Steam shows « Oct. 28, 2026. » In France, though, nobody will launch Phantom Blade Zero that day: S-GAME’s game unlocks on Thursday, October 29 at 3 a.m. in Paris (CET). That one-night gap is only the first thing to know before the Phantom Blade Zero release. Next come a preload reported at over 130 GB, demanding PC requirements and review dates that haven’t been set.
Why Steam says October 28 and Paris says 29
The game’s Steam page, viewed in French on October 21, does list October 28, 2026, at 59.99 €. Steam shows the US date. According to Vice (Brent Koepp, October 9, 2026), the game unlocks at 7 p.m. PT (US West Coast time) on Wednesday, October 28. At that moment, Europe is already on the 29th.
Vice’s table gives 3 a.m. CET for Germany, which also holds for France: winter time returns on October 25, four days before release. Insider Gaming (Andrew Highton, October 19) lands on the same moment, 2 a.m. UTC, citing SteamDB and the PlayStation Store. Both sources describe a simultaneous worldwide launch, on PS5 and PC alike.
A 134.8 GB PS5 preload, not yet confirmed
Notebookcheck reports, based on PlayStation Network data, a PS5 preload opening on October 27 and a 134.857 GB download. S-GAME has confirmed neither the date nor the size. On PC, no preload date has been published. The Steam page gives no size either. It only states that an SSD is required.
That figure is worth clearing space for now. On a first-generation PS5, it takes up about a fifth of the roughly 667 GB usable for games. The game will only ship digitally: Insider Gaming found no physical edition on sale.
The PC requirements set by S-GAME
Both tiers Steam lists for the Phantom Blade Zero release rely on upscaling (rendering at a lower resolution, then enlarging the image with an algorithm such as DLSS). Without it, the announced figures don’t hold.
- Minimum: Intel Core i7-8700K or AMD Ryzen 5 3600, 16 GB of memory, GeForce GTX 1660 6 GB or Radeon RX 5500 XT 8 GB, for 1080p at 30 frames per second.
- Recommended: Intel Core i5-10600K or AMD Ryzen 5 5600X, 16 GB, GeForce RTX 3060 Ti 8 GB or Radeon RX 6700 XT 12 GB, for 1440p at 60 frames per second.
For path tracing (lighting calculated ray by ray, the most demanding mode) at 4K and 60 frames per second, KeenGamer (Samuel Jackson, October 10) cites an RTX 5080 with DLSS 4.5, for a game built on Unreal Engine 5.
What the previews say, and what they didn’t test
The preview embargo (first impressions, no scores) lifted on October 8. GamerFuzion (SteelTron) rounded them up: four to six hours of play on a near-final build, across eleven outlets, including IGN, Polygon, Push Square and PCGamesN.
Combat wins everyone over. Travis Northup (IGN) says he felt « like a badass for the whole session, » and PCGamesN writes that « no two fights feel the same. » Push Square settles a debate before it starts: « this is not another Soulslike. » You lose nothing by dying, and enemies don’t respawn.
The reservations come down to three points. The same Northup noted « infrequent but fairly severe framerate drops » on a fairly powerful PC. Polygon finds the ordinary fights unsurprising and short between bosses, and several outlets call the story confusing in the first hours. Above all, Game Rant says it did not try the game on a standard PS5, and the roundup reports no test on that console, the one most players own.
Before the Phantom Blade Zero release, no date for reviews
As of October 21, eight days before launch, S-GAME had announced no date for the review embargo to lift. Only one site, Germany’s Playfront, suggests October 26, and no other source confirms it. If that date holds, the first scores will arrive three days before launch, and one day before the supposed opening of the PS5 preload.
Scores can diverge sharply on a demanding action game: on Valor Mortis, the press split between 9 and 6. For a 59.99 € game with no demo (Insider Gaming found none), waiting for the first reviews costs only a few days.
Price, editions and French language
On Steam, the standard edition costs 59.99 €. Insider Gaming lists $69.99 or £64.99 for the Digital Deluxe edition, whose euro price doesn’t appear on the page viewed. According to Vice, that edition adds two outfits (Wulin Legend and Blood-Steel Form), an artbook and the digital soundtrack. It grants no early access. Pre-ordering immediately unlocks the Treasure Basin accessory, which boosts Remnant Dust gains by 10%, and the Legacy outfit. Both can also be earned in play.
For the Phantom Blade Zero release in France, the Steam page lists French for the interface and subtitles. There is no dubbing: full audio exists only in English and Simplified Chinese. The game is not coming to Xbox or Game Pass, according to Insider Gaming. KeenGamer counts a 20 to 30 hour campaign, eight regions and eight endings. The hero, Soul, has only 66 days to live, a countdown that also names one of the four difficulty modes.
Originally set for September 9, the game was pushed back by about fifty days, and Sony then gave it an entire State of Play on August 17. It lands in the middle of an already busy week, six days after the release of Modern Warfare 4 on October 23.
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