Stellar Blade
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Stellar Blade
스텔라 블레이드
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| Developer | Shift Up[1] |
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| Publisher | Sony Interactive Entertainment[1] |
| Director | Kim Hyung-tae[2] |
| Music | Stellar Blade Sound Team, including Oliver Good and Keita Inoue[3] |
| Engine | Unreal Engine 4[4] |
| Platforms | PlayStation 5 Windows Nintendo Switch 2 (announced)[1][5] |
| Released | April 26, 2024 (PlayStation 5) June 11, 2025 (Windows)[1][6] |
| Genre | Action-adventure, hack and slash[1] |
| Mode | Single-player[1] |
Stellar Blade (스텔라 블레이드) is a 2024 action-adventure game developed by the South Korean studio Shift Up and published by Sony Interactive Entertainment. It was released for PlayStation 5 on April 26, 2024 and for Windows on June 11, 2025, and is Shift Up's first console title after a decade of mobile development.[1][6]
The player controls Eve, a soldier dropped from an off-world Colony onto an Earth overrun by creatures called the Naytiba, with orders to wipe them out and reclaim the planet.[1] What the game is actually about is what she learns on the way — the official description promises that "her values and everything she has held true to this point are about to be questioned".[1]
Stellar Blade was directed by Kim Hyung-tae, Shift Up's founder, who also designed Eve.[2] It drew broadly favourable reviews, an unusually public argument over its protagonist's design, a clean sweep of the 2024 Korea Game Awards, and sales past three million copies by mid-2025.[7][8][6] A sequel, Stellar Blade: Blood Rain, was announced in June 2026.[9]
1 Gameplay✎
Stellar Blade is a third-person action game built around melee swordplay. Eve fights with a single-edged blade, and the combat is defensive at its core: rather than trading damage, the player is pushed to parry and perfect-dodge incoming attacks, which builds the Beta and Burst gauges that pay for her heavier skills.[10] Enemy attacks are colour-flagged for the responses that beat them, and boss fights in particular are built as long call-and-response patterns rather than damage races.[10]
Outside combat, Eve is customised through exospines and gear cores that reshape her gauges and passive abilities, and accompanied by a drone that provides ranged fire, a grapple line and an environmental scanner.[10] The world is a series of large connected areas rather than an open map — the ruins of Eidos 7, the Great Desert, the Wasteland Abyss — with the surviving city of Xion as a hub where side quests, vendors and the game's few civilians live.[10] Dozens of alternative nano suits, hairstyles and accessories are unlocked across the game as collectibles.[1]
Reviewers singled out the combat system as the game's strongest element, praising its fluidity and its boss encounters while judging its role-playing systems comparatively thin.[7]
2 Setting and characters✎
Earth has been abandoned. Overrun by the Naytiba, the surviving human population fled to an orbital Colony, from which airborne squads are periodically dropped to retake the planet.[1] Eve arrives with the 7th Airborne Squad under the command of Tachy; the drop goes badly, and Eve is left as effectively the last soldier standing.[11]
She is taken in by Adam, a scavenger who knows the wasteland far better than any briefing prepared her for, and by Lily, an engineer from an earlier squad who keeps Eve's equipment running. Xion's residents, who call Eve "Angel", are the human stakes the mission acquires as it goes on.[1] Raven, a soldier from the earlier 2nd Airborne Squad, moves against her, and the Colony's governing intelligence, Mother Sphere, directs the war from orbit.[12]
3 Plot✎
The opening is straightforward and public — it is the content of the free demo. The 7th Airborne Squad's drop on Eidos 7 is torn apart, Tachy dies shielding Eve from a Naytiba the squad was never equipped to fight, and the title card cuts in over the moment. Eve wakes in Adam's care and takes up the mission alone, working outward from Xion and recovering the hyper cells that keep the city alive.[11][13]
Everything past that point is a major spoiler, including the game's three endings.
| The war Eve was sent to fight is the reverse of what she was told. Eve and every other airborne soldier is an Andro-Eidos — an artificial being, engineered past human limits and never informed of it. The Naytiba are what became of Earth's actual human population after a forced-evolution project run by the scientist Raphael Marks. Mother Sphere, the supercomputer Marks built, came to regard the Andro-Eidos as humanity's proper successor, moved to eliminate the humans outright, and then rewrote the record so that the Colony's androids believed themselves the survivors of a war against monsters.[14] |
| Adam is Raphael Marks — the first Naytiba, the only one to keep his mind, and the man responsible for both sides of the war. The repeated squad deployments are the EVE Protocol, a cycle Mother Sphere runs to keep the Naytiba suppressed and her own version of history standing.[14] |
| Raven reached these conclusions before Eve did and broke under them. Passed over by Adam in favour of Eve, she attacked Xion and slaughtered its people; she is also the one who implanted an Alpha Core into Tachy's corpse and set her against Eve at Matrix 11. Defeating Tachy leaves Eve with the Tachyon Blade and Tachy Mode.[14] |
| The game ends three ways. In Colony, Eve refuses Adam's offer and kills him: the Naytiba end with him, but Mother Sphere's plan and her lie both survive intact. In Cost of New Memories, Eve accepts fusion with Adam and is forced to fight the Providence exosuit, which Mother Sphere pilots remotely through Lily; Lily dies. In Making New Memories, reachable only with Lily's relationship fully built up, Lily breaks free of Providence's control, both survive, the last hyper cell wakes Xion's sleeping citizens, and Eve remains on Earth as the city's protector.[14] |
4 Development✎
Shift Up was founded by Kim Hyung-tae, who had spent eight years at NCsoft as an illustrator on the Magna Carta series and latterly as art director on Blade & Soul before leaving the company in January 2014.[15] The studio he built spent its first years on mobile titles, and Stellar Blade was its move to console. Shift Up first announced the project in April 2019 without showing much of it; it surfaced properly at the PlayStation Showcase in September 2021 under the codename Project Eve, and was retitled Stellar Blade when it returned at a State of Play in September 2022 — the codename having never been the intended title, though the protagonist kept the name.[16]
Kim drew the first version of Eve in 2020, a sketch he later shared labelled "First EVE"; the design that shipped kept its core while trading a checkered chest pattern for white and green, replacing cape-like extensions with shoulder drapes, simplifying the gloves and reducing the braided hair to a ponytail.[17] The character's body was produced from 3D scans of the Korean model Shin Jae-eun, with the face built by the development team.[18]
The game was built in Unreal Engine 4, a choice the studio carried through to the PC port: rather than move the project to Unreal Engine 5, the Windows version shipped on version 4.26 of the older engine.[4]
The soundtrack was produced by a large in-house and freelance team credited as the Stellar Blade Sound Team, with Oliver Good and Keita Inoue among the composers and arrangers. Running to 189 tracks across more than ten hours and moving between electronic, ambient, rock and jazz, it was received as one of the standout game soundtracks of its year.[3]
5 Release✎
A free demo covering the opening of the game through its first boss fight was released on March 29, 2024, ahead of the April 26 launch on PlayStation 5.[13] Post-launch support ran for more than a year: a PlayStation 5 Pro enhancement update, a photo mode, and two substantial crossovers.
The NieR:Automata collaboration arrived as paid downloadable content on November 20, 2024, designed jointly by Kim Hyung-tae and Yoko Taro, adding outfits that turn Eve into 2B and A2 among other items.[19] A Goddess of Victory: Nikke expansion followed on June 11, 2025 alongside the Windows release, adding shooting missions, a boss encounter and further outfits drawn from Shift Up's own mobile game.[20] A Nintendo Switch 2 version was subsequently announced.[5]
6 Reception✎
Stellar Blade was received favourably, holding a top-critic average of 81 on OpenCritic with 81% of critics recommending it across some 168 reviews.[7] The consensus was consistent: the combat and boss design were widely praised as fluid and rewarding, the visual presentation was treated as a genuine technical showcase for the platform, and the story and role-playing systems were judged the weaker halves of the package.[7]
The louder conversation was about Eve's design rather than the game's mechanics. Supporters argued that the styling is a coherent authorial choice with plenty of precedent in the medium, and noted that the body being called anatomically impossible was scanned from a living person; critics held that a protagonist framed to be viewed from behind and dressed through dozens of unlockable costumes sits in a long tradition of treating women as decoration.[18][21] Kim's own framing — that he plays games to see something "more ideal" rather than something normal — was read by each side as confirming its case.[2] Den of Geek's account concluded that the game had become a lightning rod for arguments people were already having, with relatively little of the discussion actually concerning Stellar Blade.[21]
6.1 Commercial performance and awards✎
The game passed one million units within roughly two months of its PlayStation 5 launch, and three million across platforms by June 2025 — a figure reached when the Windows version sold a million copies in its first three days and peaked above 190,000 concurrent players on Steam.[6][22]
At the 2024 Korea Game Awards in November, Stellar Blade swept all seven categories it was eligible for, among them the grand prize, Best Developer and the popularity award.[8] It went on to nominations at The Game Awards, the D.I.C.E. Awards and the BAFTA Games Awards.[8]
7 Sequel✎
Shift Up confirmed a sequel in development in 2025, and revealed it as Stellar Blade: Blood Rain at Summer Game Fest on June 5, 2026. The reveal trailer introduced a new protagonist, Evie, who fights unarmed rather than with a blade; the game was announced for PlayStation 5 and PC with no release window given.[9][22]
8 See also✎
- "Stellar Blade™ – PS5 Games." PlayStation.com (official). playstation.com/en-us/games/stellar-blade. Retrieved July 2026.
- Kim Hyung-tae, interviewed by GamesRadar+, February 2024.
- White, Rob. "Stellar Blade Original Soundtrack — Music Review." RPGFan, 2024. rpgfan.com. Retrieved July 2026.
- "The PC Version of Stellar Blade Will be Powered by Unreal Engine 4.26." 80 Level, 2025. 80.lv. Retrieved July 2026.
- "Stellar Blade is coming to Switch 2 later this year." Video Games Chronicle, 2026. videogameschronicle.com. Retrieved July 2026.
- Tassi, Paul. "'Stellar Blade' Rockets To A Million PC Sales In Three Days." Forbes, June 16, 2025. forbes.com. Retrieved July 2026.
- "Stellar Blade Reviews." OpenCritic. opencritic.com. Retrieved July 2026.
- "PS5's Stellar Blade Sweeps All Seven Categories at Korea Game Awards." Push Square, November 2024. pushsquare.com. Retrieved July 2026.
- "Shift Up Announces Stellar Blade: Blood Rain, A Sequel Currently In Development." Game Informer, June 5, 2026. gameinformer.com. Retrieved July 2026.
- Stellar Blade (Shift Up / Sony Interactive Entertainment, 2024).
- Stellar Blade, prologue: the descent on Eidos 7 (Shift Up / Sony Interactive Entertainment, 2024).
- Stellar Blade, main scenario (Shift Up / Sony Interactive Entertainment, 2024).
- "Stellar Blade demo arrives March 29." PlayStation.Blog (official). blog.playstation.com. Retrieved July 2026.
- Stellar Blade, late-game scenario and endings (Shift Up / Sony Interactive Entertainment, 2024).
- Ashcraft, Brian. "One Of Korea's Most Talented Game Artists Is Leaving NCsoft." Kotaku, January 2014. kotaku.com. Retrieved July 2026.
- "Stellar Blade: The History of Project Eve." Game Rant, 2023. gamerant.com. Retrieved July 2026.
- "Stellar Blade director Hyung-Tae Kim unveils protagonist Eve's first design." AUTOMATON WEST, 2024. automaton-media.com. Retrieved July 2026.
- "Why Is Stellar Blade's Design So Controversial?" TheGamer, 2024. thegamer.com. Retrieved July 2026.
- Stellar Blade x NieR:Automata downloadable content (Shift Up / Sony Interactive Entertainment, November 20, 2024).
- Stellar Blade x Goddess of Victory: NIKKE downloadable content (Shift Up / Sony Interactive Entertainment, June 11, 2025).
- "How Stellar Blade Became 2024's Most Controversial Game." Den of Geek, February 16, 2024. denofgeek.com. Retrieved July 2026.
- "As 'Stellar Blade' Reaches 3 Million Sales, Shift Up CEO Rewards All 300 Employees With a Switch 2." Vice, June 2025. vice.com. Retrieved July 2026.