1001: Threads of Mizan was, as game director Scott Lussier said to me in an interview at Gamescom 2026, the “greatest secret ever kept.” The gaming industry has a habit of leaking news about upcoming games and therefore spoiling the surprise, so when the trailer for Mizan was shown during Opening Night Live, everyone was gobsmacked. An AAA action-adventure game that absolutely nobody saw coming, with a unique setting that has rarely been explored in video games before? Count us in.

The only problem with the reveal trailer was that while it wears its Arabian Nights inspiration on its sleeve, it gave no indication as to its genre, mission structure, story, and so on. I’ve played the game now, in a 15-minute session behind closed doors. While I only got to experience a brief section of one level, Lussier also explained how the rest of the game will work.

“What we’re building here is a single-player action adventure game that gets better with your friends,” he told me. “We have created our own world that is inspired largely by the tales of Arabian folklore, and we’re weaving the world of Arabian Nights inside there. It’s about flying on carpets, fighting colossal enemies, and doing it with your friends while also experiencing stories inside of stories.”

In the demo, three of us leaped off the edge of a cliff, summoned our magic carpets, and flew through a rocky desert, taking out groups of enemies along the way. Combat is reminiscent of the Arkham or Spider-Man games: fast-flowing, auto-targeting, with options of light or heavy attacks, along with blocks and well-timed parries. It’s not reinventing the wheel…

…but it does have another dynamic in play: flight combat. After we took down the Sand Knight, a mini-boss that required plenty of synergy between our trio to dodge his attacks and pummel him together when he was staggered, the demo flung us directly into the headline act, a boss fight against a jinn named Nazjush.

Lussier wasn’t kidding when he said Mizan has colossal enemies. Nazjush was a four-armed god, 100 times bigger than each of us, wearing a headpiece adorned with 11 blinking eyeballs. She’d send out regular projectiles as we flew around, dodging them in midair, before sending cursed magic back at her to break her stamina. Eventually, she’d come slump down at the edge of our platform, opening a window to destroy an eyeball or two. It was a spectacle and a half, and if every main boss fight throughout Mizan is half as memorable, this will be a game that thrives off its set-pieces.

Each mission or level in Mizan is linear, but the order you tackle them in is not. “You can tackle bosses in whatever order you prefer,” Lussier explained. Well, “besides the main one; you have to do some pre-reqs before you can fight the main boss. But when it comes to exploration, if you wanna go and spend a couple of hours doing races, puzzles, or tombs, feel free.”

So Mizan isn’t an open-world game, but it does have plenty of optional activities that spin off from the game’s hub world. Lussier was keen to talk about something known as the djinn realm, explaining it’s essentially an “unseen world” that you “don’t naturally stumble upon, you go through a spiritual journey through that.” This realm contains vaults, which sound similar to trials in Breath of the Wild: “they can be puzzle-based, combat-based, and all those things feed into the main progression.”

Lussier also talked to me about the games that inspired Mizan: “When it comes to feel of movement, it’s hard to not look at Insomniac’s Spider-Man and how they crushed how it felt to swing through the city. So we wanted to make sure that the carpet could deliver on a similar fantasy, even though the mechanics are fundamentally different.”

Vibes-wise, though? Games that have had “regional impact on local folklore” are some of the team’s biggest inspirations, Lussier said. “Like The Witcher, right? Really put that on the map and showed everyone what that region is about. And then Black Myth: Wukong, that game really enriched that entire area. Or Ghost of Tsushima, even though that’s not folklore, and there’s been tons of feudal Japan games, but Ghost of Tsushima was such a beautiful experience and you leave knowing the heart of what a samurai is. Whether that was intentional for them or not, it didn’t matter. You felt it.”

1001: Threads of Mizan doesn’t have a release date yet, but the vertical slice I played felt incredibly polished. Lussier claims there’s no release window in mind either, as the team is still “actively building the world,” and for them to tell the story they want to tell, they “need to be able to go through lots of different worlds.” Examples he gave include lost cities, civilizations, and “corrupted cities that have been overtaken.” I cannot wait.