Development and pre-release
Bayonetta Origins: Cereza and the Lost Demon was first announced on December 8th 2022 at The Game Awards with a trailer and planned release date of March 17th, 2023. Nintendo of America tweeted that players would control "an Umbra Witch named Cereza, a young version of the Bayonetta in #Bayonetta 3." A second playable character, Cheshire, was described by supervising director Hideki Kamiya as "a rough-and-tumble stray demon."
The game represented a departure for developer PlatinumGames, a company known for intense action games aimed at experienced players and often featuring mature themes. Hideki Kamiya described the title as "something very new for PlatinumGames, made by a team of young ambitious developers with just a few vets to help along the way" and "a brand-new gameplay experience, different from anything in the Bayonetta games so far."
Director Abebe Tinari is young enough to have played the first Bayonetta game while studying in high school and the title inspired him to apply for a job at PlatinumGames, a move that would take him to Japan. "When I was looking for a job after university, development had just been announced on Bayonetta 2, prompting me to apply to PlatinumGames," wrote Tinari in a blog. "When the third game entered production, I was champing at the bit to join the project as a game designer. However, [supervising director Hideki] Kamiya and [producer Atsushi] Inaba had something else in store."