David Jaffe and The Bartlet Jones Supernatural Detective Agency’s Drawn to Death looks like a stylish, unique, and irreverent take on multiplayer shooters, but if you were still on the fence about playing it, your decision just got a whole lot easier: The game launches in April, and it’s free for PlayStation Plus members.
“I wanted to find a way to invite all of you PS Plus members into this experience and give you a look at what really excites me about games these days,” Jaffe wrote in a post on the PlayStation Blog. “We’ve been working on Drawn to Death for nearly three years, and over time, it really has become this robust, highly competitive game — and we haven’t even talking about a lot of new features yet.”
These new features “Sphinx missions,” which consist of eight different “battle-focused riddles” that reward additional weapons and levels, as well as “character-centric missions.” There are 15 of these for all six launch characters, and completing them will unlock additional costumes and taunts.
Drawn to Death will also include the ever-popular loot boxes, which contain taunts and skins, as well as a tower-climbing game that will net players in-game stickers. Jaffe is keeping an “insane mystery special offer” secret, as well, but with the release date quickly approaching, we won’t have to wait very long to find out what it its.
Drawn to Death aims to separate itself from other multiplayer shooters not just with its visual style — the game takes place in the pages of a bored student’s notebook — but also with its pacing. The “time to kill” in the game is much longer than in other shooters, giving players more opportunity to develop strategies and experiment instead of just getting shot and killed over and over again.
Drawn to Death launches exclusively on PlayStation 4 on April 4.