Picture Mario Kart. Eight players, a shared map, everyone racing toward the same goal, alliances forming and falling apart in real time. Now replace the go-karts with vampiric warriors, swap the banana peels for parry windows, and let Hidetaka Miyazaki direct the whole thing. That is approximately what FromSoftware’s The Duskbloods feels like — and it is far more interesting for it.
The Switch 2 exclusive recently held a closed network test, giving players and press their first hands-on look at a game that has been in development since 2021. What emerged was not the Soulslike most expected. The Duskbloods is a competitive multiplayer PvPvE game, and it plays less like Elden Ring and more like a particularly bloodthirsty party game.
Three Phases, One Survivor
A match of The Duskbloods — called a Dusk Battle — drops eight players into a large map and immediately starts a race for Virtue points. Virtue is the currency of survival: earn enough and you advance to the next phase. Fall behind and The Culling removes you from play.
There are three phases, each roughly eight minutes long. Everyone clears Phase I regardless of their Virtue count. After Phase II, the bottom two players are eliminated. Phase III ends with three survivors who are transported to a sealed arena beneath a blood-red sky for a final three-way PvP fight called the Moon Blood Bestowal. A full match runs approximately 30 minutes.
Virtue points come from multiple sources: killing enemies in the environment, defeating other players, completing objectives, and interacting with dynamic events that appear randomly across the map. The multitrack approach to scoring means there is rarely one dominant strategy — which is exactly where the party game comparison holds. You do not have to dominate combat to advance. You just need to be less bad than two other people.
Miyazaki on the design: The director cites TTRPG influences for The Duskbloods’ match structure and its layered approach to multiplayer interaction — not the first time FromSoftware has drawn from tabletop traditions.
The Bloodsworn: Pick Your Fighter
Players enter matches as one of the Bloodsworn — vampiric warriors each with their own weapon loadout, ranged attacks, and special abilities. The closed network test made six Bloodsworn available; the full game will launch with more than ten.
Combat has the weight and intricacy you’d expect from the team behind action games of this calibre — lock-on targeting, precise timing windows, ranged options to manage distance. Reviewers who played early sessions noted that the lock-on camera occasionally struggles with fast-moving opponents, a known issue the team is refining ahead of launch.
Nintendo’s Most Unlikely Publishing Deal
The Duskbloods is being published by Nintendo outside Japan — a detail that carries more weight than it might first appear. Nintendo is not historically known for publishing M-rated third-party titles, and the partnership with FromSoftware represents a deliberate effort to give the Switch 2 a competitive multiplayer anchor that feels genuinely exclusive rather than a port of something available elsewhere.
Miyazaki has said Nintendo was “very excited and receptive” to the game’s concept from early on. That enthusiasm translated into a publishing arrangement unusual enough to warrant attention: this is one of FromSoftware’s most structurally different games, and it sits entirely within Nintendo’s hardware ecosystem. It is a meaningful exclusive in the truest sense.
Still No Release Date
Despite a confirmed 2026 target, The Duskbloods does not yet have an official release window. FromSoftware has indicated the team is still refining features based on network test feedback before locking in a date — the test itself was as much a data-gathering exercise as a player preview.
What is clear is that The Duskbloods occupies unusual space. It carries FromSoftware’s signature difficulty philosophy — the idea that losing is part of the experience — but packages it inside a structure that rewards presence and adaptability rather than outright mechanical mastery. Miyazaki’s team has always found ways to surprise. This is arguably the biggest swing yet.
