Sony concluded its livestreamed PlayStation Showcase event on Wednesday with a 12-minute-long slice of Insomniac Games’ Spider-Man 2, PlayStation 5’s major game for 2023. It showed the heroes of the previous two games, Miles Morales and a symbiote-suited Spider-Man, working together to fight villains Kraven and the Lizard across an extensive swathe of New York scenery.
The game will be out this autumn, joined by Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed Mirage on 12 October, the latest in a long-running series of historical action games. Epic Games’ Alan Wake 2, a sequel to 2010’s Stephen King-inspired horror game, was also confirmed for 17 October.
New games from all of the studios that Sony has acquired in the past few years were shown: a reboot of sci-fi shooter deep cut Marathon from Bungie; a multiplayer heist game called Fairgames from Haven, in which players team up to rip off billionaires; and Concord, a competitive shooter from Firewalk Studios. A long-rumoured remake of the 2004 classic Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater was also confirmed.
Sony also announced a handheld streaming companion device for PlayStation 5. Currently named Project Q, it was shown as an in-progress design which looks like a PS5 controller bisected by an eight-inch screen. It will allow players to stream their PS5 games over wifi and play them on its smaller screen – as Sony’s handheld PlayStation Vita console did for PlayStation 4 – and features “all of the buttons and features of the DualSense wireless controller, including adaptive triggers and haptic feedback”, per Sony’s press release.
Anyone who remembers the breakout arthouse hit Journey on PlayStation 3 will be intrigued by Sword of the Sea, from Abzu developers Giant Squid, a beautiful-looking exploration game where you surf across undulating landscapes. Other indie highlights were Neva, a game about a girl and a wolf from the makers of Gris, and Revenant Hill, in which you are a cat training to become a witch’s familiar, from some of the creators behind Night in the Woods.
Sony has sold 38m PlayStation 5s worldwide since its November 2020 launch, despite widespread hardware shortages in the first year of its life. The company said in an investor presentation that it hopes to start outpacing the sales of its previous console, the PlayStation 4, by the end of 2023.
