Though developer Team Clout has kept its debut body ho🌺rror close to its chest, the studio has resurfaced at Summer Game Fest 2025 with a new trailer and news that it's now working with Mundfish Powerhouse – a newly-launched creative label from Atomic Heart's Mundfish – to bring Ill to life. "Before this, we had more questions than answers," Max Verehin, creative director at Team Clout, tells GamesRadar+. "With Mundfish we still have a lot of questions, but now we have people with answers."

Looking grim

There's a weightiness to everything we've seen from Ill so far. The protagonist's revolver looks powerful enough to take your arm off when it fires, while the game's monsters move with a shuddering awfulness. While Ill's research base setting and body horror leanings scream The Thing, I'm also reminded of Half-Life 2's infamous level We Don't Go To Ravenholm – which, despite being very combat-heavy, leans on its physicཧs and environmental interactivity to create desperate reactivity.

"We love Half-Life 2, and we love games of t💛hat era," says Verehin, when I point out the similarities. "You remember when games around Half-Life 2, they all had this Havoc engine? You shoot a bunch of barrels and they all fly by? We're trying to make that in Ill as well, because we like it. You enter a room and start fighting with the monster. The monster drops dead on the barrels, the barrels drop, and it's a mess. After the fight, the area you fought in is completely different. You feel the world is alive."

Verehin admits the team is being "really careful" with balancing the randomness associated with more malleable physics. Too much is a recipe for jank and bugs – as anyone who's been killed by a wayward chair in Half-Life will attest to – but with restraint, with shelves rattling and objects falling over because something is over there, the sweet spot is found. "You feel the weight of the revolver, of the animations. It's one of t꧋he concepts that we are trying to bring from the earliest ideas of Ill toward the final product. You will feel how brutal and impactful the game [is], and we are pushing that."

Outside of Half-Life 2 – which shares Ill's "Eastern Bloc [...] Mixed with sci-fi elements" setting – Verehin's own inspirat🌜ion comes from his own tastes and digging into what other people find scary. "When browsing TikTok, there's a lot of inspiration in that," he explains. "You can see fucked up stuff that gives you ideas for the monster [...] You see something that doesn't have to be scary, and you don't expect it to be scary. I'm leaning into that and trying to translate it into monster design."

While many of the 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:best horror games struggle to keep those scares when you can fight back against their baddies, Team Clout plans to lean right inౠto it. Combat is front-and-center in Ill, although getting the pacing has still proven a "huge" challenge for the studio. Besides it being action-heavy, players will have an "arsenal" of guns to fight back with – altho𒁏ugh for the sake of fear factor, they won't be able to kill everything in sight.

"We want to [include] the survival horror element, the classic PT-like horror genre where you don't have a weapon, you're just a victim," says Verehin. Certain sections of Ill will prevent players from fighting back, and even when you can go trigger-happy, Verehin circles back around to maximizing fear through sound. "Even if you have guns, [what if] there is nobody arou𝄹nd? You can't kill them, but you can hear them. You can see fucked up stuff that you cannot kill, but it can kill you."

"It's [a balancing act], but this is definitely a chall♔enge," explains Verehin. "You🦩 cannot make a pure horror experience when players have guns."

Ill doesn't fit as neatly into one box as, say, something inspired by Resident Evil's survival horror or Silent Hill's psychological tension. If anything, Verehin suggests it's an "action horror" more in line with "'90s horror movies" than anything else. But ultimately, Verehin believes horror players know what they like – however their tastes are categorized. "People are really eager to have another good fucking horror ꧃game," he suggests. "We are trying to deliver that."

Ill is planned to launch on PC, Xbox Series X|S, and PS5 at an unspecified time. Meanwhile, our 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:new games 2025 list has everything you need to plan out your year

With the heꦍlp of a special new weapon type added in the DLC, slicing and shooting my way through Krat City Zoo has been a cathartic blast. Sure, there's the threat of a certain "Puppeteer of Death" looming overhead, but it seems I have some time (and plenty of mutant elephants) to kill before I jump that hurdle. Overture presents an opportunity to take a break from the puppet plague, and it comes at precisely the right time.

A real boy's journey

The tension has peaked by the time I gain access to the DLC. Upon returning to Hotel Krat in Chapter 9 of the base game and finding Gepetto kidnapped, our puppet protagonis📖t receives a new mission: to take down big boss Simon Manus, rescue his father, and put an end to the Alchemists once and for all.

Here, I can choose to either head to the boss battle to finish the main story, or dive straight into the DLC by repairing and using the Hotel Krat stargazer. A prompt appears when I open the fast travel menu, urging me to head t🏅o the Path of the Pilgrim stargazer in the Malum district, and away I go.

Some might find it strange to head into a prequel before even finishing the main story. But the way I see it, Overture gives players a chance to grind out some more ergo in preparation for the final showdown without having to re-clear zones. Plus, thanks to the introduction of 𝕴difficulty levels, I can bump myself way down to Butterfly's Guidance – the so-called "very easy" difficulty – to help re-familiarize myself after nearly two years away from Lies of P. I'll be straight up with you, though: very easy mode is still plenty challenging.

After a short cutscene, P wakes up in a snowy field. Gemini the cricket is 🍬notably startled, commenting that he hasn't seen snow "since…."

He trails off. As I explore my new surroundings, it becomes clear that this place really is familiar to my cricket pal. Between despatching large, wolflike beasts emanating clouds of Freeze damage – a new status effect in Lies of P: Overture – and hostile, near zomboid human foes throwing themselves at me in a frenzy, Gemini marvels at Krat City Zoo in the distance. He knows for a fact that the zoo was destroyed before 𝄹the events of the story so far – which is my first true hint that, somehow, we've managed to go back in time.

Pulling the strings

Before I can even process what that means, I'm presented with a mini boss. This mutated brute was probably once some kind of wolf – or maybe a large primate? – but it looks more like an Umbrella Corporation experiment from the 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Resident Evil timeline now.

My Lies of P combat skills are immediately put to the test as the thing launches itself at me. I've already equipped all of my fire-based throwables and forged a fiery new weapon especially for the DLC, but having to learn a brand new moveset is a different beast entirely (pun intendeꦰd).

For once, my rustines൩s at puppet-slaying is a godsend. I can see the need for approach code-switching being pretty jarring to anyone coming into the DLC straight off the back of the base game, given how differently these animals move compared to humanoid puppets. But thanks to Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, my parry game is strong these days. Two tries and a LOT of thermite later, I claim victory

The zoo's main building is deserted once I finally reach it, my only welcome bei🐭ng a large, partially-destroyed double staircase bisecting the woo🌠d-paneled walls. Paintings adorn them in various states of vandalism, each depicting a strange creature from a far off place. Somewhere in the distance, a human moans in pain. Pinocchio to the rescue!

After listening as "Marchiona, Puppeteer of Death" ominously introduces herself over the crackling intercom system – a problem for another time, no doubt – I quickly scale the intact staircase. More those ganado-like human foes await, loping about the landing before hurtling toward me with an earspli🍰tting shriek. But in my rush to clear the building, I almost miss the source of the pained moaning from earlier.

Just beyond the stairs, a man sits slumped against a balcony bannister, unmoving. An interact button appears when I approach him, and I'm surprised to find he's still alive. The man pleads with me to find a woman at the Savanna Expedition Center – "a stalker with red hair" – before he chokes on his last breath. I mentally file away the clue before heading back into the main building – and that's when things really get interesting.

Don't nock it 'til you try it

Getting a bow in Lies of P is something I didn't know I needed so badly. The limited array of ranged weaponry was a bit of a sticking point for me in 2023, with only throwables and certain mechanical arms being up to the task when I wrote up my 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Lies of P review. But now, I can't imagi♔ne♈ pressing ahead without it.

Of course, my first bow-kill is a bit of an exploiꦓt. I bait a huge, pustule-ridden mutant elephant up a set of stairs by accident, panicking as I realize he hasn't lost interest. Dashing♚ through a narrow stone awning that leads out onto a patio turned out to be more than a knee-jerk fight-or-flight response when, seeing that the elephant is still charging at me despite being stuck on the other side, I decide to get some target practice in.

The damage stats oඣn the thing are pretty low, I note, but the bow comes with the same basic functionality as any other weapon: a light attack, heavy attack, and two Fable Arts specials. It can even block and parry damage, though if I'm using a bow, I'll hopefully be far enough away from an enemy to avoid being hit anyway.

Once comfortable with the controls, I finally put the giant beast to rest. It still takes a lot of chipping away, even on easy mode – most humanoid enemies are felled in maximum two strikes with my saber-dancer sword combo, but I lose count of how many this utter damage sponge soaks up before finally going down.

After a bit of an ergo boost back at the Hotel, I tell myself – because yes, you can jump between timelines through any stargazer while playing Overture – I know the bow will be my new go-to.

I don't know how Neowiz did it, but Lies of P: Overture managed to calm me down from the main game's chaos. Sending arrows flying into mutated elephants, bears, and a particularly nasty kangaroo feels immensely satisfying after spending so long clearing Krat of steampunk nightmare machines. Not only that, it offers players a moment to take a break from the main story's drama to gain a little context as to how it all came to pass in the first place.

This is a DLC that does everything a DLC should: make meaningful changes, tell a thrilling new story, and get its playerbase hyped for a grand return. Just promise me you'll stock up on fire weapons beforehand. Lots of fire weapons.

Lies of P: Overture is out now to play on PC, PS5, Xbox Series X, and last-gen consoles. Check out all the other 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:new games set to follow in in 2025 and beyond!

In its earliest days, prospective fans were enamored with its Soviet BioShock-esque premise, with one combat trailer alone racking up nearly eight million views. Anticipation was sky-high by launch, yet its reception in 2023 was ultimately more polarizing – we scored it 2.5 in our 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Atomic Heart review. Thatღ didn't stop the game from becoming a commercial success for first-time developer Mundfish, though, and just last week Atomic Heart passed the 10 m🍨illion player mark.

Jusওt over two years after launching its debut game, Mundfish has returned to announce Atomic Heart 2 at Summer Game♔ Fest 2025. The developer also has a multiplayer spin-off in the works, so to catch up on everything the studio has been working toward, we caught up with Mundfish founder and CEO Robert Bagratuni to chat via translator.

Back in the USSR

With the first Atomic Heart sitting at a Metacritic score of 70, Bagratuni says Atomic Heart 2 wil♌l carry less♛ons forward from the development of its predecessor. Rather than pointing to any one issue, though, Bagratuni says the heft of these improvements

"We started playtesting about one year before the launch, but we froze about six months before the launch," says Bagratuni. "Six months before launch, we couldn'ꦯt really change the game. I saw certain challenges and things we could have done differently – for example the first dungeon [we could] make it more simple for the player to pass and get into the open world a bit faster. [But] it was impossible to change."

Bagratuni suggests that "global circumstances also affected scores" at launch (the company faced backlash for its alleged ties to Russia), but when asked if that will affect the studio's run-up to Atomic Heart 2, insists Mundfish's focus will be on telling the story i♒t started in the first game. "We were always building a story about technology, and how it affects and changes the modern world" he explains. "This has always been the vision [...] The story itself resonates very well with the audience, no matter what is happening around it, so I think right now we're just concentrating on the story."

Atomic Heart 2's story will be a continuation of the game and its post-launch DLC, and build upon the same dystopian technological themes.. "It's not just like a 40 minute Black Mirror segment," says Bagratuni. "It's goinꦓg꧑ to be a huge world with lots of digitalization, and even though it's sci-fi, it's an imaginary world but it's very believable."

BioShocked

Besides the story, protagonist P-3's Polymer Glove – which grants powers ranging from telekinesis to electricity attacks – will also return, with players now able to use both hands at the same time. The change brings Atomic Heart 2 closer in line to the Plasmid abilities of BioShock, which the first game was compared to heavily before its launch. Yet despite similarities between the Polymer Glove and Plasmids, and even the retrofuturistic societal collapses portrayed in bothꦛ games, it was a "big surprise" when players compared Atomic Heart to Irrational's seminal shooter.

"When we were creating Atomic Heart, we were not thinking of BioShock, believe it or not," explains Bagratuni, who says the team only learned about the similarities through comments on the game's first trailer. The CEO adds that the Polymer Glove was createဣd in response to expectations from starved BioShock players. "We actually added that when we realized that if we weren't going to be added, people would be really disappointed. This was something they were now expecting from us."

With those expectations proving♍ difficult for Mundfish to match in 2023, Atomic Heart 2 presumably benefits from being more of a known quantity. Though we'll have to w❀ait a little longer to see how it shapes up, there's one last bit of good news for fans – Atomic Heart 2 isn't the only game in development at Mundfish.

The Cube

You know what they said about buses: wait for one long enough, and two will come at once. The same principle applies to Atomic Heart fans, who are not only getting a sequel, but a multiplayeꦺr spin-off called The Cube. An MMO RPG shooter set after the events of Atomic Heart's fourth DLC, The Cube will stick players down on – you guesse✅d it – a giant floating cube made up of rotating rows. The setting is so big it has its own biomes, while deep inside is an "equation" that humanity's survival hinges upon.

It is, admittedly, a deeply weird premise. The idea came to Bagratuni while he was sketching during a "very boring, very long call" between Mundfish's co-founders, and within t﷽wo hours of hanging up, the team had brainstormed the game's core concept.

Yet multiplayer shooters are a difficult nut to crack right now. Sony's attempt to wade into the genre, 2024's Concord, resulted in the game being 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:shuttered within two weeks of launch. Earlier this year, EA cancelled yet another shooter in the works at Respawn. It's not a recent problem, either, with Sega pulling the plug on extraction shooter Hyenas in 2023. When asked how The Cube will fare diffe🥃rently, Bagratuni emphasizes the game's "exploration, character development, and storytelling" – factors that are usually prioritized more in single-player games.

"The Cube is spinning, and while it's spinning, the biomes are changing," says Bagratuni, pointing to the 🐽game's unique setting. "They start to connect, and you start getting into very different situations. You meet different creatures – some of them you can communicate with, some of them you can't. You start exploring where they live, how they live, their habitat, and so on."

The ever-changing setti🍰ng sounds as complicated as it seems, and as we get more into the tech side of things, Bagratuni becomes increasingly animated. "It's an incredibly complex, complicated challenge. We had to write our own physics [with] the ballistics system. We had to rewrite the gravitation system and engine."

"We had to optimize the renders in order for it to actually work," he laughs. "This is art!"

Bagratuni describes the behind-the-scenes workings as a "technological breakthrough," and claims that "for the first time in the history of computer games, so many objects can rotate in real-time, online [and] simultaneously". He points to the launch of Crysis in 2007, which he describes as an "epitome of technological revolution" in gaming: "I definitely dra𒊎w inspiration from what it meant back then."

That, Bagratuni stresses, is why he thinks The Cube will succe♚ed. Wh🍨ile I can't speak to the game in action, having only seen some (admittedly very pretty) screenshots, the confidence is certainly there. The premise, as strange as it sounds, is incredibly intriguing. With both The Cube and Atomic Heart 2 on the horizon, the future is looking busy for Mundfish – and although only time will tell how either game shapes up, it already feels like Mundfish is trusting more in its own vision than anyone else's.

If you're looking for something to play now, our 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:best games 2025 list pulls together everything we've been loving so far this year

Revealed at Summer Game Fest 2025, Deadpool VR for the Meta Quest 3 aims to put players into the shoes of Marvel's most ✃oddball anti-hero. Before the reveal, I got the opportunity to play early portions of Deadpool VR's story campaign, along with speaking with game director Daniel Bullock and lead design manager Phil Therien from developer Twisted Pixel about bringing the off-the-wall mercenary into VR for the first time.

"Wait 'til they get a load of me…"

"It's really all about being the cool, all-encompassing Deadpool experience," says lead design manager Phil Therien on Deadpool VR. "He has the weapons, he's got the wit, the humor, and his own trademark way to solve problems. We've got all that throughout our game, so really, we've been ki𝄹nd of bottled up like what it is like to be Deadpool in VR."

In Deadpool VR, the so-called Merc with a Mouth (voiced by Neil Patrick Harris) gets dragged into a conflict with the interdimensional invader Mojo and the secretive defense💮 agency SHIELD. After being transported to the gladiatorial dimension Mojoworld, Deadpool – who's uniquely aware of being in a video game – charts a path of carnage to take down a rogue's gallery of villains and get himself back to Earth.

Much like the recent Batman: Arkham Shadow, Deadpool VR aims to capture the experience of being a superhero within VR. Compared to Batman or Iওron Man, however, playing as Deadpool opens more possibilities for fast, slapstick violence that's both gory and goofy, all punctuated by the character's deep-cut commentary that pokes fun at video game tropes – such as how the game has rooms solely designed for clearing out a certain number of enemies before allowing passage forward.

It's an action-comedy through and through, and Deadpool VR certainly delivers the Marvel-style experience of being an obnoxious, powered-up nerd who loves video game violence. The opening of the game certainly sets the tone well. Set aboard a SHIELD heli-carrier, Deadpool is captured and in pieces. From the perspective of Deadpool's disembodied head on an operating๊ table, I have to guide his body – as if playing a 3rd-person action game – to stealthily take down a scientist so that he can put himself back together. After getting his gear back and cutting down some SHIELD soldiers, I'm off to the races to slice and dice foes.

"A cheap trick and a cheesy one-liner.."

I'm impressed by how Deadpool VR capitalizes on the freeform nature of the character's combat style and the wacky hijinks that accompany reckless action. As I move with the left-control stick and use free look with the VR headset, I quickly adapt to the quick swapping between swords and pistols to create fun combos, where I can slice an enemy with a sword in one hand and then finish them off with my pistol in the other. Put it all together and I'm able to parry bullets by swinging my twin swords and then going in for a dive-💎kick attack and a head stomp.

Speaking with the lead design manager, the developers tell me they want to emphasize the freeform action and the spectacle of being Deadpool, who can wall run, fire his twin pistols, and cut down enemie🐻s with his swords𒀰. Over its last three years in development, they saw the recent Batman: Arkham Shadow, which gave them added confidence for their take on Deadpool.

"I think one of the things that I especially appreciated [with Batman: Arkham Shadow] was just how they treated the UI and how it made it flow into combat in 𒀰a way where it didn't feel like just pushing UI, and it actually blended really well with the movement," says Therien. "That was really huge for us and the type of game we wanted to make because, obviously, the more you move in VR, the more challenging it can be. However, they did it well, especially when it came to things like tuꩵrning around. For me, that's one of the big takeaways. I think they did a really good job with that."

Even when the game falls into those familiar, awkward issues of collision a🐲nd disorientation that can come with action-heavy VR games, I still find the game's pacing and open-ended approach to be easygoing – mainly for the fact that it makes me feel like an absolute menace to my enemies.

A detail that I find amusing is that you can monitor Deadpool's health by the amount of damage he has sustained to his body. Once you take enough damage, Deadpool will lose an entire limb, which will temporarily prevent weapons from being used in that hand until it grows back – which slowly goes from a short, stubby baby hand to a full-grown hand with the costume intact. Deadpool VR is also on brand for featuring secrets and easter eggs, as each stage has hidden areas that can be unlocked, which reference alternate versions of Deadpool, such as La꧂dy Deadpool.

According to game director Daniel Bullock, Deadpool VR does lean into the developer's history of comedic ga🦹mes such as the 'Splosion Man series and LocoCycle, but elevates that further with a game that tries to get players to embrace being an absolute menace to his enemies.

"There's no doubt that when we were toying around with the idea of a game about Deadpool, it was a natural fit for our studio," he says. "When we look at our history and our relationships with comedic writers, and just sort of the cultu🍨re of the studio, it just lends itself so perfectly to this character. So we're super excited to get into it and really flex our musc꧃les [with the concept]."

Despite being a character that feels like it's just for the fans, Deadpool can be a tricky character to nail – but Deadpool VR is looking to keep its focus on delivering a spectacle of goofy carnage. Of course, VR c🌳an be a tricky style of gaming to immerse yourself in, but the straightforward and punchy action Deadpool VR offers could be a solid ride for many, and I'm looking forward to seeing how far this game will push Deadpool's fourth-wall breaking, which already hits a bit different within this new perspective.

Want to keep the headset on? Here's our 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:best VR games ranking!

So, what was everyone getting excited about? Which board games were the talk of the show? Here's what stood out to me after visiting the UK Games Expo 2025 - and the titles I suspect may be in the running for our list of the 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:best board games.

1. Fate of the Fellowship

The biggest draw of the 2025 show was undoubtedly Fate of the Fellowship, an upcoming cooperative Lord of the Rings adventure 🦩from Pandemic designer Matt Leacock. One gamer who initially dismissed it to me as a weak Pandemic clone was, after pla♔ying, thrilling with anticipation for its late August release date.

That’s not surprising given that the bones of t🐟he system barely show: huge armies march across Middle-Earth, the Fellowship fulfil perilous quests that you can swap around to create “what-if” versions of the novel’s plot, and - unless you’re very good or very lucky - Frodo becomes Ringwraith food before getting anywhere near Mount Doom. The few preview copies ava𝄹ilable sell out so fast that the PR rep just laughs when I ask about them.

• Fate of the Fellowship:

2. Gwent

Next on many people’s radar was Gwent. Yes, that Gwent, the addictive card-based minigame from The Witcher 3 that became so popular it’s now ꦡgetting its own physical release. Fans can rejoice that the core of the game remains intact, but there are lots of new play modes to take advantage of face to face play, including group play for up to five and a two-versus-two team mode.

Its UK distributor, Hachette, was having a great show, celebrating two nominees for the prestigious Kennerspiel des Jahres prize, and , alongside some fun new titles. is an intriguing abstract strategy game with asymmetry, a bit like chess except you assemble your😼 pieces as you play, while is an auto-battler that lets you leverage🌱 deckbuilding for some extra depth.

• Gwent:

3. Viking Route

Perhaps the most ingenious new design on show was Viking Route from Ares Games. It’s a cooperative affair where you control a longship,🌼 navigating adventures on the seas of Norse mythology. The on-board ship piece is a compass, which always m𓄧oves where it’s pointing north, but you can control this by moving and rotating other magnetised pieces around the board, a completely new and hard to master movement mechanic.

Ares was also demoing , a🉐 new game from veteran designer Martin Wallce, which does what Martin Wallace does best: a demanding, European-style strategy game with a properly realized theme. In this case, piloting a noble family th♔rough the history of the city of ancient Rome.

• Viking Route:

4. Timber Town

In terms of sheer volume of new games on show, the winner has to be Alley Cat Games. They ꧂expanded their range of tiny, play-anywhere mint-tin games with dexterity title Barbecubes and Tic Tac Trek, which transforms noughts and crosses into a cute exploration game. is a fresh, thematic take on classic Boggle, while is a fun new entry in the neglected pick up and deliver genre.

Their hottest new release, though, is Timber Town. This looks like a traditional tile-laying game wit💟h the clever new twist that tiles float to you down a river, flowing from column to column, and must be placed in the matching position on y♎our player board when you pick them.

• Timber Town:

5. Creature Caravan

Not long ago, Red Raven Games, founded by designer Ryan Laukat, was a tiny publ𒈔isher - but the success of his games, particularly narrative exploജration game Sleeping Gods, has let them expand. They were selling their new title at the show, Creature Caravan. This is a dice placement and tableau-building title in which players trade and explore a dangerous wilderness, trying to collect creatures and be first to reach the safety of the city.

They were also demoing🌠 a couple of upcoming titles that are revamped reprints of their early games. is a super-fast area majority game that now includes twenty variants and expansioജns plus a campaign mode, while adds new narrative and spooky interaction to a beloved adventure title.

“I never win,” lame♚nts their marketing manager Tom Wetzel. “I get too caught up in the story.”

• Creature Caravan:

6. Fathom

Another standout at the show for me was the🌸 undersea Fathom by Paper Fort Games, the team that's also behꦡind the Terraria adaptation (more on that later).

This is a tile-lay𝄹ing ga💯me with an intriguing sonar mechanic that limits what you can pick up to try and form semi-realistic deep-sea ecosystems across a range of scenarios.

• Fathom:

7. Deep Regrets

Away from the bi𓆏g, gaudy publisher stands drawing in the big, noisy crowds, there are dozens and dozens of small independent publishers. The absolute standout success in this sector is Deep Regrets, a horr♚or fishing title inspired by the video game Dredge. The designer, publisher, and artist Judson Cowan and his two helpers are deluged at their stall, fulfilling demand for demos and sales.

🐲The theme is carried through the wh💎ole game not only by the mechanics but by horror aficionado Judson’s artwork. All the fish cards in the game are unique, an engaging mix of scary and hilarious, and even the inside of the box lid is illustrated. Judson went so far as to add illustrations to the shipping cartons that most people will never see.

It’s easy to forget that these folk are the lifeblood of the hobby. Often just one or two people pouring vast time and effort into creating and promoting games for the love of it, their passion p𝐆ouring 🐻out when you talk to them. There’s , described by its creator Richard Davis as a harcore zombie survival game. Two biologists are putting their time in the field into a game called , illustrated from their own photos, which pits you against the real-life challenge of running a successful nature reserve. is a fast-paced shedding game that its creator is so enthusiastic about that he stayed at his stand after closing time to play it with me. Around every corner in expo, down every row, there are hidden gems, there is magic thrumming.

• Deep Regrets:

Honorable mention - video game adaptations galore

While Gwent is a video game spinoff, there are several promising full-blooded video game adaptations at the show. The biggest name here is probably , a bold, solo-only design being boldly promoted by a man cosplaying as Lara Croft. It features a very novel dynamic puzzle system which complicates solutions via enemies showing up and getting stuck in the mechanisms. Goliath Games, meanwhile, is working on a board game version of The Sims curren༒tly scheduled for release in the summer, although they don’t have a preview available.

However familiar those titles are, they’re matched in sales terms by the less well-known , which is getting its own tabletop adaptation from a less well-known publisher, Paper Fort Games. They specialize in the kind of fresh design concepts that are increasingly rare in board games nowadays: for Terraria that looks like boxed boss monsters with modular miniatures that you physically rearrange to reflect their changing🐬 abilities as you whittle them down.

Looking for something new to play right now? Why not check out the 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:best adult board games, or the 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:best 2-player board games?

I'll be honest, I'm iffy at best on Nintendo Switch 2 Welcome Tour, and I'm being driven (ahem) up the wall by Mario Kartꦯ World'🃏s intermission tracks getting in the way of circuit domination. What's there to actually play on this thing? I've gone some rounds in Fast Fusion and it's a blast. I've thrown down blobs and blocks in Puyo Puyo Tetris 2S, which remains a certified puzzle banger. I've installed Deltarune, but I'm too nervous to feel new emotions (real). And then I see it – perfection on a pleasingly block red square – the smooth, rounded purple Nintendo GameCube controller beckons me to 🥃retro bliss.

Back to the past

That's right, Nintendo Switch Online now has 'Nintendo GameCube – Nintendo Classics' on the Nintendo Switch 2 (I'll give you three guesses as to who publishes all this, and the first two don't count). Plenty of superb ꦏgಌames have been promised, including Chibi-Robo!, Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance, and both of the perennially underrated Pokemon Colosseum games. But for now, there are three: F-Zero GX, SoulCalibur 2, and – my beloved – The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker.

Like many, this Zelda was a definitive one in my gaming career. A newcomer to the world of Nintendo once the Dreamcas🌊t's reign had turned more nightmarish, I'd only before touched The Legend of Zelda: A Link's Awakening on Game Boy. Attracted to the gleaming golden box, and the promise of a bonus disc containing The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time to catch-up, I scooped it up for a surprisingly low pre-owned price at my local game shop, after simply browsing for random games. It changed my life.

Sure, revisiting Wind Waker via this classic library isn't completely perfect. While it has save states, there's no rewind – meaning this is a pretty straightforward presentation of the original game. It also means it doesn't have any of the additional features from The Legend ﷽of Zelda: The Wind Waker HD for ꦜWii U which – while the slight art style shift was divisive – make it feel more complete (I'd still recommend that version to first-timers). And yeah, having to use the virtual console feature's tools to re🅰map the camera controls to feel more modern is a bit of a pain – with them feeling a bit twitchier than I re🌳member. But the original Wind Waker is still a banger, it's as simple as that.

I know that al🥂l ജseems a bit foolish. I readily have other ways to play Wind Waker. My Wii U is literally still plugged in. Not to mention all the other ways to enjoy Nintendo GameCube games with some enhancements available in this modern age. And in my household I do try to ensure I'm never more than 10 minutes from Wind Waker at any time. But, well, I bought the Nintendo Switch 2, so here we are. I'm pootling around Outset village. I'm looking at Link's wonderfully expressive eyes as he sidles along ledges in the Forsaken Fortress. I'm picking up a pig and dousing its farts all over Windfall Island. I'm home.

So far, Nintendo Switch 2's newest, flashiest features have been a bit disappointing to me. But there's promise in how it can (big ahem) link to the past. Nintendo GameCube has loads of excellent games locked to the system that deserve to be more readily accessible to those who aren't sicko enough like me to jump through hoops to play them otherwise. And, the extra power in the hardware means revisiting original Switch games wi🐻th performance issues promises to be far slicker. I'm eying up Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity. Is it finally time to finish the fight?

Want more adventures? Check out our 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:best Zelda games ranking!

The next portion of the Grand Prix starts off well. With Crown City in our sights, the race kicks off with the heaving crew of racers taking to the open road to actually travel to the next track from Mario Bros. Circuit. It's a bit different, but OK – race down a motorway, drift through some fast food to unlock a glorious Biker outfit for Waluigi. But what's that in the corner of the screen? Lap 2 of 3 already and we're not even there yet? Hitting Crown City, 'Lap 3' begins as we cross the start line for the first time. The track has plenty of great ideas, teasing me with diffꦰerent paths and routes – drifting up to the tops of skyscrapers is thrilling! And then it… just ends?

Pit stop

Yep, after one glorious lap of Crown City, that's all you get. And this is no anomaly – it's just standard for how Gra𒁏nd Prix are structured in Mario Kart World. You would expect a cup like this to be a true test of your track-by-track racing prowess, bꦿut instead it feels like you only get an appetizer of each track. No chance to make up time on another lap, no bungling yourself with a banana you dropped a minute earlier, no time to actually try to take the shortcut you spotted before.

So far in every cup I've played – about half, though I've played tracks from others across different modes – only the first, kick-off circuit follows a typical multi-lap structure, with every subsequent track consisting of, on average, about two out of three 'laps' driving across the Free Roam open world to the next actual next and then just one lap of that.

Even some of the ambitious tracks that cap off Cups get this treatment, a shame as it makes them feel anticlimactic instead of the tense final sprint to the finish they could so easily be. Wario's Galleon, a tight circuit that mixes harsh waves with twisting turns through wrecked ships, feels like it's over before it begins, and Bowser's Castle only teases some rip-roaring flaming action before waving the flag. I always feel like I'm getting the rug-pulled out from under me, feeling the buzz of leaping between platforms in the sky in Great ? Block Ruins (maybe m🅠y favorite MKW track), or lapping up the game's clever revamp of Dino Dino Jungle from Mario Kart Double Dash – only to be told it's time to wrap it up after one lap.

The novelty of driving between tracks is a nice idea at first, but it quickly wears thin. With a few exceptions, the track between the circuits is incredibly dull, mostly revolving around straight lines. You're just plowing forward down a motorway or straightaway, simply holding down the accelerator. One bridge has some neat rails you can grind – but I swear the up-and-down cost me several positions, meaning it was more optimal to just drive across it using boosters as normal in🌺stead. Another section has you glide straight ahead across a desert doing basically nothing for several seconds. Another has♒ you just drive forward through water to an island for a while.

To accommodate the higher player count, the roads are absolutely massive too. You rarely have to think in these 'intermission' sections that form the bulk of races, and it feels like even when another racer is technically neck-and-neck with me I ne🦹ed binoculars to actually see them oܫn the other side of the road.

As I said, I can sort of get behind the novelty. But you can't skip these in Grand Prix, and – again – it means as a result you only get one lap on the actual track. For me, it detracts significantly from each ಌcircuit, meaning you barely get a sense of their identity before you're rushed along to keep trucking through the world to the next one.

I'm also not completely convinced by Mario Kart World's original trꦏacks as a result. I like the ideas in some – as I mentioned earlier – but I can't help but feel like they've been designed to be a bit shorter and more one-note to fulfil their role as capstones to these jaunts rather than be complete ideas in and of themselves.

As it stands, the majority of 'tracks' in Mario Kart World feel, by design, about two thirds filler as you plow down pretty dull if somewhat pretty pathways. It really makes the tracks suffer on replay, feeling like you're doing a commute before you can get to the good stuff, which is then over in moments. You can play standard 3-lap versions of all the tracks… if you double click to select it in VS Mo🃏de only. There's no way to play Grand P🦋rix in the classic format at all.

Which would be annoying enough… But this 'tr🔯acks with intermissions' format is also the🐭 default in Online, meaning the majority of selections you get to vote on for the next track are, like in Grand Prix, massive slogs to get to a circuit, after which you play a truncated-feeling lap. It is possible to get a 3-lap option, b🔯ut not regular – the best way to raise your chances being to select Random at the moment, in my experience.

It might be on me for trying to go into Mario Kart World as blind as possible after securing my Nintendo Switch 2 bundle – I'm a big fan of the serie🍸s and have played Mario Kart 8 to death across both Wii U and the original Switch. But even with the open world free roam stuff I had assumed racing between tracks would be an optional feature, not something foisted onto me at every possible moment. I could understand it as a toggle, leaving me to choose when to explore, or to do so within Free Roam, but the way it is means I unavoidably have to putter down roads between each circuit just to enjoy hunting down max stars on each Grand Prix.

I don't like being a downer, but so far on a track-by-track basis I absolutely prefer just about every single track in Mario Kart 8 – even keeping to just the launch circ🥂uits – to those in Mario Kart World. Even if just for the simple fact that you're actually playing the tracks you select there. When I select a Grand Prix in Mario Kart 8 I actually get to play each circuit in full, but do the same in Mario💃 Kart World and it's more of a whistlestop tour. It's frustrating as there are moments I almost really like the game, until it just traffic jams itself.

Here, in Mario Kart World, it feels like Nintendo never wants to actually let you play the circuits it crafted, only begrudgingly allowing it via VS Race. Nintendo has given Mario Kart 8 Deluxe plenty of updates and new features. So I really hope tꦺhey're able to make a U-turn with Mario Kart World and allow for more traditional racing formats, if only to allow players to properly enjoy the track. And please, just let me skip the commute.

Want to know how to unlock characters in Mario Kart World, by the way? We've got some answers. Want more plumber action instead? Check out our 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:best Mario games ranking!

Looking back at the game, Kojima concedes that it was "weird". One of Bridges' first tasks was, remember, to hoist the US Pre💖sident's cadaver on his back, on a cross-country dash to a local incinerator. But beneath the eccentricity there was also something vaguely humorous about its central challenge: to carry heavy cargo upon your back across North America without tripping. The taller the load, the greater the chance you'd topple. It's the kind of idea you might expect to find in the work of an indie darling such as Bennett Foddy. And yet, with Sony's keen backing, and Kojima's attention-grasping reputation, a game founded on an indie-esque fancy was rendered as an extravagant epic, one featuring celebrities scanned into the game in screamingly high definition, plus a wistful, expensive soundtrack and a story whose looming relevance nobody foresaw.

Set in a fragmented America, Death Stranding portrayed a world in which society had collapsed into isolated pockets, connected only by the delivery people who hauled essentials between them. Porters such as Bridges were the new lifeblood of civilisation – not soldiers, not scientists, but logistics workers. At launch, reactions were divided. Some praised the game as vꦡisionary, a slow and meditative counterpoint to the combat-heavy overfamiliarity of big-budget games; others derided it as self-indulgent and odd. And then, shortly after its release, everyone entered a world of quarantine, masks and contactless delivery. We were cut off from our friends and family members. Toilet roll became scarce. Death Stranding's vision of h𝓰uman connection maintained through screens and packages suddenly felt less like speculative fiction and more like an act of prophecy.

Kojima had already written the script for a sequel. Then, during the pandemic, he fell severely ill. He won't discuss the specifics, but it was serious enough to trigger in him something of an existential crisis, a renewed eagerness to make the kinds of games "that don't already exist in the world", ones with resonant messages. When he recovered, he found himself back in his studꦑio's cavernous office, but almost completely alone. "Everyone else was working remotely," he says. "I felt that perhaps I would never meet anyone again."

He watched as the world shifted to online meetings: "We were having drinking parties and school events, but now entirely online, an almost entirely digital existence." It felt exactly like the chiral network, Death Stranding's version of the Internet, which protagonist Sam Bridges was tasked with bringing online, city by city. And yet, rather than feeling the satisfaction of a proven prophet, Kojima felt only dismay. "Something had been lost," he says. "Physically, we weren't connected any more. Nobody could travel. Humans can't be fully human if they can't travel any more." Yes, Zoom and all the other tools had ostensibly brought us together. But online connection, Kojima realised, w✨as not the catch-all cure that his game had suggested to the global epidemic of isolation and loneliness.

The pandemic passed, but the fragmentation and yearning for reconnection? Those remained. Kojima tore up the story he had written for 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Death Stranding 2. The sequel, he decided, would instead be a cautio𒆙nary tale about the risks of relying upon digital connectedness in lieu of physical presence. 'Should we🗹 have connected?' became Death Stranding 2's motivating question.

It's a message Kojima relays to a group of about 30 journalist🐷s from around the world on the first morning of a four-day preview event (or "boot camp", as it's referred to on several occasions by staff members) at his studio's luxurious HQ in Tokyo's Shinagawa district. It's here he spent the lockdown period alone, fretting. Today, an entire wall of the office contains the signatures and messages of notable visitors to the studio. The names include Hollywood heavyweights such as Timothée Chalamet and Nicholas Cage. Some dismiss Kojima as a star collector, but there's something else going on here. Having spent the COVID lockdown isolated in this place, it's understandable that he'd want everyone who visit❀s to leave a reassuring reminder of their presence.

"Nobody really does these kinds of events any more," Kojima says over a microphone in the studio's pristine white canteen, styled after the sꦗet designs of Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey. And it's true: in-person, group press trips, once a weekly occurrence for magazines such as this one, have fallen from fashion in the digital age. It's not difficult to see why. When preview code can be delivered anywhere in the world in no time at all, to get so many people to travel halfway the world to sit in a room in order to play a videogame might seem needlessly costly, across several metrics. But the physicality is the point, Kojima says, smiling. "I wanted to bring you all here, to be in the room together, talking, with the chance to make friends with a stranger." Nobody could accuse videogames' bes🌳t-known director of failing to fully commit to the bit.

And yet the shift of focus, and of underlying message, is not immediately clear in what we have all come to play. Death Stranding 2: On The Beach begins 11 months after its predecessor concluded. We find Bridges in hiding, a prickly recluse, shut off from the country he had previously united. In another eerily resonant plot point, he has been made redu♚ndant by the Automated Porter Assistance System, an AI-based program that initially provided support for porters but soon took over the business of logistics, making their jobs obsolete. He now lives in what looks like a kind of futuristic shipping container, a building that blends with its surroundings via holographic technology, spending his time raising Lou, the infant that, at the end of the original game, he freed from its artificial womb and welcomed into the world to raise as his own child.

The wind-worn off-road courier and the bonny 18-month-old make an unlikely couple, but, considering the trials they have endured together, their bond is understandable. It's certainly interesting from a gameplay perspective. In the opening moments of Death Stranding 2 you explore the sharp, rusty rocks around your home, keepi♍ng your balance as you lunge from outcrop to outcrop, protecting the child strapped to your chest all the while. The sense of delicate stewardship will be familiar to any parent who𒀰's navigated the outside world with a baby in tow, and the extreme setting here only compounds a sense of fretful parental responsibility.

When, midway through your trek, the area is hit by a minor earthquake, Lou begins to wail. There is a command dedicated to soothing your child, lifting the baby aloft with a cluck and a bounce – an interaction that is familiar in life, but rare i🎐n videogames, of the sort that Kojima has always been inspired to include in his work. "Let's go home and get you fed," Bridges says, when the tremors settle. We now see him in his newfound embrace of hermetic domesticity, cooking food, tidying toys, stockpiling nappies and putting Lou to bed. But he has not entirely let go of his old life. This is, we see, a man who keeps a pistol in his cutlery drawer, just in case.

Death Stranding 2 begins in earnest when Bridges receives an unexpected visit from Fragile, the enigmatic courier played by Léa Seydoux. She now runs a𒊎 private delivery service, Drawbridge, one of many powerful private contractors that run North America. She gives Bridges a new mission: to connect Mexico, settlement by settlement, to the chiral grid. In a universe filled with arcane terminology and concepts, it's a pleasingly accessible premise: no matter where in the world you live, it's easy to understand the idea of connecting remote settlements to the Internet. Fragile offers to care for Lou as you head out, and Bridges accepts the mission with surprisingly little resistance. We're back in the old boots, hiking and lunging between settlements in Mexico, and dialling in for family check-ins with Fragile and the baby, like a businessman away on a work trip.

Rural Mexico is, however, hardly a welcoming environment. The expanse of territory is marked by plunging ravines and thickly forested mountains; bandits roam its landscapes searching for porters like you, who they can attack and loot. The weather is more extreme than before: punishing sandstorms can roar in without notice, reducing visibility and violently pushing you sideways. Earthquakes cause landslides. Headwinds slow your progress to a crawl, while𝓰 tailwinds risk causing you to stumble over rocks. Rain is a dangerous substance that ages the skin of anyone it touches, and when it falls it immediately begins to damage your cargo and can quickly raise the waterline in the local rivers, reducing the number of places where it's safe to cross. But while the world is brutal and punishing, it is also littered with valuables, all of which tempt you to make brisk diversions 🦩to add them to your teetering backpack and increase the potential rewards you'll receive at the next outpost or settlement.

Every sojourn requires careful planning: is there enough life left in your boots to make the next journey? Will there be BTs – those spectral monsters, drawn to noise, that will claw Bridges down into a tar-like ooze if they catch him – for which you'll need specialist weapons and grenades? If rain is predicted, should you pack a spray that can restore your cargo? Will you take the necessary materials to build, ♍say, a lookout tower, from which you'll be able to locate and track enemies? Every decision has a physical cost, measured in bulk and weight. Overprepare and you risk becom🍬ing encumbered, and it usually pays to leave some spare kilograms for treasure you might find along the way.

Most of this feels familiar. You soon access vehicles, and the capacity to build st𝕴ructures which duly appear in the game world of other players, who can leave social-media-style 'likes' to show their appreciation. But the pacing is far snippier and more refined than in the first game – the result, it feels, of taking on feedback and recalibrating the balance between cutscene and action. Quality-of-life improvements abound. It's difficult to shake the feeling that t♏his is the game Kojima and his team intended to make the first time around.

But then, within a few hours, it seems as though it's all over. Mexico has beeꦯn reconnected in record time, and, in a dramatic climax, we see Bridges sustain a loss from which he may never recover. What now? The answer arrives quickly: Australia.

The switch to a new continent means more than a change of terrain. Something fundamental shifts. The task of reconnecting settlements is the same, but the texture is clearly different, as you acquire increasingly efficient and varied type🍰s of weaponry. You soon leave behind foot-based missions and start to use upgradable vehicles. Then you begin to receive missions in which you're tasked not with delivering cargo but with clearing out enemy encampments. The realisation dawns: combat is far more central to Death Stranding 2's loops and rhythms than in its predecessor, where you were almost always outgunned and therefore encouraged to avoid conflict.

"The first game was like the Silk Road," Kojima explains. "It was about extending connections across a country, to allow useful supplies to travel. But the flipside is that negative things can travel more freely too: cockroaches, violence, drugs." Death Stranding 2, then, is intended to show the risks of interconnectivity. "It's represented by 💞the prevalence of weapons. I'm trying to conjure the era of the East India Company, when resources could move freely around the world but, at the same time, this enabled these private companies to become more powerful than governments."

While it's still possible to use stealth, popping out of the tall grass to take down a dawdling security guard, for example, the game encourages a more direct approach. You may approach an enemy encampment from a rocky outcrop, set down your now-removable backpack, build a lookout tower that enables you to mark and track every foe, then use your sniper rifle to take out each one in series. It's all pleasingly taut and game-like and feels, in fact, like a concession to those players who bounced off Death Stranding's eccentricities as well as Kojima reconciling with his own past. Squint and you could be forgiven for thinking you were playing – whisper it – a contemporary update to 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Metal Gear Solid 5.

"I felt that myself when I played the game," Kojima admits when presented with the comparison. Drawbridge, the company you now work for, has the use of a futuristic airship, the DHV Magellan (named after Ferdinand Magellan, the 16th-century Portuguese explorer who became the first to circumnavigate the globe), which doubles as a movable base of operations, housing Bridges'ꦿ living space. "When you return to your bed on the Magellan, it's the same feeling as returning to the plant in Metal Gear," Kojima says. Nods to and echoes of his former work abound. While staying in Bridges' accommodation in any of the bases – static or movable – you can spend some time playing a series of challenges in VR that are almost indistinguishable from Metal Gear's beloved VR missions. Even the sound effects are similar. There are traditional boss battles, too, complete with glowing weak spots.

Even so, the new focus on combat is surprising (even if the bullets you fire are described as tranquillisers rather than deadly projectiles). Death Stranding was clearly designed to upset the expectations of Kojima's audience; it was a game about striding out into the world to make connections, rather than sneaking around with a silenced SOCOM. Beneath the strangeness la♕y a radical design ethos. Death Stranding wasn't about winning, conquering or killin♔g. It was about carrying, balancing, connecting. It introduced a system called the Strand mechanic: players could leave behind ladders, ropes and structures in their own games that would appear in others', anonymously aiding fellow travellers they would never meet. This asynchronous multiplayer design was an elegant metaphor for interdependence. In helping others, players helped themselves.

"I have a 'stick and the rope' theory," Kojima tells us. "So many games are just about the stick. Even in games where you're co✤nnected with each other onl𝓀ine, everyone's just battling with the stick." The rope, he says, is something used to wrap around things and bring them toward you. "In Death Stranding I wanted to make a game that was all about the rope. The sequel balances the stick and the rope."

To explain why he made this adjustment, Kojima settles into one of his favourite themes: comparisons to cinema. "When I first wrote the draft for Death Stranding 2," he says, "I referenced to my staff the first two Alien films. The first Ridley Scott film was so frightening. There were face-huggers, and monsters bursting from people's chests, and at first nobody knew what it was all about." But by the end of the film, he says, the audience had seen the alien, and understood the rules of the universe, so it was no longer frightening. "When James Cameron came to make the sequel, Aliens, he made a very smart decision to make the film not about horror, but about action. It gave🔜 the story a new dimension, which was unfamiliar. That is what I wanted to do with this sequel. Everyone understands Death Stranding's 🍸world, so now we've introduced battles to give it this new dimension."

The new focus on combat will a🉐ppease those players put off by the first game's passive approach. But Kojima has not shied from difficul💎t themes to go alongside the fighting. Grief is a central consideration of the game, a keen presence for Bridges, for whom the burden of loss is something he must carry physically.

One of Kojima's parents died when he was a teenager, so he is intimately familiar with loss. His father came home from work one day, fell down, unconscious, and started shaking. The family called an ambulance. Kojima travel💙led to the hospital with him. His father's eyes were open all the way, but he was unable to speak. Kojima felt his father wanted to tell him something. He never found out what. In this way, Kojima lost his innocence and, to a degree, his childhood. He spent his teenage years having to care for his family, making decisions for which he felt unprepared and ill-equipped. "The loss of my father was a major theme in the Metal Gear series," he tells us today. "Those games explore the theme of how you surpass your parents. Death Stranding looks in the other direction: you assume the parent's perspective, looking toward theܫ child."

One of the game's central questions focuses on the story of Bridges' baby, Lou. Kojima has a son himself. "You think you know everything about your son, but there are some things that you don't," he says. "In the first Death Stranding, Sam travels together with Lou, but he doesn't interrogate who Lou is very much. In the sequel, that has changed. It's like how an adoptive parent might not kno🐬w everything about their child. They might have questions. That's the emotion I wanted to elicit."

Narrative intrigue abounds, but so do more traditional game-like elements. This i🉐s a work stuffed with design ideas, with upgrade trees and satisfying incentives. Completing deliveries contributes toward a five-star rating for every facility and settlement in the game, and each time you achieve a new star rating you're rewarded with tools, weapons and upgrades. Facilities and structures that you or others build into the world can be upgraded using materials; with time, the idea is that the game will become crisscrossed with roads, ziplines and vehicle-charging stations. In this way, just about everything in the game can be turned into a mission, since everything is ripe for investment and nurture. Kojima's Rolodex of celebrity friends adds a less traditional incentive to explore and extend your reach, since many of the facilities are run by recognisable faces. As before, these cameos can be a little distracting, but at the very least they always🔯 leave an impression.

It's the astonishing degree of depth and variety elsewhere tha🍨t makes the real impact, though. There are wildfires, natural disasters and all manner of inventive online features which, as in Hidetaka Miyazaki's work, allow players to collaborate in mystical, indirect ways. And while the fundamental tasks could be described as industrialised fetch quests, the cargo ranges from vinyl records to pyjamas and live animals, the ways in which they can be ferried expanding accordingly.

Kojima claims the game provides at least 70 hours' worth of adventure. The scale of the production – and the sheen with which everything is delivered – is particularly notable when you consider the comparati🔯vely small size of its development team. "I've never wanted my team to grow larger than 150 people working on one game project," Kojima says. Hisဣ friend, Mad Max director George Miller, once told him that his instincts were correct, and that nomadic sheep-herding communities limit their flocks to 150 sheep, this number being the limit of what a human being can realistically track. "I talked to George last year and he congratulated me on keeping the team small," Kojima says. "I had to admit I went a little over 150, and we laughed about it."

It's easy to assume that Kojima Productions, with its extravagant HQ turning out such a lavishly produced sequel, is a blockbuster studio, but Kojima insists his work has an independent spirit. He sees himself as the head of a family, a role he has had to assume from childhood, and says he regards raising children and raising his young staff as the same. And while the director's handprints are as visible on Death Stranding 🅷2 as the impressions the BTs make in the soil whenever they approach, it's clear that the game is the result of manifold creativity from a team tඣhat has been allowed to express itself in countless ways.

Always eager to reach for a second metaphor, Kojima also compares his staff to apprentices in a kitchen. Yes, he wants them to start by washing dishes, but only so that they can work their way up and one day be able to open restaurants of their own. He resists the idea of an assembly-line studio in which each developer handles only o🐽ne task; instead, he wants creators who understand not just the "bun" but the whole "hamburger" – the lighting, the systems, the emotions. It's a visಌion of mentorship not as delegation, but as artistic awakening – and in Death Stranding 2 the results of this growth and development are clear. Yes, this is, as advertised, a Hideo Kojima game. But it's run through with an ethos that, in time, could outlive even the man himself.

Thinking of catching up on Kojima's past work before you set out on your delivery route? We've got the 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:best Metal Gear games ranked to get you started. More from Edge? Vampire Survivors kicked off a game development gold rush, but has a legitimately new genre emerged between the cash-ins?

She's also instantly become one of my favorites. Yixuan is a supremely reactive fighter, capable of rapidly parrying attacks on field as well as saving resources for explosively high burst damage in enemy stun windows. The black-on-gold aesthetic of her inky strikes is a feast for the eyes, smothering enemies in damage numbers that tickle my brain like a hit marker motivates a Call of Duty player. And thanks to her additional HP scaling, she also has a bit of a tanky bruiser feel to her that matches my tastes in action RPGs perfectly. She may end up being my new main, especially once her apparent go-tꦛo partner Ju Fufu is released in the coming weeks.

But, in my experience and according to virtually the entire Zenless community's preview analysis of Yixuan, the strongest character of them all is still Hoshimi Miyabi. It's been this way for months. Like Miyabi, Yixuan also has a unique element, the Ether-adjacent 𝓡Auric Ink, and she's even introduced a new character class called Rupture, but Miyabi remains in a tier of her own. She's our only playable Void Hunter – Yixuan is distinctly described as a Void Hunter-rivaling "Grandmaster" – and, more importantly, the strongest damage dealer in the whole game by some distance.

This was something I was eager to discuss in a May interview with Zenless Zone Zero producer Zhenyu Li. Personally, I'm glad Zenless isn't pushing the power ceiling higher every other update, at least not anymore. But how will new characters handle the Miyabi effect, and how will developer HoYoverse 𒊎balance its character ambitions with a new effort to buff old characters, starting with 1.0 star Ellen Joe, up to a more comfortable power level?

Responses lightly edited for clarity and length.

GamesRadar+: Yixuan has become the star of update 2.0, billed as a Void Hunter-level fighter. Our only current playable Void Hunter, Miyabi, has been known as the strongest character in Zenless Zone Zero since her release. How are you living up to those expectations with Yixuan?

Producer Zhenyu Li, HoYoverse: From a narrative perspective, Yixuan serves as the master to the Phaethon siblings (our protagonists) in Season 2. She's not just a mentor teaching them techniques but also plays a crucial role in helping the protཧagonists confront their inner selves during the 2.0 plot. As an Agent, Yixuan holds the title of "Grandmaster" and possesses unique Auric Ink attributes and a Rupture specialty, mastering two different Ultimate modes. Her comba✅t prowess is undeniable. As a result, Yixuan plays an absolutely vital role in both driving the Season 2 storyline and enriching the new sandbox combat stage experience.

Do you ever regret making Miyabi as strong as she is? Or are you happy for there to be standout, super powerful characters like Miyabi, and then other characters like Evelyn can be almost as strong while still being fun to play in their own way?

As the only Void Hunter currently featured in the game, Hoshimi Miyabi's exceptional power level perfectly aligns with both the plot's background and the team's expectations. Whether it's Hoshimi Miyabi or Evelyn, each character's power level is determined by their narrative and chara൩cter background, ensuring it meets t𒁃he expectations players form during gameplay.

We've heard that older characters will receive adjustments based on their combat performance and game feel. Can you share some of the Agents you are looking to adjust, and how you determine which characters are most in need of a boost? How frequently do you plan to release changes for old characters?

In version 2.0, we will first implement optimization adjustments for Ellen. As the first S-Rank character in Zenless Zone Zero since launch, Ellen represents the bond between us and the players who have accompanied Zenless Zone Zero along the way. That's why we chose her as🧸 the first character from the past to receive optimization.

During our internal evaluations, we were quite satisfied with Ellen's combat design and experience. So, for the version 2.0 optimization, we have thoughtfully integrated the Hollow Zero "𒆙Icy Blade" into Ellen's skills, while also introducing an "Activate Potential" feature for her. Proxies who own Ellen can unlock this feature by participating in an event. After unleashing her potential, Ellen will gain new Basic Attack skills and more team composition possibilities, ൩with her passive mechanism also updated to enhance her damage output further.

While this type of adjustment may not have a fixed frequency, it's somethiღng we wi𒁃ll continue to explore in the long term.

Many players have hoped to see a way to bring the character-specific gear from Hollow Zero into other modes as some sort of equipable item. One Hollow Zero modifier for Corin was shown in a developer discussion, fueling these hopes. Can you speak to how Hollow Zero gear is influencing your character adjustment plans?

In version 2.0, we will be making 🔴optimization adjustments to Ellen, including integrating her gear "Icy Blade" from Hollow Zero into her skills in a more streamlined way. As a long-term live service game, our team places great importance on optimizing the experience for characters that players already own. Moving forward, we will consider both overall game balance and player feedback when making adjustments to existing characters, with gear integration into Agent sꦏkills being one of the directions we're exploring to enhance the player experience.

A previous developer discussion mentioned plans to give all three characters in your team more of an on-field presence in the future. Can you share more details on how new and/or existing characters will be more visible in battle?

Our initial intention in introducing the follow-up attack mechanism in version 1.6 was✱ to address the issue of off-field characters having insufficient presence during combat. We wanted Agents to maintain a certain level of visibility on the current battlefield even when they're switched to an off-field position. This ensures that as your three-person squad executes their combat mechanics, each character maintains a balanced presence, a crucial part of improving the overall combat experience. Of course, to explore richer combat possibilities, we will continue to boldly experiment with new combat mechanics and expand the combat system. Our goal is to enhance the overall presence of all characters through gameplay improvements, rather than simply strengthening individual characters.

Speaking of new characters: we've already seen an alternate version of Anby with the S-Rank Silver Soldier. Are you planning to release S-Rank versions of other A-Rank characters?

What we can reveal for now꧙ is that there will definitely be more S Characters in the future. As for which characters specifically—stay tuned and look forward to it!

How do you respond to concerns that, in the Waifei Peninsula, Zenless Zone Zero may lose some of the pop, urban, modern look that drew many players to the game?

The overall design of Waifei Peninsula still centers around modern, trendy urban elements, but unlike the previous Sixth Street and Lumina Square, we've incorporated more diverse stylistic expressions and fresh attempts to build on these existing urban impressions. Our goal is to bring players a new and engaging experience. After all, even in the real world, there isn't a single image or definition of what a trendy urban environment looks l🌼ike.

From the 2.0 teaser trailer, it looks like many new characters feature a greater range of body types, from the extremely small to the extremely large. Will we actually get to play as a very tiny Thiren and a very large robot, or will those characters be unplayable, or normalized for gameplay?

Anything is possible—looking forward to all the unexpected surprises th💫ese characters will bring to everyone!

We've heard that the Proxies themselves are also becoming more active characters in 2.X by training under Yixuan. Is the long-term vision to release playable, combatant, S-Rank versions of Belle and Wise?

In Season 2, the siblings will learn mystical arts from Yixuan, the High Preceptor of Yunkui Summit, further honing their ability to manipulate Ether. They'll wie𝔍ld Eye Arts—Break, Reveal, and Seek—within the Hollow, giving Phaethon an even bigger role in more open-ended, explorable 3D stages. While they work to resolve the Sacrifice crisis, t𓆉he secrets behind the siblings' eye implants begin to surface.

With the HDD system upgrade, their Ether compatibility has been restored, allowing them to enter the Hollow in their own bodies—and the true power of their eye implants goes far beyond that. In the future, the Phaethon siblings will undergo transformations and upgrades, evolving in both identity and ability. Though the Hollow remains a dangerous place, stay tuned to discover the siblings' future 🎶powers and how their roles within the Hollow will expand.

It was also mentioned that the 2.X patches will add a way to take our relationships with characters to a new level, beyond the story encounters and trust levels we have already. I know some players have been talking about romance. Can you clarify your plans here?

The Agent companionship system will continue to expand in both narrative and gameplay, as we strive to enhance interactions between players and🐬 Agents, showcase their charm beyond combat, and create a sense of daily companionship.

On the narrative side, we'll highlight the Agents' unique appeal and their bonds with players by weaving in their personalities, backgrounds, and relationships with the Proxy. In terms of gameplay, we'll unlock more shop functions alongside events and expand interactive features with Agents. For example, the flower arrangemen🅠t gameplay introduced in version 1.7 event "Say It With Flowers," and in version 2.0, the Gravity Cinema in Lumina Square will open during events, letting players 🌃enjoy movie-watching interactions with Agents and spend relaxing moments together in front of the silver screen.

In the future, as more Exploration Areas are rele💝ased, additional shop functions will be optimized and expanded, enabling even more interactions between players and Agents, and offering deeper insights int🧸o their daily lives and personalities in New Eridu.

Finally, some players were surprised not to see the previously teased Angels of Delusion idol characters in the 2.0 teaser. Can you shed some light on when and how these characters will appear in-game?

What we can share for now is that the Angels of Delusion faction will⛄ debut in version 2.X, but please stay tuned for more details about the launch date and the faction itself.

Zenless Zone Zero tells Wuthering Waves, Genshin Impact, and Honkai Star Rail to hold my beer, giving out free S-rank characters and weapons for its anniversary.

Pragmata release date speculation

Pragmata is currently slated to release sometime in 2026, but no exact date has been specified just yet.

This new launch window came at the tailend of the latest gameplay trailer, with a little post-it note-like message penned by Diana that nods to the past delays with the word "s🅷orry" written underneath, before the text changes to "ꦑ2026, it's real", with a small smiley face sketched out below.

When Pragmata was first revealed in 2020, it was originally aiming for a 2022 release, before 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:it was later delayed into 2023. Then, it was later 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:delayed indefinitely, and the studio went radio silent on the project time before we go🤪t this new launch window.

Pragmata platforms

Pragmata is set to release on PC, Xbox Series X/S, and PS5.

When it was first ann𓆉ounced in June 2020, it was o🦹ne of the early games to be revealed for the then next-gen consoles, which hadn't yet been released. Fast forward five years later, and Pragmata is still set to come to the same platforms, with the confirming a PC Steam and console launch.

With the newly launched Switch 2 now out in the wild, there hasn't been any word on whether or not it will one day join the lineup of 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:upcoming Switch 2 games for Nintendo's new-gen ♌cons🐭ole, but we'll be keeping an eye out for any updates.

Pragmata trailers

The very first Pragmata trailer (just above) came our way back in 2020, with an introduction to a mysterious astronaut-like figure walking down a city street that we now know is the protagonist, Hugh. He's then joined by a young girl, who is later revealed to be an android companion. While the initial reveal offers up a mysterious first look, it introduces us to the two main characters and the curious sci-fiꦇ universe we'll be pulled into.

The second Pragmata trailer (which you can watch below) came during a Capco🅰m showcase in 2023, which gave us our first real glimpses of gameplay. In the trailer, we see Hugh and Diana exploring a "dystopian near-future lunar world" as 💛they go up against some robotic foes.

The latest gam𝓀eplay trailer (seen below), which dropped during the State of Play June 2025 showcase, gave us the most extensive look at Pragmata yet. "What comes after dreaming?", the title card reads, before we hear a mysterious voice introduce an organization known as the Delphi Corporation, which could have a major presence within the story of Pragmata and relate to some of its themes: "The future. It isn't just a dream, it's a promise," the voice says, as though it's an advertisement trying to sell us on the☂ organization.

"One we're turning into reality. With our third generation of Lunafilament and advanced generative AI, we♎'re reshaping the line between dreams and reality. We create life for our future. De♍lphi Corporation".

Pragmata story and setting

There's stil༒🍸l a lot of mystery surrounding Pragmata's story, but in the latest gameplay trailer, we appear to be shown the first meeting between protagonist Hugh and his new android companion.

First introduced as D-I-03367, Hugh gives his companion the name Diana, but we don't yet know the exact ꦚcircumstances that bring the pair together. But the trailer itself is also called "First Contact", which goes in line with their initial connection, and we also know that the pair will have to work together to make it 🐷through a lunar research station and defeat its AI in order to return to Earth.

Taking place in a "near-future"🥂 setting with a distinct sci-fi edge, it'll be interesting to discover how this Delphi organization factors into t♔he story, and how Hugh and Diana ended up in this situation.

In an official that followed the State of Play showcase, director Cho Yonghee said🎉 that the team at Capcom can't wait to talk about Hugh and Diana and their adventure, so here's hoping we learn mo🐷re about the story soon!

Pragmata gameplay

We've gotten to see some Pragmata gameplay thanks to the latest trailer, which shows off some of the ways Hugh and Diana work together as they navigate the research station. With Diana hopping on Hugh's back as he goes up against foes, and also using some kind of hacking ability. In the PlayStation blogpost, Yonghee explains that both protagonists have their own abilities and we'll be "controlling them both - at the same time - to oꦬvercome the many obstacles you'll face" throughout the game.

"This two-in-one approach, where Hacking is key ꧒to your success, is our own unique take on combat that you'll only find here - in Pragmata", Yonghee says, before adding that we can expect more details soon as Capcom delves "deeper into the combat experience in the near future". From the sounds of it, we won't have to wait too long to discover more about Pr♛agmata's gameplay and its "unique hacking twist".

Pragmata development

Pragmata was initially revealed during the , which streamed back in 2020 to officially reveal the PS5 for the first time, some four months before the console🌠 launched.

Originally slated to launch in 2022, Capcom posted news confirming i♉ts decision to push back the release𝔉 into 2023, citing that the team needed more time to "ensure this will be an unforgettable adventure". The delay was accompanied by new artwork of .

Then, the project was indefinitely delayed in 2023 , which marked the publisher's 40th anniversary. While assurances were given ꧟that the team were still hard at work, it wasn't until 2025 that we finally got to see the game once more, with Capcom even calling back to its initial delay artwork with a similar message confirming it's still very much real and on the way, with its new 2026 launch window.

Looking ahead to future releases with our roundups of all of the most exciting 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:upcoming PC games, 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:upcoming Xbox Series X games, and 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:upcoming PS5 games.

Maybe it's the rose tinted glasses of nostalgia, but I never noticed how quiet The Witcher 3 can be. Soft footsteps and the odd NPC bark aside, it seems these thriving townships suffer from a serious lack of actual thriving. Sure, it was (and still is) one of the 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:best RPGs for a reason, but with The Witcher 3 having turned 10 this year, it's clear that CꦰD Projekt Red🤪 has learned a lot of lessons since then. Specifically, around how to craft an environment – and the tech demo has me hyped for Ciri to get a taste of Night City's buzz

Night and day cities

As much as🐽 I love the "city of dreams,", it took the developer almost four years-post launch to achieve Cyberpunk 2077's potential.

Today, Night City is as immersive of a video game metropolis as you can get. Hundreds of NPCs crowd the streets from Heywood to Japantown and beyond, the roads teem with cars of all shapes, sizes, and engine, and sound is pretty much everywhere.

You can almost smell cigarette smoke through the screen, hazy and thick in the early morning air as a nightclub's rhythmic bass keeps the party🍌 going, or taste the oily scopdog being wolfed down by a nearby Tyger Claw seconds before getting shoulder-chucked by a dude in leopard-print hotpants. This thoroughly lived-in vibe is what makes Cyberpunk such an exciting place to escape to in a video game, and sadly, it's something we just did not get in The Witcher 3.

In the videos linked above, I was surprised to see how much I'd disregarded the lack of urban business in CD Projekt Red's most iconic RPG. One of them sees an NPC drinking silently and repetitively from a flask of wine, rooted to the spot, while a passing woman bemoans her husband's adulterous liaisons, all while Geralt simply walks past them like a ghost. Suddenly, a child comes running up beside him, causing a coll♏ision issue with the striding witcher as her character model seems to reverberate off Geralt's for a moment before coming unstuck and cꦕontinuing on her travels.

In hindsight𝄹, the lack of bustle makes these cities feel a bit, well, dead. Thankfully, The Witcher 4 looks to c🧜hange that.

Leaps and boundaries

This time around, bringing Night City's lively urban environments to The Witcher♑ 4 seems paramount to CD Projekt Red. It's part of the studio's mission to deliver "the mဣost ambitious, immersive Witcher game ever," harnessing the power of Unreal Engine 5.6 to do so.

In the short clip seen in the tech demo where Ciri walks around a marketplace in Kovir, that power is already evident – as are flavors of Night City's vitality. A tavern keeper is seen throwing an unruly patron out into the streets in what looks like a scripted environmental encounter, triggered by the player's proximity to a certain location. This reminds me of the 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Cyberpunk 2077 quest Don't Lose Your Mind, w🔯hich kicks in only when observing a car crash wh💟ile driving around Corpo Plaza's roundabout.

Not only that, the environmental noise is far more realistic. It's only an in-engine demo to showcase the technology, with an on-screen w🍒arning indicating that it's "not actual gameplay," but hearing fully-scripted NPC conversations happening while Ciri waltzes past is a far cry from the near deathly silence of towns in The Witche꧅r.

It's too early to say for sure, but this small slice of progress tells me that CD Projekt Red is taking innovation seriously. With plenty of lessons learned through Cyberpunk 2077 and DLC Phantom Liberty, its design philosophy is a testament to the studio's immense growth, reminding us why The Witcher 4 is one of the most exciting 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:new games on the horizon. Let's hope we get eyes on some actual game footage soon to see if it holds up.

There's plenty more 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:upcoming PS5 games on the way besides The Witcher 4... though I'll admit, it's still my most wanted

So it was all going hꦜorribly, and I was all ready to abandon this edgelord among edgelords. But then somebody walked by as I was trying to parry a pile of slime to disastrous results, and made a casual comment. "Oh – so it's like Sekiro?"

Yes, it is

At that moment, something clicked. On some level I'd always understood that the Executor was an homage to FromSoft's samurai sim, in the same way that the 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Elden Ring Nightreign Duchess class feels like a callback to Bloodborne, but perhaps it was more than merely being visual. I started to adjust my thinking accordingly: Stop playing this like it's Nightreign. Stop being aggressive, stop trying to outpace your foes. Try to channel Shadows Die Twice. Counter, dodge, parry. Big emphasis on that last one.

Still learning the ropes, I nonetheless found myself carried by competent teammates to the game's final boss, a lanky killer from a slasher film and a 🦂celestial event trying to meet each other halfway. Reality began to shatter against his blades and panic threatened to overtake me, but I hunkered down and sꦬimply continued doing what I'd been doing before: parry. After all, that solved basically everything in Sekiro, so let's assume it solves everything now… Right?

But the last of the 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Nightreign bosses has this move where he basically tears the universe in half. That's barely an exaggeration: the sky is rent in twain as thoughꦆ a black hole had just punched through from the fifth dimension, a spectacle beyond comprehension, and a wave of raw cosmic power sweeping from that yawning abyss that annihilates eve﷽rything in its path like a nuclear bl- oh, I just parried it.

I almost didn't believe it had happened at first, that I'd effectively deflected a collapsing star with a flick of my wrist while both my allies were punted into the horizon. But it had happened, it worked, and from that point on, I hꦯad to seriously reappraise the apparent ♏black sheep of the Nightfarers.

The Executor is by no means perfect, or even the best of the dif𝐆ferent Nightreign classes, but I urge those among you who didn't care for the character at first to give him another shot. While there's a few too many bosses that clearly weren't designed with his unique systems in mind, there's a whole different game found within his Cursed Blade ability, to say nothing of rampaging around as an ugly kaiju when enemy numbers threaten to overwhelm y𓃲ou.

More importantly, there's something rich in the idea of FromSoftware folding in whole new gameplay 🏅styles with their new Nightfarers, not just evoki♛ng different builds we remember from Elden Ring. With new characters on the way with DLC, I'd love to see the studio push the boat out and throw in something like a playable mech to stomp around the Lands Between, in true Armored Core style.

No, it doesn't make sense, but neither did the Duke's Dear Freya and Nameless🍒 King showing up. Sometimes you have to put fun ahead of logic. Otherwise, how could you ever hope to deflect a supernova?

Find out our deeper thoughts in our 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Elden Ring Nightreign review!

Where are the dreamers, I hear you ask? We're right here, arranging our candles into summoning circles and tending to the innermost wishes of our very soul. No, these aren't the likeliest games to surface from our 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Summer Game Fest schedule 2025, but they're the ones from which hope springs eternal. Without that, what would we have? 𒁏Well, we'd have Silksong, but that's beside the poiღnt.

Below, the true believers of our team have gathered to pin their wildest hopes and dreams on this week's slate of showcases. If there's something you're desperate for, join us in trying to manifest it – disappointment is temporary, but the bragging rights from a truly🐼 left-field prediction coming true last forever.

The Elder Scrolls 6

Valkyria Chronicles remasters

The Wolf Among Us 2

The Witcher 4 gameplay

Banjo Threeie

A new Animal Crossing

More Castlevania

Persona 4 Remake

A Haze remake

Resident Evil 9

Haunted Chocolatier

Resident Evil – Code: Veronica remake

For a more grounded glimpse into the future, our 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:new games 2025 list outlines everything we know is on the way

During the Pacific Rim collaboration event, a breach has opened and Kaijus from another world are unleashing attacks on the Kingdoms of Athena, which cannot be stopped by the usual swﷺords and magic you possess. Thankfully, you can call upon the help of the Jaegers from Pacific Rim, joining forces to unite their ultimate fusion of steel and science with your magic to defeat these invading beasts.

The Pacific Rim collaborat🃏ion runs from June 1 to July 31, 2025, during which a special Pacific Rꦬim-themed loading screen will be displayed, and you can earn a selection of collab-exclusive items including a Castle Skin, Leader Skin, Army Skin, Turf Decoration, Avatar, Emote, Equipment, Artifacts, and Guild Frame.

Head out on the Pacific Rim Adventure to discover secrets hidden in the depths of the ocean, using Spider Drills to locate photo fragments that can be combined to earn completion rewards including Skins and ⭕Emotes. You'll also collect Jaeger Parts during the event, which can be exchanged in the Jaeger Shop for more rewards such as Turf Decorations, Equipment, and Artifacts (Pulse Core and Synesthesia Helm). For full event details, please refer to the in-game instructions.

Alongside that collaboration, developer IGG is also celebrating their 19th anniversary with a selection of events. From June⛎ 2 to June 6, 2025 a daily login bonus is available to provide lots of Artifact Coins, which can then be spent at the Artifact Fair to power up your collection. During this event you can also challenge Hero Stages using less Stamina and farm more Medals and Trophies from them than usual to get an extra boost, while the Castle Pop-Up Store will let you exchange Castle Coins for the limited-editဣion Lordly Legacy, Pearl Coast, and Childhood Playground Castle Skins.

If you're ready to check out the Pacific Rim collaboration and IGG 19th anniversary celebrations, via the App Store, Google Play, or get the offic🥃ial standalone PC version. Make sure you also and join the to stay up to date with the latest news.

However, before you start reaching for those gold coins, let's be honest, filling a new console's library isn't cheap. You may also have you're heart set on some 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:upcoming Switch 2 games set to release later on in the year, like 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Pokémon Legends: Z-A or 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Metroid Prime 4: Beyond. Well, to make sure you get the best Nintendo bang for your buck, we've rounded up a list of thไe top 15 Nintendo Switch 2 games currently available for you to check out today.

Below, we've made sure to include something for every kind of gamer, be that RPG fans, puzzle heads, or Mario enthusiasts. So rea🥀d on and discover the best Switch 2 games to play in 2025.

The 15 best Switch 2 games to play today

15. Hitman World of Assassination: Signature Edition

Developer: IO Interactive
Released: 2025

Hitman World of Assassination:꧟ Signature Edition is a brand new iteration of Hitman World of Assassination speci🎉ally for the Switch 2 that adds 100-plus hours of content to the already massive base game. And trust us, you'll likely want to play through it all. Taking on the role of Agent 47, Hitman World of Assassination isn't just a fun game that gives you targets to take out and goals to achieve in each level.

It's an experience that promotes glorious chaos and ꦇcreativity, all wrapped up in stunning locations and refined stealth gameplay that make it impossible to put down. Not only does this title include the Hitman 2 Expansion Pack, but it also comes with the Hitman 3 Deluxe Pack and the Seven Deadly Sins Pack as well. This means out of all the entries on our list of the best Switch🅘 2 games, this one has one of the best price-value points, especially if you're looking for bargains after paying for the new console.

14. Rune Factory: Guardians of Azuma

Developer: Marvelous Inc.
Released: 2025

Set in the kingdom of Azuma (an East Asian inspired world), Rune Factory: Guardians of Azuma is the newest entry in the iconic cozy RPG series and is the perfect pick for a relaxiꦺng handheld experience on the Switch 2. While the story isn't as gripping as Rune Factory 4 or 5, Guardians of Azuma has a ton to do and wil💦l have you hooked with its cozy gameplay loop and charming RPG elements.

Like with previous Rune Factory games, you can farm, fight, tame ൩monsters, and even romance one of the characters you'll meet throughout🌺 the story. But what really sets Rune Factory: Guardians of Azuma apart from other titles in the series is the new city-building-esque mechanics available. Not only will you manage your room and farm, but you can also build shops and assign workers to them as well. It's a cool addition to the typical Rune Factory formula, and helps capture that cozy game feel.

13. Sonic X Shadow Generations

Developer: Sonic Team
Released: 2024

Mario isn't the only iconic mascot on the Switch 2, folks! Sega's famous speedy hedgehog and his edgy counterpart race onto Nintendo's new console with the acclaimed collection Sonic X Shadow Generations. This bundle will give you the remaster of Sonic Generations (aka one of the 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:best Sonic games ever released) and the paraquel 2024 title S💝hadow Generations, which sees Shadow the Hedgehog face off against Black Doom.

When it comes to polished, fast-paced platformers, few titles can hold a candle to Sonic X Shadow Generations. The game curates and improves on some of the best levels in Sonic history, while also giving us fresh Shadow levels that highlight his unique abilities. Get ready to feel the thri💖ll of unlocking the Chaos Dash and the joy of flying across levels with Shadow's Doom Wings. Shadow's campaign also offers five additional hours of gameplay, which, when paired with the graphical and performance improvements from the Switch 2, make this an absolute steal.

12. Kunitsu-Gami: Path of the Goddess

Developer: Capcom
Released: 2024

Playing as the warrior Soh, it's up to you to protect the divine maiden named Yoshiro, as she purges the evil rot from villages and works to re✃store Mt. Kafuku to peace. You'll have to defeat hordes of supernatural enemies, cleanse rot around the map, rescue villagers, and juggle a number of other tasks too. The gameplay in Kunitsu-Gami: Path of the Goddess is fast-paced but also tactical, rewarding you with satisfying sharp sword swings and strategic plays. This release even comes with the Otherworldly Ventures update (which will be on all platforms), adding even more wave-based replaya✅bility.

The visuals and world-building are also stunning, with strong Japanese and mythological influences leading the charge. Our澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询: Kunitsu-Gami: Path of 🎐the Goddess review mentions how the game feels like a "throwback to a now-classic era of Capcom", back when titles such as Okami had us all in a chok🔴ehold. It's truly on💯e of the best games of 2024 and is a worthwhile addition to your Switch 2 library.

11. Deltarune Chapters 1, 2, 3, and 4

Developer: tobyfox
Released: 2025

Deltarune is a "sort of" Undertale prequel, and has just as much charm and heart as Toby Fox's breakout success. While this new game features some characters and features from Undertale, Deltarune centers around a new human child called Chris, who is transportedಞ into a new dark world. Chris must make their way through this new magical setting to find a way back home.

You'll have to explore, solve puzzles, and fight enemies in turn-based combat. Whether you kill your foes or choose to spare them is up to you. Deltarune has been releasing episodic chapters for years now. However, chapters three and four are brand new! New chapters will be released in the future as well, but for now, we can play through what's available with this delightfully comical story and even discover a secret room that uses🤪 exclusive Switch 2 controls.

10. Fantasy Life I: The Girl Who Steals Time (Switch 2 Edition)

Developer: LEVEL5 Inc.
Released: 2025

Fantasy Life I: The Girl Who Steals Time is one of the best cozy games to release in 2025, and it's the perfect Switch 2 game to crack on with if you're looking for an Animal Crossing meets Zelda kind of experience. The sequel to the 2014 title Fantasy Life (aka one of the 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:best 3DS games of all time), Fantasy Life I: The Girl Who Steals Time revolves around a hero who finds themselves in the fantasy worౠld of Reveria after a run-in with some dragons.

It'll be up to you to choose between fourteen jobs known as "life classes" and level them up as you progress through the story. Fantasy Liౠfe I: The Girl Who Steals Time is a laid-back RPG that is addictive, rewarding, and offers to🅰ns of gameplay. You can focus on combat, decorating, crafting, or all of the above. The Switch 2 version also offers faster loading times and better graphics. It's an all-around winner!

9. Split Fiction

Developer: Hazelight Studios
Released: 2025

If you want to experience one of the 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:best co-op games of all time on the Switch 2, then 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Split Fiction is the title for you. You and your player two will play as either Mio or Zoe (two aspiring authors who specialize in sci-fi and fantasy, respectively). You'll have to team up and make your way through each othe🌞r's stories as you try to escape a machine that is hell bent on extracting all your ideas. Not only is Split Fiction visually stunning and emotionally touch♊ing, but its level design is heaps of fun.

Each new world you explore has its own creative mechanics, from shooting robots, flying dragons, or playing a rhythm mini-game with a bunch of monkeys. As our 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Split Fiction review states, the game "perfectly straddles two genres simu🐲lta༒neously and consistently introduces one good idea after another." With a free friend pass and local co-op available, this is the best two-player experience on the Switch 2 so far.

8. Yakuza 0 Director's Cut

Developer: Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio
Released: 2025

Yakuza 0 is the 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:best Yakuza game ever made (just check out our 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Yakuza 0 review for more on that), so of course, the new Director's Cut edition of this iconic title made our list of the best Switch 2 games. Set during Japan's '80s economic boom, Yakuza 0 marks the start of the story in terms of the loꦡng-running fra🔜nchise. You'll follow a young Kiryu and Majima, and play through their interconnected stories surrounding their paths in the criminal world, set against a gripping real estate plot.

Yakuza 0 has an amazing story, but is also filled with charming and silly side-quests that keep you smiling in between heavy story reveals. The beat 'em up gameplay is also uber satisfying as you hit combos and plummet enemies into the dirt. However, the big standout here is that the Director's Cut offers new cut sc🐼enes and English voice-overs. For Yakuza veterans and series newcomers, this is a Switch 2 must-play.

7. The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom (Switch 2 Edition)

Developer: Nintendo
Released: 2025

澳⛦洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:The Legend of Zelda: Teღars of the Kingdom is a masterpiece. So, its new Switch 2 version is an easy addition to our🔯 list. Link is back, and Princess Zelda needs rescuing again. Much like the first game, there's a sense of wonder and polish during every questline and discovery. However, the story feels grander and the world is more captivating too. The Switch 2 edition also offers improved graphics and supports the Zelda Notes App, which provides numerous interactive fܫeatures to enhance your game.

In our 澳洲幸运5开奖号码🌳历史查询:The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom rܫeview, we write: "Tears of the Kingdom manages to keep focus and provide a rich, robust experience that ꦐbuilds on what came before." However, it's still a sequel at the e🔯nd of the day, and for that reason, we didn't rank it higher on this list. Breath of the Wild (which we'll get more into later) is still the best starting point to revisit Link's journey on the Switch 2. However, Tears of the Kingdom is a follow-up that you don't want to miss.

6. Cyberpunk 2077 Ultimate Edition

Developer: CD Projekt Red
Released: 2025

澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Cyberpunk 2077 is one of the 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:best RPGs of all time. It's also a pretty taxing game to run with all of its realistic graphics. However, the Switch 2 runs this futuristic story like a dream. Developed by CD Projekt Red, Cyb🔜erpunk 2077 is set in the dystopian metropolis Night City, where you take on the role of a mercenary called V. After getting stuck with a cybernetic "bio-chip", you'll have to work to save your life and separate from a Keanu Reeves-shaped engram.

With FPS elements mixed with action-RPG mechanics, Cyberpunk 2077 offers a detailed open world and some of the best quest lines in modern gaming, period. In our 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Cyberpu🔯nk 2077 S💙witch 2 hands-on preview, we note that the game feels as if we're runni𒆙ng the title on a PC with settings ranging from "Medium" to "High". So, don't worry, the Switch 2 does this title justice. It also includes all DLC, so it's a great bargain for new players, especially.

5. Puyo Puyo Tetris 2S

Developer: Sega
Released: 2025

In terms of the best Sw🧸itch 2 game when it comes to puzzle connoisseurs, Puyo Puyo Tetris 2S is unmatched. While the surprise factor from the first game has come and gone, the gameplay of Puyo Puyo Tetris 2S is still as captivating as ever, as you play rounds of Tetris combined with Puyo Puyo gameplay and engage in fast-paced matches of clearing rows and greeting those sweet combos. Just like in past🌼 games, a new story adventure mode is on display here. However, there is a brand new mode called "Doubles Mode" for 2v2 matches, making it a great co-op option.

There are also 40 playable characters, including Sonic the Hedgehog, with unique stats and abilities to experience in the Skill Battle mode. So yeah, tons of new things to do and explore here, folks! The world, story, and gameplay of Puyo Puyo Tetris 2S is bright, charming, and colourful. Honestly, it's one of the 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:best feel-good games on our list for sure.

4. Bravely Default Flying Fairy HD Remaster

Developer: Cattle Call Inc
Released: 2025

Bravely Default Flying Fairy is widely considered to be one of the 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:best JRPGs to ever hit Nintendo since it first released in 2012. So, it makes sense that we'd get a shiny remaste🌼r to celebrate the launch of the Switch 2. Luckily for us, despite being over a decade old, Bravely Default Flying Fairy is still as charming and captivating as it was back in the day.

Set in Luxendarc and following four heroes who must reclaim elemental crystals from th🍰e forces of darkness to save their world, Bravely Default Flying Fairy is a classic turn-based RPG. However, it's Brave and Default system offers a fun twist to the typical combat seen in JRPGs. Gathering Brave points to take multiple actions against a strong enemy never gets old! So, while its story isn't as revolutionary as it once was, Bravely Default Flying Fairy HD Remaster gives a classic a modern makeover and is still worth your time.

3. Street Fighter 6 (Switch 2 Edition)

Developer: Capcom
Released: 2025

In our five-star 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Street Fighter 6 review, w🦹e call it "the best overall fighting game package ever made". So, yeah, it's an easy addition to our list of the best Switch 2 games and should be on every gamer's radar, for sure. Complete with an 18-character roster with new and returning fighters, Capcom's latest entry to its iconic competitive fighting series is polished, massive, and the perfect addition to add to your Switch 2 library.

Not only are there tons of modes (such as one of the best online battle hubs ever made), but the Switch 2 exclusive modes like Gyro Battle and Calorie Contest are pure fire co-op hits, that will have your heart pounding and friendships put to the test in the best way possible. Basically, even if you've played 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Street Fighter 6 before, there is a ton ꦦof new content to explore ♐with Nintendo's fresh version of this 2023 masterpiece.

2. The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (Switch 2 Edition)

Developer: Nintendo
Released: 2025

澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the 🐬Wild is one of the best games ever made, and now you can play it on the Nintendo Switch 2. While its sequel, Tears of the Kingdom, is also available (and should be played if possible as well), Breath of the Wild is still one of the 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:best open-world games around and should be your starting point if you want to experience Link's journey all over again as he sets ꧂out to rescue Princess Zelda and save the world from Calamity Ganon.

The Switch 2 Edition of the game feels rewarding to play through. Thanks to the new Zelda Notes app via the Nintendo Switch App, your progress feels more involved, as you can experience Voice Memories from characters, have a handy navigation tool at the ready, and even engage in item sharing. It truly feels like we're experiencing The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild all over again, and it's still just as mesmerizing as it was back in 2017. Read our 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Breath of the Wild review for more details on this must-play!

1. Mario Kart World

Developer: Nintendo
Released: 2025

At this point, Mario Kart is an institution, and澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询: Mario Kart World is hands down the澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询: best racing game thꦑat we've had from the beloved series in a long time. Taking a new Forza Horizon-style approach to gameplay, Mario Kart World expands the tried and tested formula to give players more freedom to explore, take pictures, and just drive for the fun of it in between races, thanks to the new Free Roam mode.

But on the competitive side of things, things have also been cranked up a notch. There are 24 drivers that you'll have to beat, secret characters to unlock, and a battle royale style mode called Knockout Tour that will 1000% cause a few screaming matches in your household. In our 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Mario Kart World preview, our competitive🐠 spirits were pushed to the max, and we couldn't wait to get our hands on the console for another round. Mario Kart World is a worthy successor to Mario Kart 8, and is hands down the current shining star of the Switch 2.

For more exciting releases, check out our pages on all the 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:new games heading our way this year. Or celebrate Nintendo some more with our list of the 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:best Switch games of all time.

My guess as to why we might not be getting a Ubisoft Forward this year? Simply that Ubisoft doesn't have enough showable content to pad out an hour-long program. It's only just given us 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Assassin's Creed Shadows, after all, and with plenty of new content scheduled to come to the RPG as detailed in a 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:recent roadmap, it makes sense that Ubisoft doesn't want to divert our attention from Naoe and Yasuke just yet.

But Ubisoft has been moving strangely in these pivotal days leading up to Summer Game Fest, and as an official partner of this weekend's LA festivities, I'm reluctant to believe that it has nothing in store…

Buying time

2025 has been a busy one for Ubisoft. Not only did Assassin's Creed Shadows finally launch after being delayed twice, the publisher recently 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:announced a partnership with Chinese conglomerate Tencent.

The details💝 around the deal are still somewhat hazy, but this partnership essentially creates a dedicated "mini-Ubisoft" that will be handling some of the publisher's biggest IPs in future. As a result, the assumed lack of Ubisoft Forward this year is indicative to me that Ubisoft is trying to lay l🐟ow until it's ready to tell us exactly what that means for named franchises like Far Cry.

However, you can't blame me or any fellow Ubisoft fans for getting a little antsy. The list of 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:upcoming Ubisoft games is looking sparse now that Assassin's Creed Shadows is out in the wild, and when the new Rainbow Six Siege game launches a few days from now on June 10, it'll be shorter still.

But still, that's not to say there's nothing in the tank. I get wanting to keep Shadows in the sp﷽otlight (pun intended) a little longer, given it barely launched two months ago, but Ubis🐻oft would be missing a trick if it neglects to show off Anno 117: Pax Romana at Summer Game Fest this weekend.

The upcoming latest in one of the 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:best city builder game franchises is currently slated for a "🦄🐎Winter 2025" release, but Ubisoft has yet to put a firm date on it.

Even a quick showing of the latest gameplay trailer would be useful to show fans that Ubisoft hasn't gone to ground completely, especially since it debuted said new trailer on two weeks ago and I'd somehow never caught wind of it until, well, literally just now. There's also the mystery-enshrouded Prince of Persia: Sands of Time remake on the cards, first announced in 2020, as well as 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Assassin's Creed: Codename Hexe and a huge question mark hanging over a prospective 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Far Cry 6 sequel – but now I'm getting greedy.

While I'd call it highly unlikely that Ubisoft's witchy follow-up to Assassin's Creed Shadows will get more than a mention (if anything at all) this weekend, the publisher has nodded to a different upcoming project in the lead-up to Summer Game Fest.

I'm talking about the 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:cheeky Splinter Cell Remake tease that had fans thrown into a frenzy days ago, and now, it would almost be cruel to have us come away with nothing. Personally, I think this would be great to see during Sunday's 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Xbox Games Showcase – though with a 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:last-m🐭inute summer edition of Sony State of🍌 Play now schedu✅led for June 4, it's anyone'ꦕs guess what Ubi has up its sleeve.

Sure, Sony might have proven that there's no such thing as being too late to the Summer Game Fest party, but I'm still not expecting to see Ubisoft Forward announced anytime soon. Even without a dedicated showcase to gather all it꧟s ducks in a row, however, Ubisoft has the chance to still make a statement this weekend. Wheth🌄er it chooses to illuminate some announced titles, go into more detail on the Assassin's Creed Shadows roadmap, or playfully tease us with an assortment of the two, I'll be keeping a beady eye out for the publisher's presence – and hopefully next year, Ubisoft Forward will be back on schedule.

Don't miss the Future Games Show Summer Showcase on June 7, hosted by the one and only Matt Mercer

Sounds like an unfortunate yet thrilling situation, dꦏoesn't it? As someone who survived the Siege of Kvatch in both the original Oblivion and the Remastered version, early game and late game, I can tell you that this part of your Cyrodiillian adventure can either be the most exciting or dullest, easiest or hardest, thing you'll ever do in this game – and it all de꧙pends on character levelling.

Cursed Kvatch

My earliest memory of Kvatch is not a happy one. In fac😼t, it's a rather embarrassi🅺ng part of my first time in Cyrodiil. With my early-game character, undeterred by the sight of a town in smithereens, I headed towards the ominous Oblivion Gate. All that stood between me and the surviving Kvatchians was a measly Scamp or two, so what could possibly go wrong? Well, long story short, the scampy fellows flattened me.

A bit surprised, I tried again and again, but same story; my attacks hard𒉰ly chipped away at the enemy's HP, whereas they could easily kill me. As dying to misshapen minions is only fun for s🍸o long, I looked into Oblivion's levelling system and realised that the issue was, quite literally, skill-based. No, my character level certainly wasn't too low for the Siege of Kvatch, but some of my skill levels certainly were, and it took a long time to fix it.

As I discovered, you could only level your character by levelling your major skills, which you'd chosen during character creation. Once you'd gained enough major skill improvements, sleeping in a bed would level you up – even without improving any minor skills. On top of tha🅺t, the Attribute Points (stat points) received upon levelling up were based on the major skills you had leveled. For example, Security, Sneak, and Marksman would belong to the 'Governing Attribute' Agility, which meant you would have to level those three skills to improve your Agility stat.

While this only scratches the surface of Oblivion's overly complex levelling system, it's enough to realize what went wrong during my first Siege of Kvatch. You see, during the tutorial, I thought I had discovered a brilliant exploit when I continuously improved my Sneak skill by loitering behind an unsuspecting Goblin. I also engaged in way too many a🍃lchemical experiments while ignoring all skills governed by Endurance, which happened to be Oblivion's most important Attribute as it provides an extra HP boost per character level gained.

In many games, such disregard for efficient levelling doesn't pose much of an issue. Just become a bit overlevelled and you'll be fine. But that doesn't work in Oblivion, because enemy difficulty scales 𝓰with character level. Imagine a player walking into Kvatch with a ridiculously high Sneak skill, neglected minor skills, terribly low HP, and a bunch of useless potions… Suddenly, those deadly Scamps make sense.

A sleepy siege

Imagine my surprise when I – again – didn't pay attention to levelling in my first Oblivion Remastered playthrough, only to find my second Siege of Kvatch rather… uneventful. I was fully prepared to fight those Scamps to the death and give it my all, but it merely 🦩required my 15%. One or two well-aimed arrows and down they went.

The Remastered version has made significantꩲ changes to Oblivion's levelling system. Although the difficulty scaling remains the same, the Governing Attributes and Endurance-based HP bonus are removed in favour of free Attribute Point allocation, and all skil💝ls, including minor ones, now contribute to character levelling. It is, in other words, much harder to screw up your character build as royally as I did all those years ago.

I should be happy, right? But although I consider this a win for the less statistically inclined Oblivion player, I couldn't help but feel that this Siege of Kvatch left me more unsatisfied than the first one. When I saw others commemorating their magnificent Kvatch battles online, I realized I still wasn't handling Oblivion's 𝕴le🦩velling system correctly.

To understand the phenomenon of the vastly-different-Kvatches, there's something you should know about Oblivion's difficulty scaling, which hasn't been changed. Rather than just making enemies harder to defeat as you level up, the enemy type changes. So, if you try to save Kvatch in early-game, you'd be met by measly Scamps, but if you were to ignore the whole thing until mid-🎀 to late-game… Well, I had to see that for m🧸yself.

In my second Oblivion Remastered playthrough, I purposely avoided Kvatch until I was level 36, and I can tell you that it was, without exaggeration, glorious. Monstrosities of all shapes and sizes came pouring out of that Oblivion Gate as soon as I approached. Daedroth, Spider Daedra, Storm Atronachs, Xivilai… These were proper demons, befitting an event of catastrophic propo🦂rtions.

Of course, I did die quite a few times before the title of 'Hero of Kvatch' was bestowed upon me (as did all the nearby soldiers – oops!), but dying to an onslaught of Daedric forces feels🌄 much better than dying to a Scamp. In the original Oblivion, it certainly wouldn't 💝have been possible to clear Kvatch at such a high level without meticulously planning my levelling progress, which is why I now consider this the best part of the Remastered version - apart from that gorgeous visual upgrade.

As unlocking the best version of the Siege of𒊎 Kvatch still requires a good deal of patience (you don't need character level 36 though, 20+ will do), when and how to become the Hero of Kvatch is up to you. But if you want to get a truly unforgettable experience… You know what to do.

The Elder Scrolls has a role-playing problem: Oblivion and Skyrim's morality can't touch the nuance found in Fallout: New Vegas

It's a buzz to be this close to so much creativity. Digital D♕ragons might not yet have the size and scale of GDC, nor the community-first appeal of something like Gamescom, but Krakow's annual B2B gamedev conference is a whole other beast in itself – and everything I experienced over my four day excursion proves it means business.

Hive mind

Looking around the crowded glass-paneled interior of the Kr🤪akow International Conference Center, I remind myself that Digital Dragons wasn't always such a huge event.

The first conference was hosted in 2012, and on a much smaller scale – 300 partners total, largely consisting of local Polish developers and publishers. But as of 2025, Digital Dragons has grown in popularity, with its number of attendees having swelled to attract 2,300 ♉participants from 53 countries this year.

There's a focus on building prestige here, a sense of "quality over quantity" as one representative from Krakow Technology Park put it, crafted through its framework of lectures intended for B2B audiences rather than the community feel of other gaming conventions. By effe൩ct, Digital Dragons harnesses the opportunity for industry professionals across Eastern Europe and beyond to show face, network, possibly recruit, and learn from one another's successes and setbacks.

This becomes especially importanཧt given how the🌳 event caters not only to double and triple-A studios and publishers, but indie developers too.

The expa✨nsive Indieܫ Zone on the ground floor fast became my favorite place to hang out between lectures, a maze of whirring computers and bright poster boards, each boasting indies of every genre imaginable.

Here, small studios set up shop to show off their works-in-progress alongside a handful of acclaimed released titles, like , and promising early access games such as . With survival horror gem 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Deep🅰 Sleep: 🍌Labyrinth of the Forsaken (winner of the convention's Indie Dragons award) on offer alongside 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Little Nightmares 3-style co-op adventure 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Bumpkin & Sprout, dark fantasy Witcher 3-meets-God of War combo 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Vranygrai, and every shade of indie in between, it was all too easy to simply while away the hours playing dem🌌o builds galore.

But even if I had stayed on the ground flo🏅or for the whole convention, I don't think I'd have missed out. Digital Dragon's Indie Zone does not play second fiddle to i✅ts plethora of high-profile lectures mere doors away. Rather, it's integral to the whole experience.

From roots to shoots

"It's one ecosystem. So everything grows together," says Jakub Ma🔯rszalkowski, representing Indie Games Poland Foundation, on the importance of championing indies at prestigious events 🦂such as Digital Dragons.

"This industry is growing in, as it was said already, a little bit of a grassroot process from the bottom up. So all the big companies 🔯we have now, at some point were smaller companies. Thꩲis – being independent – was an important part of it."

Shining a light on the exceptional talents of the Po𒊎lish games sector is especially important given the country's historical context. Since the fall of communism in the country as of 1991, Poland has been pushing to "catch up to the West," as Marszalkowski put it, and forge a new identity as a tech-savvy nation of creatives and opp🎃ortunity.

With an estimated 15,200 individuals currently in the Polꦦish gaming workforce – "which makes us, on talent pool size, bigger than Germany and somewhat parallꦦel with France" – the country is already taking serious strides forward.

"We don't have that many other cultural expo🌟rts," Marszalkowski says, referencing how Polish industries m꧟issed critical waves when it comes to music, film, and other creative booms post World War 2. "But the game industry, we were there from the very beginning.

"You probably have not seen many Polish movies, you probably have not listened to much Polish music, but you definitely know some Polish games. So this is our most important – or maybe the only – cultur🧸al export, and we should rely on that a lot to have our voice being heard globally."

Passing the baton

This extends to amplifying the voices of not only current industry professionals, but emerging talents too.

During my trip to Krakow, we had a day excursion to the neighboring postindustrial city of Katowice, where the country's alre😼ady booming game development scene is being supported through an impress꧃ive array of theoretical and practical further education courses.

The effects of these sophisticated programmes is evident at Digital Dragons, where a team of young developers – Rabid Rat, the animation studio-turned game developers who created the aforementioned co-op platformer Bumpkin & Sprout – won the indie Best Pitch award on the final day of the confer𒀰ence, alongside Atomnius, an eไven younger cohort of gamedevs, who snatched the community vote.

The joy was magnified given that 11 Bit, winner of Best Polish Game for Frostpunk 2, had donated their swanky PC prize to the pitch award victor as an act of solidarity. Every studio has to♏ start somewhere, and for a conference about prestige, there's no room for elitism here.

𝔉It was a heartfelt moment – and yes, I very nearly shed a little tear because of it – that perfectly enca🤪psulated how important Digital Dragons has become for studios large and small. This conference is a rare chance for developers to celebrate their wins, even amid a growing spate of industry layoffs, and find connection through the stress and pressure of their chosen career.

Digital Dragons is a reminder that🅷, despite how many excellent Polish games I've played and adored, the best is yet to come – sooner than you think.

June is here, meaning 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Summer Game Fest 2025 is just around the corner! Here's a full list of the events to expect from June 6-8

After all, this is the first "open world" Mario Kart game ever. Yet when I sit down to chat with Mar🀅io Kart World producer Kosuke Yabuki, he admits that isn't a term the development team uses about their new game.

"We don't feel the term open world is clear in terms of its definition," he says, with the suggestion that 'interconnected world' is a better representation of what 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Mario Kart World is offering. "We do have this expansive world, and weℱ've placed therein the Mario Kart Circuit or Bowser's Castle or Choco Mountain, and tried to build a new Mario Kart."

What intrigues me about this new Mario Kart is just how much more freedom players will have to experiment. Like The Le꧑gend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom before it, Mario Kart World is going to thrive on racers' ability to carve their own paths to hopeful victory. Yes, the development team has placed carefully crafted tracks within this v♕ast world, but the important part is that every road is connected to another, and that's where the creativity can really come in.

Riding racers

Mario Kart World is introducing new traversal tricks like wall and rail riding along with a charge jump. These new abilities will turn every surface in the game into a potential highway – it's just down to each player to figure out how to utilise each one. With such a wide range of terrain in the game – and particularly in a single race – how people utilise those tricks will become the thing for Mario Kart World.

"As you become more and more familiar with these various terrains and how to control the racers in Mario Kart World, you'll come to noti🦋ce these guard rails where you'll think 'hey maybe I can jump on that' or you'll see the walls of the cliff and think 'maybe I could jump on that'. The more and more you play, you'll learn to leverage your imagination and curiosity," says Yabuki-san.

"It was fun for us to make, but for us, the real question is how players will actually play and drive, and leverage all these moves and tricks. We can't fully imagine all the types of ways tꦦhat people will play."

It's got an air of the various brilliant creations people made with Tears of the Kingdom's construction tools. It's not quite puzzle-solving in the sa🍌me way, but I can already s🥀ee the kinds of incredible combos racers could pull off to sneak into pole position or avoid a dreaded blue shell being shared as feats across social media.

It's a knockout

That's going𒁏 to be especially true for the new Knockout Mode. The 24-player checkpoint-based mode sees players knocked out at var𓆉ious markers throughout the race, with only the top four making it through to the final stretch.

"When we created this expansive world, the first thing that we wanted to do was to enable a race going from the Eastern Coast all the way to the Western coast," but Yabuki-san and the team knew that for some players being at the back of a race for the entire duration may not be all that fun, whi💧ch is exactly the reason why the checkpoints exist.

"When looking at the hands-on even๊ts across the world, we could confirm that those who couꦉld race through to the end were happy, as well as those who dropped out midway. They both had fun in different ways. It was a happy surprise for us that those who could complete the race, and those who couldn't, both had a fun time."

Although it's seemingly going to work out oka🐭y from initial player feedback, Yabuki-san admits that he was "very careful" about adding a new mode for Mario Kart World. Not only would it fracture the player base as they split out across free roam, Grand Prix and Knockout Tour, but it was always the 𓄧goal to make sure that, despite the big changes to the approach, it still retained the classic Mario Kart experience at its core.

Balance and banana peels

A big part of that was making sure everything was balanced with each trᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚ⁤⁤⁤⁤ᩚ⁤⁤⁤⁤ᩚ⁤⁤⁤⁤ᩚ𒀱ᩚᩚᩚack, which sounds easier said than done with an interconnected world design. But, it extended to all the power-ups and items, too, with the team even considering ditching some iconic items alto༺gether.

"When we created this world from scratch, we re-reviewed all the elements that are included in this game, including the i✤conic banana skin. We actually did go through the exercise of asking ourselves, 'does it still make sense to include this item𓄧 in Mario Kart World?'"

"Another example is the green shell as well. Obviously, it's been there for a long time in Mario Kart, but when we looked at it, we asked ourselves here, 'Is it sufficient when you can just throw it over the course?'. For example, the racers like Mario and such can ride 🐼over the guardrails. Should we not enable the shell to also slide over the rails?ꦫ"

To answer these questions, the team at Nintendo had to consider "the implementation of each and every item", and dec༒ide whether each one should "remain the same as before" or "amend and add a different element to it".

As well as rediscovering old favorites (yes, the banana skin and green shell made it in), we've got plenty of new items in Mario Kart World to discover. Even from my preview time with the game, I'm already particularly hyped about the new feather. Not only does it let you jump higher to avoid attacks, 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:including the dreaded blue shell, but it also lets you access different parts of🍌 the tracks to discover even more potential shortcuts. The new hammer is also intriguing as it lets you embed hammers into the course to hit rivals but also block off access to certain routes too.

It feels like everything the team has done with Mario Kart World is letting players be more creative and tactical. I'm sure that'll mean I am 1000% times worse going forward, but it's going to be exciting to see how players evolve their skills over time with this Switch 2 exclusive.

We've got plenty more about the 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:upcoming Switch 2 games or all the 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Switch 2 launch games on GamesRadar+.

With E3 2025 remaining an impossibility – the once great annual event now fallen by the way side in favor of SGF, the 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Summer Game Fest 2025 schedule is the new tome to follow – the likes of Xbox, Steam, PlayStation and Nintendo are present, bringing info on the 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:new games of 2025 and beyond! Over the decades, it's events like these that are lynchpins of the gaming calendar, and really show what the future of gaming will bring across specific announcements, yes, bu🌸t also highlight the trends that will continue to shape the industry. The countdown to Summer Game Fest 2025 starts here!

2K

While we may be treated to updates and announcements surrounding 2K's premier sports titles such as WWE 2K25, NBA 2K, and more – the publisher has some real big adventures on the way. We expect 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Borderlands 4 to steal the show, the upcoming zany sci-fi co-op shooter looking set to bring the looter back to its roots in a big way as soon as September 12. Only a few months ahead of release, it should be a blow out. Additionally, 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Mafia: The Old Country is releasing even sooner – August 8 – and promises to be a focused single-player story experience. We're salivating to find out more about what that means. We'd also love to finally see something from the long-awaited 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:BioShock 4… could this be the time? Just don't expect much more from GTA 6 though, Rockstar marches to its own drum, and we just got a 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:massive new GTA 6 trailer for that as well as a delay to 2026.

505 Games

If our 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Blades of Fire review is any indication, 505 Games is in a really solid place right now with their slate of published games. While you can always expect plenty in the pipeline from them (I'd already be eager to get some Blades of Fire DLC, but I may be dreaming), it's Wuchang: Fallen Feathers that's they're next big release. If they're at the show, they're bound to be telling us more about this huge title from Leenze. Inspired by Chinese mythology, it aims to use the setting to offer a new twist on the soulslike genre, and it's s𓄧haping ꦫup to be seriously impressive so far.

Bandai Namco

2025 has already been a big year for Bandai Namco, but the publisher still has some absolute mammoths on the near horizon, and we expect to hear at least some news for the long-awaited 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Little Nightmares 3. Currently, the Supermassive Games title is slated to launch in 2025, so it's more than possible that a release date gets announced during a showcase. The same could be said for Digimon Story: Time Stranger, which similarly only has a 2025 release window at the moment. As massive RPG fans, we're hopeful for something 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:The Blood of Dawnwalker sꦜhaped as well, but considering that game was only announced in🔥 January this year, it may not make the showcase cut.

Blumhouse Games

Blumhouse Games may be a relatively young publisher (having only been founded in 2023), however, it currently has five games in development, and we're betting that we'll see at least a handful during Summer Game Fest. If you're a cozy gamer,澳�🍸�洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询: chances are that you've heard of Grave Seasons (a farming life sim with a serial killer twist). The game was announced in June last year, so we're due an update, and we exp🍷ect to see it during either the Wholesome Direct or the PC Gaming Show. Fingers crossed, we 🌠get more insights into Blumhouse Games' other horror titles as well in the later showcase, looking at you, Project C.

Capcom

Resident Evil 9 would be the dream, we know. However, looking closer to reality, it's more likely that Capcom's involvement in the Summer Game Fest will center around its 2026 title that was announced at the end of last year. We're talking about Onimusha: Way of the Sword, the upcoming entry to the samurai Onimusha series. It's also possible that Capcom may be in the lineup due to Nintendo. Street Fighter 6 is a 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Switch 2 launch title, and we could be seeing more of it as it's one of the best offerings for the upco🦩ming console. Personally, we're hoping for some Okami 2 news, since that was also revealed lasཧt year. Fingers crossed that Capcom meets all our high expectations.

CD Projekt

In terms of 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:upcoming CD Projekt Red games, let's be honest, 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:The Witcher 4 is going to be the star of the day. We got our first trailer for the new RPG during the Game Awards 2024 livestream, though we still don't know a release window. where they will be "showcasing some of the innovative technology & features that will power The Witcher 4, and beyond". Cyberpunk 2077: Orion (the Cyberpunk 2077 sequel) also 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:recently got༺ a pre-production update, so there's a chance it✃'ll make an appearance in some capacity as well.

Devolver Digital

Devolver Digital actually has a lot going on currently in terms of games in active development, so we expect to see quite a few offerings from the publisher pop up throughout Summer Game Fest. Since Nintendo is going to be involved, we're betting that the 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:upcoming Switch 2 game, Enter the Gungeon 2, gets some kind of news (hopefully a release window). Skate Story is also overdue for an update and still needs a 2025 release date. Starseeker: Astroneer Expeditions is also another cross-platform 2026 outing that has a lot of eyes on it, so we wouldn't be shocked to see it appear in some capacity as well. However🍨, Devolver Digital is known for th🌜rowing wild curveballs, so potentially we could be looking at some fresh, never-before-seen indie announcements as well. Devolver Digital is always a fun wild card after all.

Dotemu

In terms of SGF partners, Dotemu is definitely one of the smaller ones in terms of games in development. However, although the line-up isn't massive, it does come with one of our most anticipated 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:upcoming Marvel games and a new outing in the iconic Ninja Gaiden series. Marvel Cosmic Invasion was recently announced to be heading our way sometim🐻e in 2025, as was the 2D platformer Ninja Gaiden: Ragebound. We'll likely see both of these titles at some point, hopefully with release dates in hand. However, at least we can rest easy knowing that there will be plenty of pixelated beat em up action, regardless. I mean, what else could you expect from ninjas and superheroes, right?

IO Interactive

澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Project 007 has a new title – 007: First Light, and is set to receive its full reveal this week. No doubt, this is tying into Summer Game Fest. The dev studio already mastered assassination espionage with Hitman, so we're shaken, stirred and everything in between to see how they tackle the good guy spy himself. Also, it's easy to take the series for granted following the release of Hitman 3, but the whole Hitman World of Assassination package does continue to update and do quite well. This year is a big moment for it as well, as it'll be coming to Nintendo Switch 2 allowing players to tak♋e their hits on the go. It might even end up being one of our favorite Nintendo Swit🐭ch 2 games if it comes out well.

Mundfish

The release of Atomic Heart mu🐭st have gone well, because – that aims to help other developers get their games out there and breakthrough to audiences. Alongside the announcement, the developer also revealed Atomic Heart broke through 10 million players in total – not too bad. Given the SGF partnership, we'll likely hear more about the Powerhouse initiative, and what games they have planned for their first wave of publishing.

Neowiz

We really enjoyed this developer's Pinocchio-inspired take on soulslikes in our 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Lies of P review back in 2023. The studio has continued to bring updates to the adventure since release, and we're now barrelling close to the Summer 2025 launch wind🤡ow for its major Lies 🌳of P: Overture DLC which brings a new chapter as well as difficulty optionಞs. Summer Game Fest 2025 will be occurring over, well, the summer – so expect to hear more about the DLC. We'd also love to hear what Neowiz has planned next, but we uꦿnderstand they'll want to focus on tying the bow on Lies of P so far.

Nintendo Switch 2

Considering the 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Nintendo Switch 2 itself launches on June 5, its early launch days overlap with Summer Game Fest 2025 directly – which makes me anxious just to type out. Regardless, expect plenty of information on the launch lineup from the show, detailing the likes of 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Mario Kart World for those still on the fence about purchasing. While there's certainly lots of announcements Nintendo could make about the year ahead for the hardware, it's the imminent release of 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Donkey Kong Bananza that's sure to be in the spotlight, given its July 17 launch date. As the big new open world platforming adventure, this feels like the biggest showpiece for the system at the moment in൲ general.

Pearl Abyss

The Black Desert Online developers have more than a few new project irons in the fire, so to speak. The colorful monster catching DokeV hasn't had an update in so long it feels like it's due for a bit of a re-reveal, but we're not holding our breath. More imminent is 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Crimson Desert, which has been making the rounds at various showcases before SGF 2025. A single-player open world medieval-style fantasy adventure, what we've seen has been breathtaking, and the boss fights we've gone hands-on with have showcaseꦗd twitchy combat. We're still waiting to see how it'll all come together, and waiting for a firm release date. Here's hoping we find all that 💫out and more come SGF 2025.

PlayStation

There's so much coming up for PlayStation that we're desperate to hear more about, but let's at least try to begin realistically. 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Death Stranding 2: On the Beach from Kojima Productions is sure to have a final big showcase ahead of its June 26 release date. Likewise, 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Ghost of Yotei, from Sucker Punch Productions – the sequel to 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Ghost of Tsushima – is creeping ever closer to its October 2 launch, and we're due a deeper dive into the systems in a showcase at some point soon. It also feels like Saros, Housemarque's spiritual successor to Returnal, could put in an appearance. Whether Marathon will be there, 澳洲幸运5开奖𒁏号💮码历史查询:given the recent scandals around its art, remains to be seen.

Further off, but still possible, is 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Intergalatic: The Heretic Prophet, Naughty Dog's latest which looks to be a departure from The Last of Us and Uncharted – but it may be too early to see more on this yet. Also, given how much we loved Insomniac Games' latest in our 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Spider-Man 2 review, we're desperate for more from them, especially when it comes to 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Marvel's Wolverine. Likewise, co-op heister 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Fairgames remains a bit of a mystery, as do several unannounced projects from some of their top studios like 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:God of War: Ragnarok developer Sony Santa Monica Studio, or what's next to followup on 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Horizon Forbidden West from Guerilla Games.

Sega

Sega have so many games cooking it's hard to know where to begin, while at the same time feeling due to announce some kind of higher profile spotlight game. Could we get a new Sonic platformer? Yakuza 9? Skies of Arcadia Re-Legended? (Okay, let me have one spot to manifest). One thing is clear, Sega are big supporters of the Switch 2, with launch games⛄ Puyo Puyo Tetris 2S and Yakuza 0: Director's Cut releasing imminently, and the likes of sort-of-Persona-spin-off Raidou Remastered: The Mystery of the Soulless Army getting a remaster that'll also be on the system.

Beyond Switch 2, Sonic is still doing his thing. The actually-quite-good-looking Sonic Racing CrosꦰsWorlds is due 𝔍in 2025, so expect more details on that. On the smaller screen, Sonic Rumble is meant to be coming to mobile – but was recently delayed – and Persona 5: The Phantom X is also set to finally 𝔉release in English soon. Meanwhile, Shinobi: Art of Vengeance will be the first in Sega's series of legacy revivals, coming 29 Aug. Will we finally see more ღfrom Jet Set Radio, Golden Axe, Crazy Taxi, and Streets or Rage a🌱s well?

Square Enix

For such a huge publisher, there's actually a lot up in the air with Square Enix at the moment, so it'd be great to get a firmer picture for how its biggest series are looking to evolve next. Namely, with 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Kingdom Hea♐rts Missing Link for mobile cancelled and a recent new glimpse at 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Kingdom Hearts 4, are we due a bit of a blowout for the Disney crossover RPG? It'd be great to get some more news on what's next for Final Fantasy, be it 澳洲幸运𓄧5开奖号码历史查询:the surely-on-the-way Final Fantasy 17 and Fina𒉰l Fantasy 7 Remake Part 3, which will close out the redo trilogy. Other than that, Dragon Quest 1 & 2 HD-2D Remake, which we enjo💧yed going hands-on with, will likely put in an appearance💦 ahead of its October 30 release.

Steam

澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Could it be? Is it finally time f𝐆or🐼 Half-Life 3!? Probably not. But, well, we can dare to dream. We're a little unsure quite what Steam themselves may be doing at SGF 2025, but if we had to put money on it we'd bet they don't have much in terms of games software, but perhaps hardware instead. The SteamDeck seems to have been a success – we certainly loved the hardware in our 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Steam Deck OLED review – and it'd make sense that Steam as a platform may continue in this direction. Never a company to silo themselves, 👍it's likely more 'portable PC' devices may partner with Steam to bring its OS to devices.

Supermassive Games

The stalwart horror developer who ran screaming into our hearts with 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Until Dawn continues to release some solidly spooky games, and they've got two upcoming that are sure to be represented at SGF 2025 that we can't wait to see more about. Directive 2080 is a sci-fi thriller that looks more than a little🥂 chilling, and is the latest in their Dark Pictures anthology of frights (though the series' titling is now – and perhaps wisely – minimized). They're also working on Little Nightmares 3, a standalone third entry in the uneasy platforming series, picking up the reins from creators Tarsier Studios (澳洲幸运꧒5开奖号码历史查询:who are working on their own new thing: Reanimal).

Techland

Parkour-centric zombie series Dying Light continues to be a delight, and the developer has a followup to 2022's 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Dying Light 2 due later this year: 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Dying Light: The Beast. Seeing the return of original protagonist Kyle Crane, this started development as DLC before transforming into its own thing. Likewise, Kyle can now transform, using his titular beast powers to dominate the forested environment like we've never been able to in the series before. Beyond this, Techland is also working on some not-quite announced projects lik🌜e a fantasy game – but we'd expect them to remain focused on telling us more about Dying Light: The Beast for now.

Xbox

The platform holder isn't just at Summer Game Fest 2025, but has a whole 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历🦩史查询:Xbox Games Showcase airing on June 8. We'll be digging deep into everything Xbox is bringing, but it'll be a fascinating time to get to grips with where Xbox is in the industry at the moment. Rumors abound about all sorts, including the possibility of new hardware – though it sounds like th🔯at migh𒐪t not be kicking around this year after all. But, anything can be an Xbox now, or s🔥o they say.

In terms of games, Xbox have just come off releasing 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Doom: The Dark Ages through Bethesda. The big new release this time around will be 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:The Outer Worlds 2, as Xbox have already announced it'll receive a dedicated Direct following the broader showcase. We're also hoping Xbox Game Studios will tell us more about 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Gears of War: E-Day, 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:State of Decay 3, 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Clockwork Revolution, and 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Perfect Dark – which feel like they're due more info soon. Further off, and games we'd really love to hear more about but have been light on info for a while are the 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Fable reboot, 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Marvel's Blade, Everwild, and 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:The Elder Scrolls 6. They've got to tell us more sometime, right?

For more future releases, check out our guides on all the 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:upcoming PS5 games and 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:upcoming Xbox Series X games.

Promising aroun🥃d eight to ten hours of story, it's about as long as a proper sequel would need to be, but is introduced to me as a standalone expansion. Even so, while Biegun says it builds on some story elements in the base Rogue City, you don't need to have played it to get into the action here. As mercenaries attack a police department with a mysterious new cryo cannon, and take over a massive residential block called OmniTower, it's up to the officer known as RoboCop to fight his way in🤡side and sort things out with extreme prejudice.

Dead or alive

Playing through the first three levels and then skipping to a later one, the business might be unfinished, but it is still business as usual. Clomping around relatively slowly like🍌 a tank, RoboCop is able to sc🐼an and pinpoint enemies with a green overlay just like the movies, taking out goons with high-powered weaponry. Being slow just emphasizes the feeling of power, cooldown abilities to slow time or raise shields meaning I feel like I can take a lot of hits.

Enemies can be grabbed and thrown around too, and environmental hazards can be used to thwack enemies into objects to cause a bloody mess, such as big ol' industrial fans. Bits of cover can be blasted away with weapons to open them up to heads🍸hots (the pistols feel great), and RoboCop's vision highlights areas of wall I can use to ricochet my bullets around corners. The huge tower feels like a real space structurally, but one that RoboCop can turn to his advantage.

And yes, just like in the original Rogue City, you can also shoot enemi🐽es in the nuts for no real benefit, but as a tip of the robo-helmet to the movies. "It's still here. It's still available. It's still effective. It's still, I would 💜say, good looking," Biegun laughs. "For the fans." Likewise the sounds of guns and the action are meant to closely evoke the films, and even some of the lighting of the OmniTower is meant to resemble '80s movie lighting. "We don't want to use the word realistic, because realism is not a part of RoboCop at all," says Biegun – moreover Teyon wants to portray the heightened reality of the series.

Quickly, though, the action does escalate to be more frequently tense than in its 2023 precursor.🃏 RoboCop: Rogue City – Unfinished Business features fewer detective elements and a greater focus on action. Biegun calls it "more dynamic" because of it. There are more weapon types – including a minigun and eventually the cryo cannon itself, and more enemy types to unload into.

The enemies aren't just new models, either – but are designed to shake up the pace of encounters in Rogue City which, fun though they were,🎃 could become a bit samey. Enemies with shields require you to think about how to catch them off guard, and drones and jet-pack wearing foes emphasize the verticality at the heart of the OmniTower. It sure beats just combing balconies for where squishy enemy heads are about to reveal themselves, and keeps me on my toes even from early on. Later on, they tell me there will be ninja androids.

The single setting, the OmniTower, also allows Teyon to play with literally escalating action and keep the pace tight🧸. There are still moments where things slow down a tad, from RoboCop assisting scared residents to one section that has me go Star Wars as I blast the gears of an encroaching trash compactor's ceiling. But, for the most part, it feels natural that the higher I climb the tougher the threats I'll come up against.

The action even moves beyond RoboCop. The later mission I play sees me take control of the digital circuits of ED-209, the series' iconic heavily armed bipedal enforcement droid. I feel the weight of the machine, but it's a real power trip to stomp through the environments, cycling through a machine gun and rocket launchers to blast the heck out of swarms of enemies. It's a better machine fantasy than the more cumbersome mechs found in 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Doom: The Dark Ages, and is a highlight꧙ of what I get to play. I won't spoil too much, but one particularly funny moment even nods to ED-209's inability to tackle stairs that genuinely makes me laugh out loud. It's great to see Teyon still understanding that there's a real sense of humor to RoboCop's over-the-top nature.

In fact, as with Rogue City, a lot of work ha𒐪s gone into ensuring Unfinished Business feels like a legitimate part of the RoboCop world,🥃 the team discussing everything with the rights holders. "We have creative freedom as a developer," Biegun confirms, but this includes the likes of technology and types of guns available, as they want to avoid it seeming like "they created something out of nowhere" that doesn't fit the series.

Which is all to say that the cryo cannon – which hangs heavily over the game's opening hours – is an official addition. While I've yet to try it myself as it's at first in the enemy's hands, it's one of Biegun's favorites to use: "I😼 really love this weapon because it has an impact on the environment. When you shoot it, it will leave ice all over the p🗹lace so you can, if you walk through it, hear the crunches."

RoboCop: Rogue City – Unfinished Business is more RoboCop but not just more. It's all dialled up. Moꦗre action. More weapons. ♐More over-the-top. I can't wait to see how high the OmniTower really stretches. I'll find out soon enough, as RoboCop: Rogue City – Unfinished Business is open for, erm, business on July 17, 2025 across PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X/S.

Check out our 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:new games of 2025 calendar for what else to play next!

True, some of these games have seen more commercial success than others. South of Midnight's modest reception felt lukewarm after the breakout hype over Avowed, undoubtedly Xbox's standout first-party exclusive of the year so far, while Bethesda and MachineGames' already popular 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Indiana Jones and the Great Circle became a cross-platform favorite when it launched on PS5 mere months after its Series X debut – and hey, remember when 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion Remastere🐻d got shadowdropped five days later?

2025 is shaping up to be one of the best years for Microsoft Gaming in a very long time. That makes it even more important for the 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Xbox Games Showcase to make a strong case for the rest of the year, showing off its in-house 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:upcoming Xbox Series X games while championing the flagship console as the best place to play imminent third-party hits. Especially since, you know, the showcase is coming three days after the 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Nintendo Switch 2 launches – and I'd ꦺbe surprised if that didn't cast some kind of shadow.

Thinking outside the (x)box

With the promise of both first and third-party Xbox titles on June 8th's lineup, as well as a dedicated The Outer Worlds 2 de🏅ep-dive from developer Obsidian immediately after, Xbox Games Showcase 2025 has an opportunity to be not only celebratory, but preparatory.

The success of Avowed earlier this year cements Obsidian as the🎃 latest Xbox posterchild, with a litany of successful games released since the studio's acquisition by Microsoft in 2018. It makes sense that Xbox is positioning Obsidian front and center as it sets its intentions for the coming months; even as the publisher bears down 🎐on its cross-platform "Xbox Everywhere" initiative, first-party exclusives will still be of special interest to many tuning in this weekend.

There are plenty of likely showstoppers I can think of in that vein. We haven't seen much of Fable 4 since its 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:delay to 2026, while 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Perfect Dark and 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Gears of War: E-Day have both been MIA since their respective reveals this time last year. We're also fairly light on 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:State of Decay 3 and 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Clockwork Revolution news, as despite both currently sitting pretty on our list of expected 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:new games for 2025, 𓄧rumors and estimates have them🔴 likely to be delayed.

I'm especially keen to see if we get any new 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Marvel's Blade intel, despite how Arkane Austin said it would be "going qu♌iet" for some time in 2023 to focus on its production stages –ꦯ but hey, a girl can dream.

Xbo൲x has many third-party partners it could be showcasing this weekend, drumming up some ꦑhype around announced games with release dates already set for the imminent future.

澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Borderlands 4 is an especially hot topic, with the release date mere months away at this point, as is 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Mafia: The Old Country and Supermasive Games' Directive 8020. It would also be a brilliant time to firm up some ballpark-2025 release windows for games like 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Vampire: The Masquerade B🌳loodlines 2 (which was delayed to October for a in response to early gameplay feedback), 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Crimson Desert, and Chucklefish's cozy new pixel RPG 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Witchbrook.

After all, now that GTA 6 has been delayed to 2026, there's surely no time like the present for an ava꧋lanche of new release dates to help iron🌺 out the rest of our 2025 gaming calendars.

The road ahead

I know, I know – that's a lot of games, and a lot of educated assumptions besides. Perhaps the most interesting potential third-party partner we might see at Xbox Games Showcase, though? Ubisoft.

Despite being listed as a Summer Game Fest partner, the Assassin's Creed publisher has yet to confirm whether a Ubisoft Forward showcase will be going ahead. Bummed as I am at the prospect of waiting even longer for a look at 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Assassin's Creed: Codename Hexe, though, a cryptic tweet has led many fans to believe that 澳洲🅺幸运5开奖号码历史查询:this could be a teaser fo♚r a long-awaited remake Ubisoft announced some 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:four years ago.

If this is true, it could come at any point over the weekend's fe💞stivities – including the inaugura🦋l proceedings on June 6 – so it's definitely one for Xbox sleuths to watch for.

After an impressive start to 2025, Xbox Games Showcase is Microsoft's chance to keep the good times rolling. ✱It's an opportunity to impress console and PC gamers alike, not giving up on the strength and utility of its hardware even as console unit sales slow down, and prove that Xbox intends to carry this momentum into Q4 and beyond.

It'll be no small feat to draw attention away from the Switch 2 hype, but if Microsoft brings the goods I know it's well equipped to, the Xbox Games Showcase 2025 should be well worth postponing a 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Mario Kart World race for.

Tune into the 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Future Games Showcase on June 7 to check out a litany of brand new games on the way this year, hosted by Matt Mercer

Scriptwelder's intricate point-and-click adventure where dreams become nightmares is both familiar and novel. Sure, the DNA of the 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:best Resident Evil games is baked into its isometric, 2D pixelated world, b🉐ut instead of gunning my way through a zombie-infested mansion, Deep Sleep had me dreaming myself into subconscious terrors – and loving every second.

Dare to dream a little bigger, darling

The first thing I see when I lo🎐ad into a fresh save file is a typewriter. That's not the only thing on the screen – the scene is that of protagonist Amy's bedroom, filled with curious objects and gadgets just waiting for a closer look. I know from reading the synopsis that Amy is trying to make contact with her presumed dead brother, and it's only through dreaming that she can do so.

But even with that intriguing backstory in mind, I can't help what my eyeballs latch onto. The typewriter is a familiar touchstone, linking Deep Sleep: Labyrinth of the Forsaken to some of the 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:best survival horror games that came before it, and I simply must check it oღut.

I take a moment to admire the retro art style, noting the 2D framing of the scene as Amy gets up from her bed. I examine the electrode hood she's discarded on the bed – my gateway to nightmare puzzle worlds, no doubt – before f🍌inally clicking on the typewriter with feverish glee. What do you know? I need an ink ribbon to use it. This little nod to the titans of its genre (namely, the one and only Resident Evil) immediately charms me, clearly signposting Deep Sleep's mission as a survival horror game with a neat twist or two up its sleeve.

Once I've examined just about everything inಞ the cramped space, I click on the electrodes again. It's time to experience what makes Deep Sleep different from its predecessors: the fact that most of its action takes place in dreamspace.

This next part feels like something out of Inception, or maybe even using the animus in the 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:best Assassin's Creed games. Amy is a lucid dreamer, meaning I now get to choose what it is she dreams about now that she's fallen fast asleep. I don't recall the name of the first dungeon I pick, but it looks an awful lot like a hotel. Or🉐, in a way, the telltale winding halls and locked doors that make up Resident Evils Spencer Mansion.

But I digress. Deep Sleep: Labyrinth of the Forsaken doesn't play like a Resident Evil game, necessarily, despite how it might resemble one. This is no fixed camera angle endeavor, but a slightly isometric point-and-click adventure. I check my inventory quickly, and am disappointed to find a human bone rather than a gun as my main offensive tool. A quick rumma🍌ge through the room 💞I've loaded into, however, and I come out with a wrench – score one for me. Immediately, I set off to find something to batter with it.

Curiouser and curiouser

Exiting through a pair of double doors, I find myself on the upstairs landing of the hotel foyer. Stairs lead down to the dimly lit lobby, and in the darkness, I see something shambling about.

I flick on my equipped flashlight with a tap🤡 of the left trigger, despite on-screen warnings of some enemies being particularly photosensitive. I'm not trying to avoid a battle here, after all – I want to see what Deep Sleep's turn-based combat is all about.

When I approach the creature, I hope I'm the one who landed the first hit. The UI doesn't make that p𒁃art all too clear, but as a musical sting chimes menacingly and the edges of the ♊screen start to blur and shift in streaks of garish red, I can only assume I've triggered a combat encounter. Much as in Look Outside, my favorite survival horror indie of the year so far, combat in Deep Sleep requires a more tactical approach.

I'm presented with my inventoryꦇ, and must select a weapon with which to attack the enemy. I go for the wrench first off, sure that a swift bonk over the head will do the job – but alas, it does only two HP damage and shatters in my hand. 💯Meanwhile, my human bone fragment does the job beautifully, and three turns later, the creature falls down dead.

Still reeling from the encounter, and with a brand new bone looted from my opponent's corpse in hand (ick, I know), I pick through the rest of the lobby in search of somet♔hing stronger. Perhaps, even, something with bullets.

But, again, Deep Sleep is not as combat-focused as many other survival horror games I've played. It'༒s a puzzler, first and foremost, with seemingly infrequent run-ins with enemies not only further spread aℱpart, but a lot more optional. As I push open a door and hold my breath, expecting a room full of enemies, I'm surprised to find the hotel concierge instead.

He berates me for being late to this, my first day at a new job – a typical dream anxiety for man💜y of us, I think to myself – and orders me to deliver luggage to five separate rooms. But which bags go to which r𒁃oom, I ask, eyeing the stack of suitcases and nearby trollies suspiciously? The concierge waves me off with a huff. Apparently, working that part out is up to me.

Sadly, my demo time is cut short by the presence of another eager player, but what little I've seen of Deep Sleep: Labyrinth of the Forsaken has whetted my appetite for plenty more. It might sound simple enough, but it's exciting to see 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:new games reworking well-worn genres to bring out fresh, unexpected flavour♍s.

Deep Sleep is shaping up to be a brand new, non-linear type of survival horror game that uses dungeons, dream theory, and "elements of randomized design" to its advantage, and it's already shooting past many other 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:upcoming horror games on my list of 2025's most wanted.

Check out all the 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:upcoming PC games on the way in 2025 to help plan your gaming calendar

In discovering Ratopia, a downright adorable rat-themed city builder, I put my rodent avoiding days behind me. With its fairytale assets and nomenclature it promised a gentle foray into the life of a benevolent rat queen and her g🌳od-fearing subjects. I imagined long days brimming with rodentesque revelry and midsommar nights of placid quietude, walking the halls of my ornate mousehole. What I found instead was a rat-infested carnival of pestilence and despair.

Best laid plans

As base build🌸er fans often discover, there's an order to things. You start building with the more common resources dotted about the map, and as you tackle the research tree you'll delve deeper in order to gain rarer resources for more complex production lines. It's the basic survival game stepladder.

In starting a new game of Ratopia, you first need to build a City Gate to let in migrants. Then♚ you go about meeting their ever more elaborate needs as they become less and less comfortable with the initial asceticism of a frontier lifestyle. Your Ratizens quickly grow tired of snoozing on the cold ground witꦕh zero entertainment so you have to scramble early, earning enough research points to work your way through several research trees in quick succession.

While the research pipeline is relatively freeform, in that you're encouraged to specialize de༺pending on which resource you have greater access to, there's a core hierarchy of needs that have to be met early. Deviate from that and you'll have a hard time clawing back a single mistake, as I soon found out.

The rat race

For my third playthrough 🌠in tw🗹o days – I restart city builders a lot – I decided to go without the tutorial. I didn't see the need to go through it all again. I had the general gist. At least, I thought I did.

I spent a lot of this playthrough exploring, which brings in a steady flow of research points each time you return with a new resource. I then built myself a Laboratory to churn out and stack up even more research points before things got too heated. I thought I'd gamed it. I had a steady flow of research points, I'd locked in a🐻n easy food source. I'd even quelled their cries for a circus and went about my day. Little did I know the waveไ that was about to break over my humble hamlet.

After a few days of careful consideration, working out each aspect of my base in great detail – from the efficiency of its layout, to the color of the w꧑all hangings – it suddenly hit me. In the corner I spotted one of the many notifications I'd been ignoring for the past few hours of slogging away at my settlement, which noted that one of my Ratizens was sick. It was all downhill from th🐬ere.

Like the Plague

Having been so enthralled with micromanaging my little rat village to within an inch of its life, I'd forgotten one simple necessity: toilets. Apparently ꦛthe abundance of open pools dotted around wasn't enough for my bougie rodents – I suppose along with gaining 🌄sentience they'd relinquished their will to wash.

Despite a steady flow of research points, I wasn't pumping out nearly enough to see me through the process of rectifying a disease-ridden dominion. In order to heal my Ratizens I would need to build a toilet to head the plague off at the source. Easy enough. But to actually treat the Ratizens I'd nee𒁏d a hospital, which needed fabric and stone blocks – two things I had been willfully neglecting – as well as a pharmacy to make the medicine, and a kiln to fire the charcoal for it. In other words, a full-blown pharmaceutical production line. Not to mention the sheer rat power needed to get all this off the ground in time to save my people.

No. I was beaten. And in my attempts to emer♛ge from the plague infested hꦉellscape I had created, I thought fondly of the Rim and of squirrel invasions. As unforgiving as the Rimworld's storytellers can be, I found myself wishing for my happy place. Because in this delicate dance of survival, beady eyes begged at me for a cure I could not deliver. And in my hubris, I watched my rat empire fall.

Looking for recommendations to add to your wishlist? See what's on the horizon in our roundup of 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:upcoming indie games.

Over years of updates, reworks, and a full-blown pivot in philosophy, Star Wars Battlefront 2 has transformed from cautionary tale into cult favorite. What remains now is a slick, content-rich shooter that feels more like the game fans were promised – and a reminder that, in the right hands, even the most hated game can find its way back to the light side. Better yet, it's blowing up right now, with more players wandering back to the game every single day.

There are two reasons for the late-blooming success. The first is that Battlefront 2 feels like you're in Star Wars. At this stage you can play as everyone from Rey to Han Solo, pilot a screeching Tie Fighter or c💯harge with your friends into Naboo's capital city.

But the real secret, whisper it, is that Star Wars Ba🦄ttlefront 2 was always a pretty good game, but the progression system relied on loot boxes for some reason, and no amount of stormtroopers could make players forget how annoying it was to level up and then g🐻et nothing useful because of the random loot. It was a design decision so aggressively anti-player that it didn’t just ruffle feathers – it got government bodies talking about gambling in games. The backlash was swift and, in hindsight, probably the best thing that could’ve happened to the game.

A real fixer-upper

Under the sludge of poor monetization was something fans genuinely wanted: the fantasy of being in the middle of a Star Wars warzone. Not just playing as the ꦐbig names like Darth Vader or Yoda (though, yes, you can), but lining up as a clone trooper with your mates and pushing through tight corridors on Geonosis. Battlefront 2 understood the spectacle, the sounds, the feel of theꦡ galaxy far, far away in a way that few other Star Wars games quite managed. DICE, known for the Battlefield series, brought its trademark chaos and visual fidelity to the table – and when it all clicked, it clicked hard.

So what’s caused this resurgence? The second reason for Battlefront 2’s second wind is timing – some of it accidental, some of it not. I'd point to the success of shows like The Mandalorian and Andor, and a TikTok algorithm that seems to really love lightsaber kills.. And once people returned, what they found was a game that had quietly become one of the most complete Star Wars multiplayer experiences out there. No new monetization bait, no aggressive battle pass, just a deep pool of maps, modes, and heroes ready to be jumped into. Sure, you can spend money in Battlefront 2 𒀰if you want 🦄to, but it's not necessary and mostly for cosmetic reasons.

Part of the charm lies in just how fun it is now. The maps are dense with detail – from the decadent marble of Na꧅boo to the sun-scorched cliffs of Tatooine – and the game has been balanced over time to reward team play and moment-to-moment chaos, whether you want to squad up with your friends or run chaotic interference as a Sith Lord. You still get those cinematic multiplayer moments too. The blasters feel effective and every hero can kick arse, but I'm also wildly enthusiasꦓtic about the little assault class shotgun that you can pull out to cap someone at close range.

There’s something else at play here too: the community. Againstꦺ the odds, Battlefront 2 has developed an engaged fanbase. Hell, when I dropped in to play I found I was getting myself messed up by people who have been plugging away at the game since 2017, the video game equivalent of Japanese holdouts in the Pacific not realizing the war was over. The war, in this case, was over as soon as we met each other and they shot me to death with preternatural ability honed by years of playing a mostly dead game.

Look closely, and꧃ you can still see the cracks from where DICE performed kintsugi to turn Battlefront 2 into the best multiplayer Star Wars game out there. The live-service sheen ꧟is still visible in the bones of the UI, and there's only a few different weapons to fool around with. But in a world where AAA multiplayer games are constantly pushing new monetization gimmicks and early access asterisks, Battlefront 2 feels weirdly refreshing in its final form as a solid, complete game that respects your time.

Which leads to an awkward question – how did EA and DICE mess this up so badly in the first place? And what does it say about the games industry that Battlefront 2 had to nearly crash and burn just to end up where it probably should’ve been at launch? These are tough questions, but important ones, because the story of Battlefront 2 is the story of how fan pushback can make a difference – and how corporate course cor💟rection, when handled seriously, can actually result in something be🐲tter.

In the end, Battlefront 2 isn’t just a comeback story. It’s a cautionary tal♏e, a redemption arc, and a quiet triumph all rolled into one. It’s a reminder that good game design and fan trust go hand in hand𒆙 – and that sometimes, when you strip away the marketing bluster and revenue models, what’s left is a fucking good video game.

The🌱 servers are alive, the force is strong, and Battlefront 2 is finally the game it was always meant to be.

Star Wars Battlefront 3 hopefuls pour one out as EA is reportedly “focusing on a small handful of franchises” after cancelling Black Panther: “EA fumbled one of the biggest IPs in existence”

Suddenly the floodgates were open, and everyone had their own hopes for crossover game🌳s. Dream crossovers like Street Fighter Vs Mortal Kombat, Crash and Spyro, or Jak and Daxter teaming up with Ratchet and Clank, were becoming highly requested. Luckily for PS2 owners, one of the most obvious crossovers ever came to be when Metal Gear Solid crossed over with… Ape Escape.

Son-keys of Liberty

Okay, so, maybe Ape Escapeꦏ and Metal Gear aren't exactly a destined duo. But for whatever reason, the powers that be decided that for the tꦅhird entry in each series, Snake and the titular apes would cross paths. Reasons that even Snake's actor himself – David Hayter – was unaware of. "While we were recording MGS3, they just came in and handed me a script," he tells us, "and my first line was 'Snake Vs Monkey' and I could only ask, 'Why am I saying this?'"

The reason a state of emergency is declared: apes have escaped and fled to a Russian jungle, and the only people able to stop them – Spike and Jimmy – are away on summer vacation. With nowhere left to turn, the professor goes to Roy Campbell, who knows just the man for the job: the legendary soldier 🐠Solid Snake. Snake – begrudgingly – is ripped away from his own holiday at 2am and enters the jungle in search of Specter's mind-controlled simians.

"They just told me that it was a side-game and that was all," recalls Hayter, adding, "Y'know in Metal Gear, they ask you to say a🔴 lot of weird stuff; you just sort of roll with it." Sadly, aside from a small intro scene to set the stage, Hayter's voice talents weren't utilised during the minigame.

Snake Vs Monkey sends you through seven stages (each with a title that's a pun on a film's, such as 'Ape Fear' and 'The Apes Of Wrath') in which you musꦬt search for and catch those cheeky monkeys. It's a fairly simple minigame, reusing the level des🤪ign and mechanics of Metal Gear Solid 3 in a faithful recreation of Ape Escape. It even features a level set in the field where Naked Snake and the Boss have their final battle in one of MGS' most emotional moments, now filled with funny little monkeys. Hayter muses, "Y'know it's kind of the soul of Metal Gear; it goes from the sublime to the ridiculous."

While there are some fun touches, like a Shagohod-inspired ape mech in a couple of the stages, they are merely cosmetic; the game boils down to shooting targets with the EZ Gun and running into them. Still, for a small si🐭de-game in one of best games ever made, it's a fun distraction.

Snake Escape

Snake Vs Monkey could have easily been an enjoyable little side-game in MGS3 and that would've been the end of it. However, Japan Studio had other plans. When Ape Escape 🦋3 was released less than a year later, the developer had its own take on the crossover with the Mesal Gear Solid: Snake Escape minigame. That's no typo. 'Mesal' is a portmanteau of the Japanese words for 'metal' and 'monkey' – 'metaru' and 'saru'. Once again Snake would meet the apes; however, this time David Hayter would not be brought in to voice the legendary Metal Gear hero. "I think it's the first I'm hearing about it," Hayter exclaims when we ask.

Instead, the role was give🍌n to another Metal Gear Solid alumnus, Vulcan Raven actor Peter Lurie, who tells us that "someone who knew me from some of my other work came to me and said 'We really want you to play this part.'" Lurie was given very little information in advance. "It wasn't until I actually walked in there that I realised it was playing Snake, which I was a little surprised at but thought, why not? Let's see what happens."

Ape Escape's Professor is doing his laundry, when hܫe gets a call from his best pal from school, Colonel Roy Campbell. He informs Professor that he has lost contact with Snake, whꦛo was infiltrating a base to destroy the newest version of Mesal Gear, and needs help locating him. It turns out that a specially trained ape guerrilla force has commandeered the latest Mesal Gear and is demanding ten billion bananas within 72 hours or they will fire the mech's 'Lazy Cannon.' Campbell requests the help of the elite ape-catching force of Spike and Jimmy… who are once again away for the summer.

When all hope seems lost, Professor has the brilliant idea of uploading Snake's battle data into a monkey helmet, and thus Pipo Snake is born. In addition to the battle data, Pipo Snake also took on Snake's voice actor. Even though Lurie was pulling double duty, he quite enjoyed playing Snake's monkey variant, saying "they [non-verbal characters] can▨ be a lot more freeing because it can be left up to your own interpretation."

While Snake Vs Monkey is a touch underwhelming, all things considered, Mesal Gear Solid is shockingly ambitious. Set aside all the apes and the game feels like a legitimate Metal Gear Solid adventure. The opening areas emulate iconic scenes from MGS1, such as the elevator and the initial approach into Shadow Moses from the beginning of the game, as well as a fist fight on top of a destroyed mech from the finale. The game doesn't stick to co-opting areas from past Metal Gear games, however, and that old Ape Escape flair is soon added with levels inspired by the likes of Edo Japan and the Wild West. The developers even use small touches like cutscene direction, the way the guards patrol, and posters adorned with bikini-clad monkeys. All of these go to show 🐼that this was 🧜a true love letter to the greatest stealth series of all time rather than some half-baked crossover mandated by a publisher.

Bananas of the Patriots

So, how do you get into the mindset of a battle-hardened ape? According to Lurie: "If I remember correctly – and t💮his happens a lot with characters who don't speak 'the Queen's English' – you're given a 'We want a response and this is what emotion we want to convey.'" However, even when your dialogue is as simple as making 'oo-ki' noises, the direction is taken as seriously as any other. "There will be times where a director will tell you in a polite way 'That's really good but let's try it this way, remember, you're trying to convey this.'" Lu𝔉rie says that's "someone's subtle way of trying to say 'Yeah, that's not it.'"

Of course, the Metal Gear series is known for jumping between utmost seriousness and utter ridiculousness at the drop of a hat. Working on those games, it seems, acclimatises you to the extreme ends of the job. David Hayter agrees with this, saying, "It's kind of cool to create a world like that, where the serious stuff, tragic stuff, and hilarious stuff all comes together." He adds, "I think it's kind of comforting for people when the game developer i𒉰s confident enough to joke with you. That's the kind of stuff that fans come up and talk to me about all the time. I always feel like when a situation is dire people tend to joke, and, in a way, it sort of mirrors life."

A version of this article originally appeared in PLAY Magazine – 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:which printed its final issue in 2024. More stealth needed? 7 years on, Agent 47’s attempt to contain a deadly virus in Patient Zero brings the classic Hitman stealth action to an unmatched fever pitch

My god, Nightreign is so much better with friends. Granted, in my experience shoveling thousands of pounds of mulc✱h on a humid summer day is also much better with friends. Everything is. The friend buff is real. But the gulf between the solo and team experience in Nightreign is so massive, from coordinating abilities to sharing loot to managing aggro, that it's got me thinking about the merits of explicitly building your game with teams of three in mind, especially when you have limited in-game communication and no crossplay. Betting your game's experience on the player's ability to recruit two friends feels like a mistake.

Looking for one

This has been on my mind since the recent alpha for Marathon, which is also designed for teams of three. I actually had a lot of fun with the alpha when – here it comes – play🐬ing with two friends, but where Nightreign is simply grueling solo, Marathon feels completely unplayable alone. You would have to pay me to play that game with two randoms. It's like herding cats. In Nightreign, going alone is hard; in Marathon, it's standing in a field with your ass in the air and asking for a team to take your guns.

While both of these games have matchmaking that will put you in a team of three – and I'm frankly impressed with how stable the Nightreign servers have been in my limited experience – they do very little to help those teams coordinate and succeed and, you know, have fun. Adding matchmaking is the bare minimum. It's surviving. But I don't want to survive; I want to thrive, and other multiplayer games do this stuff so much better. You can ping things in Marathon, and N🐻ightreign lets you put a marker on the map to suggest where to go, but playing either game with two random players still feels like trying to staple rain to a tree.

Maybe – okay, definitely – some people have more patie🍃nce for this than I do, but I hate rolling the dice on whether my LFG teammates are going to enhance my evening or sabotage it. I'll let you guess the impact of the random mage who joined a buddy and I last night, and who seemed incapable of using their skill or ultimate but kindly gave us a lot of practice on how to revive downed teammates. I have an easier time tolerating that gamble when games help me steer the ship, but the matchmaking and communication in these two is a crapshoot.

There's been a lot of noise about Bungie omitting solo and duo queue (and also proximity chat) in Marathon, 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:among other deserved noise around t𒆙h⭕e game. FromSoftware has openly 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:admitted it goofed up and forgot that people might want to play Nightreign with just one friend, though it's considering adding bespoke duos in the future. And any raid leader can tell you that booking one friend is exponentially easier than getting two or, horror of horrors, more online at the same time. Why do you think so many peꦏople a🌊re specifically begging for a third in the Nightreign Reddit community? Your average gamer is an adult, the world is by and large hellacious, andꦇ life gets in the way. Gam🥃e nights are hard to coordinate!

On top of that, not everyone likes Souls games. This is a different formula for FromSoftware, but it's still Elden Ring. My Destiny and Monster Hunter buddies don't translate well to Nightreign. And that goes double for extraction shooters like Marathon. How did two of the most intense and demanding genres in gaming 🌳both decide that t🧸hey'd be just fine without multiplayer features that infinitely more approachable games figured out years ago?

Marathon, I realize, is an unfinished and unreleased game, but its intended launch is not far away and its established direction feels like a misread from Bungie, which should know better after 10 years of shepherding Destiny players and probably five years of studying other extraction shooters. Nightreign, to FromSoftware's credit, is already planning a patch that should make the solo exper🎃ience more fun. But I'm really hoping for more. Duo balancing, crossplay, in-game chat, smarter pings – I don't know how difficult or feasible it would be to add these in future patches, but I reckon they'd go a♎ long way to making this game more fun o𓄧n average.

For my money, that's what good matchmaking and multiplayer design does. Playing with friends sets the ceiling for fun. Playing with randoms is the floor. Good multiplayer systems narrow the gap between those two scenarios and give players a better average experience, ideally while helping them make and find lasting friends within the game. There are absolutely merits to multiplayer-first design – the co-op-only game 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Split Fiction is one of the best games of the year – but if studios are going to push teams of three this hard, they're going to have to do more to cultivate and support those teams. For the time being, when I can't wrangle some Nightreign buddies, 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:I'll be playing Fant💃asy Life i in✨stead.

Elden Ring Nightreign passes 2 million sales on its first day, despite a "Mixed" Steam rating and some of FromSoftware's lowest critic scores in years.

That's because the perfect hole isn't one that's been made specifically for me. In this instance, the journey really does beat the destination – the perfect hole is the one you dig yourself. Or, in my case, the one I spend every day resisting the urge to create. When my two-year-old husky digs in the garden, a possessed look in his eye, part of me bellows for him to stop and another, secret part of me craves to join him in the dirt. Digging rules. Holes rule. A Game About Digging A Hole, which is a short indi൩e game about digging a hole, rules.

Celebrity Skin

A Game About Digging A Hole begins with the player buying a puny, surfa🦩ce-level home. The home doesn't really matter. What matters are the rumors of buried treasure in its garden, and wouldn't you know it, you've brought a shovel! Somewhere down there is a wealth of riches (supposedly), and that's all you know – and frankly, need to know – before getting to work.

There's a mischievous joy, like eating someone else's chocolate, in taking your first scoop of dirt out of the pristine lawn. Unearthed soil handily disa🎃ppears – sorry, Realism Mode Diggers – but you do have to manage your battery, used up by digging, and your health, which🐽 tends to go down by falling into the product of said digging.

Learning nothing from 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Minecraft, I opted to dig directly down before realizing that I had no way of climbing back out. In this instance I had enough battery left to corkscrew-dig my way back up,🥀 but if you run out, you're teleported back to the garden without any of the stone or precious metals you may have found. These natural treasures can be sold in your garage, while the profit is used to heal, recharge your battery, and upgrade gear. That includes fairly grounded things like a larger battery size, extra inventory slots, and a wider digging radius for your shovel. But it can also be used to buy a jetpack – crucial for getting out of deeper holes despite it greedily sucking up your battery – along with single-use la🌌mps and dynamite.

As the materials you find become steadily more valuable (and upgrades predict✨ably pricier), A Game About Digging A Hole settles into a fairly straightforward formula. Dig as far down as you can, leaving just enough of your battery to jetpack back to the surface, then sell your goodies and spend cash before delving into the ground once more.

I'm a goblin in human flesh, so this is all I need to feel alive. My only hang-up is having to buy lamps, which make sure I can see what I'm doing when my hole spirals so deep I can no longer see the sky. I couldn't tell you why spending money on light irritates me so much – perhaps it's because gloom feels like an essential part of the subterranean experience – but even my long-professed love of the underground isn't enough to wo🌄rk in total darkness. Curse you, sun-spoiled eyes.

At this point, you know all there is to know about A Game About Digging A Hole aside from one little thing – the small matter of treasure – and that's not for me to spoil. If you're anything like me, you'll find minute satisfaction in every plunge of your shovel, the mere thought of turning a minor pothole into a cavern of Moria-esque proportions will feel like biting into forbidden fruit. is filled with positive reviews from people who Just Get It, with praise varying from "a religious experience" to those gra🐻ppling with an awakened "primal instinct" to d♈ig.

The game itself is short – don't expect more than an hour or two of play – but as the internet has become fond of saying, at $3.99 it costs less than a cup of coffee (how much are you all paying for coffee?) and delivers everything it promises. Having recently dug the foundations for a patio, I can also promise that it's much easier than the rea♒l thing. More importantly, it captures the same sense of playing god, of making the very ground we walk upon your own, and carving out your own domain beneath the dirt, and… look, maybe my dog is onto something, alright?

A Game About Digging A Hole is out now on PC. Here are the 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:upcoming indie games of 2025 we're most excited for.

In reality, of course, the title Hell is Us isn't just about the bizarre enemies Remi encounters as he returns to his home country, Hadea, in t🐲he middle of a particularly brutal civil war in 1993. His parents had smuggled him out of the hermit state country at a young age. But, compelled to return, he joins up with a peacekeeping force to get through the border before going AWOL to track down his parents – only to discover that as bloody as the civil war is, something that seems to defy reality itself is bubbling beneath the surface of its strange tombs.

'90s Circle of Hell

Hel😼l is Us' military aesthetic echoes the likes of M🐟etal Gear Solid and Death Stranding with its tactical gear and rain ponchos, and creative director and art director Jonathan Jacques-Belletête's time working on 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Deus Ex: Human Revolution and 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Deus Ex: Mankind Divided can be felt too in the angular sci-꧟fi elements. While a lot of my hands-on revolves around trudging through muddy trails and dark tombs, there are moments of beauty in the ruined vistas – one field of blue flowers in particular standing out as quite striking.

Just like the strange goopiness of the white Hollow Walkers, there's something almost unnaturally sleek to Remi's melee weapons, which he finds after encountering someone else wielding them. Normal guns are useless against the unnatural threats that stalk the land. Jacques-Belletête describes the off-kilter, out of place designs as "phantasmagorical". Remi is just as likely to stumble on a bizarre crypt full of smooth doorways and sickening, ritualistic lore notes about racial conflict in the region as he is to explore a ruined shack on the edge of a cemetery or poke around World War 1-style trenches. Importantly, though, both are here – an♐d the collision creates an un𓆏easy atmosphere.

Inspiration for the fictional Hadea has been taken from all over. Eastern Europe included, of course, but not solely as Jacques-Belletête finds it "a bit cliche" and doesn't wa💖nt to invite too much comparison with the likes of Stalker 2, which also has a military aesthetic and themes. He's also inspired by the British countryside, including the New Forest in particular – a place he calls "magic".

The idea is to bring the strangeness into these familiar feeling locations and have them live side by side. "I did a b❀it like what Disney was doing in the 30s, this fascination with the more fable-y Europe stuff," says Jacques-Belletête.

But, thematically, it's also "a bit like being in Cairo," he notes. "You're in a modern city, then you have those ginormous pyramids behind you that for the longest time [nobody] remembered what they really were – even today, we're not fully sure," he says, adding "the Sphinx was half buried under sand at one point". Hadea is built on top of something, but understanding it, even as you grapple with the consequences of it being u𝔍nleashed, is another 𝔍thing entirely.

The '90s setting, on the other hand, comes from observing the geopolitical landscape of the era. "It's as simple as this. It was a decade of civil war. You had the Bosnian war, you had Kosovo, you had Sierra Leone, you had one in Rwanda," says Jacques-Belletête. "There's still civil🎐 wars today, sadly, they happen all the time. Sometimes we don't even hear about some smaller on𓂃es. But in the '90s it was like a bloody trend. [We thought,] let's kind of thematically be there with them, temporally, chronologically."

It also adds to the sense of colliding aesthetics. Crunchy '90s analog technology is very recognizable and evocative, making it all the more obvious 🌼when Remi loads up with glowing swords and a high-tech drone that something is off. "But when you see computers in the game, when you see television units in the game, when you see things like that – it's like 'Oh yeah, yeah, okay, we're in the '90s'," says Jacques-Belletête.

Hell to pay

Just as aesthetics and technology create this off-beat mix, so too does Hell is Us find a unique cadence in play even as it takes some cues from other action adventure games. Jacques-Belletête takes some issues with soulslike comparisons. With that said, "It's a bit hard to ignore all the stuff that has come from the soulslike, from the FromSoftware combat in the past I would say 15 years," he says, adding that Hell is Us doesn't default to a brutal dif🍌ficulty, feature dropped experience points, or even have enemies respawn when you die (though that is an option if players want it). Combat, too, is only one part of Hell is Us' identity – some puzzles here will really make you think, and Remi will need to make use of a compass to explore discrete semi-open world areas.

Even so, when Remi gets stuck in medieval style with his huge swords, twin axes, polearms, or any number of glistening weaponry, things are quite soulslike in how they function. You mix together light attacks and heavier attacks (though these powerful blows require charging, more like 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:The Legend of Zelda, Jacques-Belletête notes). You lock-on, strafe, parry, riposte to open foes up to taking bigger damage. You warily turn corners lest you ge🥂t jꦛumped by enemies just out of sight.

The amount of blows you can dish out depends on stamina, the maximum of which is tied to your remaining health. Encouraging aggressive play is a healing pulse which gives you a chance to cash-in a sustained combo to restore your meters with a well-timed press of a shoulder button – a bit like the ki pulse in Nioh. It does mean that getting swarmed by Hollow Walkers can push the momen🌃tum against you, making it tough to get back on top – but my demo's standard difficulty isn't too tough, and without enemies respawning (though they will if you leave a map and come back), dying isn't too punishing either.

Helping you out further is your drone, which can be🌳 modified with different abilities. Introduced early is a distraction mode that can temporarily stun an enemy in a group, useful for taking the heat off me when two beefy enemies take center stage. Returning to the umbilical cords mentioned at the beginning, this can be a big help with those – split Hollows like this won't die until both an enemy's main body and its weird♛ blocky other self are taken out together. Later on, the drone allows me to pull off some stronger special moves on a cooldown to help in a pinch like a Crash Bandicoot-style spin attack.

Exploration in Hell is Us, on the other hand, is deliberately very hands-off, looking to empower players to find their own way by asking NPCs about the world, collecting keywords to probe further, and using a compass to chart your own course through semi-open areas. Puzzles and clues lie off the beaten track to complete optional investigations (yes, Remi's data pad even has a little digital clue board). While the likes of 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Dark Souls also emphasize exploration, and Hell is Us' dungeons are a similar network of tunnels and shortcuts, the wide zones Remi explores have much more in common with the likes of 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Stalker 2 or Atomfall.

Carrying a compass at all times, I'm able to activate it to temporarily add a UI element that shows the direction I'm heading in. Quite often, information given by NPCs will point me on a path that requires self-navigation, the introdꦬuction having me hunt down a dying soldier's supply camp to the north-east. At other times, turned around in dungeons, it can simply reassure me I'm heading back the way I came.

Characters in the world nudge Remi to check out features of the environment – whether it's pointing him to a map to follow in the footsteps of a squad of soldiers that requires you to o🎐rient yourself, to tasking you with following wind chimes through a forest. At its best moments, Hell is Us constantly reminds you that Hadea is a space that exists fo🌄r these characters.

Whi💟le Remi can track the main objective in his datapad – through notes he's learneꦯd rather than any explicit quest logs – plenty lies of the beaten track to explore. In the small opening dungeon, I find a heavy door locked with grooves for animal medallions, though having found a different key item I'm free to move on and leave this puzzle if I want. Likewise, able to then move from one map to the next, forgoing the mode of transportation means I stumble on a whole other mysterious structure on the other side of a hill.

"There's multi map spanning secrets and things that evolve," teases Jacques-Belle💦tête. You always have the option to return to past areas, and may sometimes need to. While following the main story has been designed to not be too confusing, he says they allowed them to be less forgiving with peripheral mysteries. "Good luck! You take your grid paper – I'm exaggerating, it's not a dungeon crawler – but, you know what I mean. Take your notepad, take a pencil, because you'll probably need it," he laughs.

Datums – essentially keywords and nuggets of information Remi collects and notes – don't just allow you to keep track of what's going on, but are used to askℱ NPCs more about the world of Hell is Us. Hadea feels lived in even as many are dying – atrocities committed by humans in the civil war conflict often just as, if not more, grim than the supernatural threat itself. I've only met a fraction of Hadea's survivors, but there have been some stomach churning situations.

I'm keen to see more about how it fits༺ altogether, but Hell is Us is shaping up to be something quite unique. "There's like a setup now that if you see it on a screenshot it's like 'ah, it's a soulslike'," says Jacques-Belletête. "But if you actually analyze what that means [...] it's not necessarily true."

There are a lot of throughlines, but I do agree that it can be reductive. While the tech drone powers can seem a little The Surge, and the goopy enemies and pointy melee combat a bit Mortal Shell, the mix of elements in Hell is Us really isn't quite like anything else. I'm looking forward to further plumbing the phantasmagorical tombs beneath this bloody civil war – ev♏en if I'm certain plenty of grim discoveries lie in wait for Remi yet.

What else is coming up? Check out our 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:new games of 2025 highlights!

I've put about 18 hours into Fantasy Life i since its launch on PS5, PS4, Xbox Series X, Nintendo Switch, and PC. (I'm playing on PC, and the game has annoyingly crashed twice, but thankfully with no save or recovery issues.) Most of that was in the past few days. GOTY frontrunners like Blue Prince and Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 were predictably enjoyable, but this is the first time since 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Monster Hunter Wilds that a game has well and truly consumed me. Every non🐽-essential in my day has been sacrificed at the altar of Fantasy Life. Anything to squeeze in another hour of fun.

Welcome back

Fantasy Life i presents itself with charm and color and comedy, and behind that is an airtight loop of systems and ideas that feed into each other in engrossing ways. You have 14 Lives to learn and master; these are basically classes focusing on combat, gathering, or production. Hunt monsters as a greatsword-wielding Mercenary, swap to Miner mid-dungeon to clobber a boss-grade ore vein, then take those materials back to your island base to refine them as a Blacksmith, Carpenter, or Tailor. Forge a stronger sword to fight tougher monsters and get rare materials to finish Life challenges to increase your rank and expand your skill tree. Craft a better sawꦫ to craft a better axe to cut better trees to craft a better bow💫. On and on and on.

The whole game is a daisy chain of serotonin. Every accomplishment sets off dominoes in your mind, and every grind is so strai🎃ghtforward and punchy that you never feel stuck in one place. Missing a material? Here's where to get it. Something fun and unexpected, whether a new side quest or a hidden collectible, will probably happen on your way there. You are never doing just one thing in Fantasy Life i. If you are, you're doing it wrong. It's the best kind of wanderlust.

This is what my average session looks like. I need to hunt this boss for a challenge to level my second combat job. And l mean, I'm here, so may as well hit these freshly respawned legendary trees and fish on the way. Oh, there's a hidden dungeon down this well by the fish's lake, which I heard about from NPCs because they're actually worth talking to. I'd better explore that first, and oh man, the ꦛore down here unlocks a new tier of Alchemist items. Now I can make better potions to bring to that boss fight, which I'm going to have to do tomorrow because it is suddenly 2am on a work night.

It is hard to believe, and convey, just how much game is in this game. After 18 hours I feel 10% done, yet I'm never overwhelmed, just hungry for more. And there is, somehow, always more. You can find and level NPCs who give you specific buffs when you're crafting or fighting, and they all have their own friendship meters. There's an entire roguelike dungeon mode that creatively challenges you to clear encounters using different Life skills. You can decorate your house and terraform a big island filled with your favorite NPCs. A huge open-world section has its own progression systems, subplot, and quests. Plus you can do a lot of this stuff, particularly the roguelike dungeons, with friends in crossplay multiplayer. And I am still in the early hours of this game.

I couldn't ask for more. I wouldn't have thought to ask for all this. Combat feels great, the crafting minigames are fast and intuitive as ever, and this is hands-down the most fun you can have chopping trees or mining rocks in a♐ video game. Every Life I've tried has been a blast, and figuring out how to work each one into this grand cycle of progression, from making new gear to clearing specific thresholds, just activates my neurons. So far, Fantasy Life i is everything I wanted twice over, and I love it more every day.

Fantasy Life i: The Girl Who Steals Time is getting free DLC with new recipes and other cozy goodness due to "the game's global success and the warm support from players around the world."

When I speak with him ahead of launch, Ishizaki seems contemplative. I ask him to walk me through the very beginnings of this game, which heܫ's been thinking about since development on Da▨rk Souls 3. Elden Ring, in all its hugeness, gave him the foothold he needed. He never thought he'd be the one directing it, let alone that FromSoftware boss and Souls maestro Hidetaka Miyazaki woulꦐd specifically push for him to take the reins.

A new challenge

"To have that opportunity finally presented to me, ꦚI was frankly very excited, and I couldn't believe that this opportunity had finally come," he says. "So it was extremely exciting, but at the same time, of course, you feel, wow, is this really happening? Is this really something I'm going to do? Is this really something I can🔜 do? So again, mixed portions of excitement and nerves, but I'm extremely honored and happy to have been given that chance."

Ishizaki says he'd love to direct again, especially now that he's gotten more of a feel for the role. At the start, he thought he might have "fu🌞ll control" over everything as director. He soon realized yet again that "games these days are way too big in scope, and it quickly became important to me to suppress my own emotions and ego and take input from all sorts o🅘f parts of the team and project." He reflects on the "fork in the road" of the game's pacey three-day structure, which prompted "some concerns" within the studio at first, and it seems he's also been feeling out how to find what a game "wants to be."

"From conception to finding the idea of what the game wants to be and what I feel it should be, there are a lot of difficulties, and there's a lot of points you have to overcome in o🌄rder to accept that," he says. "You have to go into these things being prepared to explain your ideas to the team and to sort of overcome these difficulties. But during that process, there come these moments where you find something that just feels pure fun, and you just have to try to lock into that. It's an ongoing process that occurs every day.

"Every day you try to find something new and something fun to lock into, something that's giving you that i♛dea and that motivation to keep going. So this is kind of how I feel the process went with Nightreign, and we'll see how it pans out for a future project."

More multiplayer

FromSoftware, it seems, has locked onto something new. Nightreign gained new meaning after the reveal of 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:The Duskbloods, the studio's 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Nintendo Switch 2-exclusive PvPvE title due in 2026. Another multiplayer-focuse꧟d game, so soon? Some fans, who are specifically here🔜 after the studio's string of single-player triumphs, were perplexed or concerned.

Ishizaki, an outspoken fan of multiplayer, reiterates what Miyazaki sꦺaid previously: FromSoftware isn't changing its DNA by dabbling more in multiplayer. Nightre⛎ign is an extension of the studio's design philosophy, not a rejection of it.

"Of course, I can't personally speak t🔥o what FromSoftware as a company might make in the future," he begins, "but in terms of the types of experiences we're all aiming to create, we're always looking to make something valuable in our games, something that feels worthwhile to play, that you come away from it and feel satisfied like that was a good use of your time. And I think that's the crux of what makes our titles and what we keep in mind with everything we develop.

"We've had these two titles, Nightreign and the recently announced Duskbloods, with multiplayer at their core. But that's not necessarily to say that we are leaning in that specific di𒅌rection going forward. Iཧ think this is simply a result of ideas and interests taking shape in the company across various departments and various titles. I think there's a little bit of serendipity involved there. But personally, I feel that multiplayer is a very interesting aspect to explore, and I think users will find that both these titles are very different and something else to enjoy along with our back catalog."

Despite reusing many assets, even Nightreign is meaningfully different. It treats Elden Ring "as a base," Ishizaki reckons, but you don't need to play the original game before diving in here. "We feel that the gameplay is a key part of Nightreign that differentiates it from Elden Ring, as well as our other previous Soulslike titles," he says. "If you're familiar with Elden Ring, you might have some preconceptions going in☂ and some ideas of what to expect, but it's ultimately a very different experience, and we're excited for new players to jump in and make this their first FromSoft game."

What's next

Especially after the sky-high success of Elden Ring, 澳洲幸运🎶5开奖号码历史查询:which just rec🍸ently topped 30 million copies sold, there was a reasonable expectation that FromSoftware would double down. It felt like the capstone of🌼 Souls games, and clearly this kind of game can soar. Surely there are more coming. And there are, surely, more coming; Nightreign and The Duskbloods just come first.🐲 Ishizaki says "I am sure there's still many things that we're looking to challenge and experiment with in future. So we look forward to the continued support and blessings of players and media alike."

"This is a condensed RPG," Ishizaki concl🎉udes. "There's a short time span in which a lot of exhilarating and dramatic events can happen. We wanted this to be the focus of Nightreign, to create these dramatic and dynamic play sessions, and to have all of these emotions and these peaks and troughs occur during any one single session. This was a challenge for us to make in this short time span, as well. But we hope that users will appreciate this new challenge and appreciate this new game flow with Nightreign. We're really looking forward to it."

Our 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Elden Ring Nightreign review arrived alongside dozens of others calling it a well-executed idea held back by a punishing solo experience. The scores are pretty good across the board. Nightreign has settled as the lowest-rated Fr🍰omSoft game in several years, but that ain't bad for an experimental project competing 🏅with some of the most acclaimed games in the industry.

After playing an early build of Nightreign, I'm personally excited for launch today, May 29. (Our 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Elden Ring Nightreign live coverage has all the unfurling details in one place.) Assuming the servers hold – Ishizaki laughs out loud when I ask about plans for worst-case scenarios, ꦑbut says they've prep🅠ped all they can for the launch rush – the multiplayer buff, the peerless fun multiplier of playing with friends, could bump this game up a notch provided you've got buddies to spare. Th♏ere's always matchmaking if you don't. And FromSoftware has largely made the same type of game for over a decade, so I'm thrilled to see it step outside the box a little, even if the box is still comfortably in The Lands Between.

Elden Ring Nightreign release time – FromSoftware's new co-op roguelike is almost here.

But that's just it. The new demo is a short and sweet taster of the creepy mayhem yet to come in Quest Craft's upcoming new game, providing just enough of an introduction to Ghost Keeper's RTS and management systems to get you hooked. It certainly worked for me, and I'll likely be replaying the demo over and over again just to🅷 see how many kooky w🌟ays I can kill off or scare off those foolish mortals.

Cunning plan

My first mission iꦡn Ghost Keeper is simple: free Phineas the Mad, a trapped poltergeist stuck in a broken elevator. This first level takes place in Phineas' mansion, though sadly, he is rather dead. That means there's plenty of humans simply walking about his former home, and it's my job as Ghost Keeper𒊎 to help the phantoms regain control of their haunt.

The ꦇdemo is essentially a long tutorial. I'm quickly introduced to the basics: I have two out of three ghosts currently available to summon and recall as needed, and can place them iꦅn any room in the three-storey mansion. Each ghost has its own requisite powers, and it's through harnessing each one's skillset that I'm able to manipulate the wandering mortals to do my bidding – including setting Phineas free.

Night Blade, the assassin, excels at flickering lig🃏hts, stalking mortals in the shadows, and locking all doors in a room to trap his prey inside. Meanwhile, William has a 𒁏bit more offense utility. He can set mortals ablaze with Wild Fire, cause household objects to malfunction, and draw unsuspecting mortals to his location using a Whisper skill.

Each of these actions costs some ghost energy, with each ghost starting with 100 energy points, and some of them increase their visibility. That makes it a bit of a give and take situation, as if a ghost's visibility meter maxes out or they use allꦍ their energy points, they are rendered unusable – or worse, vacuumed up🌟 by a member of the ghost-hunting Brotherhood. See what I mean by reverse Ghostbusters? I'll get to those guys in just a moment.

Despite how the first part of the Ghost Keeper demo is largely about freeing Phineas, the real fun begins once I do so. Now, I have access to all three spirits, and can finally amp up the hauntings! However, freeing Phineas causes enough spooky occurrences that the mortal residents of his once-glorious mansion have called upon the Brotherhood to help rid them of their paranormal predicament⛄.

Mischief management

As mentioned earlier, the Brotherhood patrol the house as wandering spirit hunters. They are a lot harder to scare than regular mortals – their fear meter has 300 charges, whereas the househoꦡld inhabitants have 120 apiece – but it can be done. I now have full rein of the house,🗹 the ghosts, and all their skills, meaning it's time to scare or slay the night away.

Scaring mortals using Night Blade's haunting skills causes their purple fear meter to fill up, shown beneath their p𝐆ortraits along the top right-hand corner of the screen. Fill it all the way, and the mortal runs screaming from the house to escape. Alternatively, I can chip away at their green health 🐼bars to kill them off instead – and this turns out to be my favorite way to handle things.

Call me s𓆉adistic, but there's a smug satisfaction in using a combination of ghosts to achieve creative death situations. Taking advantage of the pause ♋button to do so, I manage to catch two of the three mortal residents in the dining room, trap them there with Night Blade, and immolate them with William.

I also throw out a fe🅺w other spooky tricks and treats to increase the level of haunting (charted by the amount of green ectoplasm spattered across a given room) like making a table levitate or bursting a nearby pipe. Then, when everyone is nice and terrified (or on fire), I send Phineas in to perform an Ectoplasmic Explosion and deal some extra damage.

Sure, it's only May, but I'm glad Ghost Keeper brings Halloween early with this nifty little de✤mo. I might have run into a couple of bugs, but if I did, I didn't notice them – except for the one time I was unable to summon Phineas, despite him having zero visibility and 87 ghost energy, forcing me to restart the whole level from scratch.

I wasn't mad about it, though. It just gave me another opportunity to think outside the pine box and come up with mischievous new ways to achieve☂ the same goal. And if that's noꩲt the whole point of an RTS game, I don't know what is.

Check out some of the 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:best free Steam games for more credit card-free experiences just waiting to be downloaded

Announced during the 2025 Xbox Developer Direct showcase, Ninja Gaiden 4 will introduce us to a new martial arts genius from the Raven clan called Yakumo. While series staple Ryu Hayabusa is still in the story as a playable character, Yakumo will be our primary protagonist this time around and will be bringing with him a ton of cool new combat features, as well as a new chapter to the long-running series. Change can be scary, but from gameplay footage, trailers, and information from the dev team, we're confident that newcomers and Ninja Gaiden veterans alike will have plenty of reasons to get excited about this 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:upcoming Xbox game.

So, if you want to get on the Ninja hype train, keep reading as we take you through everything that you need to know about one of the 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:best action games on the near horizon. From the Ninja Gaiden 4 release window, gameplay details, story, and more,🉐 you'll find all the latest news and insights right here.

Ninja Gaiden 4 release date speculation

Ninja Gaiden 4 is set to release sometime in 2025. 𝔍This big news was revealed during the Xbox ꦑDeveloper Direct 2025 live stream back in January. So, we are due an update soon for sure.

We do know that the game will release during either Q3 or Q4 of 2025. This essentially means that it can occur anytime from July to December. However, we have our fingers crossed that a firm release date will be announced during the 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Summer Game Fest 2025 schedule. We'll keep you♉ posted as more news heads our way!

Ninja Gaiden 4 platforms

Ninja Gaiden 4 has been confirmed to be heading to Xbox Series X, PC, and PS5. The good news is that it'll also be included with the Xbox Game Pass subscri♒ption from day one of its release!

It's always great to see a release be available across multiple platforms straight away. But we're still waiting to see if it'll also be added to our list of 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:upcoming Switch 2 games in🦄 the future. Nintendo's new console has been receiving more and more big games, so it'sꦜ possible that Ninja Gaiden 4 will make its way there, too. Stay tuned for updates.

Ninja Gaiden 4 trailer

We got our first trailer for Ninja Gaiden 4 during the Xbox Developer Direct 2025 live stream, and it's stunning. ⛄Not only does it offer a detailed look at a cyberpunk Tokyo that is gripped by cursed rain, but we also get an action-heavy introduction to the new hero, Yakumo. You can watch the teaser for yourself aboveꦯ!

Ninja Gaiden 4 story and setting

Ninja Gaiden 4 is set in a time period after the eve🍷nts of Ninja Gaiden 3 in an abandoned futuristic Tokyo that is plagued by chaos caused bꦅy the ever-looming husk of the Dark Dragon. The trailer announcing the game gave us a pretty good introduction to the world of the title, explaining the dark cyberpunk-like setting.

"Several years ago, the Dark Dragon, youngest of the Divine Dragon Gods, wreaked havoc across the world," a voice over tells us, while the camera in the teaser sweeps across a dark cityscape under a massive dragon skeleton. However, before the evil villain could complete his nefarious scheme, we lea𒁃rn that a "sole ninja" stopped him. But it wasn't a total victory as the Dark Dragon's Husk remained and caused an endless downpour of cursed rain called "꧋Rain of Darkrot". The rain means that the Dark Dragon is still alive and that peace cannot be obtained until the rain is fully stopped.

Ninja Gaide🅷n 4's story follows a young ninja called Yakumo, who uses a fighting technique called Bloodraven Form♐. This allows the ninja to manipulate blood and create powerful attacks. Ryu Hayabusa ( the previous protagonist in the other Ninja Gaiden games) will also show up in this new outing. Currently, it's unclear how the two characters will interact with one another or what their end goal is. However, it seems like the action will revolve around fully defeating what is left of the Dark Dragon and stopping the "Rain of Darkrot" curse. We'll keep you posted as more details head our way.

We also know that the current state of Tokyo is due to the dealings of an organization called the "Divine Dragon Order". ꧂Yakumo will have to face off against members of the groupꩲ regularly during his mission. They are guarding the Dark Dragon's seal. Demons are also on the loose, and Fiends are back in action here.

Ninja Gaiden 4 gameplay

Ninja Gaiden 4 is a Hack and Slash action game that will have you battling enemie🔴s with furious colourful flurries and satisfying combos. Developed by Team Ninja and PlatinumGames, relentless, fast, but fair combat is the main focus of the game. Meaning that if you're a thrill seeker with a strategic mind, this will be right up your street

In fact, if you need any more convincing that the upcoming game will be the snappy action affair of the year, Team Ninja director Fumihiko Yasuda said 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:during the Xbox Devel𒉰oper Direct 2💝025 showcase: "We are excited to announce Ninja Gaiden 4, a new mainline entry in this high-speed action series, wher📖e you become the ultimate ninja and take on relentless enemies in fierce combat."

In Ninja Gaiden 4, you'll have plenty of enemies to face at every turn, and we also know from gameplay footage that as you progress through the story, you'll have to deal with the environment working against you as the curse tries to destroy everything. This means buildings will c🏅ollapse and roads will warp, 🐟creating more of a challenge as Yakumo tries to complete his mission.

Yakumo will also utilize several Ninja tools and techniques when it comes to combat. This includes his cool Bloodraven Form, which allows him to manipulate his own blood and that of his enemies to perform꧒ powerful attacks. "Nue" style is another feature for Yakumo that lets him take out hordes of enemies at once, turning the tide whenever he is outnumbered. Speed of battles has been heightened in Ninja Gaiden 4, and we also have never seen before far-range instant kill attacks to look forward to!

Players will also get to play as Ryu, who has a vastly different fig⛄hting style from Yakumo. This means that there are tons of different ways that players can approach combat and play the game. There are legacy moves for veterans and new moves for everyone to dig into with both characters. So don't feel as if you're trapped by one particular playstyle!

Finally, players will also get to travel to different locations via rail gliding, swinging through gaps, and more. You'll want to explore the map as well since there are also plenty of challenges, scenarios🦩, and hidden items waiting to be di💙scovered.

Can you pre-order Ninja Gaiden 4?

Sorry, folks, but you currently can't pre-𓆏order Ninja Gaiden 4. However, you can wishlist the game on the platform of your choice! The game currently has a page live on Steam, Microsoft, and the PlayStation Store.

While we wait for updates to go live, you can also explore our thoughts on 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Ninja Gaiden 2 Black, which was released earlier this year.

For more new releases, check out our guides on all the 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:upcoming PS5 games and 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:new PC games heading our way.

After watching two of Warhorse Studios' finest give lectures at Digital Dragons 2025, I catch up with audio director Vojtěch Nedvěd to speak more about how the game strikes this razor-fine balance between stylish medieval movie and gritty historical realism. And, of course, how to record ꦫbelievable fart noises.

Rhyme and reason

When𒅌 composer Jan Valta begins his lecture – more of a standup set at times, given the frequent one-liners and subsequent guffaws from the full-house audience – he gets right to business.

Namely, describing the three guiding style principles that game director Daniel Vávra outlined for Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2's sound design. He reels them off speedily: "an ancient feel, '70s and '80s-style Czechoslovakian wave m🔯usic, and orchestra music only i𒈔n cutscenes."

So what did Valta change? "Well, orchestra music is almost everywhere," he says gleefully, ♚the audience tittering in appreciation. "I believe it's the best thing to score virtually anything [with]. It's the only really universal thing you can use anywhere.

"Of course, you need to know what you can or what you cannot do for a particular project," Valta explains. "I knew I was gonna ཧneed a lo🦂t of medieval spice to put on top of it, you know, because otherwise I would lose the connection with the 15th century. And that would be very bad," he says solemnly.

But orchestral sound limita💃tions aren't the only part of Vávra's vision that the composer tweaked for the game's final version. Regarding the strong focus on authentic period music, Valta compromised by only includi⛦ng it for "diegetic or semi diegetic or quasi diegetic" purposes.

That means if a certain kind of in-world music is not being played in a given scene, you won't hear it as the player – as outlined in Valta's example of the Gregorian chant heard in and around the monastery. Finally, Valta wanted to use music only when necessary, a🥀nd that means a score that's very comfortable with moments of silence.

"The best effect you can have with music is that it starts playing. Because, you know, everybody notices that,"💮 he says. "The second best tool you can have is that it ends, and it doesn't play anymore. And the funny part of being a composer is that you are paid for whatever🗹 is in between."

It all feeds into the stylized realism that Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 aims to de🎐liver – a fine balancing act that's also reflected in the smaller diegetic sounds you might have missed along the way.

Immersion diversion

Despite the composition and sound design teams being pretty discrete entities at Warhorse Studios, the key principles that guided Valta's department were present in audio director Vojtěch Nedvěd's, too. An interest in cinematic film scores, especially the work of 🦄Czech composer Daniel Glick in the 1967 movie Marketa Lazarová, governed this approach.

"The music [in Marketa Lazarová] is borderline music-sound design. He uses the humaℱn voice quite a lot, too, and I tried to do it in a KCD2 as well – like, do this really raw, dark approach when it's needed, because these movies are really dark. I tried to put something of that in the game when th🐻e game asked for it," he says of the balance between sound effects and music composition.

Nedvěd also took inspiration from the Ishar trilogy – a series of old-school '90s RPGs that🐻, sadly, nobody else in the room had heard of – and the mag💧ic of pitch variation to communicate the spatial aspects of diegetic sounds, from crowds of people speaking Czech languages at the marketplace to rain, birdsong, and more.

Nedvě𒊎d personally oversaw the 95% of sound recordings that comprise the game's slew of sound effects and atmospheric elements – including the retch🐽ing you hear when Henry and Hans have one too many at the tavern. That stomach-turning gagging? Yep, that's him.

"We were having so much fun trying not to overdo it," Nedvěd tells later of the hands-on recording approach. "And when we are doing a sound like this for the open world, we go step further and we 🐼just try♏ to be as realistic as possible without being ugly about it.

"Not just barfing, but farting, for example – we recorded farting in a bucket and I used some empty plastic bottle for that," he laughs. "I'm not that realistic – I'm no💖t putting myself in that situation."

But why even bother recording everything, even the icky fart jokes and body humor so♋und effects, when sound banks exist? "I hate taking sounds from the banks," Nedvěd says plainly of 🍰his preference for foley recordings, "and we were lucky to have three environments when we where we recorded the sounds."

In escalating order of preference, these environments are the sound studio, motive studio, and 🅷field shoots. With four or more microphones set up to record the sound of something as basic and omnipresent in the game as a medieval bow and arrow being fired outdoors, the painstaking amount of detail is apparent – and, according to Nedvěd, it's completely non-negotiable. "KCD2 is a realistic game and so the sound design should be like this. It should be realistic."

Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2's stylized historical realism is thereby reflected in the nitty-gritty of the game's sound design, rightꦰ down to setting up on-site shoots at medieval villages to record the noises made by period-specific, wooden-hinged doors. It all goes to show that even with seven years of development in the bag, the little things really do ma൩ke all the difference in a hugely immersive RPG like Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 – from barfing to battle symphonies and beyond.

There's more RPG mayhem to come in some of the 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:upcoming PS5 games on the horizon in 2025

That can't be said about, for instance, Daggerfall. The sophomore Elder Scrolls game has more in common with a fantasy life sim🃏ulator than a modern open-world RPG. This is a game where becoming a vampire means sunlight will kill you in a matter of minutes, you can learn conversational Spriggan, take out a loan from the bank, and buy a boat to sail across a procedurally generated world so massive that it w﷽ould take to cross it on foot.

Oblivion is a fantastic game, but you can throw a stone at a random Steam page and hit a game that lives in its long shadow. Today, Daggerfall remains bold, unique, and wonderfully weird with few comparable analogs. It's also barely playable on modern systems without use of a fanmade remake. These things should make it an ideal candidate for an official remaster – it's more♌ ambitious than the comparatively primitive Arena and even stranger than the comparatively accessible Morrowind – but I suspect one thing holds it back. Daggerfall might be too weird to remake, at least to the same extent that Oblivion has seen.

Daggersprawl

The most pressing issue is that Daggerfall is huge. Frankly, it's too huge. There's a reason the size of Elder Scrolls games was♓ reined in as their fidelity went up with Morrowind and beyond; handcrafting anything on that scale in 3D would be a nightmare. Nearly all of Daggerfall is procedurally generated a♕nd represented by simple polygonal objects and generic 2D sprites. It might be nearly , but it's a hell of a lot blurrier.

Even quest ob🧔jectives, of which there are a theoretically infinite amount, mostly pull from repetitive scripts that fill in the blanks with random NPCs and points of interest. Daggerfall gets away with this because quests primarily serve to prod you around the world so emergent things happen along the journey, and fast travel allows you to simulate going hundreds of miles in mere seconds. Assuming you could recreate the world and all its nightmarish dungeon labyrinths with modern visuals, the majority of it would 🔯still be skipped over with fast travel by anyone looking to complete the game in less than a lifetime.

NPCs are similarly lo-fi in the interest of being all-purpose. Most exist to be asked about nearby factions and points of interest, and to fill in when a procedurally generated quest needs it. Some are little more than set dressing that can't even be so much as pickpocketed. With so much dialog and so many disparate NPC, the addition of much voice acting would be infeasible and any increased fidelity would only highlight how uncanny they are when treated as real characters. In the same way that part of Oblivion's charm is its wonky NPC conversations and comical bugs, part of Daggerfall's charm is the spartan visual style that all🥂ows your imagination to take the reins.

The elephant on the moon

If you'veꦏ kept up with Bethesda RPGs for the last few years, some of these issues might sound familiar. Samey radia🎃nt quests, a world so big that fast travel is the only reasonable way to get around, uncanny NPCs (many of whom just stand around waiting to be talked to) – all these things that delight in Daggerfall as janky '90s charm are very real problems in Starfield. Starfield is bigger than and graphically superior to Daggerfall, but its dialog system is simpler, its NPCs feel lifeless, and its less diverse dungeons quickly blend together. Why one game works and another doesn't is a different discussion entirely, but it's evidence that building an inconceivably huge sandbox RPG is an ambitious risk, even for a developer as seasoned as Bethesda.

It begs the question: even if Bethesd🐻a or Virtuos were up to t✱he task of remaking Daggerfall, would it be worth the effort?

Rather than try to overhaul it completely or give it visuals on par with Oblivion Remastered, Bethesda could just touch it up and help it play nice on modern machines at a decent resolution. The problem is, fans have already done that for them with the exceptional 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Daggerfall Unity. Even so, the game remains quite niche among 🤡its cult following that, while dedicated, isn't nearly as massive as the mil🔥lions that show up to buy each new Skyrim re-release.

The Elder Scrolls series took a deliberate trajectory in a different direction, slowly favoring streamlined roleplay and buildcrafting systems to highlight handcrafted, action-heavy, blockbuster questlines. Tඣhat approach is mismatched with Daggerfall's systems-led sandbox, and as such, would stick out like a sore thumb next to Bethesda's newest games. To RPG or sim enthusiasts, Oblivion may look pedestrian next to Daggerfall. But it also sold a million more copies and laid the groundwork for Skyrim, one of the most popular games ever made.

I definitely wouldn't mind being proven wrong with a remake that serves up Daggerfall with the level of visual splendor my imagination reconstructs it with in my memories of it. However, I think its strange, offbeat appeal is just that, and Oblivion is such a comparatively safe choice for a remaster that I wouldn't be surprise𒐪d if Bethesda's next target for a remake was Skyrim.

We'll be waiting a long time for Daggerfall's makeover - here are the澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询: best RPGs you can play right now

A few contracts into Oblivion's Dark Brotherhood line, you're sent after a mystery figure. All Vicente can tell you is his name, and the fact that he's a High Elf who goes for long walks around the Imperial City. Clearly, there was some sleuthing to be done, so I headed to the Elven Garden District, figuring that would be the best place to get a lead on ♉an enigmatic Elf.

It didn't take long until I had my lead. My target, Faelian, could often be seen wandering around the Tiber Septim Hotel. From there, he'd be easy to find, but my contract required him to be killed in secret, so that his death might look like just another murder. I'd have to follow him, work out where he goes – so to make sure I'd have an excuse for loitering around the fanciest hotel in the Empire, I booked a room for the nigh🍌t.

True Detective

Of course, this is an Elder Scrolls game, and no-one would have batted an eyelid if I'd simply stood outside Faelian's door for 24 hours straight. But my decision to actually stake out my target was a marked departure from a playstyle that had previously hinged around repeatedly battering my enemies to death in Oblivion Remastered's Arena. Suddenly, I felt like I wanted to take my time, 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:and play things out in a more subtle way.

My patience paid off. I located Faelian, but even though he managed to slip awa🐈y as I waited for the coast to clear, he left behind his long-suffering girlfriend. She was quick to tell me that her boyfriend is addicted to skooma, and that she'd followed him to an abandoned house elsewhere in theও city. Knowing that I'd eventually catch him there, I headed to his skooma haunt, picked the lock, and settled in for my stakeout.

Knowing that I had plenty of time – this was early afternoon and I knew Faelian left the hotel in the early hours of the morning – I scoped out the house. For the most part, I found shattered furniture and a few bottles of skooma that I'm yet to find a better use for, but I also discovered the body of the house's former occupant lying in a pool of his own blood in the basement. As a member of the Dark Brotherhood, it's not really up to me to decide who de🌊serves to be assassinated, but it's nice to know that my target (probably) deserves his fate.

Patience is a virtue

Having cleared the house of everytꦰhing useful, I settled in to wait for Faelian. I figured I'd be here a while, but I didn't really want to just use the 'Wait' function to skip ahead for him to show ꧒up. So instead, I read through a few of the books I'd picked up on my travels, and had a snack of bread, cheese, and fruit that I pilfered from the kitchen, all while sat on a chair in perfect view of the door. Faelian would see me the moment he walked in the door, but I figured that there's something appropriately unsettling about someone waiting in your drug den while nursing a bottle of ale.

Ironi🍷cally, it's Faelian who eventually gets the drop on me. Momentarily distracted in real life, I jump when a wired-looking Elf walks through the door and immediately engages me in nonsense conversation. Thankfully, my surprise doesn't stop me from taking Faelian down in two punches, even as he flees for the door. To keep up the illusion, I drag him to the chair I've been sitting him and bury a knife in his back - a callback to the skooma-fueled murder I assume he committed, and an attempt to cover my own tracks by making this look like a random killing, not a Brotherhood-sanctioned hit. A job well-done, I fade into the crowds of the Imperial City.

Since then, I've continued my Dark Brotherhood roleplaying across a suite of other hits. For the infamous Murder Mansion, I dressed in my finest garb, before slipping out of sight and donning my Brotherhood gear instead. I scouted out a distant stronghold, napping in a nearby camp as I waited for cover of night to infiltrate it, complete with a handy night vision ring. Right now, I'm travelling far to the south of Cyrodiil, disguised as a priest so as to not attract too much attention on the road, sheltering from the rain in nearby caves and scrumping vegetables for my mobile supper. It's a peculiarly honest take🦋 on some deeply dishonest work, but it's offering me a connection to Oblivion Remastered that's far deeper than I expected, and the ki𝓡nd of thing that could easily keep me exploring for another 20 hours or more.

Faelian isn't the only skooma fiend in Cyrodiil, thanks to one streamer who turned Emperor Uriel Septim himself into a skoom-hound.

In a world teeming with dying gods and dark supernaturality, sees a lone pagan priest known as a volkhv (think of him as a Slavic druid) on a mission to free his sister's soul, which is trapped somewhere between the world of the living and that of the dead.

Promising magic-melee "Soulslite" combat and a tight, linear narrative told across hub-and-spoke exploration zones, Vranygrai already looks and feels better than I expected it to at this early stage in its development – and 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Crimson Desert hopefuls will want to pay attention.

Arcane roots

As soon as I start exploring Vranygrai, I'm struck by h🧸ow gorgeous it is. Kubal sits next to me as I take my first inquisitive steps, marvelling at the sights and textures of the not-quite open world lying before me.

Despite how its magic-infused melee combat and RPG systems are partly inspired by CD Projekt Red's Witcher games, I'm told that Vranygrai offers a more focused storytelling experience that taps a more God of War-like vein.

This nod to Santa Monica's 2018 modern classic, widely regarded as one of the best PS4 games ever, is palpable from the movement of♓ the volkhv as well as the worl🍒d itself. That's because it's impossible to take a wrong turn in Vranygrai, since the environment gently funnels me toward the mission objective – here, namely, to seek "the maiden born of dew and conceived of three mothers" – though I see loads of potential for collectibles and other optional opportunities.

Given the context of Great Moravian and Slavic folklore, Vranygrai's purposely confusing, archaic la🐬nguage seen in both mission objectives and in-game inscriptions reminds me of Ninja Theory's Hellblade games. The effect is immediately alienating, pitting me against my surroundings as the world becomes the primary antagonist. The deliciously bleak atmosphere only adds to my enjoyment of Vranygrai's style and tone.

Instead of traversal-based puzzles like in Hellblade 2, however, Vranygrai gets a little more hands-on and Witcher-y.🌜 One riddle I chance upon tasks me with killing a certain nearby enemy and bringing back something specific, which in tu💝rn will activate a shrine – I'm playing a priest, remember?

Kubal warns me of something very key, ho🌊wever – much as in the best FromSoftware games, resting at a shrine in Vranygrai replenishes all health and magical essence at the ꩲcost of enemies respawning in the world.

Bear necessities

Alas, resting at shrines is paramount in Vranygrai. It's a beautifully rendered world, yes, but also plenty hostile.

When I'm not battering every red-eyed, gnomish enemy in sight with my massive druidic staff, I'm pelting them with magical ranged projectiles. Every so often, I burn through a large amount of essence, make like 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Baldur's Gate 3's Halsin, and hulk out in bear form to deliver a turbo-charged special attack. It's a welcome change of pace from the button mashing, combo-heavy likes of Crimson Desert, another upcoming Witcher-like, so anyone who didn't like the sound of its combat in our latest 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Crimson Desert preview can take solace in Vr꧒anygrai's more traditional approach.

That's not to say Vranygrai is eaﷺsy, despite its simplicity. Enemies hit hard, and every use of magic abilities eats away at your magical essence bar. Defeated enem🐲ies sometimes drop HP or essence top-ups in the form of glowing green orbs, but for the most part, essence is something I try to savor instead of splurge.

With a more powerful, charged heavy attack at my disposal in the form of an AOE ground-pound, I quickly learn that without a block or parry mechanic – "yet," hints Kubal – dodging and timing is everything. That doesn't stop me from wasting all my essence too early, however, and I sadly run out of juice and🎐 patience when facing my first heavy enemy and promptly die at their hands.

Though my first hands-on𓆉 experience with Vranygrai might have ended in bitter defeat, I'm all the more excited to have another go someday soon. It's staggering to think of this demo as the work of a solo developer. With the exception of one or two collision problems with felled enemies – the dead dudes seem to have little invisible walls built around them – my gameplay experience is pretty much flawless. With the more RPG-leaning elements like parrying and an inventory still in development, I have no doubt that Dire Badger will impress me again with a full demo – and next time, I will have my revenge.

Check out all of the 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:upcoming PC games coming in 2025 and beyond

It's also perhaps the most fun I've ever had in Helldivers 2, even if the teammates, civilians and AI-controlled friendly soldier🔯s that I've been teamkilling don't quite feel the same way.

The losing side

Helldivers 2 has always been intense and chaotic. Sending four players down to a planet with a collection of impossibly destructive and hard to aim weaponry and friendly fire enabled is always going to lead to tense situations, rather that's intentional or unintentional teamkilling as you fight your way through hordes of enemies. Still, it's easier to control the situation as you land on these abandoned planets and give the bugs/bots/disco squids a hiding in the name of space fascism liberty.

But you don’t really know chaos until you've dropped into a Super Earth mission in Helldivers 2, with Illuminate dropships blinking into orbit like shielded-up little gods. One moment, you're holding the line with a SEAF squad that barely knows le🐲ft from right, the next you're knee-deep in plasma fire and praying your 500kg bomb doesn't land on your own head. The Illuminate don’t swarm like bugs – they float, they vanish, they batter you with big blue balls that knock you on your arse. They wipe your entire squad with clinical precision, and then they do it again for fun. Illuminate fighters strafe the ground and kill you instantly, floating Leviathans will dish out an impossible amount of punishment before you can take it down, and the voteless will swarm you as soon as you're no longer paying attention.

There are two paths to survival. Keeping the tempo high and making sure you don't get swarmed by🌃 the Illuminate or holding one spot and putting out a withering amount of firepower in the hope of clearing an area for a little while. Both are flawed, but fighting in city maps doesn't just feel like like business as usual, it feels like a total rework: the skyscrapers mean your destroyer has to reposition before it drops an orbi▨tal strike, and it means you're forced to fight instead in choking alleyways and car parks filled with explosive hazards.

The missions you're doing here are totally unique too: unlock a special planetary defense cannon from its prison beneath a kids playground and pelt the massive death-jellyfish floatin𝓰g over the city, rescue civilians, or try to repel a fleet of floating saucers that are landing and disgorging enemies all over the place. The maps are small but dense, and fig🥂hting is near constant.

Then there's the NPCs, also new with this update. Panicked civilians run through the dust, wandering into the splash zone for your explosives and, while SEAF troops are also running around out there, trading shots with the Il🅘luminate and acting like Helldivers instead of the harmless adorable puppi🎃es they are.

It's not just the AI additions that make Super Earth feel lived in. 🎶Because you're often in choked up alleyways and close quarters across the board it feels —to this Helldiver at least— that you're constantly on the defensive, like you're really trꦡying to defend the last bastion of humanity, instead of the usually jovial tone. It’s harder to use your strategems here too: your destroyer has to move into position before unleashing hell, with those seconds ratcheting the tension up even more as you wait for things to fire. Lethality is way up too, because there's nowhere to hide from the explosives you and your teammates are chucking all over.

That extends to the city's civilians. Hit them – regardless of whether you accid🐟entally belted them with ship-launchꩲed ordnance or shot them in panic because they ran at you from nowhere – and you'll be docked some requisitions, meaning you have to identify your targets and can't just turn the whole city to rubble.

That will probably happen anyway, though. As the push and pull of battle rages on, the great skyscrapers of Super Earth's last few cities shake and collapse in combat. Some of this is probably be𝓡cause of the plasma-fire of the Illuminate but most of it, if we're being honest, is my fault.

While Helldivers 2 has previously sold the Starship Troopers fantasy, here it's selling Aliens instead. Super Earth is a claustrophobic horrorshow that will often have you low on supplies and desperately pushing forwards in the name of survival. It's a perfect – if slightly late – first birthday celebration for the game and shows that Arrowh☂ead isn't scared to shake things up in bold new ways. This isn't the addition of a mechsuit or even the rad as hell Jetpacks, but a change to the status quo. It's still Helldivers 2, but it feels like a whole new beast. Most of all, Heart of Democracy feels like a meaningful escalation of stakes, and I'm excited to see where it could possibly go from here to keep things fresh.

Helldivers 2 grunts suspect Illuminate interference as Automaton distractions and a last-minute update contribute to a Major Order failure: "Illuminate is controlling High Command"

The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening earned its stripes not for its ambition, but because it understood that smaller can be better. It's widely regarded as one of the 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:best Game Boy games ever, and thanks to a keen understanding of its strengths, the remake proves it one of the 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:best Nintendo Switch games of all time some 32 years later. You don'🅺t need to mess with perfection, and it turns out that all Nintendo's first handheld Zelda game needed to delight a new generation of schoolyard kids was a bit of polish, a bit of love, and a ton of respect.

We're on island time

Recalling these playground memories, one game stands out in particular. Gripped in our sweaty little hands, our Game Boys were, of course, loaded up with our own copy of The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening.

Each day we'd bike furiously to school hours early to sit side-by-side exploring Koholint, abಞsorbed in ꧋these miniscule adventures that nevertheless felt enormous and fateful, and most importantly, our own.

As the first ever Zelda game made for a handheld device, the personal aspect of Link's Awakening was very important to me. After all, much of the appeal of the Game Boy was that it was mine and mine alone. It was not a shared TV in our living room, or the PC monitor in my dad's office where I'd play Wolfenstein 3D and Reader Rabbit. The Game Boy, in all its monochromaticཧ glory, was a personal portal to adventure, unlike anything I'd experienced.

For years afterwards, me and my friends, and many others outside my main group of friends, including older cool kids, would bond as we played through the same game, trading tips and experiences, racing through RPGs, and, when the mood would take us, hauling our TVs to each other's houses so we could return back to those cold mornings on the schoolyard.

Many years later, I would gift that same friend a map of Koholint Island as a thank you for being the best man at my wedding – those early days cemented in our 🌞most momentous milestones.

Link's Awakening is about t🉐raveling to another world, an uncanny manifestation of imagination, and all of that is encompassed in t💎he experience of exploring the island, discovering the secret of the Wind Fish, and realizing that your experiences there were no less real or valid or consequential as Link's.

To that end, Link's Awakening was and remains a singular experience ওwithin Zelda canon, a title that chall🧜enges its player to consider the ephemerality of game worlds.

Beyond worlds

The spectre of maturity has haunted the Zelda franchise ever since that fated GameCube demo whet appetites only for Nintendo to deliver (the objectively fantastic) Wind Waker and its cartoony graphics. It's a game openly inspired by Twin Peaks, and one of the few Zelda titles that genuinely gets metatextual (shoutout to Majora's Mask).

That one of its most conceptually challenging and interesting titles is a low resolution Game Boy game with an alligator who loves dog food, a chain chomp with a bow, and a mermaid who's lost her bathing suit top is testament to how themes can be conveyed through often conflicting visual design and tone.

Link's Awakening works because it doesn't seem serious on the surface, so its melancholy explorations of ephemerality hit harder when they become apparent. When Nintendo announced a Switch remake of Link's Awakening, it walked a thin line between introducing a new generation of schoolyard kids to Marin, Tarin, Ulrira, and the rest of the motley residents of Koholint Island.

The remake recaptured the lightning in a bottle that originally transported those millennial children –♕ now the parents of those very kids newly discovering Zelda on Switch – to Link's side as h💝e sought to wake the Wind Fish in the mid-'90s.

Remake reckoning

Link's Awakening isn't alone. We've seen a glut of remakes of classic titles over the past several years, with some of the most prominent, like 2024's Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth, choosing wholesale modernizations that challenge the very concept of remake. Others, like 2020's Trials of Mana, retain the classic structure and systems but move into full 3D.

These titles🎃 illustrate why terms like "remake" and "remaster" are difficult to define in brief. With Link's Awakening, however, Nintendo chose slavish recreation over moderinizatio🍃n.

Most of the changes focused on quality-of-life improvements (like making the sword, shield, bracelet, and boots permanen💙t equipment, instead of taking up one of your 🐬two precious button slots) and capturing the feeling of the original by adopting a toyish art style – replete with a plasticine world and a tilt shift lens effect to create the feeling of exploring a tiny diorama – that captures the memory of the original Game Boy pixel art graphics, rather than trying to recreate them. To that end, Link's Awakening is one of the tightest and most satisfying Zelda titles in the series.

The Nintendo Switch remake of Link's Awakening retains all this magic because it understo🉐od that the original game was a perfect little puz🐓zle box, strengthened – not hindered – by the limitations of the Game Boy.

Leaning into traditionalism with Link's Awakening also provided Nintendo with a solid, tested foundation for innovation. As mentioned in GamesRadar +'s 澳洲幸运5开奖号♎码历史查询:The Legendꦰ of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom review, the first ever Zelda⛦-starring Zelda game pushed the boundaries of what we expect from the series' 2D offerings by adopting the free-forming traversal and non-linearity of its modern siblings, melding modern and classic Zelda into something new – and it likely wouldn't have existed without Link's Awakening.

The original Link's Awakening was like carrying a different world around in my pocket, and sitting side-by-side with my bestie, absorbed in his own adventure, was a joint experience that's stuck with me ever since. It showed me how video games can bring people together, even when they're single player titles - and thanks to the Link's Awakening remake, that experience has become a liv✱ing legacy.

Check out all the 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:upcoming Switch 2 games coming to the new Nintendo console soon

Gears of War kickstarted one of Xbox's biggest series from developer The Coalition, and brought us a memorable action-packed experience that earned it a reputation as one of the 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:best shooters of its day. With its sequel Gears of War 2 coming a few years later to join the ranks of the 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:best Xbox 360 games of all time, the Gears of War universe is still going strong to this day, with a new entry set to come in the 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:upcoming Xbox Series X game, 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Gears of War: E-Day.

We've brought together everything you need to know about Gears of War: Reloaded, from a breakdown of all of its new features to its release date, platforms, and more. So read on below to get an ov🍷erview of what you can expect from the Gears of War remaster.

Gears of War: Reloaded release date

Gears of War: Reloaded is set to release on August 26, 2025.

Xbox confirmed the release date in the official announcement on , with The Coalition studio head, Mike Crump, remarking that the upcoming launch of the remaster comes before the original Gears of War's 20th anniversary in 2026. It's great that longtime fans and newcomers alike will be able to step into the action before the🉐 big milestone.

Gears of War: Reloaded platforms

The Gears of War: Reloaded platforms have been confirmed, with🎐 the remaster set to land on PC, Xbox Series X/S, and PS5, and will also be available on Xbox Game Pass Ultimate and PC Game Passꩵ day one.

Yes, alongside its release on Xbox Series X, Gears of War: Reloaded will also be among the 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:upcoming PC games and 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:upcoming PS5 games, which means the first Gears of War game is getting a multip🔯latform release for the very firsꩵt time.

What is Gears of War: Reloaded?

Gears of War: Reloaded is a remaster of the original Gears of War game, with several enhancements and for current-gen consoles, and is described as the "definitive way to experience" Gears of War. Alongside the core campaign of the base game, Reloaded also has all of the post-launch DLC and extra content found in the Gears of War: Ultimate Edition, including the bonus campaign act, all multiplayer maps and modes, and the "full roster 🍌of classic characters and cosmetics" that are unlockable as you progress.

Gears of War: Reloaded features

The Coalition also revealed all of the Gears of War: Reloaded features that will be included. As a true remaster for current-gen consoles and PC, it boasts 4K resolution, 60FPS support in the core camp༺aign, and 120FPS in multiplayer. It will also have High Dynamic Range (HDR), 4K assets and remastered textures, improved shadows and reflections, zero loading screens during the campaign, Dolby Vision and Dolby Atmos sound, and 7.1 3D Spatial audio, and variable refresh rate (VVR) support.

So you can expect smoother gameplay, enhanced visuals and sound, and fastܫ loading sp♎eeds overall.

Gears of War: Reloaded multiplayer and co-op

The Coalition has confirmed Gears of War: Reloaded will feature eight-player onliꦰne Versus multiplayer support as well as two-player split-screen and online co-op for the main campaign.

The orig♏inal Gears of War featured a wealth of different multiplayer maps and modes, including Warzone, Execution, and Annex. The complete multiplayer experience looks se🏅t to return, with cross-progression support across all platforms in both the campaign and multiplayer.

Will Gears of War: Reloaded support cross-play?

Gears of War: Reloaded will support cross-play across all platforms, meaning you'll be able to team up with players across both consoles and PC. The Coalition has confirmed that no Microsoft account will be required to play, but "signing in with a Microsoft account unlocks full cross-platform functionality", adding that "it enables cr♐oss-progression, so your campaign an𝔍d multiplayer progress carries across devices. It also allows you to send invites and play with your friends across platforms - like Xbox to PlayStation or Steam to Xbox".

Gears of War: Reloaded price

The Gears of War: Reloaded price comes in at $39.99 for all platforms, with The Coalition also confirming that anyone who purchased the digital version of Gears of War: Ultimate Edition p♕rior to "16:00 UTC on May 5" will receive a free upgrade to Reloaded, which will be delivered "prior to launch of the game via a direct message to eligible Xbox accounts".

Looking for more action? Check out our pick of the 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:best FPS games you can play right now.

Yes, Dragon Warrior. Released back on Ninte𒆙ndo's very first console, the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES), in the United States the humble Dragon Quest went by a different name. Europe, on the other hand, didn't get a single taste of the Dragon Quest fruit until 2004's Dragon Quest 8 on PS2. Overworlds, turn-based battles, stats – in Japan, these early NES titles that make up Dragon Quest 1 & 2 HD-2D Remake popularized the RPG conventions that are vital to the genre now, laying the groundwork for the all-conquering Final Fantasy.

Quest log

Now, in a bid to reintroduce Dragon Quest to the world, Square Enix is finishing what it started last November with 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Dragon Quest 3 HD-2D Remake. Taking a confusingly Star Wars-like approach to storytelling, Dragon Quest 1 & 2 HD-2D Remake picks up where last year’s luscious prequel left off. Telling the ta🍌le of King Erdrick, these first two titles actually conclude the high fantasy trilogy's storyline, lovingly preserving and repackaging these pioneering pixel RPGs by blowing the dust off and imbuing them with some much-needed spit and polish.

Put 🔥into the pointy leather shoes of the unimaginatively named Hero, this double pack is oওnce again developed by the creators of Bravely Default and Octopath Traveler, Team Asano. As the charmingly rendered sprites designed by Dragon Ball creator Akira Toriyama shuffle across sharply rendered backgrounds, it’s impossible not to smile – even seven years after Octopath Traveler first wowed us with its eye-catching HD-2D art style.

If you've ever played a sprite-based RPG, you can't resist the charms of this cozy little remake. These expressive little sprites and comfortingly simple story capture that feeling of having your head buried in a Game Boy during long childhood car rides – and as I dive into Dragon Quest 1 & 2 HD-2D Remake at Square Enix HQ, I’m immediately transported to a simpler age. Where 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Final Fantasy 7 Remake fundamentally changes the feel of the original – for better and for worse – playing these shiny Dragon Quest remakes today feels like a platonic ideal of an RPG, the ro♔se-tinted memory of 8-bit and 16-bit epics in your head.

Like the best remakes, this double pack captures the charm of a bygone era while imbuing it with all the modern gaming luxuries that we now take for granted. Everything on your journey now exists to make the core adventuring as 🔯enjoyable as possible, giving players the options to remove the genre’s arcane annoyances or to opt to play with them sadistically intact. The most obvious quality of lไife improvements are to the battle system, once again transforming the archaic grind of NES turn based battling into a furiously fast frenzy or even a skippable afterthought, letting players toggle auto battle and switch between four different battle speeds.

Death is less of a hair-pulling frustration this time around, too. If your entire party falls on the battlefield, you can count on the modern magic of autosave to instantly let you replay the fight again, skipping a frustrating retracing of footsteps. Where these classic RPGs often had your objective uttered once by an NPC and then immediately forgotten, here, any time you speak to someone, you can choose to commit the last thing you heard to memory, ensuring 𝓀that you always know what your objective is, even if you've booted your 20 hour save file again after a four month absence.

Chu༒rches still allow you to save manually in classic fashion, as well as letting you buff your party. Yet each party member’s individual death remains refreshingly old school. Slain party members can only be resurrected by visiting your local church, their corpse following you in a comically rendered coffin sprite un♛til they’ve been revived. In true Catholic fashion, though, you must cough up gold in order to receive this divine blessing, of course.

The battlefields are bursting with newfound personality. In ♛a nice touch, backdrops to turn based battles match the background of wherever you’re standing in the overworld map. Grass sways in the wind behind an army of slime, casting a sizz spell scorches a murder of stark ravens with a vibrant flame.

Yet like with last year’s Dragon Quest 3 HD-2D Remake, it’s the lavish fully orchestrated soundtrack that really seals the deal. Performed by the Tokyo Metropolitan Orchestra, those once distorted 8 bit bleeps and warbles have been utterly transformed into cinema-worthy scores, with battles and exploration trans🌼formed into rousing jaunts, each soaring string section putting a spring in your step. In a nice touch, the lush modern orchestra is broken up with authentically distorted bitcrushed battle noises, with those classic level up and door opening noises left pleasingly intact.

Voice of reason

Like with the third game's overhaul, pivotal story moments across these two games also get the fully voice acted treatment, with players able to experience the delightful melodrama in English or Japanese. Non-voiced dialogue is still charming enough, mixed with your classic ye olde text crawl, or even brought to life between important characters with expressive anime style animations appearing above their head with a 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Golden Sun-esque charm.

Where many games have become increasingly complex, Square Enix have smartly opted to make the core adventuring as simple as possible. Tutorials pop up explaining what items do, and these optional qual🦄ity of life improvements remove the frustrating quirk that makes it a 🍃pain to return to these early RPGs today, ironing out the kinks and turning these classics into a breezy good time. The map system is a lifesaver, too, allowing you to always see your objective on the map, saving hours of frustration by eliminating aimless wandering.

I only get twenty minutes with each game, with Dragon Quest 2 being party-focused like the NES original. Yet during my time with the first game, as I save a villager from a monster-ridden tow♛n, he enthusiastically encourages me to capture any monsters I see roaming the overworld – a nod t🦩o Dragon Quest 5 and the Dragon Quest Monsters games. Whether these monsters are purely collectable and remain in an arena in town (as is the case in Dragon Quest 3), or are partymon pals that fight alongside you a-la Dragon Quest 5, however, still remains to be seen.

While games like 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Sea of Stars provide quirky love letters to their genre forefathers, Square Enix has instead opted to just let you replay the classics with minimal meddling, polishing their rust soaked code into a pleasingly accessible new package. Whether you're slaying your first slimes in Alefgard or the thought of playing Dragon Warrior on a CRT makes you꧑ embarrassingly misty eyed, it's hard not to be charmed by this loving ode to gaming past.

The playable equivalent of sipping a steaming hot chocolate on a frosty winter evening, I feel a wave of warm, fuzzy nostalgia wash over me throughout my demo – despite not even being born when the original hit shelves. It’s the perfect mix of 8-bit charm with modern sheen, and once again leaves me crying out for Game Freak to remake those classic Pokemon games in this gorgeous art style. While Dragon Quest 1 & 2 HD-2D Remake are largely a continuation of what Square did with the third game, these lovingly made refreshes are shaping up to be a wonderfully accessible way to experience a crucial piece of gami🐲ng history.

Quest without the waiting with our 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:best JRPG games ranking!

Delivering illegal texts was a perilsome, very real endeavor in 1866, and this point-and-click boardgame-style management adventure is more about wits and str🍸ategy than anything else. My experience with the demo was longer than my other indie sessions that day – 45 minutes, to be precise – but the truth is that I barely felt the minutes tick by.

Dicey histories

B💮ook Smugglers takes the shape of a 3D board game, with large gold coins sitting at crossroads across the map. These are flipped at the start of each turn, with the symbols representing a series of randomized encounters my Smuggler 𒉰must contend with.

As I click on one such crossroad coin, I'm given a choice: give an old man five gold out of the goodness of my heart, or ignore him. I click the more benevolent option and feel awash with pride, basking in my own charitable glow in having surrendered a handful of rubles to a good cause.

That pride soon sours and turns to indignation when, almost immediately, on-screen text describes how the man has also pilfered one of my precious books in the process. Ordinarily, I'd shrug it off. But money, food, weapons, and literature – especially literature – are impor🌱tant commodities in Book Smugglers, and that one act of kindness has just 🗹cost me double.

The comౠpulsive blend of choice-led narrative, randomly generated board game "moves", encounters, inventory juggling, and strategizing makes Book Smugglers an immediately gripping experience. I know nothing of my character's background at first, save that I'm part of a secret unit of Lithuanian book smugglers desperate to keep the local language alive amid the R💮ussian Empire's occupation.

I'm briefly introduced to the first of my vital resources: rubles, useful for purchasing items from patrons and vendors alike while visiting taverns along my journey. I have 100 rubles to start with, as well as 15 books, a full health bar, and a single food item. I'm prompted to eat as soon as possible once my health drops too low following one too many failed🌸 encounters with everything from brambles to hostile NPCs, meaning food hoarding will almost certainly😼 be key if you want to conserve more valuable resources.

Once I have my bearings, it's time to move to a new encounter. I trade a book for some bread, much to the chagrin of the wandering traveler who's clearly aware of the illegality of my proposition, before making a bit of a boo-boo and clicking on a coin that eiꦿther had an exclamation mark on it or a s✃kull and cross bones. Either way, it wasn't a smart move – I'm set upon by a police patrol, and with no weapon to use in my defence or bootleg booze to bribe them with, I'm forced to make a break for it.

Tall tales

A chase ensues, underscored by dramatic music. Following a short freeze-frame cutscene, one I'm told is being padded out into full animation (though the ha🌳nd-painted stills are beautifully fitting for a game about books, in my opinion), I somehow manage to escape the police unscathed.

Mercifully, run into a kindly priest named Father Valenčius, with whom I share my dangerous mission. Much like in Pentiment, or any of the 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:best visual novels you might h🐬ave played yourself, dialogue-heavy encounters with NPCs are presented via on-screen text with a portrait of the character placed nearby. To my surprise, the Father is actually delighted to hear of my quest, as a firm supporter of preserving local culture. He's also keen to know more about my chara💎cter's backstory – which is when Book Smugglers starts to dip into RPG territory.

When asked about my profession before joining the smuggling syndicate, I'm given three choices: a bard, a bureaucrat's assistant, or a far𒈔mer.☂ Each background comes with respective stat buffs or other perks.

Bards have 10% increased luck and earn one ruble per book delivered, assistants can sell items at full price as well as peek at one random encounter at the start of each turn, and farmers 20 get🔜 more HP and an extra inventory space. Sadly, being a jack-of-all-trades is not an option, so I go for the assistant background. Prescience is kind of a big deal in a game like t🦄his, I figure.

From here on out, I treat Book Smugglers more like a strategy game. Rationing my money, books, and food wisely is paramount, but I try not to scrimp too much when the chance to load up on items presents itself.

Talking various NPCs in a t๊a𝓰vern soon after leaving the Father, I discover each of them is selling something of use. From a huntsman slinging weapons to a kindly farmer selling food and manual tools, elements of build-crafting start to emerge. Do I blow 60 of my 100 rubles on a shotgun, just in case I run into another police patrol, or do I opt for camouflage and survival gear instead?

A mix of a bit of everything is probably most useful, but the potential for tactical planning and experimentation in Book Smugglers is plain from this short demo alone. If you're a fan of point-and-click stories with a str꧃ong helping of "choose your own adventure" sensibilities – and if you love to learn as well as have fun playing games – you'll want to keep an eye on . And your myriad resources in case an old man tries to nab them, apparently.

Love a good yard? Check out the 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:best video game stories the medium has ever seen

This tale of woe put me off Oblivion for years. Between the apparent ability to accidentally trap yourself in an alternate world and the imminent arrival of Skyrim, I'd heard enough that I felt no need to lose dozens of hours to The Elder Scrolls 4. But with the arrival of 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Oblivion Remastered, I felt it was finally time to rectify this💮 gap in my Bethesda knowledge - and finally put right the wrongꦆ my friend had suffered.

The observant among you may recognize this painted prison as a key part of the A Brush With Death side-quest. In it, the player is tasked with finding a missing artist - who, it quickly becomes clear, has somehow entered into his own painting. Thanks to a magic paintbrush bestowed on his father by the goddess Dibella, the artist is a𝔍ble to create exceedingly lifelike worlds by stepping into his artwork. Unfortunately, the brush is stolen from him - a thief bashes him on the head, stuffs him inside his pai🌳nting, and jumps in, painting in some trolls to help cover his tracks. Without the brush, the painter is trapped forever, but with six trolls guarding it, there's nothing he can do.

When you follow the artist intoℱ his painting, he'll tell you that the thief is already dead - his head caved in by the monsters he conjured to keep him safe. It's now your job to recover the brush, without which neither 🎉of you will ever be able to return to the real world. The only way out is to kill all the trolls, and return the brush to its master.

Paint me a word quest

If this sounds about as simple as most Oblivion sidequests, that's because it is. Your objective amounts to little more than 'kill six monsters', all of whom are so spread out that you can easily take them on one at a time. The multi-troll beatdown I'd imagined my friend suffering through all those years ago could only manifest if you ran through the painted world, aggroing all six of them at once, and surely he hadn't done that.

Deeply confused, I sought answers. 'I beat this super easy Oblivion Remastered qu☂est today', I told him. 'Something about some trolls an𝐆d a painting?' I didn't take him long to catch on, but while I made fun of his apparent ineptitude, he explained that I was forgetting a major part of the story.

I'd assumed that my friend had been critically underleveled. There was no way this could be an issue with gear - I ran through the trolls with a hand-to-hand build and some tatty light armor. Maybe he's accidentally stumbled upon the painted world far too early? In fact, almost the opposite true - my friend was far enough into the game that he'd become a vampire. But what norma🅠lly shou🦹ld have offered a combat advantage is exactly what held him back in this quest.

There will be blood

Vampirism in Oblivion offers a powerful boost to several stats and attributes, particularly if you haven't fed for a few days. Unfortunately, if that's the case, hungry vampires will also take significant damage from sunlight - while your strength, speed, stealth, and destructive magic might all be ♚much stronger at 100% vampirism, you'll also take eight points of damage every second that you're out in the 🔴sun.

Most of the time, that's not a problem. It's easy enough to stay indoors, wait until nightfall, or even stroll around Oblivion for a while if you want to stay in the shade. The painted world, however, is a picture, and it's one where the artist has chosen to replicate a sunny day. There are no cloudy days or starlit nights, just a perfect blue sky that will do some real damage to any vampire foolish enough to get stuck in this sun-soaked painting. Trapped in the sunlight, my friend's vampire was burned to a crisp long before he could race through all the✨ trolls, and that meant loading an hours-old save or abandoning the playthrough all togetherಞ.

It might be one of the edgiest of edge cases, but it's an Oblivion story that's (mostly) stuck with me for nearly 20 years. And as unfortunate as it might have been, it's also testament to just how effective an RPG The Elder Scrolls 4 was, even all those years ago. The series' take on vampirism was always keen🍌 to play blessing off against curse, but it's rare to see the negatives well and truly win out in that particular matchup. Oblivion might be showing its age, even in this remaster, but one thing it still nails is consequence - the freedom of its world still shines through (albeit sometimes a little too bright) and the depth of its systems remains clear. Nearly two decades after being convinced that this game really wasn't for me, I've found that not only did I never really have anything to be afraid of, but that there's more to experience here than I ever expected.

My first 3 hours in Oblivion Remastered were crammed with 2006 weirdness, making it the perfect reimagining of my favorite RPG

But with plenty of gameplay footage, trailers, and interviews with the development team, the sense of anticipation for Little Nightmares 3 has only grown. Once again tapping into the distinctive blend of cute and creepy that the series has become so well known for, we'll be meeting new characters and facing fresh frights in what promises to be one of the biggest 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:upcoming horror games of the year, alongside the studio's 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:other major project, Directive 8020.

Exciting times are just ahead, too, with the 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Summer Game Fest schedule 2025 lineup set to bring us a host of showcases that promise to give us a look at some of the biggest games coming our way in the future. And while we don't yet know if the next Little Nightmares game will make an appearance, we h⛄ave our raincoats securely on and our fingers crossed that we'll get to see more. In the m🍨eantime, we've brought together a helpful overview of everything we know so far about Little Nightmares 3, from running down its co-op support to rounding up its gameplay features, and more.

Little Nightmares 3 release date speculation

Little Nightmares 3 is expected to launch sometime in 2025, with no exact release date as of yet.

Following its initial reveal, the return of Little Nightmares was set to land sometime in 2024 before Supermassive posted . While the game then later appe༒ared at Gamescom 2024, we've yet to get a c🎃onfirmed release date beyond its year launch window. We'll be keeping our eyes peeled for any updates!

Little Nightmares 3 platforms

Little Nightmares 3 is set to release on PC, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, PS4, PS5, and Switch.

While it's been confirmed that the horror-filled adventure will be among the 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:upcoming Xbox Series X games, 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:upcoming PS5 games, and 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:upcoming Switch games, as well as last-gen consoles, we don't yet know if Little Nightmares 3 will also come to the Switch 2. Given that Ninteওndo's new console is launching in 2025, it's not entirely outsid💛e of the realm of possibility, but we'll have to await further news.

Little Nightmares trailers

We've gotten a helping of Little Nightmares 3 trailers following its initial reveal. With an announcement꧅ trailer (which you can watch above) giving us our first look at the new protagonists of the adventure, we also got to see various obstacles they'll face in the dark world, with teases of different locations and a very ominous mir🧸ror.

In the "You're being watched" trailer (below), we're introduced to a mysterious figure who's said to always be watching every move we make in the world. It looks like we'll be tracked on surveil♈lance-style monitors. How unsettling.

Little Nightmares 3 story

Little Nightmares 3 story follows protagonists Low and Alone, two young children who became best friends when they encountered each other in a "lonely nightmare". As they get lost in the frightening world of Nowhere, they'll have to work together to try and find a way out together, or risk being condemned to a "fate worse than dea𝓰th".

With emphasis once again put on the idea that you'll be entering a world "not made for children", Little Nightmares 3 looks set to build on the chilling atmosphere of games past, and of course, just like any number of the 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:best horror games, you can expect to face some unsettling figures that won't be giving you a wa♏rm welcome in Low and Alone's shoes.

For a refresher on the previous games, be sure to check out our 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Little Nightmares review and 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Little Nightmares 2 review.

Little Nightmares 3 setting

The settin൲g of Little Nightmares 3 will once again bring us into the universe known as Nowhere, which is only accessible through dreams.

With Low and Alone lost in a nightmare, they'll be venturing through various locations within a 🐭twisted place called The Spiral, and face all kinds of monstrous dangers. From a sandy Necropolis where a giant baby resides, to a creepy candy factory and "filthy funfair". Each place will be filled with residents who will try to hunt you down, so you can expect to face obstacles and some nasty inhabitants.

Little Nightmares 3 gameplay

We've gotten to see quite a lot of Little Nightmares 3 gameplay since it was first announced, trailers showing off some gameplay elements, as well as an in-depth walkthrough from Bandai Namco which showed off of the "many hidden hazards of the Necropolis". In the latter video, we see Low an♌d Alone venture through a sand storm before climbing up into♏ the ruins of the Necropolis.

Unfortunately, this is the p🐼layground of a monstrous baby that looms large over the location, and who seems to be hellbent on making you its next playthings. We see how both Alone and Low have to sneak out of the way of the baby's line of sight, or find safety behind cover, which transforms the area into a scary game of hide and seek.

Not unlike the earlier Little Nightmares adventures, the gameplay we've s♚een so far shows off some familiar elements, such as puzzle-like sections that see the pair work together to move boxes, or make it across a platform. There are also shots o💮f the pair using various objects to make it through areas - such as using a parasol-like makeshift umbrella to float across a ledge. With some unsettling scenarios, we'll often have to run, hide, or a combination of both, and even if the occasion calls for it, defend ourselves.

Is Little Nightmares 3 co-op?

Little Nightmares 3 will be the first entry in the series to support online co-op.

澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Speaking on co-op, Bandai Namco producer Coralie Feniello said it was "the most requested [feature] by our♉ community" following Little Nightmares 2, which had the perfect set-up for a similar feature since it saw you play as Mono as he travelled through the world alongside Six - the lead character from the first game.

But you'll alsoಌ be able to play the entirety of Little Nightmares 3 solo, too. Should you do so, one of the characters will be an AI that you give instructions to, as Feniello explains:

"We don't want to have the AI being too smart, because the player might feel like they ar꧙e doing everything, but we don't want to have the AI feeling dumb, either. The first time you see an object that the AI can interact with, you have to call the AI, and then they come and they do it. But in terms of gameplay, we are making sure that it's the same level of experience and as enjoyable in multiplayer [as it is] in single. But maybe in single, you will have a bit more on the narrative part."

Little Nightmares 3 development

While the first two games in the Little Nightmares series wer🦂e made by developer Tarsier Studios, Supermassive has taken up the mantle for the third installment, with Bandai Namco back on board as the game's publisher. Supermassive is a studio well-versed in the horror genre, having made narrative, survival experiences like🤪 Until Dawn and The Quarry, so it'll be interesting to see how the team puts their stamp on the universe.

Tarsier, on the other hand, is currently developing a🎃 new horror IP with Reanimal, which promises to take you on an "even darker and more terrifyin꧑g journey than e🍒ver before".

He first met Yars' Revenge creator Howard Scott Warshaw. They hung out, and Howard won over the director by joking that he might be part of an advance alien scout party making movies to convince humanity that they mean us no harm. "I had an interview with Spielberg because he wanted to choose the programmer for Raiders," Howard recollects. "We chatted for a while, and then my weirdness kind of took over. I told him about my theory that he was an alien! I think he just loved that, because ♔the next morning when I got to work h𒅌e had talked to Warner or Atari and had said that he didn't need to see anyone else. I only saw him twice more during the entire development. He would come to Sunnyvale and I would give him a demo of the game, and then we would have lunch together."

Since Raiders' hero was as adept at using his intellect to solve problems as he was at overcoming physical challenges, Howard designed his Atari 2600 adaptation as part action game/part adventure, and he looked to an earlier 2600 title for inspiration. "Indiana Jones had to be smart as well as adventurous and capable," Howard reasons. "I wanted to do both, so I made Raiders an action adventure game. My goal was to do the biggest adventure game that you could possibly imagine on the Atari 2600. The game Adventure had been genre-d꧑efining, so to me that was the launch spot. Then if I was going to stand on those shoulders I needed to do something to improve the view."

Of the many improvements made to what had been defined by Adventure, Raiders' inventory stood out as one of the most innovative. It allowed players to collect, arrange and combine multiple objects in order to solve the game's challenging puzzles. "There ♛were cases where you had to manipulate your inventory in a certain way," Howard considers. "So you could have the same objects, but if they weren't in the right order you wouldn't be able to execute some challenges. Even if you got all of the objects and got down from the mesa then one of the thieves might steal your shovel. That sucked, because it meant that you had to go through all of that again!"

Mesas – flat-topped desert hills – played an important role in Howard's game. He devised a novel way for Indy to get from one to another, and an exciting method of getting the hero down to ground level from them. ♕"I figured Indy could use a grappling hook to get between mesas," Howard enthuses. "It was about what I could do graphically to create action and to move him around. That also made the map room work, where you saw a map that told you where the Grail was. The idea of jumping off the mesa with a parachute to get to the Grail was just because I wanted some sort of hand-eye co-ordination challenge."

The 2600 Raiders adaptation sold over a million copies on its release in 1982, and in 1984 it was followed by the C64 platformer/puzzler Indiana Jones In The Lost Kingdom. In 1985, Atari released an arcade game based on the 1984 Raiders sequel Indiana Jones And The Temple Of Doom. Prior commitments meant that the Star Wars coin-op developer Mike Hally couldn't produce Atari's Indy title from the outset. "I'm sure the success of the Star Wars coin-ops led to a good relationship with Lucasfilm," Mike notes, "but when the Temple Of Doom project started I was working on Road Runner, so my involvement came after that. I was put on there to geไt the game done, because my expertise other than being a producer and lead designer was playfield design and gameplay. So I took what they had and I fully developed it."

Of course, not every scene in the Temple Of Doom movie was suited to being a level in the coin-op, so its development team adapted the action sequences that suited the hardware they were designing for. "If you strip out how the characters meet and how Indy gets to certain places then what you come down to is: he was in the mines to save the children and then he gets into the mine carts," Mike recalls. "Then there's the Temple Of Doom, and finally there's the end sequence with ⛦the rope bridge. Those were some of the best action scenes in the movie, so those were the action sequences that were pulled from the movie for the coin-op."

The sequences adapted from the second Indy film🉐 involved different gameplay and mechanics, but a constant throughout the coin-op was that Indy could always rely on his whip to defend himself and use as a makeshift swing. "The Temple Of Doom movie was all about Indy and his whip, so having it attached to him in the coin-op at all times was a no-brainer," Mike grins. "You had to position him so that it would hit the target you wanted to hit. Then one of the most fun parts of the game was using it to swing over gaps to get over hazards. So wherever we could use the whiꦫp we did."

Indy's whip was essential in the finale of Atari's Temple Of Doom arcade game, which tested players' reactions by sending enemies and projectiles at them aꦉs they crossed the rope bridge seen in the film. "We put Mola Ram in between Indy and getting to the other side to save his friends," Mike remembers, "so he was constantly having to deal with flaming hearts coming from the right and Thuggees moving fast from the left. You were constantly whipping to the right and the left, and moving back and forth, so it was a timing t💫hing, but I think we captured the essence of the movie's finale. Later on, the Temple Of Doom coin-op team did the NES version. I did all the design for that from scratch, based on designing a consumer game versus what you would do for a coin-op."

Before the Temple Of Doom coin-op was adapted for the NES by Mike and his team in 1988, the text adventure Indiana Jones And The Revenge Of The Ancients appeared in 1987. Then in 1989 a comput🌠er and console action game based on that year's Indiana Jones movie, Indiana Jones And The Last Crusade, arrived. Interestingly, three Czech text adventures for the ZX Spectrum were released by Frantisek Fuka between 1985 and 1990. They're not official releases, but are still of interest if you enjoy Indy's exploits.

The Last Crusade was also adapted as Indiana Jones And The Last Crusade: The Graphic Adventure, which was given to Ron Gilbert and others at Lucasfilm Games after a third-party developer let it down. "The Indiana Jones rights had been given to someone else, and they weren't performing. They weren't actual😼ly making the game," Ron points out. "So Lucasfilm pulled the rights back, and David Fox, Noah Falstein and I had nine months to finish the whole game – start to finish. So the three of us, who were some of the most experienced adventure game creators ဣat the company at the time, just jumped on the project to try to get it done."

As with earlier Indy movie adaptations, consideration was given to which of The Last Crusade's action scenes would work in Lucasfi🌸lm's graphic adventure. A decision𒈔 was then made to adapt sequences that could be lengthy puzzles. "Noah was in charge of the action sequences, so it was him that mostly focussed on those," Ron credits. "But I remember some of the conversations were about what was going to translate well, because we couldn't put everything in the game. We certainly wanted things that would have some duration to them, like working your way through the castle and finding parts of stuff. So we at least wanted to extend the action sequences out to that degree."

An interesting approach was taken to solving puzzles in The Last Crusade: The Graphic Adventure, in that there were up to three solutions for each with ꦑpoints accrued over multiple playthroughs depending on how many solutions you found. "Some of that was based on how Sierra On-Line games calculated your score," Ron acknowledges. "But we didn't just want to have a score, so we called it the IQ – the Indy Quotient. That was a measure of how well you were being Indy. We had different ways to solve puzzles: the action way, the dialogue way and the puzzle way. To get the IQ up you played the game again to try each way."

Unlike the game's IQ points, its dialogue system was entirely original. It allowed players of Lucasfilm's game to immerse themselves in Indy's world by having conversations with its inhabitants. "The dialogue puzzles were a huge thing, because we didn't have those before," Ron points out. "Noah was probably instrumental in figuring those out. They ended up being super influential, every adventure game after that had dialogues in them. They really allowed players to feel like they were a part of the story because even when they didn't really affect the game you sti❀ll felt more involved in what you were doing."

In terms of oversight from the movie's creative partnership, its director made periodic visits to inspect progress on the graphic adventure adaptation, although these were largely motivated by his passion for gaming. "Spielberg came by the office because he was visiting George for other reasons," Ron mentions. "He was a big gamer; he loved games. I remember showing him our game, and he would muscle h༺is way in to grab the mouse."

After The Last Crusade adventure game launched in 1989 to much acclaim, a NES adaptation o🍃f the third Indy movie was released in 1991. The 1992 Lucasfilm original adventure Indiana Jones And The Fate Of Atlantis was clearly influenced by the former, and was just as appreciated by gamers. This was especially true of Craig Derrick, who is now Lucasfilm Games' executive producer of the current Indy game The Great Circle. "I'm an Eighties kid, and I was a huge fan of Raiders, Temple Of Doom and The Last Crusade," Craig beams. "Fate Of Atlantis came out in the Nineties when we were all wondering if we were going to get another movie. The developers just nailed the tone, sense of adventure and incredible dialogue. Back then, Fate Of Atlantis felt like the movie we never got, because it really captured the spirit of the movies that came before it."

In an evolution of there being up to three ways to solve puzzles in its Last Crusade adventure, Lucasfilm developed three ways to play Fate Of Atlantis: the Team Path, Wits Path and Fists Path. "I think it was a brilliant design choice," Craig assesses. "We spoke a lot about it during the development of The Great Circle. Indiana Jones is a character that can solve problems in different ways. He isn't just a brawler or an academic or an adventurer; he's all those things, and I think it really made the character coꦫme together in gameplay for the first time. Giving pla🎉yers that choice at that time in games was really interesting, because it branched the story with different experiences along the way."

Of the three different ways Fate Of Atlantis could be played, its Team Path was perhaps the most unique. It relied on Indy co-operating and getting help from non-player character Sophia Hapgood, a psychic and fellow archaeologist. "Sophia Haꦬpgood was a really great character, and the Fate Of Atlantis team really knocked it out of the park with her!" Craig exclaims. "She made the entire story work in a lot of ways, because you needed a good partner and the call to adventure. So Indy goes to New York to find her and then he gets pulled into this adventure. A lot of times that's just the character of Indiana Jones."

In 1992, both Fate Of Atlantis and a NES platformer based on the TV spin-off The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles hit shop shelves and were well received. Two years later, Factor𝐆 5 developed an ambitious SNES adaptation of all three Indiana Jones movies called Indiana Jones' Greatest Adventures, although this hadn't been the intention of its producer Julian Eggebrecht. "I was hoping to make three games, because I assumed that it should be possible to do Super Raiders Of The Lost Ark, Super Temple Of Doom and Super Last Crusade," Julian recollects. "Instead we had to fit all three movies into one game because LucasArts projected that it would be done by 1994, and by 1995 it was expecting the next generation Nintendo console would be out. Of course people still liked Greatest Adventures a lot."

A challenging Mega Drive title called Instruments Of Chaos Starring Young Indiana Jones also came out in 1994, and in 1996, a PC/Mac action adventure Indiana Jones And His Desktop Adventures followed. In 1999, Julian produced an N64 adaptation of the newly released PC title Indiana Jones And The Infernal Machine. Despite a tight deadline, he all but redesigned it for the console. "We wanted to do a completely reinvented N64 version of Infernal Machine," Julian reflects, "so we took the cancelled PlayStation version as the basis and ported that to the N64, then we merged it with our 🔥Battle For Naboo engine. We replaced the PC controls with a new camera and control system inspired by Ocarina Of Time, and then we made the weapons lock-on with targeting and all of that, so it was essentially Ocarina Of Time with Indiana Jones."

Infernal Machine reviewed well in 2000, as did a 2D Game Boy Color version in 2001. In 2003, the action adventure Indiana Jones And The Emperor's Tomb was released, followed by 2008's humorous retelling of the first three movies – Lego Indiana Jones: The Original Adventures, which coincided with the fourth film India🐓na Jones And The Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull. A sequel called Lego Indiana Jones 2: The Adventure Continues appeared in 2009, as did the LucasArts action title Indiana Jones And The Staff Of Kings. Then in 2011, the Facebook game Indiana Jones Adventure World went live.

In 2023, Indiana Jones And The Dial Of Destiny arrived in cinemas, then Indiana Jones And The Great Circle appeared on PC and Xbox Series X/S in late-2024. The Great Circle channels a much earlier movie, as MachineGames creative director Axel Torvenius explains. "It all started with a conscious decision about which version of Indiana Jones w🍬e wanted to portray," Axel considers. "We're fans of all the Indiana Jones movies, but we settled on Raiders Of The Lost Ark being the prime resource. Obviously there have been great games too, like Fate Of Atlantis, so those were relevant. Then when we got closer to working with Lucasfilm Games we gained access to its archive and started digging into the juicy secrets."

Unlike earlier Indiana Jones games, The Great Circle primarily gives players a first-person perspective view of the action. As well as providing a more immersive Indiana Jones experien♔ce, this was implemented to make its puzzles feel more intuitive. "We wanted the player to step into the shoe꧋s of Indiana Jones, and to be up close and personal with different components throughout the game," Axel remarks.

"We have a lot of puzzle-solving and interactions with mysteries, like picking up notes an⭕d looking at scrolls. We felt all of those close-to-face interactions were best perceived as part of a first-person experience. If they had been third-person you would need to either zoom in or have a pop-up screen, or whatever. We also have a lot of enemies, and when you're punching them in the face you can get so close you can see the saliva, so first-person gets you really close to the action. Although we also have third-person cutscenes and cinematics, and we move the game into third-person for all traversal and platforming."

As well as its first-person viewpoint, The Great Circle also stands out for its epic narrative, which involves a source of great power related to mysterious sites around the world that when viewed on a map form a perfect circle. "MachineGames executive producer Todd Howard had this overarching pitch in terms of the core premise that involved the locations of The Great Circle," Axel comments. "Well wouldn't it be cool if those were all connected, but what do they connect to and what's happening? We started figuring out 𒐪what the big idea behind all of that was. I don't like spoilers, but there is a big cool thing at the end that's the enigma you're trying to solve."

The way that The Great Circle seamlessly intertwines challenges requiring Indy's physicality, problem-solving and archaeological expertise is equally worthy of note. Axel 🌠describes this feat of development as an exercise in connecting gameplay that would otherwise have been disparate. "How did we balance going from crashing a battleship or whatever to the calm after the storm?" Axel ponders. "Well the set up we worked with pushes the player to go into the adventure aspect as well as platforming, and on the way to find a puzzle maybe they encounter a new enemy. I think that helped to make the big puzzles more of an adventure experience rather than just standing on the spot and figuring them out."

As Craig Derrick prepares for the 2025 release of The Great Circle for the PS5, the game's executive producer for Lucasfilm Games considers Indy's importance to the studio over the years and concludes by explaining why great Indiana Jones games continue to be made. "Indiana Jones has always been a cornerstone of Lucasfilm and Lucasfilm Games," Craig reviews.♏ "He embodies adventure and mystery and puzzle-solving, and those things make really great games as well as action adventure movies. I think as to why we still make Indiana Jones games, well we're all fans. So I think there's absolutely always a place for Indy in gaming, and we were lucky that we had a chance to prove that with The Great Circle."

Stages of evolution: unearthing Indy's other notable entries

Indiana Jones in The Lost Kingdom

Release year: 1984 | Developer: Michael J. Hanson | Platform(s): Commodore 64

This C64 exclusಌive is part puzzle game/part platformer. It sets the player the task of completing logistic puzzles across six levels, all without any instruction on how to do so! All manner of hazards hamper your attempts to platform ar꧅ound, from bats and butterflies, to gargoyles and deadly orbs.

Indiana Jones in Revenge Of The Ancients

Release year: 1987 | Developer: Angelsoft | Platform(s): Apple II, Mac, MS-DOS

Set in the Mexican jungle, Revenge Of The Ancients is a challenging text adventure where death waits around every corner. Your goal is to recover a golden key before the Nazis get it. It’s visible from your starting location, 🌟but of course you can’t claim it without first solving numerous puzzles.

Indiana Jones And The Temple of Doom

Release year: 1988 | Developer: Tengen | Platform(s): NES

Developed by the same team that made the arcade game of the same name, the NES Temple Of Doom has 12 variations of the stages found in the coin-op. These are🎃 referred to as waves. Helping you to beat them are pick-ups not found in the arcade title, such as guns, swords, extra lives and extra time.

Indiana Jones And The Last Crusade: The Action Game

Release year: 1989 | Developer: Tiertex, NMS Software | Platform(s): Various

Released alongside Lucasfilm's graphic adventure adaptation of The Last Crusade, this action-focussed counterpart has you platforming, artefact col♕lecting and whipping your way through four stages based on scenes from the movie, set in Colorado caves, a circus train, a Zeppelin and Castle Grunwald.

Indiana Jones And The Last Crusade

Release year: 1991 | Developer: Software Creations | Platform(s): Various

There's a variety of gameplay in this NES exclusive. It has a beat-'em-up on a ship and a sliding puzzle stage, there are top-down motorcycle cha💫ses and a maze of corridors in its Castle Grunwald level. As the plot unfolds, you get some choice over the order you play these eclectic challenges in.

The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles

Release year: 1992 | Developer: Chris Gray Enterprises, Jaleco | Platform(s): NES

Based 𒉰on the TV show of the same name, Jalecওo's NES title sees young Indy fight in the Mexican Civil War before heading to the French and German battlefields of World War I. Each country has a selection of tough side-scrolling run-and-gun and shoot-'em-up stages, platforming levels and boss fights.

Instruments Of Chaos starring Young Indiana Jones

Release year: 1994 | Developer: Brian A. Rice, Inc. | Platform(s): Sega Mega Drive

If🔥 this challenging Mega Drive game isn't striking you with lighting then it's sending birds or bats after you that cause you to fall off the ledge that you've spent ages platforming to! You get young Indy's whip, a pistol and grenades to defend yourself as his mission takes you around th🌜e world.

Indiana Jones And His Desktop Adventures

Release year: 1996 | Developer: LucasArts | Platform(s): PC

Best d🐼escribed as a point-and-click actioඣn adventure, Desktop Adventures sets you lock-and-key puzzles that you solve through exploration of its sprawling world, speaking to non-player characters and beating foes. The latter is done much like you would in an action game, albeit by using the mouse.

Indiana Jones And The Infernal Machine

Release year: 1999 | Developer: LucasArts, Factor 5 | Platform(s): PC, Nintendo 64, Game Boy Color

Its level designs and top-down viewpoint set it apart from the third-person perspective PC and N64 versions, but the Game Boy Color Infernal Machine otherwise captures the essence of its counterparts. The🐠re's more emphasis on platforming and dealing with opponents, but this doesn't do it any harm.

Indiana Jones And The Emperor's Tomb

Release year: 2003 | Developer: The Collective | Platform(s): PC, PS2, Xbox

A stylish prequel to Temple Of Doom in game form, the Emperor's Tomb contains all the third-person platforming, exploration, problem solving and combat that you would expect in a Tomb Raider title. There are grea🌠t setpieces and of course a globe-trotting narrative with a quest for an an๊cient artefact.

Lego Indiana Jones: The Original Adventures

Release year: 2008 | Developer: Traveller's Tales | Platform(s): PC, PS﷽3, PS2, PSP, Xbox 360, Nintendo W🅠ii, Nintendo DS

Considering Lego Indiana Jones involves collecting ✨Lego studs for points and building items from Lego blocks, it's a remarkably accurate if more family friendly adaptat🍸ion of the first three films. It has a series of sidekicks that you can switch to if needed or let a second player or AI control.

Indiana Jones And The Staff of Kings

Release year: 2009 | Developer: Artificial Mind & Movement, Amaze Entertainment | Platform(s): PS2, PSP, Nintendo Wii, Nintendo DS

While similar to the Emper♏or's Tomb in terms of its platforming, adventuring ဣand brawling, the Staff Of Kings distinguishes itself with its setpieces. These include climbing a burning rope bridge using Track & Field-style controls, a combat flight sim stage and a firefight where you aim using a reticule.

Lego Indiana Jones 2: The Adventure Continues

Release year: 2009 | Developer: Traveller's Tales | Platform(s): PC, PS3, Xbox 360, Nintendo Wii

The third Lego Indy title, if you count the Java platformer Mobile Adventure, Lego Indiana Jones 2 is packed full of features not found in the original like driving and puzzle-focussed levels. Like the original, it has stages based on the original film trilogy, buꦫt it also adapts The Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull.

Lego Indiana Jones 2: The Adventure Continues (handheld)

Release year: 2009 | Developer: TT Fusion | Platform(s): Nintendo DS, PSP

Based purely on The Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull, the PSP and DS adaptations of Lego Indiana Jones 2 primari💦ly favour left/right movement across the screen and adapt some different movie scenes than the PC, Mac and other console versions. Despite this, the portable editions retain the fun of their counterparts.

Indiana Jones Adventure World

Release year: 2011 | Developer: Zynga Boston| Platform(s): Facebook

Long since shut down, this isometricဣ Facebook game focussed on exploration but had some action elements. You played as a member ﷺof a group called The Adventure Society rather than Indiana Jones, but Indy would accompany you. Adventure World also had a turn-based combat system and some RPG elements.

So how did the new game turn out? In our Indiana Jones and the Great Circle review we called it "the best adventure Indy has embarked on in over 30 years"

Before you dismiss Bumpkin & Sprout as a quasi-educational game for kids, think again. Rabid Rat presents a vibrant 3D world to explore either by yourself or with a friend, featur♊ing platforming puzzles, hack-n'-slash action, and a combat-free map mode. Bolstered by a stunning handmade visual aesthetic, which you can check out for yourself on its , it was all too easy to lose myself in Bumpkin & Sprout's charming little demo – and for 30 minutes, I did.

So mush-room, so little time

Bumpkin & Sprout is a new co-op game in a similar vein to 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Little Nightmares 3, and I'm reli🧸eved to discover that it's just as fun to play by yourself. Loading into a fresh🉐 save at Digital Dragons, no co-op buddy by my side, my first choice is to select a character.

I'm not sure which mushroom-capped eco-warrior is which, but I choose the younger looking fungus of the pair. Given the bearded "chin" sported by the other, pointy-headed mushroom, I assume I've selected the rambunctious little Sprout.

The symbolism of having one older and one younger protagonist isn't lost on me. Even w﷽ithout a wise caregiver at my side, it's a beautifully effective way for Bumpkin & Sprout to angle itself as a platformer for all ages – and it's probably a bit more appropriate for younger chil🤡dren than the unnerving likes of Little Nightmares 3.

But the warm fuzzies don't last long. As Sprout navigates his fantastical 3D environs, the cozy forest vibes soon give way to more serious conservationist themes. He encounters mounds of rubbish at every twist and turn, as well as patrolling impish minions sent by the toxic Spirit to disrupt Nature. For destroying the piles of trash I'm rewarded with power-ups, which float up in little bubbles from the d🌜etritus.

These vary from temporary traversal tools – like speed-boosting roller skates and an umbrella parachute, both used by holding the left trigger – to what I think must be health boosts (since my HP bar refilled inexplicably at one point) a🅷nd other 🧸useful items that likely come in handy later on.

The same melee attack is useful against the Spirit's lackeys, each emanating toxic purple plumes as they march across the forest like Goombas in a Mario game. Instead of jumping on their heads, though, Sprout can march up and simply whack them out of the way. I💜 eventually stumble upon a new way to attack my foes, however: a devastating ground pound, executed by double jumping and hitting the right trigger.

Growing together

Super satisfying mel🅠ee combat aside, Bumpkin & S🧔prout's quirky level design is the real stand-out.

While exploring the forest and putting its smooth platforming opportunities to the test, I encounter plenty of inventive nods to the broa🐈dಞer theme of ecology, each more adorable and clever than the last.

Interacting with a discarded tin opener unravels a hidden bridge, allowing Sprout to safely cross a sludgy river bursting with toxic waste. Elsewhere, a grimy toilet spews yet more filth. A discarded lighter becomes a makeshift hot air balloon, opening up the game's verticality as Sprout travels not only across the forest but up and down it, too.

These subtle quirks are a true highlight for me, identifiably connecting Bumpkin & Sprout to its core themes without being heavy handed about any of them. It's just one aspect of the consistently strong visual language that governs the game, fro🌃m colors and their connotations to the symbolic nature of various setpieces, reinforcing Rabid Rat's expertise as 3D artists.

After 30 minutes of solo exploration, I still wish I'd had a chance to play Bumpkin & Sprout in co-op mode. I can only imagine how Rabid Rat has re-worked these nifty mechanics to accommodate two players, perhaps in the puzzle-solving vein of Hazelight favorites It Takes Two or Split Fiction. I can also see Bumpkin & Sprout's two-player functionality suiting the looser structure of something like Rayman Origins, one of the 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:best PS3 games for local co-op shenanigans, right down to the colorful cast of characters in all 🔯their oddly-pro💖portioned glory.

Either way, I'll be keeping an eye on Bumpkin & Sprout as it moves toward its unnamed release date – though next time I g꧟o hands-on with i💦t, I'll definitely BYOB (bring my own Bumpkin).

Check out the 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:best co-op games to play while you wait for Bumpkin & Sprout

Thank God you're playing Silent Hill 3, and protagonist Heather Mason is simply having a bad dream. Those rabbits weren't as nauseating as the decomposing monsters waiting in the rollercoaster line, but the now infamous 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Robbie the Rabbit mascots encapsulate what makes Silen🍬t Hill 3 an unparalleled survival horror exp♊erience even 22 years after its release date: it's "cute but scary," as Robbie's designer tells me in an interview translated by Junko Okada.

To Usagi Tanaka – usagi うさぎ means "rabbit" in Jꦉapanese – "cute but scary" seems like a code by which one may live honestly. He made a habit out of always carrying , and, at the moment, the artist makes soft vinyl he says are inspired by Night of the Living Dead director George A. Romero. "In the future, I want to design more characters that are a little scary but still cute and turn them into soft vinyl figures," Tanaka continues.

Dawn of the rabbit

Tanaka stumbled into his role as the bunny whisperer by accident. He joined the Silent 🐻Hill 3 team halfway in its production as a background designer, and didn't design and model Robbie until the game was nearly done.

"I remember we needed to create a 'mascot-style rabbit' lying down in [Lakeside Amusement Park]," Tanaka says. "However, as the production was at its climax and everyone was busy, no one had time to create it. Since I always had a strong desi꧋re to create a character, I volunteered to do so."

"I volunteered because I wanted to do it," Tanaka continues, "but I struggled with the design and the pressure was intense, too. Many people supported me back then, and I'm still grateful ℱto them. Even now, the experience of creating Robbie continues to benefit me."

Tanaka and the red-eyed, bowtie-wearing creep Robbie soon became insepar🍸able.

"I was able ౠto have Robbie included in almost every [Konami] title I worked on," Tanaka says, like as a in the PS2 ARPG The Sword of Etheria, a mask in Metal Gear Online for PS3,💎 and as a supportive audience member in Dance Masters for Xbox 360 Kinect.

"Even now, I'm still supervising the prototype and package art for the [Japanese figurine retailer] Grecco's Robbie statue," Tana꧒ka continues. Though, "in addition to Robbie the Rabbit, Lakeside Amusement Park has three other mascot characters" – such as and , both of which undeniably have unfocused eyes that seem to suggest some homicidal impulse. "I daydream about getting the chance to design them someday."

"I like charact♎ers based on small animals," Tanaka explains. "They are easy to give contrasts such as [...] 'tiny but grotesque.' I especially like squirrels." But rabbits are good because of "the movement💃 of twitching its nose."

"Don't you think blondes have more fun?"

In many mythologies, rabbits represent luck or rebirth. Silent Hill 3 is practically a torture device for protagonist Heather, who experiences tragedy in the game about uncovering her true self almost as often as she blinks, but I think Robbie the Rabbit is a replenishing symbol in her nightmares, too (spoilers ahead!).

Heather's old soul has been abused for so long, she doesn't even know when it started; over the course of Silent Hill 3, as Heather's buried memories resurface at the sight♏ of old classrooms, hospital beds, and her dead father's cold corpse, she begins to understand herself as something like a self-contained ecoꦍsystem.

24 years ago, she was Alessa Gillespie, the violently beaten daughter of a cultist who thougꦕht Alessa might give birth to Silent Hill's hateful god. Instead, Alessa's spirit split apart from the pain, reincarnating as Cheryl Mason, who is later reborn, renamed, and♐ raised as Heather.

"I'm not Alessa anymore," Heather contemplates, "but Alessa is sti𓂃ll me. I'm not really trying to deꦅny it or anything… I just… don't want to remember."

Heather lives in a seemingly limitless state of rabbit-like rebirth. God is still in her stomach. She's her own mother and child in a literal way that would , so she's to me and lots of other female gamers, who think of Heather – unlike many male heroes, who lead with brawn – as ✅the pinnacle of a furiously rich inner-life. Misery never fully breaks her, it's only ever absorbed or worn with pride. I aspire to that level of emotional strength, but it's sad that each fresh chance at existence for Heather is cherry-stained with blood… or observed by that unblinking weirdo Robbie the Rabbit.

"I think mascot characters in amusement parks tend to look kind of creepy and unsettling when they are in costumes," Tanaka says. "It🍌's probably a shared impression across any country. And when you place them in Silent Hill’s world, especially in the bloody and rusty amusement park in Otherworld, that impression is even more pronounced."

But since everything else in Silent Hill 3 seems to want to either rip apart your flesh or sacrifice it, the unmoving Robbie mascots also fಌeel like unofficial safe zones. He is a bunny wearing overalls, at the end of the day. Though his mouth is smeared with mystery gore, it's easy to feel like you can trust him – maybe he was munching on strawberries!

On my first Silent Hill 3 playthrough, I was almost surprised by how com🐬fortable I felt arou𒉰nd Robbie (I say "almost," because I'm a firm believer in spooky sweetness, and I plan to one day build a taxidermy collection as varied as my shelves full of dolls).

Equally unexpectedly, through her suffering – even when she eventually enters the real, rusted Lakeside Amusement Park to be surrounded by slumped Robbie suits and literally battle herself, the doppelgänger – Heather continues to cope🃏 with coquettish charm.

"Don't you think blondes have more fun?" she says in the last line of Silent Hill 3's standard ending. As the player, having finished witnessing tremendous amounts of cosmic horror, part of you wants to scream um, no!

Still, it's Heather's ability to maintain her humor, bleach-dyed hair, and revulsion for the unjust w🥃orld around her – in other words, her talent for being a teenage girl – that make Silent Hill 3 unlike any other survival horror game. Instead of making Silent Hill 3 feel like unrelenting, somewhat laborious torment – like a more self-serious title – Heather's attitude categorizes Silent Hill as startlingly familiar. It's aꦰ place where you inexplicably want to take your shoes off. As a New Yorker, I react similarly to the New York City setting in Rosemary's Baby; like Heather, like Rosemary, I'd be laugh-crying if my apartment suddenly descended into hell, too.

It's a creepy cute situation. It's like a beloved childhood teddy bear missing one of his button eyes. Or a birthday party clown whose smile is too wide, or a Venus fly trap sucking on a mealworm. Creepy cuteness is recognizable and rotten, both inviting 🀅and fanged – and without Heather and Robbie the Rabbit acting as proof of that magnetic power in Silent Hill 3, I wouldn't let it consume me.

Famed Silent Hill artist Masahiro Ito, creator of Pyramid Head, says scrapped concepts of freaky creatures "still exist in my mind" and "their children may be" used in future titles.

Duck Detective: The Ghost of Glamping sees titular sleuth Eugene McQuacklin still in the middle of a messy divorce with his swan wife, now 🦂living with roommate Freddy Frederson – an overly enthusiastic crocodile – after falling behind on the rent on his apartment. Down on his luck as he is, perhap🍒s the only thing stopping him from wallowing in the shallows of his own heart is the potential to lose himself to another case.

Quacking the case

Falling back into his bread addiction, and struggling with the age-old rule don't text your ex, Freddy invites Eugene to forget it all for a weekend and join him on a relaxing vacation: a spooky glamping trip outside a haunted sanatorium. (This would work on me, to be fair). To make matters worse, Frཧeddy is meet💖ing up with his new girlfriend who's attending the spot for work – yes, Eugene is third-wheeling here, which ruffles his feathers.

Where The Secret Salami revelled in its office setting, having Eugene peck apart the long and complex relationship𓂃s between long-time coworkers, The Ghost of Glamping is the opposite – all about a group of strangers thrown together by circumstance. The campsite caters to those in raggedy tents all the way to influencers staying in their VIP accommodation (which is more like a penthouse apartment) – meaning characters from all walks of life collide when criminal conspiracy rears its long, bendy neck. It's a compelling hook that sets it apart from its predecessor.

I also want to emphasize that you don't need to have played The Secret Salami to enjoy The Ghost of Glamping. While characters return, and Eugene's circumstances have evolved, for the most part this really is a standalone mystery that just plays in the same world. Just as one episode of C▨olumbo exists next to another, but has its own tricksy plot for Peter Falk's character to pick apart, so too is this just another case for the Duck Detective.

The only times that standalone nature feels more questionable are a handful of spots where Duck Detective once again incorporates some very lightweight geopolitics into its plot. The mystery and characters themselves don't completely hinge around the tense relationship between this world's East and West – but they do return, and I 🌞found myself struggling to follow these parts just as I struggled in The Secret Salami. It's so in the background it's largely a non-issue, and it's perhaps testament to the strong character writing that underpins the mystery here that 𝐆the larger picture just doesn't go into my brain right – but it's an element Duck Detective still hasn't quite landed yet and that I have trouble engaging with.

For the most part, anyone who played Duck Detective: The Secret Salami will know what they're in for, as the mystery mechanics are largely the same. You'll be collecting details on new characters (and matching names to their portraits), presenting evidence to learn more about them, using your magnifying glass to highlight clues across the likes of bags and open laptops, and filling out mysteries. 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:A little like The Rise of the Gol🎃de🧸n Idol, these take the form of slotting collected evidence keywords into statements with missing gaps. The game nudges you if your solu🎶tion is close (and a Story Mode makes this even easier). After coming 🃏up with the correct statements, the plot moves forward for you to do it again.

Duck soup

Yet, though the mechanics are largely the same, The Ghost of Glamping does bring some great improvements in terms of presentation and pacing. A clearer UI that's still pleasingly snappy makes it easy to tell at a glance what clues are new and what you've already investigated. As before, a map⭕ highlights where new interactables are located, but with tighter areas and fewer loading screens it feels like there's a lot less back and forth and trawling for clues.

The Ghost of Glamping also has some more variety with its puzzles, adding some lightweight decrypting and handwriting analysis to the mix in addition to its keyword-filling foundations. This works well, and both unlocking new areas and making deductions feels compelling. It does mean, however, this mystery feels a bit shorter and simpler than The Secret Salami, but my playtime is only 90 minutes here versus 110 minutes there so it's much of a muchness. (I have to mention I do read pretty fast, I'🃏d guess on average most people will get around 2 hours out of this).

I did feel at points The Secret Salami could get a bit bogged down – especially when it came to waddling back and forth in the offices – and while The Ghost of Glamping maybe goes too far the other way in being overly breezy it's nice to see some dials being adjusted for this followup. Some puzzles in The Secret Salami are cleverer than The Ghost of Glamping's, nothing here reaches the devious heights of some of that game's final brainteasers. But, likewise, The Ghost of Glamping has some sequences that are more fun than The Secret Salami's slower bits. There's ups and downs. You know, like… the feꦚathers. Oh god, am I the Freddy Frederson🥀 of GamesRadar+ Towers?!

Is Duck Detective: The Ghost of Glamping one of the 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:best mystery games out there? Not really – but it does feature some of the slickest detective mechanics and a bread-bite-size nature that's irresistible to duck-dive back into. A finger sandwich's worth of adventuring. I had a fun evening, and while this particular mystery won't stick with me, the characters of Eugene McQuacklin and Freddy Frederson will, as well as the new faces they encounter here. There's♍ no mallardy to Duck Detective's refined and brilliantly simple mechanics that continue to evolve, and there's a real chance that, collectively, the case files of the Duck Detective could become a real standout.

Duck Detective: The Ghost of Gla♒mping was played on PC, with a code provided by the publisher

, Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One, PlayStation 5, and Nintendo Switch. For more recommendations, head on over to our 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Indie Spotlight series.

Nobody expects players to have developer-level knowledge about games. But because games don't dwell on this stuff, because as a player you only get a driver's view, and because most studios rarely explain these elements – shoutout to the blogs, threads, and GDC talks that do – there are a lot of misconceptions about how games are made. As a result, a lot of people who love games set themse✨lves up for disappointment or frustration with skewed expectations or assumptions.

I thought it would be interesting to unpack some of those misconceptions. Since I don't haﷺve dev-level knowledge either, I approached this the only way I know how. I asked over 40 devs from around the world – most of them quoted in this story, some inspiring separate stories – one simple but big question: what is something you'd like to clear up that people, especially players, misunderstand about how games are made?

Responses lightly edited for clarity and length.

Why games are hard

I knew going into this that making games is hard and expensive. But a comment from Ape Out and 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Baby Steps' Gabe Cuzzillo struck me and really set the tone for this. "Video games don't want to exist," h🧸e says. "Other mediums, you're kind of working with them. Beat a drum, it makes a noise. Nothing is like that in video games. Just by default, they resist existing. They do everything wrong. By force of will, we'll just kind of tear them into shape, patting them down, just trying to contain this chaotic thing."

While many comments in this article are, in part, informed opinions, and several developers unknowingly disagreed with each other during separate interviews, Cuzzillo's perspe🔯ctive touches on a common theme.

澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Helldivers 2 creative boss and ex-CEO Johan Pilestedt reasons that "the one [thing] people misconstrue the most is, if you think about when movies are made, you get an actor and they're there and you tell them what to say. But games are so me🏅ticulously crafted. You have to build the actor from the ground up for them to even be able to perform those lines.

"People say, 'can't🎀 they add this or do that,'" he continues. "Most of the time, all of the decisions that you make, especially the larger the game gets, have so many consequences that🀅 cascade, making something that seems easy really hard, or something that seems really hard to be super simple. It's unintuitive unless you've worked in games to see how they're created."

Cole Medeiros, Stardew Valley board game designer and business head at ConcernedApe, agrees: "People underestimate how hard it can be to build something seemingly simple and therefore they often overscope their projects. It's difficult for them to see all the complex systems and restrictions that exist but are not apparent unless you've actu♔ally built and supported a game. So they might not understand why something takes a long time, or doesn't work quite right, or why a bug was not found by the developers."

"Players do not know how ridiculously much work goes into a video game," says Getting Over It's Bennett Foddy. "Part of that's on us, because we show them🎐 the bits that are the most fun or silly or glamorous."

"When devs make updates, it's꧋ all visual, but there's a lot of things that go into the game that's not visual, things that are hard to put into words," says Building Relationships dev Tanat Boozayaangool. "What you see is not the game; it's what's under it," agrees Eagle Knight dev Jorge Ferretiz.

John⭕ Romero, game director at Romero Games, sums it up: "Game development is messy, iterative and non-linear. Game designs aren't clear blueprints like building a house, and it's not a linear process. Finding the fun is not always easy, and sometimes takes a lot of development to demonstrate. Also, with so many interwoven disciplines, changing something in one area often impacts many others and could ꩵcause delays."

Finding the fun

Romero mentions an understated but important process: making something people will want to play, not just that they can play. Once a game works, and it's overcome all the technical and creative obstacles to run, it may not be fun yet. I'm reminded of 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Todd Howard's comments on Starfield, saying it took seven years to find its fun and that he🐼 "thought we would find the answers faster."

Finding the fun is something Papers, Please creator Lucas Pope mentions. "I start with a nicely rounded idea, then immediately dive into the weeds and hang out there for most of the project," he says. "I happily assume that the pieces could be put together to make a fun g🏅ame, with only a vague idea of how. And that idea changes as the pieces are completed."

XCOM creator Julian Gollop, now CEO of Snapshot Games, largely agrees. "It's such an incredibly iterativeꦅ process that normally takes you, in some cases, far away from your original conception. When you say you're a game designer, if you've designed the game, well, what do you do the rest of the time it's in development? You're constantly iterating and testing and refining all the data inside of the game. The whole iterative process of game creation is maybe something that people don't appreciate very much."

Four members of the Possessor(s) team at Heart Machine offered an example of how things come together. Producer Myriame Lachapelle discussed the making of a boss fight, and how multiple people acro🎐ss disciplines will put their fingerprints on that small section. "Making a game is much more collaborative than I think people think it is," she says.

Director Alx Preston notes that adding another person to a dev team can also add "multi-dimensional" complexity to how that tea꧟m works. Writer Laura Michet dismisses the idea that one person could, or should, take matters into their own hands because, as Romero also said, chan💃ges affect more than that one person. And on the other hand, narrative director Tyler Hutchinson points out that adding more people doesn't inherently make things go faster. Making games "is a communication problem," he says, and more people complicates that communication.

People make games

The human element of game dev was another recurring point. Newblood Interactive head Dave Oshry not-unreasonably reasons that most players "know next to nothing about how games are made." There are more similarities to film and TV production "than you would 🔯think," he explains, highlighting the way development teams coalesce.

"With the exception of solo devs, games are an artistic endeavor that require the cooperation of handfuls, dozens, hundreds or even thousands of people at once working 🐷together to create interactive art," he says. "You can p𒐪ut all the great programmers, artists, animators and sound designers you want in the same building but that doesn't mean they can make a great game. Great games are made by great teams that work great together. It helps when they're all friends, too."

Likewise focusing on 🐟"the human aspect," Iconoclasts creator Joakim Sandberg worries "the vocal audiences still lack empathy for the staff of a company." There's an idea "that one person, like the director, is responsible for every popular aspect of a game. Video games have many directors ... A game is its team, not its auteur."

One such director, David Jimenez at Altered Alma's 2Awesome, describes his role as creative director as "like directing an orchestra. You have to manage people rather than manage the game. My job is mak♎ing them all work together in the right directio𓆏n."

Games are their people. (, who I have mercilessly turned into a section.) It's why a studio's output can feel so different if key creatives leave, ༺or are laid off to assure investors a number will go up for a quarter. Teams of a similar structure can also differ wildly. Offbrand Games CEO David Gorman notes "there's not one type of development team," just as there isn't "one way to make a game." Instead, "depending on their background, certain things might be easier or harder for them."

One way these assumptions manifest, Palword publishing manager John Buckley finds, is that "people have very unrealistic expectations of timelines." Titans like Fortnite and Call of Duty suggest content can be pumped out in days or weeks, but those games are made with unparalleled resources. For the ove💫rwhelming majority of devs, things take exponentially longer.

"I think gamers have just become so used to this kind of constant cycle that they're now applying it to every game they play," Buckley adds. "A new island in Palworld, that's half a year's work. That takes six months. And when it comes out, people are super excited, but you just get so many nasty c🅘omments before that about these things. And you try to explain it, and there'll always be a few gamers who get it, and they really appreciate that dialog, but quite a lot of them don't."

Iron Lung and Dusk's David Szymanski believes "communication between players and developers in the indie sphere💎 is pretty open, or at least it is when both parties allow it to be." Richard Atlas, CEO and creative director at Ultimate Sheep Raccoon's Clever Endeavour, thinks "players are easily converted from having a lot of complaints to really empathizing if you speak to them as humans. I understand why you're annoyed about this feature we just made, here's why we did it and here's what we had to sacrifice in order to do this thing."

When games fail

This kind of rapport becomes especially valuable when games stumble or break. Some of the shakiest theories and worst arguments can surface when players are unhappy with games, the time when feedback is arguably most important, and this 🎐is when🏅 once-harmless misconceptions can poison the well.

I'm not suggesting people who make games can do no wrong or that design or monetization missteps shouldn't be criticized. As ex-BioWare community dev Frank Sanchez told me for my story on 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:why onl♎ine games always break at 🉐launch, there are 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:valid reasons to hold ꧂devs accountable and, if problems aren't being addressed, "put their feet to the fire and say, 'Hey, I'm nᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚ⁤⁤⁤⁤ᩚ⁤⁤⁤⁤ᩚ⁤⁤⁤⁤ᩚ𒀱ᩚᩚᩚot having a good experience, this is why.'" Don't, you know, harass them.

Countless devs have said it: player feedback is essential. Even the biggest teams can't test and find everything themselves. Erenshor creator Brian 'Burgee' put it this way: "There's nothing I appreciate more than someone writing out a post about a mechanic and how they think it can be better." But , there are🍒 good and bad ways to give feedback, and a lot of that ties into how problems happen in gam🍸es and how they can be fixed.

"Behind a lot of releases that just didn’t turn out the way people expected them to, there was a dev team trying its absolute hardest to make that game as good a🐟s it could possibly be under challenging circumstances," says Romero Games CEO and studio director Brenda Romero. "We cough up a chunk of our soul for🔯 these games, and while a non-optimal release sucks, I can assure you that the dev team tried everything in its power to deliver on that vision."

TinyBuild CEO Alex Nichiporchik says "making games is insanely difficult, especially before you’ve announced and had some traction," when you're wondering if anyone ⛄will care and, if they do, if you can meet expectations.

"There's a constant battle between the realities of trying to make a game under a time frame and a bud🍷get and all that other stuff, and how difficult it is to do one little thing," echoes Graffiti Games lead producer Troy Saemann. "When you add all that stuff up, that's where you start to see delays and other issues that I think cause a lot of the games t𓆉hat people see as being bad or rushed."

"People th✨ink developers have a lot of malice behind anything they do when it's actually just thﷺem trying to make sure you get the best game possible," adds indie dev Aerial_Knight. "When things do launch with bugs, and there's no way to make a game without bugs, it's nothing they left in because they didn't care."

Szymanski targets the idea of "dev laziness" as "a blanket explanation for missing/buggy features or seemingly hacky implementation." He says "these decisions are nearly always driven by an unseen web of more complex issues and/or external pressure." He worries online tutorials an🅘d tools can be "a bit of a double-edged sword in this instance," because "it's now very easy to acquire enough knowledge to make broad incorrect assumptions about how easy a given task should be." With his recent game Butcher's Creek, Szymanski found that something that sounds like "a simple fix" for AI and animations actually would have required overhauling huge chunks of the game.

Some developers I spok🍸e to were hesitant to "call out" players. Others, like veteran dev Andrew Gilmour, best known for Slain and Valfaris, reckon players don't care as long as the game is good, so he may even advise devs to "stop trying to explain your process and get baꦉck to actually working on your game, and if you have done it correct you won't have to explain it." Lies of P director Jiwon Choi was of a similar mind. Via interpreter, he said: "In the end, if I make a good quality game, without having to go into the details of all the challenges we went through, I believe the fans will see it."

What I wanted from this story was a look into how devs think about games and why games require the resources they do, and a broader perspective on game development that doesn't rely on jargon I frankly wouldn't understand either. If there's a theme to all of these responses, it's that making games is hard and expensive and time-consuming🔯, and also diverse and messy and collabor💦ative, often in unseen and unpredictable ways.

Games are 3D shapes, and playing them only shows you one side; we won't know if that square is part of a cube or a pyramid. S🤪o we shouဣld criticize games, interrogate claims, and share opinions. But we should also resist the urge to generalize and assume, because wrong assumptions can become an obstacle to our own experience and feedback, and it is so incredibly avoidable.

"The eShop needs to be better. MUCH better": 28 game devs, from the creator of XCOM to indie legends, explain what they want from Nintendo Switch 2

There's no perfect shorthand for describing Sunderfolk, which is the first video game from Dreaღmhaven studio Secret Door, but the quickest I've been able to do it is "D&D by way of Jackbox." You play through a campaign with classes and progression using your phone to avoid cluttering up the main screen, which always has the map or main cutscene presented. There is a single narrator that voices all o♈f the NPCs and reads descriptive text out loud. It's much, much better with friends.

Adventure awaits

And that's absolutely by design. According to Sunderfolk game director Erin Mare💧k, the core premise of the game, regardless of any🌺 mechanical descriptors or adjectives, is that it's trying to solve a relatively common problem: people being unwilling to give physical tabletop games a chance for one reason or another.

"'I love these games,'" Marek says while describing the exact issue. "'I want to play these games with my loved ones and my friends, but they will not give those games a chance.' And so this is a game to try to get them that bridge into the space, to try to get them to catch the b💯ug."

"I have twin boys," says Chris Sigaty, studio head of Sunderfolk developer Secret Door. "They're now 17, and I'm a big board game and tabletop player, and I would s🌊ay, to some extent, Sunderfolk is inspired by the challenges I had as a father even getting my kids to do it. And unfortunately, they have not caught the bug in the same way I have with board games, like I'm willing to listen to really long rules and read them and do all that stufꦰf."

Functionally, Sunderfolk streamlines the traditional tabletop process to make it as easy as possible to actually pick up and play. There are absolutely rules about how different mechanics work, what to do when and where, and how to play, but they're presented piecemeal over time without the need to break out the Player's Handbook just to figure out what spell🌌s you have access to.

This is instead boiled down to a series of predetermined cards you can pick ahead of missions꧑ (which are voted on collectively) that include straightforward instructions about moving, damage, status conditions, and so on. Further customization comes in the form of trinkets, equipment, and new cards that are layered over time into the fabric of play in a straightforward manner.

Sundered folk

"There's a lot of complicated things that make up what Sunderfolk is," admits Sigaty. "But the goal is this bridge into the hobby, and there's so many wonderful different types of games there, but if you're knowledgeable enough to say 'tactical turn-based game that's on a hex board that uses card mechanics that's inspired by actions on a card that you may have seen in this board game' – 🙈you're already so advanced that I think we're missing the point."

"If I'm talking to the🔜 average person, it's like, 'it'sꦐ an adventure that you can go on together as a family or as a group of friends,'" continues Sigaty. "At the highest level, that's what it's doing."

To Sigaty's point, it'd be one thing for me to describe, mechanically, how exactly movement functions across grids, what individual cards do in tandem with one ano💧ther, the ways you interact with players and NPCs, turn order… or I can simply say that I'm doing everything within my power to have my littlꦿe bat bard push enemies into pits, and I'm lovin' it. Both are true, but the latter is a much more digestible description.

"I love playing things like D&D and Pathfinder and all these systems that, honestly, just provide these opportunities for me my friends to get together and just play a litt൩le bit of m❀ake-believe," adds Marek, "but it's very tiring for me, the GM, to have to prep content."

"Sometimes I want to still get together with them," Marek continues, "but I'm like, 'I don't have the energy to actually get this stuff together for us to play.' And so it's also for those folks who are like, 'Hey, this isn't a rep♎lacement for these board games and these things you love, but it is maybe an easier space if you're feeling tired, a reason to get together still, even if you don't have all of your content prepped to hang out with your friends."

And it absolutely w📖orks. More than once these past few weeks, I've managed to salvage an evening where my friends and I were initially meant to play D&D, but someone had to drop out, into a Sunderfolk night. It doesn't scratch the exact same itch, but it is so shockingly close that it's a welcome surprise regardless.

Sunderfolk is currently available on PC via Steam, PS5, Xbox Series X, and Nintendo Switch. If you're looking for something more traditional, be sure to check out our ranking of the 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:best tabletop RPGs.