Back in 2022 I went to a preview event for The Callisto Protocol in London to write an article for the gaming magazine that I worked for at the time. Shortly after shaking hands with director Glen Schofield, he watched in stunned silence as I repeatedly died in the corner of an intense enemy encounter, awkwardly failing to swerve incoming swings with its incredibly unwieldy directional dodging system.
“Have you tried using the gravity gun?” he eventually suggested. “I literally can’t find the button for it,” I replied. I looked over my shoulder and saw his head in his hands. At the time I thought that I was struggling because I had been tossed late into the game with no tutorial. Of course, when the game finally released, I, along with tens of other players around the world, realized that, no, it’s actually just hellish to control.
I bring this up because I couldn’t help but recount the episode as I walked away from my brief hands-on time with some of Stranger Than Heaven’s combat encounters at Summer Game Fest 2026. To be clear, I don’t think its mechanics are quite that rough—but even when I fully understood its many idiosyncrasies, I wasn’t exactly having fun.
Heavenly? Not quite
Just like The Callisto Protocol, directionality is at the core of brawls in Stranger Than Heaven.
The left-hand side of your controller represents the left-hand side of the player character’s body, while the right-hand side is the right. It sounds simple enough. You tap the right bumper to swing with your right fist. Pull the left trigger, and you get a left kick. You’re meant to alternate between sides as you beat up thugs—rely on one too much and they’ll soon cotton on and block.
Fair enough: switching between mashing buttons on both sides sounds like it might have a good rhythm to it. Unfortunately, Stranger Than Heaven is far from a button masher. Encounters, especially those against large groups, play out at a snail’s pace. Swings are slower than you would expect, and you’re clearly meant to think about each move carefully. If you’re too aggressive, you’ll get knocked down and summarily beaten to a pulp.
Enemies deal a Dark Souls level of damage, and if one of them grabs you, they can easily whittle your health bar down to a slither in just a few hits. When you do find yourself in a baddie’s grip, your first instinct is probably to mash the dodge button to escape, but you actually need to work out which side they’re grabbing you on and send out some attacks from the opposite one in order to knock them off. It goes against basically everything that other action brawlers have ever taught you, and feels clumsy as a result.
Don’t even think about using a health item either. For some reason, the protagonist takes what feels like an hour to scoff a single rice ball in an animation that you can’t seem to interrupt, even in the face of imminent danger. You’ll barely have a chance to swallow before a foe unleashes a special katana attack that cleaves you in half.
You do at least get some melee weapons of your own to even the odds, and I got to try three. My favorite was comfortably the knife, finding it often hilariously unbalanced. Sprinting up to a goon while frantically mashing the attack button seemed to catch them totally off guard, causing them to freeze up and take a few hits before actually starting to fight back.
There was also a moment where I used my swings to push a powerful boss enemy, the supposed climax of my hands-on, into a doorway in the background of the combat arena—which he immediately became stuck on, giving me the opportunity to mince his torso into steak tartare. It felt like some well-deserved payback for the handful of times my own attacks inexplicably failed to connect throughout the encounter.
I was, of course, playing an early build, so a lack of polish is to be expected, but watching your fists simply pass through someone’s chest with no visible reaction lent the fight a real sense of sloppiness that was hard to shake. It’s a shame that I wasn’t able to sample any of the activities outside of the fights as well, or even see any of the narrative beyond a few out-of-context voice lines before getting stuck in.
The idea of an epic story that spans five whole eras is certainly intriguing, and I hope it will be able to make up for any combat awkwardness that might remain when Stranger Than Heaven releases for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X and Series S, and PC on January 15, 2027.
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dash.wood@futurenet.com (Dashiell Wood)
