The rhythms of the triple-A videogame hype cycle are now so firmly established that anything that disrupts them is bound to stand out. But even if not for the remarkable nature of its arrival - revealed and launched at January 2023's Xbox Developer Direct - Hi-Fi Rush would surely have made a splash. Here was a game that applied blockbuster production values to something other than photorealism; a character-action game that was also a rhythm-action game; and a Tango Gameworks release that seemed a world apart from the most famous works of its soon-to-be-former CEO, Shinji Mikami.
But then Hi-Fi Rush was born from a desire to do something different. Very different. John Johanas had graduated from designer on 2014's The Evil Within to director on its sequel, having also helmed the first game's two downloadable expansions. By the end of 2017, in other words, he'd just come off four horror projects in a row – and the prospect of another, in the form of the in-development Ghostwire: Tokyo, was not wildly appealing.
