Mythology Meets Modernity in Norse-Inspired Action Game ‘Street Gods,’ Launching Today on Meta Quest

The Nine Realms have come crashing into New York City, bringing a horde of ravenous mythological creatures to the streets. But the explosion of mythology into the modern world also brings you a powerful weapon so you can fight back: Thor’s hammer, Mjolnir.

Street Gods, launching today on Meta Quest, puts you in the role of an ordinary girl wielding the power of the gods, bringing the hammer down on enemies ranging from undead draugr to towering, corrupted jotunn. It’s up to you to push back the monsters and stop reality from being torn apart.

How you do that has a lot to do with the godly hammer in your hands. Street Gods is largely a melee game, and developer Soul Assembly has put a lot of emphasis on making Mjolnir feel as realistic and powerful in your hand as possible. That means swings will reverberate when you land them, and you’ll need to be skilled and precise as you throw the hammer at your enemies and then recall it to your hand.

Mjolnir is an important part of your arsenal, but it’s not all you have at your disposal. Street Gods is a rogue-lite game, meaning that each run you take through the streets of New York is different — the powers and weapons you find along the way are randomized, and even the streets themselves won’t be laid out in the same way. As you complete more runs, you’ll earn new powers on runs you can use to take on the game’s massive creatures, including elemental abilities that let you channel lightning, fire, and water.

Central to each run is the Talf board, which allows you to actually shape the city before you venture into it. The board lets you place city blocks, building a map that manifests into reality and allows you to choose your path through the city and the battles you might face. Opting for tougher fights and paths might yield better rewards, but at the risk of being overrun and having to start over.

To celebrate the release of Street Gods, we sat down with Lead Game Designer Jim Norris and Associate Lead Designer Tony Cooper to talk about the game’s story, the merging of the mythological and modern worlds, and how the developers approached bringing Mjolnir to life.

Street Gods is a first-person melee action game, where the player gets to physically build their own runs, features tons of motion-centred combat mixed in with permanent and temporary power boosts, all wrapped up in a story about finding your place in the world.

Val is just a regular teenage girl from New York who loves art, and is busy making her latest graffiti when a magical hammer falls from the sky. She soon discovers that the Norse myths are real! Thor, the god of lightning, is trapped inside his hammer Mjolnir; some strange force has merged the Nine Realms together, breaking New York into pieces in the process; and undead enemies from Hel are spilling into the streets.

Val has to use a magical Tafl board that has also appeared, to turn these pieces of the city into new areas to explore, fight these enemies, and uncover powerful runes that Thor hopes will return things to normal.

But when Val finds a spray can that can seemingly alter reality itself, the temptation to use it for herself might just be too great....

Well, bashing enemies with a big hammer is very fun! But the hammer itself has other abilities. For example, if you throw it at an enemy, there is a chance to stun it, giving you the freedom to attack, or allow you to focus on a bigger threat instead. And as you progress through the game, your mysterious benefactors grant you new abilities — new types of hammer swings and throws that do more damage, hit multiple foes at once, or juggle enemies into the air.

And you don’t just have the hammer! You will gain three other relics that you hold in your offhand — Gleipnir (a whip), Svalinn (a shield), and the Duo Hammer (exactly what you think it is), that you can use to gain the edge in combat.

Combined with these are the Runic Blessings — special magical abilities you will find in chests throughout your runs. These will not just boost your own abilities, but can power up the hammer and relics too.

Each enemy and each attack will have its own weakness and defense for you to learn, and when you combine all your weapons with the randomized Runic Blessings, it means no fight will be the same!

Well, this is a great question, and probably the one we spent the most time working out and iterating upon. Things like swinging slowly, holding a button to charge up, and moving the hammer in a specific way was what we settled on. There are many ways that you can convey weight in VR, but the reality is, the weight of a player's swing is based on the weight of the controller and their own body. At its fundamental, we wanted Street Gods to be a fast-paced action combat game, the idea that the more you swing, the more you use Mjolnir, the stronger it becomes. The charged hit and ultimate system is where we landed and we feel it gives the player a great variation of power throughout the battle, and game, and it’s up to the player how and when to use them. Also we think the fact that the mighty Thor is literally trapped inside of the hammer also makes it pretty mighty.

As you progress through the game and attempt to reset reality, you will uncover new Runic Blessings that you can imbue yourself with during a single run of Street Gods. You unlock more Blessings the more runs you complete that add to the pool, and you also gain new ones as you uncover new offhands. We ease players in and by the end of the game, you have a whole bunch of new abilities to use, blend, and double-up on for the awakened version of that Blessing. Some players will find a few they use each run, if they are lucky enough to stumble upon them, and others will enjoy trying to find all of them. And you are going to need them by the end of District 3 — we really throw a lot at players by the end of the game.

The player has to place tiles on the Tafl board to create a path from a set Start Tile to an End Tile, which then becomes their next “run.” Each tile has a fixed number of portals that allow them to connect to adjacent tiles, and each tile is actually a piece of New York City!

Whenever the player discovers a new World Rune during a run, that whole chunk of the city becomes a tile they can now place on the board.

At the beginning of the game, each board puzzle only has one solution, to get the player used to how it all works, but as the game progresses and the player increases their pool of tiles, each board can have multiple solutions and it’s up to the player what type of run they create.

But the enemy knows what you are doing, and will be laying traps on the board for you — tile spaces that will set that part of the city on fire, freeze it solid, or corrupt it, changing the tile layout and the types of enemies that spawn when you enter it. So you don’t get it all your own way!

Street Gods is a mash up of all things people in the studio love: hip-hop, modern animations, and of course, the hammer Mjolnir and the god of thunder Thor. We wanted a way to have the hammer to almost be the central character of the story in a way, something the player would carry with them throughout the rest of the game. Once we knew that, it was a collection of mood boards, and media that everyone on the team pitched in with that breathed life into Street Gods.

We really poured our heart and soul into this game, and we can't wait for people to get their hands on it and let us know what they think. If there is any feedback, or things you really love about the game and you want to let us know what you think of the experience, please let us know on our Discord server.

You can claim Mjolnir and start bashing enemies and summoning lightning in Street Gods today. It’s available on the Meta Horizon Store for $19.99 USD.