Make new friends and immediately kill them in Code Vein II

The Revenant Hunter has a problem. To destroy their current target, the warrior has to break open the impregnable cocoon that shields their prey. The only way to do that is to go back in time through the magical abilities of a young girl named Lou MagMell, in search of the key that can open the cocoon in the present. And that’s the easy part: once the cocoon is open, a multiphase battle with a hulking monstrosity of a boss awaits. Nobody said hunting revenants was easy.

That’s the narrative crux of Code Vein II, a game about fixing today’s problems by fighting alongside them in the past. The shambling beast fought by members of the press at the end of a recent hands-on demo is the debauched form of Josée Anjou, a legendary hero who lived a century earlier. For the bulk of the demo Josée, essentially a teenage girl forced to fight a war she never asked for, is the Hunter’s partner as they team up to save her endangered community. Along the way the player learns the tragic backstory of Josée and her sister, which turns them both into complicated and deeply sympathetic characters. So when, after all of that, the Hunter has to kill Josée’s corrupted future form, it lands with unexpected poignancy. The final boss battle of this portion of Code Vein II is against the character the player has spent an hour getting to know intimately—and that’s a basic scenario that will recur throughout the game, according to its developers.

Much will be made about Code Vein II’s similarity to From’s Souls games. It’s an especially obvious influence on the game’s structure: saving at a “mistle” restores health but revives every defeated enemy, the player drops whatever unspent experience points they’ve earned when they die but can reclaim them if they get back to that spot before they die again, etc. Combat has some basic similarities, but Code Vein II moves faster, and the presence of partners makes it a little more complex. Beyond normal attacks with a blade or bludgeon, “drain” attacks pull ichor from enemies, which charges up the “formae” special abilities provided by the Hunter’s partners. Those “formae” are linked to an equippable item called a “Jail” which reflects the skills of the different partners met along the way. And partners can fight alongside the Hunter or merge with them to increase their stats (that second one is especially helpful during boss battles), switching between the two roles at a press of a button. Partners can also revive the Hunter when they fall, although it has a pretty long cooldown and restores less health every time they do so. Between the seven different weapon categories and the variety of “jails” to be acquired, there appears to be a good amount of flexibility when it comes to combat; and by making partners materially useful in a variety of ways, the game’s action reinforces the emotional bonds created by its story.

Those relationships with the Hunter’s partners seem to drive the game, and the one with Josée was the most compelling part of the demo. It also promises to be the most important difference between Code Vein II and a Souls game. The former seems more finely attuned to emotion and the inner lives of its characters than anything in the From canon.

Although From’s games are fundamentally about loss and wholesale societal collapse, they rarely feel all that human. They’re more concerned with the scale of that degradation than its impact on the individual, and that ensures a distance between the player and the characters they meet in Dark Souls or Elden Ring. There appears to be little aloofness in Code Vein II; the game goes out of its way to build a strong, close relationship with Josée, using playable cutscenes to depict her deepest pain and fears in vivid detail, before having the player ultimately destroy her. In this case it’s portrayed as a form of liberation; the Hunter is freeing Josée from the monstrous curse that’s kept her alive well past her time should’ve ended. But that doesn’t make it any less tragic.

That battle with Josée is part of the Hunter’s quest to defeat a group of characters called the Fallen Heroes of the Resurgence. They’re all sealed within their own cocoon, and to destroy them the Hunter will have to become good friends in order to discover whatever emotional or mental trigger will awaken their twisted form in the future. It’s a bit manipulative, an easy way to pull emotion out of the player, but in execution Josée’s story never feels overly cloying. Perhaps because the game’s entire aesthetic is defined by an anime maximalism, the operatic melodrama of Josée Anjou felt appropriate and not over-the-top. Code Vein II’s emotional needle was permanently in the red from the start of the demo, and it’s that pathos and that attachment to its characters that might make this game something special.

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Code Vein II, which is more of a soft reboot than a sequel, with all-new characters and story riffing on the same basic concept as the original, will be released on January 30, 2026, for PlayStation 5, PC, and Xbox Series X|S.

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