Ravenswatch added Kintarō as a new playable hero on October 12, with Passtech Games and publisher Nacon dropping a launch trailer on the official PlayStation YouTube channel alongside the update. The Japanese folk hero arrives roughly 13 months after the game left early access in September 2024.
Kintarō joins the existing roster as the game’s first major post-launch hero. The trailer leans hard into his sumo-wrestler roots: he slams enemies with his fists, has a built-in lifesteal, and can pull off massive jumping slams that send foes flying. Passtech teased the character back on October 1 with a six-minute gameplay reveal, and today’s launch trailer is the final, marketing-ready cut. The DLC follows the same pattern of paid post-launch hero drops as Risk of Rain 2: Hallowed Concepts, which added the Acolyte and Enforcer to Hopoo’s roguelite earlier this month.
Ravenswatch is a top-down, action roguelite in the same vein as the developer’s previous Curse of the Dead Gods, with each run built around a single hero out of a growing roster drawn from folklore. The base game launched with characters based on Sun Wukong, Snow White, the Headless Horseman, and others. Kintarō, the red-trousered strong child of Japanese legend, is the first new hero added since the game left early access. Like most roguelites, the new hero lands ahead of the game’s Release Calendar refresh and gives the Discord a fresh thing to theorycraft around.
Kintarō is available as a paid DLC on Steam today, with the same content coming to consoles via the update. Passtech has not yet announced any further heroes, and the official launch trailer is the first real marketing push from a publisher that has been largely quiet on Ravenswatch since launch. For comparison, Marvel Tokon: Fighting Souls and Tekken 8 have both run similar Year-1/Season-1 character drops over the last week, all of them betting on DLC characters to keep the live-service crowd engaged without a sequel.
Our read: this is a small but notable move for a roguelite that has been quiet since launch. The Kintarō DLC is the first signal that Nacon and Passtech plan to keep updating Ravenswatch with new heroes rather than letting it coast on the existing roster. The official PlayStation trailer is a real marketing push from a publisher that often leaves its mid-tier games to fend for themselves. Whether it pays off depends on how often more heroes follow. Roguelites live or die on the variety of their roster, and a sumo-themed bruiser with a grappling hook is a much more interesting addition than another ranged character would have been. You can see what the current numbers look like on our Steam Player Counts tracker.
Edited by Kerwin Stewart, Editor-in-Chief · How we report
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