When you’ve played video games long enough, you eventually develop something of a “Spidey Sense” when you see a game that seems like it’s going to be extra special. You never know until the final product is on your hard drive, of course, but more often than not, that sixth sense is correct.
Replaced, a 2.5D action-adventure game drenched in an absolutely stunning sci-fi cyberpunk pixel-art aesthetic – complete with incredible camera work and moody music – is making that Spidey Sense tingle. I’d already played a brief three-part demo over a year ago, which only reinforced that feeling I first got after the initial reveal four years ago. This time I got to play the first 30 or so minutes of the campaign, and it did nothing to dampen my enthusiasm for what could be – if the rest of the game delivers – an all-time indie classic in the same category as Limbo, Braid, Inside, Balatro, etc.
Right from the jump it’s obvious that Replaced’s art director knows what the heck they’re doing. The look of this dystopia, set in an alternate-history 1980s America, takes the 16-bit graphics I grew up with and plusses them up with soft dynamic lighting and some absolutely brilliant cinematography. Toss in just the right amount of depth of field and you get a world that looks lived-in. It oozes griminess and despair but somehow makes them look gorgeous.
Replaced is set in an alternate-history 1980s America and takes the 16-bit graphics I grew up with and plusses them up with soft dynamic lighting and some absolutely brilliant cinematography.
You play as R.E.A.C.H., an AI that lives in the body of a man named Warren, who wakes up after having been literally left for dead amongst a pile of corpses. The world of Phoenix City you see before you is the evolution of a worldwide nuclear event that occurred several decades prior. There are diaries, news articles, and other ephemeral bits of world-building information scattered around for you to collect and read in your Wingman – think of it as this cyberpunk world’s version of a 1980’s Walkman-meets-Palm-Pilot.
Replaced starts simply enough, keeping you on a left-to-right 2D plane, old-school-style, and having you do little more than some basic platforming. But it establishes its setting so amazingly well – and quickly to boot. Whether it’s the aforementioned digital clippings revealing pieces of the radiation-coated backstory or the searchlight-wielding snipers who will gun you down in one shot if they spot you, things are clearly grim in Phoenix City. Before long you’ll have to fight to survive, as you’ll be forced to throw hands with a couple of faction members and soon entire gangs of them.
And that’s where Replaced will next impress you: it’s packing a proper Batman: Arkham combat system. Enemies who are about to attack will get a yellow lightning bolt over their heads. Press Y when you see that to instantly counter them. And then – my fellow Arkham veterans know where this is going – when a red lightning bolt appears over a foe’s head, that means they’re about to unleash an unblockable/uncounter-able attack, and you need to press the A button at just the right moment in order to dodge-roll away. Successful dodges and parries charge up a special-attack meter, which in Replaced’s case, means you get to either fire a shot from your found firearm at distance, or brutally execute an enemy if you’re at point-blank range. Of course, it’ll get more complicated; before long rifle-wielding bad guys will enter the fray, and the timing window changes on their (obviously) unblockable bullets. Enemy heavies will complicate things too. There was just one in the opening minutes of Replaced, and, probably by design, he wasn’t too tough to tango with. All of his attacks are unblockable, and he takes a ton of hits to bring down, but he didn’t have friends left by the time we faced off, so it was a very straightforward introduction to the higher-hit-point heavies you’ll face off against later in the game. So I expect the fisticuffs to ramp up significantly over the course of Replaced’s runtime in every sense of the word: number of enemies, difficulty, etc.
Soon Replaced began introducing the 2.5D elements, literally expanding its world by letting me walk to the background or foreground to get something I needed to progress onwards. You’ll need to grab onto dumpsters to slide them around in order to climb up on them to reach a higher ladder, or to bridge a gap, just as one example. While this opening sequence didn’t offer me too much freedom of movement within the environment, I know it eventually will, because I’ve seen it before in last year’s demo. I should add, though, that exploring will sometimes reward you with pickups that are often tucked out of plain sight – I won’t go so far as to call them secrets – and they’ll fill out your dossier and shed a little bit more light on this broken world, or give you an upgrade. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that Replaced is going to have replayability, per se, but if the developers do an awesome enough job at building out the backstory of Phoenix City, that might deliver enough motivation to want to go back and find all of the hidden bits of information.
Replaces is packing a proper Batman: Arkham combat system.
This year’s demo – again, since it was the very beginning of the game – also didn’t show off the biggest pleasant surprise from my initial hands-on with it last year: the RPG hiding under its 2.5D cyberpunk aesthetic. From the first couple of extremely impressive trailers, I’d thought that Replaced was “just” a side-scrolling action-adventure game. But no, it’s got sections packed with quest-giving NPCs and the ability to free-roam the area. I absolutely can’t wait to dig into more of this.
But getting back to this newest slice of Replaced, I should take a moment to compliment the music. A moody synth soundtrack is key to nailing the vibe in any dystopian cyberpunk piece of media, and Replaced wastes no time confirming it understands the assignment in that department. And I’d actually like to get back to the visual identity of this game for a second as well. The pixel art, as you can already tell, is phenomenal, and the use of color and lighting is top-shelf, but I’d also like to shout out the animation. I’m not sure if this will make sense, but in attempting a retro look complemented by modern visual touches like in Replaced, there is such a thing as the animation being too good. I would argue that the development team at Sad Cat Studios has struck a perfect balance here. Neither R.E.A.C.H. nor his enemies move too smoothly. Instead, they have a slightly stilted movement to them, which only adds to the broken, beat-down spirit of Phoenix City, and it sells the neo-16-bit look even more perfectly, in my eyes.
When I reached the end of the demo build of Replaced, all I wanted was to play more. It is simply a captivating game from top to bottom, and I can’t wait to see where R.E.A.C.H.’s story goes as well as what the deeper plot reveals. I’m also eager to find out how much deeper the combat and RPG elements specifically go. I’d love nothing more than for my Spidey Sense to prove correct and for Replaced to be one of the best and most memorable games of 2026 (even if we already know that Grand Theft Auto 6 will dominate the headlines). We don’t have a release date for Replaced quite yet, but I get the sense that it’s close. Hopefully we’ll soon find out exactly when we can see just how special the final game is.
Ryan McCaffrey is IGN’s executive editor of previews and host of both IGN’s weekly Xbox show, Podcast Unlocked, as well as our monthly(-ish) interview show, IGN Unfiltered. He’s a North Jersey guy, so it’s “Taylor ham,” not “pork roll.” Debate it with him on Twitter at @DMC_Ryan.
