Like many video gamers, I was — how should I phrase this? — "very freaking deaking excited" to see a Spider-Man: Miles Morales game and sorta-sequel to 2018's standout Spider-Man PS4 title would be coming to PlayStation 5, with returning creative team Insomniac Games and a dope first look to boot. Was I a little disappointed to hear it would feel more like a standalone spin-off rather than a full-on adventure game? Reader, I was. But now that members of the Insomniac and Marvel teams have told EW some more details about the forthcoming game, I'm back in it and ready to go.

In the original Spider-Man, Miles Morales was not only a playable side character, but in a post-credits stinger, revealed to have been bitten by a radioactive spider in Norman Osborn's lab and achieved damn spider-powers himself! Like the inciting incident of Spider-Man: Into the Spiderverse reminded us, Peter Parker ain't the only damn Spider-Man in town! At one point, this post-credits reveal was merely meant to be a fun Easter egg, nothing more. But Bryan Intihar, Insomniac’s creative director, insisted that it sow the seeds for a potential sequel: "We knew really early that [Spider-Man] was going to end with him getting the spider bite. We would tease it during development. I think everybody was focused on, 'Can you make the first one really good and we'll worry about the other stuff later?' But we wanted to have that set up so if it became a reality [to do another game] we could pull it off... One of the reasons we put that out was to hopefully convince people that ‘He’s a Spider-Man now. Can we have a game with him?‘"

The answer is, indeed, yes! And the "game with him" will take place one year after the events of the first Spider-Man. Miles, who lives in Harlem, must deal with the warring factions between a crime syndicate using advanced weapons and technology and a massive energy corporation — and my friend, I am very into Miles Morales going through a character-growing "David vs. Goliath" story that touches on the horrors of tech, capitalism, and over-industrialization!

As for the "shortened scope" controversy, the fact that it's not a "full sequel," the comparisons to Uncharted: Lost Legacy? Intihar promises the game "is a full arc for Miles Morales that started in Spider-Man. We really are completing this hero's coming of age in our game. It is a complete story... When we started crafting it, we realized that, with a little bit more of a compact storytelling style, we could tell a very emotionally impactful story that would fit really well as an experience that would take Spider-Man 1 and [Miles Morales] and do justice to this character." Intihar also mentioned how every facet of the game, from its shorter scope to its animation styles, is specifically character-driven toward Miles Morales, calling him "his own Spider-Man" and stating that his arc, in comparison to Peter Parker's, "is more so born out of family. What I think is really compelling about Miles as a character is he has friends that he could actually let into his world — his human world and his Spider world. He's a little different in the way he approaches it."

I, for one, can't wait to see how Miles approaches it when the game drops on PS5 at the end of this year. For more PS5 goodies, here's a boatload of memes.