HoYoverse’s Varsapura Is More Control Than Genshin Impact And I’m Already Intrigued
Clocking in at the gacha bureau.
Best known for its smash hit Genshin Impact, developer HoYoverse is on something of a game announcement spree lately. On top of supporting multiple already-released gacha games, the studio recently announced cozy life sim Petit Planet and Honkai spinoff Nexus Anima, and now it’s revealed Varsapura, a surprisingly different game from the rest of its offerings with some unexpected influences.
HoYoverse just debuted Varsapura with a 30-minute gameplay trailer showing off the supernatural detective game in action. It begins with the player character entering the headquarters of SEAL, a group devoted to fighting a paranormal force called Mindrot, and immediately getting a job interview. If only it were really so easy.
Varsapura is a decidedly different looking game from HoYoverse.
The influence of Remedy’s Control is immediately apparent in Varsapura. The game begins with a gloomy voiceover from its protagonist, who’s arriving at a nondescript administrative building for a job. The interior of SEAL headquarters has a similar bureaucratic-but-spooky feeling and it’s strewn with documents that build out the organization’s lore. It’s certainly derivative, but if you’re going to crib from any game, Control is as good a place as any to start.
Things get weirder as the gameplay demo goes on. The protagonist is drawn into a shadowy world where a cat and a man without a face give her an interview she doesn’t even realize is an interview. Good for her, though, she apparently passes and a SEAL officer shows up to induct her into the bureau.
Varsapura blends noir and supernatural horror in an interesting deviation from HoYoverse’s usual aestethics.
Already, Varsapura looks like quite a different game from HoYoverse’s other titles. It has a roughly realistic modern-day setting with supernatural elements on top, and its art style is markedly different as well. Where games like Honkai Star Rail go for a colorful, anime-inspired art style, Varsapura is more muted, pushing more toward realism. Except for its characters, that is, who still have anime-inspired designs, but are still far more grounded ones than the characters in any other HoYoverse game. A pigtailed, flail-wielding party member who shows up later on in the footage shows that there’s still room for wackier designs in Varsapura, but for the most part, the trailer sticks to its more realistic aesthetic nicely.
When it comes to combat, Varsapura starts looking a little more familiar. Battles here have a lot in common with Zenless Zone Zero, focused on fast-paced attacks with a party of three characters you can switch between at any time. Still, it’s far less chaotic than even ZZZ, though that may change when we’re not looking at footage from the very beginning of the game. Aside from the cartoonish flail used by a character who only appears in the combat sequence, the main characters wield an umbrella and a file folder full of paperwork, respectively, and I’m hoping HoYoverse finds other creative ways to turn more down-to-earth items into weapons with the rest of its cast.
Combat takes cues from Zenless Zone Zero, but looks more deliberate than HoYoverse’s more chaotic brawler.
Combat frankly looks fine. It looks engaging enough, but not particularly original. It’s also broken up by a few stealth segments, which look equally commonplace. What’s more interesting is everything that comes between the action segments. In some conversations, dialogue options are marked by different traits like empathy or deception, suggesting that there may be more depth to how you develop your character, or at least some different options to flavor your interactions. When Honkai Star Rail launched, one of its biggest surprises was just how good the writing in incidental interactions with NPCs was, so if Varsapura is taking that even further, I’m a lot more excited to try it out. And while the mission shown off in the gameplay trailer is combat-focused, the game’s premise does leave the door open to more detective work (maybe using that stealth system), which could make for another interesting change from HoYovers’s usual style.
But this is just a first look, and Varsapura still hasn’t even announced a release window or platforms. It may be a while before we see how the full game shapes up, but I’m at least interested to see just how far HoYoverse goes with its unique premise.
