Final Fantasy 15 lead designer shows off No Straight Roads, a musical hack-and-slasher

The studio co-founded by Final Fantasy 15's lead game designer Wan Hazmer has shown off new footage of its upcoming musical action game, No Straight Roads.

In the video (above) Hazmer and fellow co-founder Daim Dziauddin, formerly a concept artist on Street Fighter 5, give us a tour of the the new Malaysian studio and show off plenty of No Straight Roads gameplay. They're at pains to tell us that it's not a typical rhythm game: rather, it's a music-based game with big boss battles that react to the beat. For example, one boss lays bombs that will detonate in time with the music.

You control an indie rock band battling against an evil electronic dance music empire. During battles, the music will dynamically shift between rock and EDM depending on how well you're performing—press forward for a big attack and you'll like hear guitars blare. You beat individual bosses by hijacking their own concerts, and you'll come up against artists ranging from classical pianists to club DJs.

I like the colourful art style, and if the combat can match it then Metronomik might be a winner. No Straight Roads is due out in the first half of this year.

Samuel is a freelance journalist and editor who first wrote for PC Gamer nearly a decade ago. Since then he's had stints as a VR specialist, mouse reviewer, and previewer of promising indie games, and is now regularly writing about Fortnite. What he loves most is longer form, interview-led reporting, whether that's Ken Levine on the one phone call that saved his studio, Tim Schafer on a milkman joke that inspired Psychonauts' best level, or historians on what Anno 1800 gets wrong about colonialism. He's based in London.