Phantom Blade Zero Is Out Now: Release Date, UK Launch Time, Price and PC Requirements

Phantom Blade Zero is out now. The Phantom Blade Zero release date was 29 October 2026, and S-GAME's dark wuxia action RPG unlocked worldwide at the same moment: 2am GMT on Thursday 29 October in the UK (3am CET in central Europe), which was 7pm PT / 10pm ET on Wednesday 28 October in the US. It's available on PlayStation 5 and on PC through Steam and the Epic Games Store, priced £49.99 / $59.99 / €59.99 on Steam.

Launch day has gone well. Phantom Blade Zero holds a Metacritic score of 88, Steam rates it Very Positive from more than 5,600 user reviews, and over 610,000 people were playing it at once on Steam at midday UK time on 29 October.

Below you'll find everything confirmed at launch: the exact unlock time, prices on Steam and the PlayStation Store, the 5GB day-one patch and S-GAME's NVIDIA driver advice, the PC requirements, what critics are saying, and whether it's coming to Xbox.

Soul crosses a ruined bridge in the Wulin, the dark wuxia world of Phantom Blade Zero. Image: S-GAME

Phantom Blade Zero at a glance

Is Phantom Blade Zero out now?

Yes. Phantom Blade Zero launched on 29 October 2026 on PS5 and PC. S-GAME's pre-load post on Steam set the start time as 28 October at 7pm PDT, which was 2am UTC on 29 October, so players in the Americas got in on the evening of Wednesday 28 October. That's why Steam lists the release date as 28 October for US users.

PC players could pre-load from 26 October, also at 7pm PDT. On launch eve, S-GAME's creative director and CEO, Soulframe Liang, posted a long letter on Steam. In it he looks back to Rainblood: Town of Death, the RPG Maker game he made as a student 20 years ago that first created the Phantom World. He also describes the thousands of hours of motion capture behind the combat, including choreography guidance from Shaolin monks, and the team's work with action director Yang Liu and Donnie Yen.

When was the Phantom Blade Zero release date?

The release date was Thursday 29 October 2026, worldwide. The game was revealed at the PlayStation Showcase in May 2023 and was first scheduled for 9 September, 2026. In June, during a State of Play broadcast, S-GAME announced a 50-day delay. Liang said the team had found one final chance to make the game a meaningful step better, and wanted players to get the best version from day one rather than relying on post-launch patches.

Preorders opened on 11 August, when S-GAME confirmed that development was complete, and the date didn't move again.

Phantom Blade Zero launch time

Phantom Blade Zero unlocked at 02:00 UTC on 29 October, the time S-GAME gave in its "Ready your blade!" post on Steam (28 October at 7pm PDT). The launch was simultaneous on PS5 and PC. Here's what that was in other regions:

UK and European times reflect the clocks going back on 25 October.

Watch the Phantom Blade Zero launch trailer

The official launch trailer, released on PlayStation's YouTube channel on 23 October, runs just over three minutes. For a longer look at the game, the 11-minute Pre-Order Trailer from 11 August opens with Soul fending off pursuers from a speeding horse-drawn cart, then moves into a full boss fight against The Hunt, one of the game's main antagonists.

A week after that, PlayStation aired a dedicated State of Play with nearly 20 minutes of gameplay covering combat, exploration, character builds and side quests.

How much is Phantom Blade Zero?

Phantom Blade Zero comes in two editions on both PS5 and PC. There's no launch discount on Steam.

In the UK, the PS5 version costs £5 more than on Steam for both editions: £54.99 for the Standard Edition and £64.99 for the Digital Deluxe Edition. In the US, PS Store and Steam prices are the same. The PlayStation Store also sells the Deluxe Edition Pack separately as an add-on (£10.01 / $10.00).

At £49.99 on Steam and £54.99 on PS5, Phantom Blade Zero is cheaper than the £69.99 that many big PS5 releases cost in the UK.

Preorder bonuses

Preorders came with two items unlocked early:

• Treasure Basin: an accessory that increases Remnant Dust drops by 10%
• Legacy: an alternative outfit for Soul

S-GAME has confirmed that both items can also be earned through normal play, so buying after launch doesn't lock you out of them.

Combat in Phantom Blade Zero is fast and acrobatic, with launchers, juggles and weapon swaps. Image: S-GAME

What is Phantom Blade Zero about?

You play as Soul, an elite assassin for a powerful organisation called The Order. When the Order's leader is murdered, Soul is framed for the killing and left for dead with a grave wound to the heart.

He survives, but only just. Soul has 66 days to live, and he spends them hunted by his former comrades while trying to uncover the conspiracy behind the murder and clear his name.

The story takes place in the Phantom World, a dark version of the Wulin, the martial arts underworld of classic wuxia fiction. S-GAME describes the style as "kungfupunk": traditional Chinese martial arts mixed with industrial machinery and supernatural horror.

Donnie Yen's role in Phantom Blade Zero

Martial arts film star Donnie Yen has worked on Phantom Blade Zero as a creative consultant since 2023. As well as advising on combat choreography, he performed motion capture, facial capture and English voice work for the character Mó Yuan.

The action director is Kenji Tanigaki, a long-time collaborator of Yen's on films including the Rurouni Kenshin series.

The Phantom World mixes wuxia legend with supernatural enemies. Image: S-GAME

Phantom Blade Zero gameplay: how combat works

Phantom Blade Zero is a third-person action RPG built around fast, combo-driven melee combat. S-GAME has repeatedly said it is not a Soulslike. Fights are faster and more aggressive than in FromSoftware's games, closer in feel to Ninja Gaiden or Devil May Cry, though bosses are still tough.

The core of the combat is a mix of light and heavy combos, dodging and parrying, with Soul able to swap weapons mid-combo. Many attack animations were motion captured with professional martial artists to make the fights feel like a kung fu film.

Weapons and Phantom Edges

Soul carries two types of weapon:

• Main weapons: more than 30 blades, from light swords to heavy two-handed sabres. Each has its own move set, which changes with its length and weight.
• Phantom Edges: more than 20 secondary weapons, including hammers, lances, bows and even cannons. They're used for special attacks, crowd control and punishing openings.

Weapons can be upgraded and paired with accessories to build around a particular style. A Reforge system lets you recover materials from gear you no longer use and put them into something new, so experimenting with builds isn't punished.

Phantom Edges are secondary weapons such as hammers, cannons and bows. Image: S-GAME

Bosses

Boss fights are the centrepiece of every trailer so far. The Pre-Order Trailer shows Soul against The Hunt, and the official screenshots include a towering masked boss that breathes fire and a horned demon fought beneath strings of red lanterns. For harder encounters, the State of Play confirmed you can summon help during some boss fights.

Bosses in Phantom Blade Zero are large, aggressive and heavily choreographed. Image: S-GAME

Exploration and side quests

Phantom Blade Zero isn't a fully open world. You explore large, interconnected regions packed with hidden paths, secrets and optional fights. Along the way, Soul meets characters who need help, and their side quests can open up new paths through the story.

Phantom Blade Zero difficulty options

Unlike most hardcore action games, Phantom Blade Zero lets you choose how hard it is. Confirmed difficulty settings include:

• Wayfarer: a story-focused mode for players who want to enjoy the world and combat without hitting a wall
• Hellwalker: harder fights with more advanced enemy AI
• Sixty-Six Days: the highest difficulty, named after Soul's countdown

The PS5 version also includes eight accessibility options, among them subtitle settings and adjustable difficulty.

Phantom Blade Zero offers difficulty options from story-focused Wayfarer to the brutal Sixty-Six Days mode. Image: S-GAME

How long is Phantom Blade Zero?

S-GAME has said the main story takes around 20 to 30 hours, with roughly 20 more hours of optional side content on top. That puts a full completion somewhere around 40 to 50 hours. Your time will depend heavily on which difficulty you choose.

Phantom Blade Zero PC system requirements

The PC requirements are modest for an Unreal Engine 5 game. A GTX 1660 meets the minimum spec, but you'll need plenty of fast storage: the game takes up 145GB and an SSD is required at every setting.

Both tiers assume you are using upscaling. For the extra graphics features, S-GAME lists an RTX 5060 for ray tracing and an RTX 5080 for full path tracing. For the pre-load, S-GAME advised keeping at least 300GB free while it installs.

A few other PC details:

• The Steam version uses Denuvo DRM.
• It supports Steam Achievements, Steam Cloud saves and Family Sharing.
• It's available in 15 languages, including English, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Japanese, Korean and Chinese.
• It supports 16:9, 16:10 (laptops and handhelds) and ultrawide screens wider than 3:1, and controls can be remapped.
• Valve still lists its Steam Deck compatibility as "Unknown", although S-GAME says it has tested the game on handhelds.

Phantom Blade Zero day-one patch and PC performance

S-GAME released a day-one patch of about 5GB. It significantly improves ray tracing and path tracing performance and fixes several bugs. If you pre-loaded, download and install it before launching the game; new downloads include it automatically.

The studio also says it spent a long time on the rasterised (non-ray-traced) visuals so that every area still looks right with ray tracing off, and that it has tested the game extensively on mid-range and lower-end PCs as well as handhelds.

NVIDIA owners: S-GAME has seen performance instability with NVIDIA's latest 621.01 driver. Its testing found that driver 617.42 gives the best experience, so if you've installed something newer, it recommends rolling back to 617.42 with the clean installation option and staying on it until NVIDIA's next driver, which it expects soon.

A rain-soaked duel showing the visual effects S-GAME polished for launch. Image: S-GAME

Phantom Blade Zero on PS5 and PS5 Pro

Phantom Blade Zero is PS5 Pro Enhanced, using the extra GPU power for sharper visuals and better ray tracing while keeping performance smooth. On every PS5, it supports DualSense adaptive triggers and haptic feedback, plus 3D audio, and S-GAME says there are three button layouts to choose from.

The PlayStation Store lists eight accessibility features, including adjustable difficulty, and PS5 Game Help support.

Is Phantom Blade Zero coming to Xbox or Nintendo Switch 2?

Not for now. Phantom Blade Zero launched as a console exclusive for PS5, with PC as the only other platform.

Multiple outlets have reported that the console exclusivity runs for at least 12 months, which means an Xbox Series X|S version couldn't arrive before late 2027. S-GAME hasn't officially announced an Xbox or Nintendo Switch 2 version, but it has never ruled one out either.

Some retailer and fan sites listed an Xbox version for 29 October. That was wrong: there is no Xbox version.

Phantom Blade Zero is a single-player game for PS5 and PC. Image: S-GAME

Is there a Phantom Blade Zero demo?

There is no public demo. Hands-on builds were playable at trade shows, including Summer Game Fest, ChinaJoy, Gamescom and Tokyo Game Show. A PS5 demo was rumoured ahead of August's State of Play, but it wasn't announced and S-GAME hasn't mentioned one since.

Phantom Blade Zero reviews: what critics are saying

We haven't reviewed Phantom Blade Zero ourselves. Here's how the published reviews look: the game has a Metacritic score of 88 on both PS5 and PC. On PS5, 43 of its 45 critic reviews were positive and one was mixed when we checked on launch day.

• Game Informer (9.5/10) calls it one of the best action games its reviewer has played, which it finds all the more remarkable for a studio's first game in the genre.
• PCGamesN (10/10) praises the combat, the world and the original story, and says the game is a carefully built Metroidvania at heart.
• TheGamer (5/5) singles out the boss battles and a soundtrack that mixes Chinese sounds with modern genres, and calls it a Game of the Year contender.
• PlayStation Universe (10/10) loved the combat choreography and exploration, but noticed occasional camera quirks and invisible walls.

The criticism elsewhere is mostly about smaller things: some reviewers found the storytelling scattered, missed map markers or had trouble with the lock-on, and one Brazilian review mentioned PC performance issues.

How many people are playing Phantom Blade Zero?

A lot. Phantom Blade Zero passed 1 million Steam wishlists within 15 days of its date being announced, and more than 3 million by September. On launch day, Steam's own player count showed 610,220 people playing at once at midday UK time, and the game was rated Very Positive from 5,683 Steam reviews. On the PlayStation Store, it averaged 4.82 out of 5 from about 4,000 ratings.

If you liked the combat in Black Myth: Wukong, Sekiro, Nioh or Stellar Blade, critics' comparisons suggest this is the one to try this autumn. It arrives in a busy October that also brought Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 on 23 October. Catch up on the rest of 2026's biggest launches in our Marvel's Wolverine release date guide and our Witcher 3 Remastered coverage.

Sources: S-GAME's Steam announcements (pre-load post and launch letter), Steam, the PlayStation Store, the PlayStation Blog and Metacritic. All images courtesy of S-GAME.

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Phantom Blade Zero FAQ