Three critically acclaimed point-and-click adventure games built entirely from collaged Renaissance paintings are arriving on consoles for the first time — and for PlayStation 5 players specifically, two of the three have never appeared on any PlayStation hardware before. Publisher Akupara Games and solo developer Joe Richardson have confirmed that The Immortal John Triptych, an anthology collecting Four Last Things (2017), The Procession to Calvary, and Death of the Reprobate (2024), will launch on August 27, 2026 for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, Nintendo Switch 2, and PC via Steam.

Four Last Things and Death of the Reprobate have never appeared on any PlayStation platform; their arrival with the Triptych marks a genuine debut for PlayStation owners. The Procession to Calvary received a PS4 release in July 2021 but has not previously appeared on PS5. All three games also carry "Overwhelmingly Positive" ratings on Steam, alongside Metacritic scores of 83, 78, and 81, respectively — strong credentials for a solo developer's entire career output arriving in a single package.

Richardson is a London-based musician, animator, and game developer who built all three games without a studio. The Triptych announcement — first revealed on April 30, 2026, with the specific August 27 date confirmed July 28, 2026 — represents the first time his complete trilogy has appeared on a non-PC platform in a unified, remastered form. For the adventure game genre as a whole, a solo developer's trilogy receiving this kind of anthology treatment signals how thoroughly the indie revival of the past decade has matured: publishers declared the point-and-click adventure commercially dead in the early 2000s, and now a single developer has produced three well-reviewed entries and earned a full console release.

Built From Real Old Master Paintings, Not Original Art

The visual methodology behind Richardson's trilogy is specifically worth understanding, because it is not ordinary game art. Every scene in each of the three games consists of cutouts from actual paintings — works by Bosch, Bruegel, Rubens, Rembrandt, Vermeer, and Velázquez, among others — digitally extracted, animated, and composited into navigable game environments. The art spans Renaissance, Rococo, and Romantic periods, representing hundreds of years of European painting history collapsed into one anachronistic world.

Richardson has described the process of building The Procession to Calvary as being "trapped in the Louvre for two years" while painstakingly tracing outlines around every element before it could function as game geometry — a description he offered in his own words on the PlayStation Blog. The bonus content included in the Triptych makes this process visible: developer timelapses show Richardson assembling these collages in real time, giving players a window into what "making a game from a museum collection" actually looks like at the construction level.

The result is a world that looks unlike anything else in the adventure genre. Accompanying the imagery, composer Eduardo Antonello contributed an original score recorded on real medieval and Renaissance instruments, interwoven with publicly available classical works; the music adapts dynamically as each story progresses.

How the Point-and-Click Mechanics Work on a Gamepad

The Triptych uses a "verb coin" interaction system — a radial pop-up menu of action verbs that appears when the player highlights an interactive object — rather than the traditional LucasArts-style on-screen verb bar. This design choice is part of the modernized adventure interface that turns out to translate naturally to a thumbstick: a player uses the left stick to navigate toward an object, and the radial verb selector is controlled directionally, with a face button to confirm. A drop-down inventory accessible at the top of the screen completes the interface.

Full controller support is one of the headline additions in the Triptych remaster, alongside a unified UI overhaul that brings visual and navigational consistency across all three games for the first time. The games were previously PC-only by default, with only The Procession to Calvary making it to console under a prior publisher arrangement with Digerati in 2021. The Triptych is the first release to bring all three games together with a shared interface designed for gamepads.

What to Expect From Each of the Three Games

Four Last Things (2017) launched on PC and mobile and earned a Metacritic score of 83, a nomination for Best Art at the Independent Games Festival Brazil, and a PC Gamer description as "Monty Python-esque, painterly point and click." It follows a man trying to confess all seven deadly sins so an overworked church will grant him absolution — a premise the game dispatches with gleeful irreverence.

The Procession to Calvary (2020 on PC, 2021 on consoles) is a direct sequel, placing players in control of a female fighter on a quest to track down an escaped tyrant named Heavenly Peter. Its Metacritic score of 78 came with reviewers noting it as one of the most amusing and unique video games released at the time. The game is more expansive than its predecessor, with more puzzles and dialogue.

Death of the Reprobate (2024) is the trilogy's conclusion, earning a Metacritic score of 81; Eurogamer praised it as "infectiously cheeky" and called it one of that year's most memorable adventure games. Its story follows the dying heir of Immortal John, dispatched on seven good deeds by a disapproving father.

While the three games tell separate stories, recurring characters and thematic threads run across all of them; the Triptych format makes playing them in sequence more coherent than buying the individual PC titles.

Richardson on Consoles

Richardson himself set the tone for the collection's console arrival in the original April 2026 announcement: "Playing a point-and-click adventure game on a video games console is like reading Rabelais on an e-reader. It's vile and abhorrent and you ignorant f***ing heathens are going to love it."

The Rabelais reference is precise. François Rabelais was a 16th-century French humanist whose work — earthy, exuberant, and cheerfully profane while sustaining genuine philosophical weight — is broadly considered the model for the kind of humor Richardson is attempting: lofty subject matter handled with gleeful flippancy, jokes about posteriors treated with maximum seriousness. PC Gamer and Push Square have both used the Monty Python comparison, which is the other obvious lineage: anarchic comedy applied to serious theology.

The Triptych's puzzle design operates differently from the absurdism of its visual surface, however. Richardson emphasizes that the puzzles maintain "a consistent internal logic" — solutions are weird but follow rules internal to the world, rather than requiring brute-force clicking or arbitrary verb-guessing. This description appears across all official press materials. The games contain cartoon violence, occasional nudity, strong language, and adult themes, which potential buyers should factor into purchase decisions for younger household members.

PC Players: What's Changing on Steam

Existing Steam owners of any of the three individual games will receive a free quality-of-life update bringing each title up to the Triptych's unified standard. Players who own some but not all three can unlock missing titles directly within the Triptych bundle after purchasing it. A separate paid DLC — officially titled The Immortal John Triptych: Weird Extra Content Art Gallery DLC Thing-y — will also be available on Steam and includes additional bonus material beyond the standard package.

What This Launch Means for Point-and-Click Adventure Games

Publishers declared the point-and-click adventure genre commercially dead in the early 2000s, after FPS games cannibalized the market and LucasArts and Sierra both folded their adventure divisions. Tim Schafer raised $3.4 million on Kickstarter in 2012 — against a $400,000 goal — specifically because publishers refused to fund adventure games, and that crowdfunding success triggered a broader indie revival of the genre.

Richardson's Triptych sits in direct lineage with that revival. He built all three games alone, released them through digital distribution, earned critical recognition on PC, and has now produced enough total work — three full games, each receiving positive critical scores — to merit an anthology console release with a dedicated publisher. That arc, from solo Steam release to multi-platform remastered console collection, is exactly the trajectory the indie adventure revival made possible.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is The Immortal John Triptych a PlayStation debut for all three games?

For Four Last Things and Death of the Reprobate, yes — neither title has appeared on any PlayStation platform before. The Procession to Calvary is not a full PlayStation debut; it released on PS4 in July 2021. However, the Triptych marks the first time all three games appear together on PS5, and the first time The Procession to Calvary is available on PS5 specifically. Push Square confirmed that neither title had previously appeared on PlayStation.

How does Joe Richardson make games from Renaissance paintings?

Each scene in the trilogy is built from digital cutouts of actual Old Master paintings — works by artists including Bosch, Bruegel, Rubens, Rembrandt, and Vermeer — extracted, animated, and assembled into navigable environments. Richardson has described the process as painstakingly tracing every element from every painting. The Triptych's bonus content includes developer timelapses that show this collage process in action, making it visible how a navigable game world gets built from a museum collection. Richardson described the full process on the PlayStation Blog when the PS4 version was announced in 2020.

Do the three games need to be played in order?

Each game tells a standalone story and can be played independently. However, recurring characters and thematic threads run across all three, and playing them in release order — Four Last Things, The Procession to Calvary, Death of the Reprobate — provides a more coherent experience of the shared world Richardson has built. The official features page confirms each game features its own unique story with recurring characters and themes.

What happens if you already own the games on Steam?

Existing Steam owners will receive a free quality-of-life update for any games they already own, bringing them to the Triptych's unified standard. Players who own some but not all three games can unlock the missing titles within the Triptych package after purchasing it. A paid DLC with additional bonus content will also be available separately. The official press release confirmed all these details for existing PC players.