Sony Santa Monica has revealed God of War Laufey, the next entry in its long-running action series, and the headline change is impossible to miss: you don't play as Kratos this time. Instead, you step into the boots of Faye, formally Laufey, Kratos' late wife and the mother of Atreus, in a story that unfolds in the afterlife of the gods. The studio showed roughly 20 minutes of gameplay during a recent PlayStation showcase, though it stopped short of giving a release date.
If you've only ever seen Faye as a body on a funeral pyre, that's the point. She's been the most important off-screen character in the modern saga, and Laufey finally hands her a controller's worth of agency.
What Santa Monica Actually Showed
The demo opens almost exactly like 2018's God of War: Kratos lays Faye's body on a burning pyre and says goodbye alongside Atreus. Then the perspective flips. Faye wakes somewhere else entirely, aware that her husband and son have already set out on their journey, and starts moving through a realm we've never explored before.
That realm is the Everywhen, described as the afterlife of the gods, a place where deities from across different mythologies fight for power. A new character, a talking "cosmic cube" named Phranque, helps frame the setting. The enemies holding Faye captive occasionally echo the undead foes of earlier games, but the overall world feels deliberately foreign, which is the smart move here: a new lead deserves a stage that isn't just recycled Midgard.
Combat will look familiar to anyone who played the Norse games, fast, weighty, brutal, but Faye plays differently than Kratos or Atreus. Her standout tool is a blade she can throw and recall, giving her clever ranged-and-melee options in the same spirit as the Blades of Chaos or the Leviathan Axe. Attached to that sword are sentient ribbons called Rue, which exist to keep the weapon from being lost to enemies. Here's why that matters: a recallable weapon changes the rhythm of a fight from "close the gap" to "control the whole room," and it gives Faye a signature feel rather than a reskin of her husband's kit.
A Story That Runs in Parallel
Rather than a sequel or a flashback, Laufey runs alongside the events of the 2018 game. Before her death, Faye set Kratos and Atreus on their path to scatter her ashes in Jötunheim. Once she arrives in the Everywhen, she's given reason to believe that path has been compromised, and that she'll have to act from the other side to keep the two of them safe.
That framing is doing quiet, clever work. It means gaming fans who know the original beat-for-beat get a second, hidden layer running underneath a story they thought they understood.
The Decade-Old Mystery It Might Solve
There's a moment in the 2018 game where someone blows a horn that summons Jörmungandr, the World Serpent of the Lake of Nine. Kratos, carrying a sick Atreus to Freya's hut, only hears it in the distance, and the series never explained who blew it or why. Cory Barlog, Santa Monica's Head of Creative, once teased that an answer would come eventually, and fans have theorized for years that Faye was the culprit.
Laufey is the most plausible vehicle for that payoff yet. If Faye's entire mission is to protect Kratos and Atreus from beyond the grave, she becomes the obvious candidate for manipulating events behind the scenes. None of this is confirmed, so treat it as informed speculation rather than fact, but it's the kind of loose thread that a parallel-timeline story exists to tie off.
Why This Counts as a Risk
Replacing your franchise's marquee character is genuinely bold. Kratos is one of PlayStation's most recognizable faces, and stepping away from him, even temporarily, is the sort of swing more long-running PlayStation series could stand to take. The upside is obvious: a fresh protagonist, an unfamiliar world, and a chance to recontextualize a story fans already love, all while keeping the combat DNA that made the series a hit.
What's Next
The big unknown is timing. No release window was given, and based on how early the footage looked, 2027 is the realistic earliest target. For now, the safest takeaway is that Laufey is a full-scale entry built around a new lead, not a small experiment, and that the next time Santa Monica talks, the questions worth asking are about the release date and, of course, who really blew that horn.
