PixelJunk Monsters 2, the sequel to Q-Games’ 2008 tower defense game, is coming May 25 to PlayStation 4, Steam, and Switch—and it looks gorgeous.


Kotaku got a brief demo of the game at Game Developers Conference yesterday at the booth of its publisher, Spike Chunsoft. If you think the visual style looks nice in screenshots, it looks amazing in motion. It’s all done with a pseudo-stop-motion effect that makes it look like everything is made of wood and clay and cloth, and there’s a tilt-shift camera focus effect that makes it all look like a little tiny diorama. It’s really pretty just to watch.


It is a tower defense game, so you will spend a lot of time with the camera zoomed out. You can actually zoom in close on your main character and look at things from that perspective to see all the detail (as in the image at the top of this story), but it’s hard to play the game that way. (A representative of Q-Games said that the designers had looked into creating gameplay functionality that used that up-close view, but ultimately it did not work out.)

The Q-Games rep shared that PixelJunk Monsters 2 will run at 60 frames per second on PlayStation 4, and 30 frames per second on Switch, whether docked or in handheld mode. It’ll have two-player local co-op play, as well as a 4-player online-only mode. Q-Games will share more information about PixelJunk Monsters 2 via Spike Chunsoft’s livestream event tonight at 8 PM Eastern.