Babylon’s Fall, Platinum’s Fantasy Action Game, Has Nier Vibes

Babylon’s Fall, Platinum’s Fantasy Action Game, Has Nier Vibes

Babylon’s Fall exists. If you are most people, you’re probably thinking, “What the heck is Babylon’s Fall?” But for a very specific subset of people, this is fantastic news, given that they’ve been waiting since 2019 to hear more about Nier: Automata and Bayonetta developer Platinum Games’ latest collaboration with Square Enix.

Today, as part of its E3 conference, Square Enix showed off Babylon’s Fall in a trailer that focused on the multiplayer action and a lot of ominous monologuing. Characters used swords, bows and arrows, and weapons of the like in cavernous environments, to battle all manner of enemies — including very large armoured foes. The goal is to progress through the titular tower, Babylon.

The game does not have a release date yet, but it’s coming to PS5, PS4, and PC. Here’s an official description sent out after the conference:

In BABYLON’S FALL players become a group of warriors known as the sentinels, bonded with special equipment called Gideon Coffins, and throw themselves into an odyssey to overcome the titanic Tower of Babylon, within which sleeps a great legacy. In addition to weapons wielded in both hands, characters can use the power of their Gideon Coffin to equip two more, allowing for combinations of up to four weapons at once. The capabilities of different equipment will also bring endless variation to the strategy that can be employed. The game’s visuals are achieved using a newly developed “brushwork style” to create a unique fantasy setting with a medieval oil painting aesthetic.

Babylon’s Fall looked like it was destined to become vaporware for a second there. It was originally revealed at E3 2018 as part of a painfully insubstantial Square Enix press conference, and its trailer didn’t give people much to work with. The two-minute cinematic was jam-packed with lore, but viewers may as well have been speed-reading a wiki entry. This culminated in two armoured figures getting into a big, bulky throwdown, only for one to steal the other’s sword with magic threads and strike a decisive blow.

It was certainly an intriguing scene, but it revealed precisely nothing about how the game would actually play — or even really what it was about. Originally, the game was set to launch on PC and PS4 in 2019, but that didn’t happen. In 2019, Square showed a tiny snippet of action-heavy gameplay at Sony’s State of Play event, but again, it explained basically nothing — though Nier Automata’s trademark floating weapons made an appearance.

This was followed by a long period of radio silence, which was finally broken in July 2020. On Twitter, the game’s development team published a statement saying that they had intended to show more of Babylon’s Fall over the summer, but circumstances (read: covid) got in the way. As a result, the team was “working safely from home.”

Today’s update is the culmination of all those ups and downs. Here’s hoping that the game’s quality will not suffer as a result.


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