Stranger Than Heaven has one of the most inventive combat systems at Summer Game Fest

Stranger Than Heaven was the talk of Summer Game Fest for being brutally hard, and the hands-on demo backs that up — at least for the first few minutes. Once the system clicks, though, it stops feeling punishing and starts feeling genuinely fascinating.

The whole demo was combat-focused across three short extracts from three separate locations. The core mechanic maps your four limbs directly to the four shoulder buttons: left bumper punches with your left hand, left trigger kicks with your left leg, and the right side mirrors that. One-handed weapons like a knife only activate from the hand holding them, so you can slash with your right and jab with your left simultaneously. Two-handed weapons swing in different directions depending on which bumper you use. Blocking is on B/Circle rather than a shoulder button — hold it for a standard block, or combine it with a directional bumper press to parry. Holding any attack button charges it, two matching buttons execute a grab, and enemies can be knocked down for a ground-pummeling follow-up. The first arena was set in Kokura, Fukuoka in 1915, labelled beginner-friendly — which still meant multiple enemies from the start, plus bottles on tables to smash over people's heads. The second raised the difficulty with a larger group and at least one hulking boss-type enemy.

Stranger Than Heaven is developed by Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio — the team behind the Yakuza and Like a Dragon series — and sits as a distant prequel in that lineage. RGG games have always leaned into brawler combat with a theatrical edge, but this one pushes the mechanical complexity further than anything in the mainline series, landing somewhere between QWOP's limb-by-limb physicality and the deliberate button discipline of a fighting game like Tekken.

The biggest hurdle is unlearning muscle memory: defaulting to one hand and one leg gets you read and countered fast, and the parry system takes real time to internalize. But the demo suggests that once it all lands, Stranger Than Heaven has a combat loop that rewards patience and experimentation in ways most brawlers simply don't.