Annapurna Interactive made its debut appearance at Tokyo Game Show 2025 in style, bringing with it a handful of its celebrated, existing games, but also dropping a trio of brand-new announcements with playable demos at the show.
Of this triple of tantalising titles, People of Note – from California-based Iridium Studios – is the one that stood out to me the most. I love a good turn-based RPG, and I reckon there aren’t nearly enough musical games (distinct from music games) out there, so a combination of the two is very much my shit.
The preview demo runs through kind of top-line notes on what’s going on in the game’s story before diving right into the action, but the general gist is that Cadence, an aspiring pop star, is looking for her big break in the city of Chordia’s ‘Noteworthy Song Contest.’ Rejected for seemingly nefarious reasons, Cadence decides that her best chance is to switch from solo act to formidable group effort, and goes on a quest to recruit a team of musicians from across a number of genres to break completely new ground and find her spotlight.
With this quick bit of context, I’m dropped into a section of the game where Cadence and her EDM-wielding companion Synthia (fantastic name) have join forces with rocker, Fret, to convince a heavy metal faction known as the Osmiums of their shared cause. What ensues is a jaunt through a metal-inspired underworld where the trio tussles with Osmium goons and thematic beasties, solves puzzles and eventually squares off against the boss rocker, Frequency (or Quincy for short).
While roaming around a dungeon-like environment and solving some basic mirror-laser puzzles made for an okay first impression, People of Note’s real draw is its unique, musical twist on typical turn-based RPG combat. Your ‘turns’ in battle are known as Stanzas, and like the name implies they’re a form of structure wherein everyone in your party gets their chance to perform an action. The order of actions within a Stanza is up to you, so you can switch between each ready bandmate and decide who makes their move first. After you’ve used up all your actions in a Stanza, the enemy takes theirs, and all of it is tracked in a progress bar along the bottom of the screen.
Each of your party members has their basic attack to perform, along with a number of abilities that use up ‘BP,’ and if you’ve played any kind of turn-based RPG this stuff will all feel pretty familiar to a point. Where it gets a little more interesting is in your party members’ individual musical styles, which see them buffed when the genre of the current Stanza matches theirs. You’re able to see which styles are coming up, which makes proper planning around which teammates are going to be best poised to assail your opponents in a given turn an essential part of your combat strategy.
On top of this, your abilities often come with a very simple beat-matching minigame that determines how powerful or successful the action is, which is about as close as the game comes to typical rhythm game ideas, at least as far as I played. There’s a particular cadence (sorry) to all of this that took me a minute to wrap my head around, but once I fully understood how to best take advantage of each Stanza, work the turn order and set my musicians up for success I felt I settled into the rhythm quite nicely and gained immense satisfaction from slapping down Quincy with style.
There’s a lot I’m still curious about when it comes to People of Note. It’s got some really neat ideas that I’m keen to see fleshed out further, but it’s also got a lot to prove outside of its inspired combat. If the story can meet the potential of the writing and voice work I’ve experienced so far, and the exploration and puzzle-solving are turned up a notch, this genre mashup could wind up topping the charts.
People of Note is slated to launch in 2026 for PS5, Xbox Series X|S and PC.
