TGS 2026 — Decapolice Hands-On Preview: Dial “RPG” For Murder

After a promising resurgence at last year’s Tokyo Game Show, Level-5 came out swinging at TGS 2026. With a booth that put all others to shame in terms of volume and colour, Level-5 was showing nearly a full house of RPG-adjacent games, including Snack World Reloaded, Holy Horror Mansion, and a return of last year’s demo for Professor Layton and the New World of Steam. Their stations were jam-packed with press, but I managed to get an extended hands-on with Decapolice, Level-5’s sci-fi detective RPG first announced in 2023 yet often delayed.

First, let me clear the air: there’s no cutting off of heads in Decapolice, despite what the name might suggest. Rather, you play as a team of rookie police detectives who enter a digital world called the Decasim, where copies of past crimes await solving. Though the game has a cutesy art style akin to Level-5’s repertoire (Ni no Kuni, Inazuma Eleven, etc.), I was impressed by the depth and detail of its police-procedural writing.

Decapolice is not afraid to tackle dark subject matter in the form of violent crimes, but it has a clever workaround: in the Decasim, your characters take on cutesy stuffed animal personas, so the crime scenes you investigate become rooms of scattered stuffing rather than blood.

The game also does a good job of nudging you along the mystery without outright taking the wheel. With my passable Japanese, I was able to investigate several fluffy corpses, interview the witnesses (and intimidate or coerce them with my various party members), collect clues and evidence, and then piece them all together in a digital case board minigame. With the clues aligned, the game’s hotshot protagonist Harvard Marks makes an accusation, and the story progresses.

If you accuse the wrong person (which I totally only did for research purposes!), the game tells you something is fishy and lets you try again. It’s a weird comparison perhaps, but the case board was not dissimilar from Alan Wake 2’s Mind Place detective segments, though I actually felt more logically involved in the mystery here, like when reading an Agatha Christie novel or some other such whodunnit.

With the right accusation made, the demo jumped to the real world, where Harvard Marks and his team confront the perp in very Ace Attorney fashion, including a lot of dramatic finger-pointing. The suspect grew enraged and began lashing out with a barely controlled cybernetic arm—thus started the game’s turn-based combat.

Harvard Marks and his party of five detectives (all named after famous universities, as luck would have it) share one life bar and make decisions based on a case-board-like timeline of three or so moves for every boss turn. The selectable moves are categorized by verbal appeals to the criminal, and attacks do health damage alongside emotional damage I’ll provisionally translate as Anger, Fear, Sadness, and Bewilderment.

Keep attacking the boss and you’ll enrage them, making them transform into what the game’s site calls a Crime Beast. Healing or restoring status may confuse the boss, and debuffing them could deepen their sadness. In this way, the difficulty increases should you rely too heavily on the same types of moves.

With the boss’ HP drained, Harvard Marks gets a 50/50 dialogue option that can Break the criminal, tying back to the crime scene and the criminal’s implied psychological condition. The first time I broke the boss, he became terrified of going to prison and kicked into a second, more aggressive phase. In practice, the game doesn’t reinvent turn-based combat, but it is conceptually and aesthetically cohesive in a way I always found engaging and interesting.

Decapolice is a surprisingly hard-hitting sci-fi mystery JRPG that may appeal to adults as much or more than to kids, as is the case with Detective Conan in Japan. There’s even a companion anime coming. For now, let’s wait for the biggest mystery to unravel: when will the game release within its new projected window of 2027 on Nintendo Switch 2, PlayStation 5, and PC?

More Decapolice Screenshots