The big-budget gaming business has always been predominantly concerned with North America, Europe, and Japan. There haven’t been all that many big titles, especially recently, that allowed us to explore the cultures and mythologies of the rest of the world. Enter 1001 Threads of Mizan, a newly announced action-adventure fantasy title from MBC Game Studio, based on the folklore and stories of One Thousand and One Nights. We got to spend some hands-on time with 1001 Threads before its big reveal at Gamescom’s Opening Night Live, and it seems like this one might end up being a surprisingly clever one.
In 1001 Threads, an ancient and power-hungry Jinn is determined to tear down the barrier between the physical world and the spiritual one, and it has unleashed a bunch of other, lesser Jinn into the world of Mizan to help make that happen. To stop the Jinn’s plans, players must choose one of three hero characters and battle against the big bad’s supernatural forces, which includes some impressively gargantuan bosses, either alone or in co-op. It’s an original tale that includes pieces of many of the stories of One Thousand and One Nights, similar in concept to what The Witcher series does with Northern European folklore.
As is the case with so many other games, 1001 Threads stands on the shoulders of games that came before. But it doesn’t quite fit any existing archetypes in an overall way. It borrows some co-op elements from Borderlands, like the way it uses three hero characters, each with their unique move sets and skill trees, and it appears to take inspiration from Shadow of the Colossus and Destiny raid bosses for its super-sized boss battles. It takes the “magical technology” aesthetic from Final Fantasy and gives it a fresh Middle-Eastern bent. But the actual moment-to-moment experience of playing 1000 Threads isn’t really like any of those games, because the developers put these pieces together in a unique way.
The key to that uniqueness is the magic carpet, which takes what might otherwise be a pretty standard hack-and-slash experience and turns it into something fresh. The carpet can be used to take flight at any time to help avoid attacks from enemies or put yourself in better position to fight back against them. Switching between ground and air combat is seamless, and you’ll be just as effective fighting from the air as you would on the ground. Indeed, using the magic carpet to fly is as fundamental as walking in 1001 Threads.
It’s in the boss fights where the carpet really shines. The boss battles in 1001 Threads pit you against colossal foes over multiple phases. My fight against the Jinn Nazjush, pictured above, involved damaging its armor while avoiding various objects it threw at me, which required a lot of fancy moves with the magic carpet. Once we reached the damage phase, we had to pluck out each of the 11 eyes on Nazjush’s crown before the phase ended. It’s not revolutionary stuff–abstractly, in fact, that just sounds like standard boss fight stuff that could have come from a number of different, well-liked games. But the verticality and movement offered by the magic carpet fundamentally changes the dynamics of the fight into something more interesting.
Even though I had to learn the mechanics on the fly, the demo itself wasn’t particularly challenging–it helped, no doubt, that game director Scott Lussier and creative director Lars Bonde were my co-op partners. But as a former Destiny player, I couldn’t help but see that boss fight, at least in terms of its mechanics, as kind of a less-intense Destiny raid boss. One of the differences, though, is that you only have three players in 1001 Threads, versus six in a Destiny raid, so the fights in 1001 Threads would never require that same sort of coordination. Even so, Lussier said Destiny’s example is “a north star for us,” in terms of the amount of complexity they want these big boss fights to have.
1001 Threads is expected to have difficulty settings that you can crank up for a tougher experience, though Lussier stressed that they haven’t yet worked out exactly what they will look like. Bonde suggested that at higher difficulties, the game could offer less guidance during the boss fights–like not indicating you need to destroy Nazjush’s eyes during the damage phase–but the developers are still figuring all that out.
Since I played the demo in co-op, I only got to experience the three-person version. But 1001 Threads of Mizan can be played alone or with one or two friends–this isn’t like Big Walk, where the co-op is required to get anywhere. Lussier told me playing solo is the baseline experience for 1001 Threads, in terms of difficulty, and that the battles scale up the mechanical complexity and the number of enemies when you have more players. “It’s a lot more threat coordination and management,” Lussier told me.
1001 Threads of Mizan doesn’t have a release date yet. But when it does eventually come out, you can expect it to be available for PC, PS5, Xbox Series X|S, and Switch 2.
