“28 Floors: Outbreak” Suspected of Stealing Drake’s Face – Will It Really Be Released in 2027?

200 hours into grinding all kinds of Japanese RPGs to the point of numbness, I somehow got jolted awake today by a new horror game whose problems jump out at you at first glance. The indie title “28 Floors: Outbreak,” now listed on the PS Store and scheduled for release in 2027, has already gone viral for “looking too much like other games.” The feeling is like pulling a bootleg Arsène from a Persona gacha – you know something’s off the moment you see it.

First, the basics. “28 Floors: Outbreak” appears on the PS Store as a first-person survival horror game set in a high-rise where only one elevator still works. Players have to fight their way up floor by floor, rescue survivors, and ultimately break through to the rooftop. If this setup were made into a Japanese, floor-based RPG, it might have a pretty satisfying “tower-climbing” rhythm. Unfortunately, the gameplay description so far leans entirely toward realistic survival horror and hasn’t shown any standout systems, making it hard not to worry that this is just an “elevator edition corridor simulator.”

The real controversy is about its “face.” Some players have pointed out that the male protagonist on the cover and in the screenshots looks basically like Nathan Drake stuck in a different backdrop; from facial proportions to stubble and hairstyle, the resemblance is striking. Some reports even describe the protagonist as the spitting image of Uncharted’s legendary treasure hunter. The déjà vu is like suddenly running into an NPC in Final Fantasy claiming to be Cloud’s distant relative, carrying a giant sword that is “absolutely not the Buster Sword” – the dissonance yanks you straight out of the atmosphere.

On top of that, the monster designs are also being called out for “borrowing too much.” After comparing images, some players think these enemies were practically traced from the Clickers in The Last of Us, with only some texture details changed while the overall silhouette and the split-open head structure remain highly similar. For someone like me who’s used to seeing all kinds of deified monster designs in JRPGs, this sense of copy-paste is like dragging the Einherjar models from Valkyrie Profile into another game and throwing them straight into battle. No matter how realistic the mocap is, it can’t withstand this kind of visual “face collision crit.”

It’s worth noting that this game has no official partnership with Sony or Naughty Dog. The developer is an indie studio from Estonia called Witenovastudio OÜ. Their official website is still under construction. Previously, they made a highly divisive little title called “Comfy Corners,” a casual sticker-organizing mini-experience. Jumping from that to realistic survival horror is like asking the Story of Seasons team to suddenly make a hardcore mecha SRPG; the lack of transition in between inevitably makes people raise an eyebrow.

Timing-wise, Naughty Dog’s Uncharted series has formally wrapped up, Nathan Drake’s adventures are over, and the studio is busy with its new sci-fi IP, “Starfall: Heretic Prophet.” In this gap where the old IP has stepped off the stage and the new one hasn’t yet arrived, an indie horror game that appears to copy the old protagonist’s image suddenly pops up on the platform. This kind of face-riding behavior is extremely sensitive from a brand-protection standpoint. It’s like you’ve just seen off a generation of main characters in the Trails series, then turn around to find a mobile game next door that straight-up copies the entire party’s character art, only changing the names while daring to use the same genre tag. It’s hard not to provoke strong backlash from fans of the original.

The community’s response has been fairly unified: some joke that this is “Nathan Drake lost in a horror elevator,” while others directly place the monsters side-by-side with Clickers for comparison, accusing the game of being blatant knockoff work. More importantly, reports say that Sony has not yet made any statement, nor clarified whether the game will be taken down despite the obvious alleged infringement. This leaves the whole affair in a strange limbo, like a turn-based battle where you’ve already queued up your skills but the combat resolution just won’t start, leaving you feeling uneasy.

From a player’s purchasing perspective, I’d offer a very conservative recommendation: there’s no need to add it to your wishlist right now, and no need to rush to support or boycott it. There’s still a long way to go before its planned 2027 release. Whether the character designs will change, whether it’ll be delisted, and whether it’ll eventually present genuinely creative systems are all big question marks. For a completionist like me, a game that “hasn’t even figured out its own face yet” isn’t worth investing emotional energy or time in advance. Better to save that effort for titles that genuinely have their own style in both art and gameplay.

That said, this whole situation is somewhat of a cautionary tale for indie game trends as a whole. Shared assets, AI generation, and templated design are becoming more and more common, and some teams have started treating “familiar-looking” as a shortcut, assuming that resembling some blockbuster gives players a sense of safety. But building game characters is more like the crystal-themed variations in JRPGs: references can be homage, but copying too faithfully just ends in awkwardness. From here on, it’s up to Sony to decide whether to step in, and up to the dev team to decide whether they’re willing to perform a true “reset” before launch – rebuilding this 28-floor tower from the foundations up.