Hideo Kojima's OD remains a mystery. Unveiled in 2023, the Metal Gear creator says he wants to "explore the concept of testing your fear threshold, and what it means to overdose on fear" – which, you know, is a lot. But still I'm excited to learn more, particularly as this is the first time Kojima has taken a swing at outright horror since the demise of his Silent Hills initiative with Konami.
OD – or Overdose, as it's being called – is in development at Kojima Productions, made in collaboration with Xbox Game Studios. The upcoming horror game doesn't have a release date just yet, but with Death Stranding 2: On the Beach set to launch in 2025, I can only hope that Kojima will turn his full attention to this new Xbox exclusive soon enough. So you'll want to keep on reading to discover everything we know so far about this wildly ambitious new Xbox Series X game, from the way its leveraging Xbox Cloud Gaming to how the use of Unreal Engine 5 will deliver scares like you've never seen before.
OD (Overdose) gameplay experience
At least when creative director Hideo Kojima was working on Metal Gear Solid games, you sort of knew what you were getting – cinematic stealth action. But as soon as he started to stretch into other franchises and new IP, his work became more difficult to anticipate. P.T. was a masterclass in looping psychological horror, Death Stranding, an oddly esoteric game about hiking through an apocalypse, and then there's OD.
Kojima himself has said that he is "creating a very unique, immersive, and totally new style of game – or rather, a new form of media." The first teaser trailer ends with a sting claiming that Overdose will be "for all the players and screamers." There's a lot to unravel here, so let's start with genre, as that's easier to figure out: OD will be a horror. Kojima Productions says that "OD explores the concept of testing your fear threshold, and what it means to OD on fear."
Okay, so that's a start. The studio also says that it will do this "while blurring the boundaries of gaming and film", which is where things start getting a little more complicated. At The Game Awards, Kojima reaffirmed that OD "is a game, don't get me wrong" but then went on to note that "at the same time, it's a movie; and at the same time, it's a new form of media." It sounds confusing is what it sounds like, which is likely why Academy Award winning filmmaker Jordan Peele (Get Out, Us, Nope) has come on board to collaborate – one of "several talented storytellers involved in the project."
A very bizarre leak in 2022 wasn't all that helpful in figuring out what style of play we should anticipate here, I'd say that it will likely blend some degree of active and passive play – owing to the fact that Overdrive development is being driven through a partnership with Microsoft Gaming, leveraging the power of Xbox Cloud Gaming for development. I've written in the past about why the Xbox Game Studios and Kojima Productions partnership is important, and in that article I touch on how important the speculation game is to these sort of weird creative endeavors. Kojima says he wants to "make something nobody has seen before" – we know that it'll be a horror, and that it'll blur the line between games and film, but exactly what shape that will take remains to be seen. And I wouldn't expect to see anything more for a while yet.
OD cast
Hideo Kojima has unveiled the actors who will take starring roles in OD, although he is yet to confirm the names of the characters that they will eventually play. It's likely to be a little while before we learn more about the OD cast, but you can find the current list of will star in the project here:
- Sophia Lillis (Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves)
- Hunter Schaffer (Euphoria)
- Udo Kier (Flesh for Frankenstein)
OD teaser trailer
The first OD trailer was unveiled at The Game Awards 2023. The short teaser shows three of the core cast in what appears to effectively be motion-capture screen tests – floating heads on a black background, rendered by Epic's Unreal Engine 5 and MetaHuman technologies, as the eyes illuminate the lights and camera in front of them. You can watch the first teaser trailer for Hideo Kojima's OD above.
OD expected release date and platforms
The OD release date is still likely to be years away at this point. Creative director Hideo Kojima is certainly focused on development of Death Stranding 2 right now, with this upcoming Xbox Series X game expected to follow after. Kojima Productions and Xbox Game Studios announced their collaboration in 2022, explaining that the two development houses were working to utilize the power of the cloud. What that means for platforms is anybody's guess, but I'd suspect that it will land on Xbox Series X, PC, and mobile devices via Xbox Cloud Gaming and Xbox Game Pass.
