Threads of Mizan Was One in every of Gamescom 2026’s Finest Motion Video games

1001: Threads of Mizan was, as sport director Scott Lussier mentioned to me in an interview at Gamescom 2026, the “biggest secret ever stored.” The gaming trade has a behavior of leaking information about upcoming video games and due to this fact spoiling the shock, so when the trailer for Mizan was proven throughout Opening Night time Dwell, everybody was gobsmacked. An AAA action-adventure sport that completely no one noticed coming, with a singular setting that has not often been explored in video video games earlier than? Rely us in.

The one drawback with the reveal trailer was that whereas it wears its Arabian Nights inspiration on its sleeve, it gave no indication as to its style, mission construction, story, and so forth. I’ve performed the sport now, in a 15-minute session behind closed doorways. Whereas I solely acquired to expertise a short part of 1 stage, Lussier additionally defined how the remainder of the sport will work.

“What we’re constructing here’s a single-player motion journey sport that will get higher with your mates,” he informed me. “We’ve created our personal world that’s impressed largely by the tales of Arabian folklore, and we’re weaving the world of Arabian Nights inside there. It is about flying on carpets, preventing colossal enemies, and doing it with your mates whereas additionally experiencing tales within tales.”

Within the demo, three of us leaped off the sting of a cliff, summoned our magic carpets, and flew by way of a rocky desert, taking out teams of enemies alongside the way in which. Fight is paying homage to the Arkham or Spider-Man video games: fast-flowing, auto-targeting, with choices of sunshine or heavy assaults, together with blocks and well-timed parries. It isn’t reinventing the wheel…

…however it does have one other dynamic in play: flight fight. After we took down the Sand Knight, a mini-boss that required loads of synergy between our trio to dodge his assaults and pummel him collectively when he was staggered, the demo flung us immediately into the headline act, a boss combat towards a jinn named Nazjush.

Lussier wasn’t kidding when he mentioned Mizan has colossal enemies. Nazjush was a four-armed god, 100 instances greater than every of us, carrying a headpiece adorned with 11 blinking eyeballs. She’d ship out common projectiles as we flew round, dodging them in midair, earlier than sending cursed magic again at her to interrupt her stamina. Finally, she’d come droop down on the fringe of our platform, opening a window to destroy an eyeball or two. It was a spectacle and a half, and if each important boss combat all through Mizan is half as memorable, this shall be a sport that thrives off its set-pieces.

Every mission or stage in Mizan is linear, however the order you sort out them in just isn’t. “You may sort out bosses in no matter order you like,” Lussier defined. Nicely, “in addition to the primary one; you need to do some pre-reqs earlier than you may combat the primary boss. However with regards to exploration, should you wanna go and spend a few hours doing races, puzzles, or tombs, be happy.”

So Mizan is not an open-world sport, however it does have loads of elective actions that spin off from the sport’s hub world. Lussier was eager to speak about one thing often called the djinn realm, explaining it is basically an “unseen world” that you just “do not naturally come across, you undergo a non secular journey by way of that.” This realm comprises vaults, which sound just like trials in Breath of the Wild: “they are often puzzle-based, combat-based, and all these issues feed into the primary development.”

Lussier additionally talked to me concerning the video games that impressed Mizan: “In relation to really feel of motion, it is laborious to not have a look at Insomniac’s Spider-Man and the way they crushed the way it felt to swing by way of the town. So we needed to ensure that the carpet might ship on the same fantasy, though the mechanics are basically completely different.”

Vibes-wise, although? Video games which have had “regional influence on native folklore” are a number of the workforce’s greatest inspirations, Lussier mentioned. “Like The Witcher, proper? Actually put that on the map and confirmed everybody what that area is about. After which Black Fable: Wukong, that sport actually enriched that complete space. Or Ghost of Tsushima, though that is not folklore, and there is been tons of feudal Japan video games, however Ghost of Tsushima was such a stupendous expertise and you permit figuring out the center of what a samurai is. Whether or not that was intentional for them or not, it did not matter. You felt it.”

1001: Threads of Mizan would not have a launch date but, however the vertical slice I performed felt extremely polished. Lussier claims there is not any launch window in thoughts both, because the workforce continues to be “actively constructing the world,” and for them to inform the story they wish to inform, they “want to have the ability to undergo a number of completely different worlds.” Examples he gave embody misplaced cities, civilizations, and “corrupted cities which have been overtaken.” I can not wait.