Crimson Moon wants you (and maybe a friend) to feel like a badass

During the February 2026 State of Play Presentation, one of the new announcements that caught our attention was Crimson Moon​​​​​​, an action RPG with a crimson gothic art style. Boasting "replayable missions that blend visceral combat with deep character progression," along with a heavy metal soundtrack, we were curious to find out more about what this game entailed.

At GDC 2026, I had a chance to meet with the ProbablyMonsters development team as they showed me a bit more of the game in a hands-off demo. Guiding the demo was Mark “Bot” Subotnick, Chief Product Officer at the studio.

In the world of Crimson Moon, the city of Gildenarch has been overrun by an army of undead known as the Infernal Legion. Placed in the shoes of a half-angelic warrior known as the Nephilim, it is your task to wipe out the Legion, apparently as ruthlessly as possible.

ProbablyMonsters is not shy about the type of tone that the studio is going for with Crimson Moon, if it wasn't already evident from the announcement trailer. Bot opens up my preview saying, "You're powerful, you're a badass. You're going to go slay a bunch of really scary badass undead. And so we're leaning into that power fantasy." 

The GDC demo included two types of playable characters revealed so far: Sunder and Aegis. Sunder is a range-based character, while Aegis is more straight combat. I asked Bot if these were like a character class, to which he responded, "We're not a class-based game, but it's probably the easiest word to get your head wrapped around. They have different movesets, they have different effects." We proceeded through the demo using the straight-combat Aegis character.

The game's main hub area is Sanctus Clypeus. Bot explains to me that they spent a lot of time designing and building this area, since this is where you are going to be spending most of your time in between missions, building your character. 'Gothic, High Renaissance architecture' is how he describes the aesthetic philosophy. The game is mission-based, which includes a variety of difficulty levels and challenge modifiers that you set on any given mission before heading out, although I did not get a chance to examine these options closely. Having presumably demoed the same mission several times throughout the day during GDC, he went for the second-highest challenge level and set off.

One of the game's most significant components is that it can be played either solo or in co-op multiplayer with a friend. This is also very clear in the announcement trailer, and one of the game's tag lines is 'hunt alone or slay together'. Bot explains:

"Co-op is drop-in, drop-out; it's peer-to-peer. Whoever has the best connection is going to host. As for solo and multiplayer, we don't want to make it 'either or'. We know some people want to play solo, and some people want to play with friends. It's an option with dynamic difficulty scaling. You're going to get roughly the same experience either way. Now, we do have a 1 plus 1 equals 3 idea of balancing. If we were playing together, and we worked on our loadouts, and we started progressing in a certain way, we could have some [synergistic] benefit from playing co op."

As we proceeded through the demo mission, which was hands-off for me, it seemed most similar to me to something like Nioh or Nioh 2, only quite a bit faster-paced. I saw a staged-based, stamina-focused combat with a variety of different movesets and abilities, alongside a significant loot and gear system that plays a big role in building your character to be as deadly as possible. There is additionally an overdrive-like "Angel Mode" which increases your damage output (and I assume lowers your stamina requirements in some way).

I asked Bot what the strongest inspirations were for Crimson Moon. "Dark Souls, Darksiders, Diablo, Lies of P, Nioh, Elden Ring ... we play them all. We are influenced by them," he says. "I also would say we're influenced by 80s metal album art."

Heavy metal music was something the ProbablyMonsters team mentioned several times throughout the demo (and yes, also gleaned from the announcement trailer). Blood-pumping, adrenaline rush-inducing gameplay is explicitly what the developers are going for here.

One of the ways Crimson Moon differs from other modern action RPGs is how it incorporates a Lives system. It's what it sounds like, where you can revive on the spot once your HP is depleted, assuming you have a Life to spend. It's a bit more arcadey in that sense, where you are given a second (or third, or fourth) chance after losing all your health. Bot had six lives during the demo, although he explained these would normally be increased by progression through the game.

"It's a little bit more forgiving in a sense," says Bot "You get a second to breathe, figure out, okay, how am I going to get through this now?". He also stated that the number of Lives you have may increase as you proceed through the game.

Bot emphasized that the game is not open-world or even open-zone. It is a level-based system, where you proceed through a series of encounters and land on a boss fight at the end. He did clarify that there is still wiggle room to explore for loot and lore within each level, as they still want to encourage wanderlust within the world they created.

The demo ended at a boss, named 'Cardinal Mathias', who was a large, agile zombie with an equally large weapon. While the boss did have a health bar and name populating the top section of the screen, I noticed that the boss did not have any sort of stagger meter or stun bar. There is a poise system in place (perhaps the Lies of P inspiration), where the boss might be stunned momentarily if it takes a sufficient amount of damage within a certain window of time.

During my preview session, I wanted to confirm what the structure of the game would be like. The original press release and PlayStation Blog post described 'replayable missions'. From everything I saw, you start missions from a hub area and return with loot, power up, and then continue on. ProbablyMonsters said to me they call it a "mission roguelike", which was a little strange to hear, because I hadn't really seen anything that explicitly indicated a roguelike loop. When I pressed them on this, Bot responded:

"I'm calling it an action RPG with roguelike elements. There's different loot that will appear, and we have different boons or passive effects that can spawn on equipment. For us, whenever you complete a mission, you get to keep and obtain that loot ... we're still having a lot of those other roguelike elements implemented." It was a bit tricky to grasp in the context of a 30-minute guided demo precisely how the larger roguelike meta progression worked in coordination with leveling and gear. As Bot said, it seemed that some of the boon and run elements were still being decided on.

To be as clear as possible, I asked: "If we call this an action roguelike RPG, you don't think that's a misnomer?" He replied: "I do not think that's a misnomer."

During the demo boss battle, Bot once again points out to me the music coming in as the boss is on its last legs: "You get that perfect blend of gothic high-renaissance music and then metal .... I don't know ... when I'm playing in that metal kicks in ... it just .. It fuels me." 

Crimson Moon is set to release later this year for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, and PC.