Hope in the City launches November 10, 2026 on Steam, Xbox Series X|S and Xbox on PC. Its Tokyo Game Show appearance also confirmed Xbox Play Anywhere and day-one Game Pass availability.
Hope Song is 17. She returns from school to a wrecked apartment and no sign of her parents, then begins investigating without the institutional tools that normally define detective fiction.
An artist replaces the investigator archetype
Hope records suspicious details as drawings. Objects that seem misplaced, visual inconsistencies and expressions can enter her notebook, where observations are connected into insights and eventually larger breakthroughs.
The mechanic makes her artistic identity functional rather than decorative. She does not suddenly become a forensic specialist because the plot requires one. She relies on the thing she already understands: looking closely enough to reproduce what she sees.
There is something suitably adolescent about that approach. Hope is building a theory before she has the authority or experience to know whether anybody else will take it seriously.
Shenyang is meant to feel lived in before it feels threatening
The setting is the real Chinese city of Shenyang, not an invented cyberpunk approximation. Lofty Sky has highlighted the relative lack of northeastern Chinese settings in games and wants familiar streets, stores and residential spaces to carry the mystery.
Creative director Judith Cheung describes observation and curiosity as the game's primary tools. That works particularly well in a location that is presented first as Hope's home rather than an inherently sinister environment.
A mystery becomes more unsettling when ordinary places stop behaving normally.
Its visual language already looks half-drawn
Hope in the City uses deliberately angular character models and geometric faces, with neon light cutting through otherwise everyday urban spaces.
The result sits somewhere between low-poly 3D and a graphic novel. It also connects neatly to the sketchbook concept: Hope's world already looks interpreted rather than photographed.
Lofty Sky has been building toward this kind of story
The Canadian studio previously worked on Sky of Tides and the Annie Award-nominated animated documentary Eternal Spring. Hope in the City has since appeared in GDC's Best in Play program and was selected for Busan Indie Connect 2026.
A Steam demo is available now, with the finished mystery scheduled for November 10.
