At the February 2026 PlayStation State of Play, a trailer for a currently untitled John Wick video game was featured. It was all CG renders and no gameplay, but it could be promising considering the last attempts to put John Wick in a video game was a passable crossover in Payday 2, the strategy game John Wick Hex that I heard was pretty good, and likely other crossovers.
Then it was announced that Saber Interactive was making it, and among my friends the hype immediately deflated. Saber’s games vary wildly from being “perfectly fine and inoffensive” to “absolute trash.” They’re kinda like Rebellion Developments in a way, where their best games are mostly above-average schlock, but their bad games are truly terrible games.
This got me looking into one of their previous attempts at a licensed game. I opted to go for the one based on a mostly forgotten 2013 movie based on an equally obscure comic book series. Bonus: we get digital Jeff Bridges and Ryan Reynolds in this one.
Based on the 2013 movie of the same name, R.I.P.D.: The Game is a product of Old School Games, a short-lived subsidiary of Saber Interactive based out of Russia. They only released two games, both in 2013: This game, and God Mode, a medieval horror shooter hybrid. This was published by Atlus USA in the final year before Sega acquired the Atlus brand, which might seem weird to folks finding out the same company that published Persona and Catherine published this. Then again, Sega published indie games like Hell Yeah! Wrath of the Dead Rabbit (which I wrote about here), so I guess it was kinda On Brand for companies to publish offbeat games like these in the early 2010s.
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R.I.P.D.: The Game’s story is a loose adaptation of the film: Nick, played by Ryan Reynolds, dies and is assigned to the Rest In Piece Department, a supernatural police force meant to take out “Deados” – their version of zombies, basically – and either eliminate or arrest them. With the help of Roy, played by Jeff Bridges, the two must fight all kinds of Deados through various locales like a Meth Lab, a Library, a Construction Yard, and eventually gain enough to tackle the leader of the pack named Hayes, played by Kevin Bacon.
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