Tokyo Game Show positively popped off this year, drawing over 250,000 attendees and dropping copious amounts of hype game reveals and trailers. Among them, there have been many blasts from the past, including Crazy Taxi World Tour —a revival of a dormant franchise that depicts what life was like in the crazy days before Uber— as well as Persona 4 Revival —a remake of one of the most popular games in the Persona series that depicts what life was like before streaming services were a thing. Yep, we were all climbing into our CRTs to have adventures back then. Good times.
However, perhaps the most exciting among these past-blasts are the updates we got about Kojima Production’s newest title, PHYSINT, which sees Kojima returning to his roots of tactical espionage action games.
If you haven’t been living under a rock during Hideo Kojima’s reign in gaming over the past 40 years, you know Kojima is responsible for one the greatest franchises of all time, the Metal Gear series of action-espionage games – a genre he pretty much invented. He’s long been lauded for his unique vision and movie-like approach to game direction.
It’s been a while, though, since Kojima has tapped the action-espionage well, taking a diversion to more directly explore horror and the supernatural with things like PT and the Death Stranding series – known to some by its much catchier and less-official title, Norman Reedus and the Funky Fetus.
Kojima then announced OD-KNOCK, continuing his horror exploration by partnering with Us and Get Out director, Jordan Peele, for a game that aims to go "beyond the limit of the 'scariness'" other horror games do. We don’t know what this game is going to be exactly, but it promises to be a “very unique, immersive, totally new style of game.”
But just when you thought he was out of the spy-game game for good, Kojima revealed he’s got even more gadgets his sleeve by announcing PHYSINT, a game that promises to deliver on action-espionage gameplay, the very thing that put Kojima’s name on the map.
We’ve only seen a few scant details about PHYSINT since then, but this week we finally learned who will be the face of the project, and it’s a very expressive one at that.
PHYSINT will star none other than Pennywise himself, Bill Skarsgård. Known in that role for his striking facial performance, it’s safe to say the Swedish actor pairs exceedingly well with the state-of-the-art scanning technology that Kojima Productions is well known for.
Skarsgård joins fellow stars Charlee Fraser, who played Mary Jabassa in Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, Don Lee, who played Samson Hook in Death Stranding 2, and Minami Hamabe, who appeared in Godzilla Minus One and with whom Kojima has been wanting to work with for many years.
PHYSINT and OD-KNOCK will also have a new publishing partner in XBOX. Besides both preferring to use all-caps in their naming conventions, the partners have another thing in common: a commitment to transmedia storytelling. In a statement, the companies say they are “working together across film and television to bring new stories to broader audiences.” For an auteur like Kojima that already creates games as if they were playable movies, this seems to be a match made in Outer Heaven.
As the excitement mounts for PHYSINT, you might consider pairing your tactical espionage games with a tactical espionage controller – the Stealth Ultra from Turtle Beach. It’s got features your foes won’t see coming, like anti-drift Hall-Effect thumbsticks, adjustable trigger stops, and mappable quick-action buttons – because you’ll need every tool at your disposal if you find yourself in Close Quarters Combat.
