Surprise, there's a new God Of War game out—alongside the biggest trailers from today's State Of Play

The video game hype calendar has its own set of esoteric, corporate-branded holidays, scaling from Nintendo’s (relatively) low-key Directs all the way up to the explosion of trailers, hooplah, and irritation known as The Game Awards every December. On that calendar, Sony’s State Of Play events sit closer to the latter than the former, as the PlayStation company rolls out big, splashy trailers for months’ worth of new (and, increasingly, very old) games. One such event was held today, including the somewhat surprising return of John Wick to the gaming space, and, perhaps just as shockingly, the reveal that there’s a brand new God Of War game, Sons Of Sparta, that’s out right now, having been surprise-released during the show.

It’s not wholly unexpected that Sony would be digging down deeper on God Of War, mind you: Amazon has been releasing a flurry of press announcements about the casting for its TV adaptation of 2018’s God Of War and its sequel, and everybody enjoys a dollop of corporate synergy. Even so, Sons Of Sparta is a little strange: It’s a side-scrolling prequel to the original God Of War games, whose explosive deicidal machismo studio Santa Monica Studios spent the two most recent games in the series carefully mitigating. But that might be changing, too: The studio also announced that a remake trilogy of the original 2000s-era games was in early development. The upshot is that there’s going to be a lot of Kratos in all his grunting, teeth-gnashing, block-kicking glory to go around.