The structure
🧩 Eight hand-painted maps
They connect into one seamless world. S-GAME's own words are that it is neither an open world nor a linear adventure from beginning to end — which in practice means hub-and-branch rather than either extreme.
🏯 Pangzhen
The named destination city, and the only settlement S-GAME has named so far.
🔍 What is in them
Secrets, hidden enemies, side quests and story clues, described as meticulously hand-crafted rather than generated or repeated.
Places shown but not named
- A valley held by ruthless bandits.
- An abandoned warehouse full of puppets.
- A vast lake you cross by speedboat — in a Ming-dynasty setting, which tells you how far the steampunk goes.
What it means for how you play
Explore before you push
Twenty of the forty-to-fifty hours are side content. A world built by hand rewards looking, and a seamless one makes backtracking cheap.
Do not expect a map marker economy
Nothing S-GAME has shown suggests an open-world checklist of icons. Treat it as a place to read rather than a list to clear.
What 'neither open nor linear' looks like in practice
🧭 Eight maps, not eight levels
They connect into one continuous world, so the boundaries between them are not loading screens with a mission select behind them.
🚫 And not an icon farm either
Nothing S-GAME has shown suggests a map covered in question marks. The stated design is hand-crafted secrets, hidden enemies, side quests and story clues — things you find by looking, not by clearing a list.
⏳ Half the game is off the main road
Twenty of the forty-to-fifty hours are side content. In a world that is continuous rather than gated, that is an argument for wandering early rather than saving it for a completion pass.
Still to verify
Cross-checked on 10 September 2026 against GamingBolt's State of Play deep dive and Wikipedia's Phantom Blade Zero entry, which agree on the eight hand-painted maps forming one seamless world, on Pangzhen as the named destination city, and on the three unnamed locations above. No map, region list or area count has been published, so this page invents none. What is still unverified is the only thing reading cannot settle — nobody here has played it.