Planned Release Date: To be announced

About This Game

Journey to the West is over. The debts of the gods remain.

Shadow Play: Nezha brings kung fu-inspired spear combat, divine powers, and Chinese shadow puppetry to a 2D side-scrolling action adventure. Wield Nezha's spear through roguelite battles and Metroidvania exploration, uncovering an ancient calamity across repeated lotus rebirths.

Spear techniques meet divine powers

Fight at close range with spear techniques, movement arts, and supernatural abilities. Combine your attacks with skills, relics, and talismans to respond to the enemies in your path. Martial arts-inspired weapon combat and mythological powers come together in a side-scrolling hack-and-slash adventure with room to shape your own approach.

Build a fighting style around spear techniques, divine skills, movement, combat tactics, and cultivation. Develop combinations that suit your preferred abilities, or adapt your choices to the enemies and routes of the current run. Face celestial warriors and legendary demons with a growing understanding of both your martial techniques and your divine arsenal.

Build across lives. Explore beyond familiar paths.

Death begins another cycle, with rearranged routes and enemy encounters. Combine skills, equipment, relics, and talismans, grow through repeated challenges, and discover new events, characters, and secrets along the way. Each choice changes how you fight and explore during that life.

Travel through interconnected mythological regions and revisit them as new abilities open previously unreachable paths. Double jumps, barrier-breaking abilities, and water-crossing arts lead to hidden routes, relics, encounters, and story events. Roguelite variation meets Metroidvania exploration, giving you new reasons to return to places you thought you knew.

Vintage Chinese animation. Stories on a shadow-puppet stage.

Vintage Chinese animation is central to the visual identity. Inspired by classic Chinese animated films, the art brings traditional shadow-puppet forms and lighting into an animated mythological world. Characters, environments, and story performances share this distinctly Chinese retro-animation sensibility.

Shadow puppetry is more than a visual style: it is also how the story is performed. Numerous shadow-puppet story cutscenes bring mythological characters and their conflicts to the stage. Beyond combat and exploration, these theatrical sequences invite you into Nezha’s story through the characters and their unfolding drama.

Characters, landscapes, lighting, and battles unfold like a living Chinese shadow-puppet performance. Real-time lighting evokes translucent materials and projected silhouettes, while paper-cut and ink-wash influences reshape mythological figures and supernatural powers.

Articulated silhouettes, light projection, and the distinctive movement of shadow puppets define the visual language. Traditional Luogujing percussion also interacts with combat flow, attack feedback, entrances, and skill performance. Martial action and theatrical rhythm turn each encounter into part of the shadow play.

The gods return. Old conflicts endure.

After the Journey to the West, Heaven wages another campaign against the demons of the Northern Continent. As the war stalls, a calamity older than the conflict begins to surface. Grudges from the age of Investiture draw familiar figures into turmoil again.

Nezha once sacrificed his flesh and bones, returned in a lotus body, and rose among the gods. Now stripped of his divine status and hunted by Heaven, he is trapped in cycles of destruction and rebirth. Sun Wukong, Zhu Bajie, Li Jing, Zhong Kui, celestial warriors, and figures from Chinese folklore cross paths in this original continuation of the myths.

Some may stand beside you; others oppose you or pursue their own aims. Piece together the truth across successive lives, question the boundaries between gods and demons, and discover what becoming a god truly means for Nezha.

AI Generated Content Disclosure

The developers describe how their game uses AI Generated Content like this:

Generative AI was used during development to assist in creating some artwork and some character dialogue voice lines. These assets are currently used as development placeholders and are planned to be replaced before the full release. The game does not include runtime generative AI content.