Blackwood

BLACKWOOD is an upcoming game scheduled for release on September 16, 2026. It is set in New York in 2012, where the player runs a DVD store by day and works as a ruthless assassin by night after dark. The premise places ordinary retail work beside organized violence, making the store and the assassination career two parts of the same playable life. The contrast is not incidental: the announced description defines the character through this split between a public daytime job and a dangerous nighttime role.

Set in 2012 New York, the game uses a specific time and place rather than an undefined modern setting. The DVD store anchors the daytime side of that setting: it is the business the player runs, and it gives the character a visible occupation that exists alongside the concealed assassin identity.

BLACKWOOD is described as a cinematic third-person shooter. That perspective places the player behind the protagonist during action, while the word cinematic identifies an intended presentation built around the character's story and high-impact encounters. The description pairs that presentation with direct control rather than presenting the game as a passive film.

Its announced action language is equally specific. BLACKWOOD promises grounded melee combat, so close-range fighting is presented as a physical part of the assassin's work rather than a separate, abstract feature. It also promises brutal takedowns, highlighting the final moments of close encounters as a defining element of the game's violence. Together, these details point to an action system organized around proximity, impact, and finishing an opponent.

Gunplay is another central pillar. The catalogue calls it responsive, distinguishing the shooting from the close-quarters systems while keeping both within the same third-person action framework. The player therefore has two explicitly named forms of confrontation: grounded melee combat at close range and responsive gunplay at shooting distance. Both belong to the assassin side of the character's double life.

That double life supplies BLACKWOOD with its clearest organizing idea. Daytime is associated with managing a DVD store in New York; nighttime is associated with working as a ruthless assassin. The game's tension comes from having those roles coexist in one protagonist, linking a mundane retail responsibility with a violent professional identity. Neither side replaces the other in the announced premise.

Scheduled for September 16, 2026, BLACKWOOD is presented as a release built around that setting, that profession, and the friction between its lives.