Hideo Kojima says OD will be the scariest game ever, with a secret system for terrified players

Hideo Kojima says his next horror game, OD, will go further than any game before it. The creator behind Metal Gear and Death Stranding wants OD to be as scary as possible, and he means it literally. His goal, in his own words, is to go beyond the limit of the scariness that other games had reached. To get there, he has even built a secret system for players who get too frightened to keep going.

OD is built around a single chilling idea: overdosing on fear. The title is short for overdose. Kojima has described it as a game that tests your fear threshold and explores what it means to OD on fear. Rather than a normal scary game you simply push through, OD is designed to find the exact point where a player's nerve breaks.

That is where the hidden system comes in. Kojima wants the game to terrify, but he does not want players to just quit when it becomes unbearable. For those who might stop playing when it gets too scary, I have thought of a system that will allow them to keep going, he said. He refused to explain how it works, adding that saying more would give too much of a hint on the system, and that he could get in trouble for revealing it.

The concept was a hard sell. Kojima has said he pitched OD to several major companies, and many turned it down, telling him he was crazy and that they did not understand what he was trying to make. He calls it something that no one has ever seen before, an idea he has carried since his work on Death Stranding. Xbox was the one that finally took it on.

Microsoft is more than a publisher here. OD is made by Kojima Productions and published by Xbox Game Studios, and Kojima says the team is leaning on Xbox cloud gaming technology to attempt something new. He has framed OD not just as a game but as a new form of media, and has talked about trying to change the service model of games from the ground up.

The creative team is stacked. Kojima is co-writing OD with filmmaker Jordan Peele, the Oscar-winning director of Get Out, Us, and Nope. Kojima has hinted that OD may work as an anthology of horror segments made by a group of directors he jokingly calls the Avengers, including himself and Peele. His own segment centers on a simple, primal terror: the fear of a knock at the door.

The cast pulls from horror and prestige drama. It stars Sophia Lillis, known from It, alongside Euphoria's Hunter Schafer and veteran actor Udo Kier. Kier's role became a poignant footnote. The actor died in November 2025 before finishing his voice and motion capture work, making his appearance in OD posthumous.

OD runs on Unreal Engine 5, and its eerie reveal footage has drawn heavy comparisons to P.T., Kojima's legendary 2014 horror teaser that fans still mourn. The first OD teaser arrived at The Game Awards 2023, showing the cast's faces frozen in fear. A 2025 trailer titled Knock leaned further into that dread, putting Sophia Lillis front and center.

Development has not been smooth. Performance capture work was paused in 2024 during the SAG-AFTRA actors strike, and the project went quiet for a stretch. Kojima confirmed that development resumed by June 2026. There is still no release window, and he has suggested OD could stay in the works for several more years.

What makes OD so anticipated is the combination behind it: gaming's most ambitious auteur, a master of modern horror cinema, a brand-new gameplay system no one has seen, and a stated goal to be the scariest game ever made. Kojima has reinvented genres before. With OD, he is promising to break the ceiling on fear itself, and to catch the players who fall when he does.

What is OD? OD, short for overdose, is a horror game from Hideo Kojima and Jordan Peele built around the idea of overdosing on fear and testing how much terror a player can take.

What platforms is OD on? OD is published by Xbox Game Studios and built in Unreal Engine 5, using Xbox cloud technology. A release date has not been announced.

Who stars in OD? Sophia Lillis, Hunter Schafer, and Udo Kier, whose role is posthumous after his death in November 2025.