Hello! My name is Tom Doyle. I am the Co-Founder and Creative Director of Endeavor One, a game studio based in Seattle, WA. Today we are excited to announce our stealth-action sandbox game, Arashi: Castles of Sin, is coming to PlayStation VR this summer!

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Your mission

Assume the role of Kenshiro, an elite shinobi and the last surviving son of the noble House Arashi. Castles across feudal Japan have been captured by ruthless bandits, the Six Oni of Iga. With your wolf companion, Haru at your side, exact revenge for their merciless destruction and reclaim the castles for good. It is a time of warring states, and the land cries out for justice. It’s up to you to deliver it.

Your arsenal

In the field, the path and methods are left to you. Every decision you make must be thoughtful. Every move – powerful. Your wits as much a weapon as your inventory; the environment both an enemy to defeat and ally to command. Take out your enemies head on? Employ deception using light and shadow? Distract and side-step obstacles and adversaries undefeatable? The choice is yours.

 Arashi is built from the ground up for VR. With state-of-the-art movement and a deadly arsenal of feudal era weapons, there are endless ways to play. Personally, I use the spider approach – setting traps and luring enemies into my web for the ambush kill. Your mileage, or playstyle, may vary.

Your allies

Ayane, Spymaster to the Shogun and your loyal cousin, will guide you in your quest. Haru, your wolf companion since you were both young, is highly-trained to take out enemies. When you’re far from home, Haru is by your side. A ruthless weapon in battle and an empathetic friend when you need her.

At Endeavor One, we’re huge fans of genre filmmaking. We have a passion for storytelling and a love of creating immersive experiences – it’s what drew us to VR in the first place. It has been an amazing journey for us to make Arashi: Cast

PS VR Spotlight returns today, with new reveals and updates on previously announced PS VR titles. We’ll be highlighting seven games in total, so keep your eyes on our channels starting at 8 AM PDT / 4 PM BST, with updates every half hour.

And as mentioned, this is all about the games. So to manage expectations, there will be no next-gen VR related news. But in the meantime, stay tuned right here to learn more about some of the amazing PS VR games launching soon!

Last week, we finally got our first proper look at what awaits us – and Aloy – in Horizon Forbidden West. Guerrilla tantalised us with new gameplay mechanics to master, new Machines to overcome and new locations to explore. And accompanying that visual showcase was the alluring yet all-too short debut of some of the game’s soundtrack. Today, we get to linger on that score. 

Firstly, the chance to absorb four tracks from that State of Play demo in isolation, forming The Isle of Spires EP that’s just released onto streaming services – listen to it here. 

Secondly, we’re excited to reveal the composers behind the music of Horizon Forbidden West. Joris de Man, Niels van de Leest and composing duo The Flight all return from Horizon Zero Dawn, and are joined on the sequel by Oleksa Lozowchuk. 

To mark the EP’s release, and share the first details of what players should expect from them for Horizon Forbidden West, we brought the composers and Guerrilla Music Supervisor Lucas Van Tol together for a roundtable discussion. That wide-ranging chat tackles amongst other things, the challenges of building upon what went before, deciding who worked on what (“we have a lot more music than in Horizon Zero Dawn,” Van Tol explains of the necessity) and individual approaches to composing (fun fact: one composer builds their own instruments). But first, introductions:

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Getting the band back together 

Consideration for the sequel’s music began “since the moment we knew there would be [one],” jokes Van Tol. 

Guerrilla’s Music Supervisor is credited not only with defining which aspects of Horizon Forbidden West’s music each of the four composers would work on but keeping track of everything. Creating the sequel’s open world soundscape – covering but not limited to tribes, characters, enemies, locations, cues – as well as evolving it from what came before was understandably a herculean undertaking. It made sense to split and divide. Van Tol played both ringmaster and conductor, briefing and guiding the group throughout production. He also wanted a different approach to the game’s score. ”In Horizon Zero Dawn our initial focus was on locations,” he explains. “This time around we wanted to follow the story a lot more closely and create a more fluent and emotional experience, also outside of the cutscenes.”

That previous collaboration helped the studio decide the best way forward. The Flight’s Alexis Smith notes that Van Tol gained valuable insight as to each composer’s sounds and st

Email us at PSPodcast@sony.com!

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This week, Head of PlayStation Studios Hermen Hulst drops in for an interview on studio development updates and much more.

Stuff We Talked About

• Horizon Forbidden West
• Final Fantasy VII Remake Intergrade
• Returnal
• Operation: Tango
• Destiny 2 (That’s right, Justin’s back!)
• Mass Effect Legendary Edition

The Cast

Tim Turi –  Manager, Content Communications, SIE

Sid Shuman – Senior Director, Content Communications, SIE

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Hi everybody, we hope you are all doing well and keeping healthy.

Today, we have colorful news coming to you from Team Asobi, the Tokyo-based PlayStation studio responsible for the Astro Bot series.

Following the release of Astro’s Playroom for PlayStation 5, Team Asobi is now spreading its wings and growing bigger! This is a very exciting time for the team, and we are very much looking forward to this next chapter. We wanted to take this chance to thank all of you, the PlayStation fans, for your kind words of support over the years, especially since Astro made its big debut on PlayStation 5 alongside the DualSense wireless controller.

While we are growing and challenging bigger things, our mission at heart remains the same as ever: bring you PlayStation magic, innovation and put smiles on your faces with fun, colorful games for all ages.

To go alongside this news, we are proud to show our new logo which you will see in our future productions. We took inspiration from what Team Asobi meant to us. Some of the old-timers might recognize other influences from the PlayStation early days as well!

To keep in touch, we are also launching our own social channels on Twitter and Instagram to keep you updated on all things Team Asobi! Please follow them and don’t hesitate to engage with us.  We have a million anecdotes to share about the making of our games so please come and say hi!

And in case you are not familiar with Team Asobi, let us tell you more about our origins.                                                                                    

The team was first assembled in 2012, a bit more than a year before the launch of PS4. Back then, a handful of us were working away on tech demos showcasing what the new hardware could do. We sat down one day and decided we needed a name for our team; something that would work as a reminder to us of what we believed to be the most important part in any video game: great gameplay and that second-to-second enjoyment it can provide!

In Japanese language, the word “Asobu” literally means “To Play” and so we settled on “Asobi “. Those simple five letters were a surprisingly fitting name with a good sound to it and it stuck!

Fast-forward a few years, the team is still expanding, we launched Astro Bot: Rescue Mission in 2018 and Astro’s Playroom for PS5 in 2020. And now, Team Asobi has become the newest internal studio within the PlayStation Studios family. At the heart, our philosophy revolves around that quintessential joy in play, be it through pixel-precise character controls, exploiting a cool new controller in surprising ways or packing humorous animations in every nook and cranny, this is the stuff that excites us :) 

So, who are the Asobis then? Well, since we are a PlayStation game development studio located in the cool and vibrant Tokyo, the majority of the team are Japanese. We also have several members coming from various other countries: England, Germany, France, Scotland, Korea, Spain, and Colombia. It’s impor