NeverDead

Who wants to live forever? Not wise-cracking demon hunter Bryce, that's for sure. After 500 years on this mortal coil, he's royally bored of Abba tributes and Only Fools and Horses repeats. And there's only so many times you can listen to people whining about The Phantom Menace before you want to rip off your own head.

In fact that could be what happened to Bryce. Discovering he could roll his own head around the floor, while still alive, he also realised he could bite the ankles off anyone he chose. Practical and fun. That's not the real backstory, of course, but while NeverDead lead designer Shinta Nojiri continues to keep tight-lipped about what's really going on we might as well speculate.

All we know for now is that Bryce is mightily pissed with the Demon King. A spot of handbags five centuries ago resulted in his unwelcome immortality. With his powers weakened, this "zombie demon" scratches out a living fighting off weaker demons with Arcadia, a female government agent he doesn't get on with.

"Bryce doesn't care what happens to himself, so he'll just always kid around," Nojiri-san reveals. "He's very cynical and miserable, basically, but we add comic relief through his personality. We kind of imagine how you would be if you'd lived for 500 years, and how you would end up."

From the tiny snippet of gameplay shown off to us, the answer appears to be like a crusty Max Payne. But although you're playing as a diving, rolling, twin-pistol toting dude in a flowing leather coat, the comparisons stop there.

"The key feature is the immortality of the player," says Nojiri. "He will be dismembered when he gets attacked in some critical situation, and it causes some dismemberment, but he will remain alive.

"For example, he has a gun in both hands, but when he gets damaged or loses his left arm, his dismembered arm will lie on the floor and still can shoot. It can hinder the aim, and his attack power will be halved, but it has other uses for gameplay strategy."

Bryce can also remove his own arm, Nojiri says, and throw it at enemies. "You can't control the detached arm but you can shoot with it," he explains with a gleeful grin.

And it gets better, gore fiends: "Bryce can also dismember his own head in order to reach higher or narrower areas the player cannot access with their body."

That's right, you'll be battling it out with your own head spinning merrily while the remains of your undead body lay scattered about the place. "To put your body back together you have to roll into the body parts," Nojiri tells us - something the rather elegant gamescom trailer comically illustrates.