Wolverine and Saros release dates confirmed in fan-pleasing PS5 State of Play

The last State of Play for 2025 turned out to be pretty decent in the end, with a lengthy look at Insomniac Games’ bloody new Wolverine game.

All three console manufacturers have been letting people down this year, with their online preview showcases, but there was some hope that Sony might push the boat out, at least a little, for their traditional September State of Play.

It didn’t feature any major surprises, but it did start with a proper look at Saros, Housemarque’s follow-up to the excellent Returnal, and ended with the first gameplay footage of Marvel’s Wolverine, by the makers of the Spider-Man games.

Saros got an exact release date too, while Wolverine was narrowed down to late next year. It won’t be shown in public again until next spring though, which may be a hint that Naughty Dog’s Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet is going to be at The Game Awards in December.

What is Saros and when is it out?

Saros was first announced in February but no gameplay was shown, with developer Housemarque (who are celebrating their 30th anniversary this year) describing it as a spiritual sequel to Returnal. It’s easy to see why, as all you’d need to do is swap the main character back to Selene Vassos and it’d look like a straight follow-up.

We’ll take it either way though, because Returnal remains our favourite first party exclusive for the PlayStation 5 and we’ve always been big fans of Housemarque’s arcade style action in general. Returnal took all that to another level, with third person bullet hell shooting action combined with Metroid Prime-inspired exploration.

Whether Saros is still a roguelike is unclear, but the talk about how time ‘stretches and tears’ seems to hint at that. Whether it’ll still have the Lovecraftian influence of Returnal is also unconfirmed, but that boss at the end of the footage looked like something straight out of a Guillermo del Toro movie.

The best news of all, is that the game will be released on March 20, 2026, as a PlayStation 5 exclusive.

What games were in the September 2025 PS5 State of Play?

There was plenty of interesting stuff in between Saros and Wolverine but a lot of it was games we already knew about or had been leaked earlier, such as the February 6 release date for Nioh 3.

The whole showcase was only 40 minutes long, so we recommend watching the whole thing, but other highlights included a release date of December 8 for Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 (with PSVR2 support planned later), and Deus Ex Remastered (which we imagine will turn out to be multiformat) on February 5.

Sony also took some time to promote new hardware releases, including the Pulse Elevate PC desktop speakers and a new branded DualSense controller for the 20th anniversary of God Of War – although that was the only time Kratos and co. were mentioned.

Kazunori Yamauchi also popped up to celebrate 100 million units sold for Gran Turismo, over the last 28 years. There was no mention of a Gran Turismo 8 though, just a Spec III Update for sometime this December.

What is Marvel’s Wolverine and when is its release date?

Many fans had speculated that the long-delayed Wolverine game might be the mic drop at the end of the State of Play and that’s exactly what it was. Developer Insomniac showed more than expected though, even if the amount of gameplay shown wasn’t very much.

They were very keen to emphasise that the game is super violent, with Insomniac creating special ‘blood tech’ to simulate claret being spilt in the most realistic way possible. It was certainly fun seeing that juxtaposed with Wolverine’s traditional yellow and blue costume, although it’s the yellow and brown one on the box art, and you can see him fighting in his civvies and cowboy hat at various other points.

Mystique, Omega Red, and the Sentinel robots were confirmed as bad guys. There are apparently hints at other bad guys in the footage but we’re not experts on Wolverine’s rogues gallery, so we didn’t pick up on them. Although we think the robot-looking guys might be the Reavers?

Locations include Canada, Japan, and Madripoor, which hints at various storylines from the comics, although we very much doubt the game will be following any of them that closely.

Wolverine will be voiced by Australian actor Liam McIntyre, who’s also doing the motion capture. We had to look him up but apparently he had the lead role in Spartacus: Vengeance and has also voiced JD Fenix in Gears Of War and fallen Jedi Taron Malicos in Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order.

The big news at the end of the State of Play was that the game will be released in autumn 2026, which implies it’s Sony’s big PlayStation 5 exclusive for next year.

Email gamecentral@metro.co.uk, leave a comment below, follow us on Twitter.

To submit Inbox letters and Reader’s Features more easily, without the need to send an email, just use our Submit Stuff page here.

For more stories like this, check our Gaming page.