Since its announcement in March, it is gave the impression of Sleight of Hand must be a improbable stealth-action sport in a magical noir setting — and now it appears that manner, too. Its newest trailer, revealed within the Day of the Devs 2024: Game Awards Edition stream, showcases witchy card-slinging gameplay on the gritty streets of Steeple Metropolis for the primary time.
Within the stream, creator Joshua Boggs describes Sleight of Hand as, “If you happen to took Steel Gear Stable and changed the weapons and instruments with playing cards.” That is adopted by a shot of the protagonist, Girl Luck, making an attempt to sneak previous a guard, solely to set off a brass-backed exclamation level as she’s noticed. The traditional stealth references do not finish there, both: Girl Luck is voiced by Debi Mae West, who performed Meryl Silverburgh in Steel Gear Stable. (The brand new trailer begins at 37:20 within the beneath video).
Girl Luck is a retired occult detective who takes on one final case as a way to destroy her former coven, which has a stranglehold on Steeple Metropolis. The sport combines third-person stealth motion with card-based technique, and within the new trailer, these mechanics seem to work in hardboiled concord. Playing cards in Sleight of Hand permit Girl Luck to see by way of partitions, deploy smoke bombs, blind enemies, teleport, sling hexes and crush all of the bones in somebody’s physique, to call just a few skills.
Aspect notice: On its face, Sleight of Hand‘s premise is eerily just like Deconstructeam’s The Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood, a superb 2023 sport starring an exiled witch who enacts revenge on her former coven by studying and constructing tarot decks. The video games are fully totally different in any other case — Sleight of Hand is third-person stealth motion and Cosmic Wheel is an isometric narrative affair — and I do not level this out as a result of I feel something nefarious is happening. I simply thought it was fascinating. Clearly there was one thing within the zeitgeist that made card-wielding witchy girls a scorching idea at each studios, and it is fascinating to see how the identical conceit may be interpreted in such vastly alternative ways.
Sleight of Hand appears like a classy new entry within the stealth-action style, and its witchy noir universe appears to assist a wide range of approaches in every encounter. It is developed and revealed by New Zealand studio RiffRaff Video games. RiffRaff was initially based by Boggs in 2019 below the identify MayDay, following the success of his spy-comic sport, Framed. Tencent threw down an undisclosed quantity to change into a minority investor within the crew in 2022, which is when it modified names to RiffRaff and employed up expertise from across the globe.
Sleight of Hand does not have a agency launch date, but it surely’s on monitor to hit Steam, Xbox Collection X/S and Sport Go in 2025.
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