I Want to Play the Villain! heads to PlayStation and Xbox with a puzzle built on actors’ egos

Every theatre company knows the real drama happens before the curtain rises, in the casting room, where egos, fears and old rivalries decide who gets the crown and who is handed the mop. Triomatica Games, the small Ukrainian studio that made its name with the wordless puzzle adventure Boxville, has built an entire puzzle game out of that backstage negotiation, and the idea is sharp enough to deserve a bigger stage.

I Want to Play the Villain! casts you as the person nobody envies: the one who must make the show work while keeping every performer happy. Each actor arrives with a personality, a dream role, a preferred scene partner and something they would rather never do in front of an audience. The release frames the job simply: rearrange the cast, swap costumes and rewrite the story until everyone on stage gets what they want.

Two kings, a queen and twin maids cast in a royal intrigue play in I Want to Play the Villain — Image: Triomatica Games

What makes it more than a sorting exercise is that the story itself is the puzzle board. The screenshots show a stage split into two scenes, each narrated in a line or two of plot, with comedy and tragedy masks above every actor’s head signalling who is content and who is sulking. One actor insists on a royal part; another confesses they are too shy to face the seats. Change who plays the maid and the plot of the next scene bends with it. Triomatica describes its stories as modular, so a single swap can turn a romance into a ghost story, and each chapter brings its own setting, characters and mechanics.

That is a natural evolution for this team. Founded by artists and developers, Triomatica handles development and publishing in-house, and Boxville won the mobile award at the Game Developers World Championship and an international best indie prize. Its follow-up, the point-and-click detective story Trust No One, set its mystery in the streets of Kyiv. I Want to Play the Villain! keeps the studio’s gentle humour but trades environmental riddles for social ones: the obstacles here are people.

A king, a queen and a ghostly maid in a moonlit night scene in I Want to Play the Villain — Image: Triomatica Games

The news this week is reach. The game’s PlayStation and Xbox store pages are now live for wishlisting, joining a launch plan that already covered PC and mobile. The full list spans Steam, Epic Games Store and GOG on PC, PlayStation 5 and PlayStation 4, Xbox Series X|S and Xbox One, Nintendo Switch and Switch 2, plus iOS, Android and the Samsung Galaxy Store, with release set for the first quarter of 2027. Pricing has not been announced.

Players do not have to wait to audition it. A demo is available on Steam, and a free standalone app simply called Villain!, which contains the game’s first chapter, is already out on iOS and Android. At launch the game will be playable in thirteen languages, including English, Ukrainian, Spanish, French, German, Japanese, Korean and both Simplified and Traditional Chinese.

The title is the joke and the thesis. Somewhere in every cast there is an actor who would rather be the villain, and the whole design is built on the suspicion that a happy company makes a better show than a perfect script.

Tags: indie games, puzzle games, Boxville, I Want to Play the Villain!, Triomatica Games, Trust No One