Four movies in, John Wick is one of the most talked-about assassins in action cinema, and you’ve barely seen him work before he retired.
Think about how much of the franchise runs on rumor. Old allies and old enemies keep bringing up the impossible jobs, the bloody feuds and the relationships that turned him into the Baba Yaga. The films keep telling you who he was without ever showing you.
Saber Interactive’s untitled John Wick game is going after that gap. It’s an original story set years before the Impossible Task, so you’ll meet John while he’s still an active assassin, well before he becomes the grieving retiree Keanu Reeves plays at the start of the first film.
Hex did something clever, and fans wanted something else
The last time John Wick got a video game, it went somewhere nobody expected. John Wick Hex, released in 2019, turned Wick’s fighting style into a timeline-based tactical strategy game. It was a smart, inventive take on the character and earned a 74 Metascore.
It also split people. Planning gunfights on a timeline meant you almost never felt Wick’s action the way the movies deliver it, up close and immediate. For a franchise built on choreography, that was an odd trade.
Saber’s game drops the strategy layer and goes straight for the action. It’s being developed with Lionsgate and franchise director Chad Stahelski, and it will have a hard-hitting gun-fu combat system, cinematic camerawork, driving sequences and environments built to make you feel like you’re controlling Wick inside one of his movies.
That shift is significant, and it’s been a long time coming. Hex had you thinking like John Wick from a safe distance. This one puts the gun in your hand and asks you to keep up with the fast, brutal gunplay that made the series a hit. Honestly, it sounds like the John Wick game most people pictured in the first place.
The timeline is the part to watch
The combat is what will sell the game. The setting is what makes it interesting.
Here’s a quick refresher on the canon. Before the first movie, John wanted out of the business so he could build a life with his wife, Helen. Viggo Tarasov agreed to let him walk away on one condition: he had to finish an assignment that looked impossible. John pulled it off, and the job cemented the reputation that follows him through the whole series. Helen’s death later leaves him grieving, and that grief kicks off everything that follows.
But the films have never really shown the years that made him the Baba Yaga. That stretch is still one of the biggest holes in the story, even after four movies spent building out the High Table, the Continental and all the rules that keep that sprawling network of killers in line.
Don’t expect the Impossible Task (probably)
Setting the story years before the Impossible Task gives Saber a lot of room to work with. The studio said the game will expand the franchise’s lore with familiar characters and entirely new ones. That opens the door to John’s earlier relationships, his past missions, his ties to the Continental and the High Table, and whatever eventually left him desperate to get out.
Just don’t count on playing the Impossible Task itself. The time jump suggests the game is more interested in building the John Wick who would eventually take that job on.
That could be the smartest thing about it. If it works, you’ll finally understand why a quiet life with Helen meant enough to a man like that for him to try something everyone around him believed couldn’t be done.
