogrammetry to create realistic 3D renders of real environments, and after a software error fractured those renders, the studio thought to make a game about piecing them back together. The result is essentially a 3D jigsaw puzzle that lets you assemble real cityscapes, landmarks, and other real-world settings, all in a VR space. Puzzle pieces snap together fluidly, and the scenes really start to wow once you get a few pieces together. Puzzling Places will launch with many, many puzzles of varying difficulties – some made of hundreds of pieces – and more are planned for after release.
Heavenly Bodies - coming to PS5 and PS4 later this year
Imagine the frustration of building a difficult piece of furniture. Now imagine you're in space and constantly at risk of floating perilously into the void. Oh, and the furniture is a spaceship. That's Heavenly Bodies, a physics-based environmental puzzler about operating a space station using puppeteer-esque controls. You – and optionally a friend – play as a cute little astronaut whose limbs are all mapped to individual inputs, so you have to fiddle and fumble your way around to align satellite arrays, harvest minerals from passing asteroids, calibrate systems, and so on – all while keeping a white-knuckled grip on whatever anchor is keeping you from drifting into the endless beyond. "To some, these scenarios may sound straight-forward," says director Alexander Perrin of developer 2pt Interactive. "We can guarantee that the heart and mind will be tested. For in a world without gravity, nothing is still, nothing is secure, and nothing is simple."
Disco Elysium: The Final Cut - coming to PS5 and PS4 March 30
Originally announced late last year, the Final Cut of Disco Elysium adds four new side quests, full voice acting (!), and heaps of updated animations and other art to the hardboiled detective RPG. Disco Elysium was utterly brilliant when it was first released, and with more to love in the Final Cut, we're willing to bet it will only get better. If you want to learn about the game's origins and inspirations, check out this chat with developer ZA/UM.
And so, the list of upcoming PS5 games gets even more promising.
