The *Finished!* team is done with romance this time—they’re making a Hong Kong undercover film.

What impressed me most wasn’t the Hong Kong film theme itself. What really hits hard is that it removes the most common “omniscient player” setup in interactive movie games. You can’t flip through every ending like browsing a menu; you can only keep moving forward along the path you choose. That instantly creates the kind of pressure an undercover story should have, like the information fog of Her Story colliding with the moral tug-of-war of classic Hong Kong cinema.

The announcement this time came from “Xiaoyou Content,” the team behind Finished!, or more precisely, Finished! I’m Surrounded by Beauties!. The official statement mentioned that the project from two years ago showed both the team and players the appeal of interactive works, which led them to seriously think about where to go next. Honestly, this surprised me. Instead of doubling down on the romance genre they already knew well, they made a sharp turn toward an original cops-and-gangs undercover IP set in the “golden age of Hong Kong cinema.”

It’s definitely a risky choice. The team itself admitted that the interactive movie game market is now almost overflowing with “dating simulators,” and a cops-and-gangs undercover story is obviously not the safest direction. But from another angle, that’s exactly the part I most want to see: indie teams don’t necessarily have to compete on scale. Sometimes all it takes is a fresh enough angle on the subject to tear open a gap in aesthetic fatigue, much like how some pixel indies once punched through an entire experience with a single clever idea.

Interestingly, they also emphasized an “all-Hong Kong production team” this time. From production and cast to filming locations, everything is aiming for an expression closer to the temperament of old-school Hong Kong films. Confirmed participants already include Golden Horse Best Actor Tse Kwan-ho, Hong Kong Film Awards Best Supporting Actor Philip Keung, along with several veteran performers. Add in practical explosions, gunfights, and chase scenes, and at least in terms of scale, this doesn’t look like one of those lightweight interactive projects shot casually on a makeshift set.

In terms of subject matter, it also wants to tell more than just a surface-level cat-and-mouse game. The official description explicitly mentions that the work will revolve around loyalty, betrayal, and the complexity and struggle of human nature. Beyond romance, it will also bring in weightier bonds of brotherhood. Players will have to make choices across different life paths—for example, whether to pursue love or the truth—and different choices will lead to different outcomes. If this design is done well, it could feel a lot like taking the sense of fatalism from Hong Kong films and packing it into the branching structure of interactive storytelling.

One statement from them really resonates with me: "We don’t want to make a 'safe' product; we want to make a work that 'dares to speak and has power.'" It sounds bold, but it also raises the bar. Because what interactive movie games fear most is this: a concept that sounds electrifying, only for the branching paths to amount to nothing more than a few swapped lines and a few changed shots. That would be a real shame, and the creativity would instantly fall back to the level of an ordinary stitched-together short drama.

From an industry trend perspective, this project is actually well worth watching. Interactive movie games were popularized by romance themes in the past, but that also made them easy to trap within a single genre. Now that Xiaoyou Content is stepping out on its own initiative, it shows that someone in this space is already trying to create a second possibility. If it can truly twist together Hong Kong film sensibility, actor performances, and branching narrative into one tight rope, it could be a meaningful expansion for the entire interactive movie game market.

But unfortunately, the official side has not yet revealed the project’s formal title, release date, price, or platforms, so it’s still too early to judge its true quality. My suggestion is simple: don’t rush to mythologize it, and don’t write it off in advance either—just put it in the wishlist observation zone for now. After all, anyone can sell a Hong Kong cinema filter. What’s truly hard is turning the tension of “an undercover agent can’t turn back” into a gameplay experience where players personally bear the consequences. If they can pull that off, I’ll be there to support it on day one.