Despelote is heading to Switch, PlayStation 4, PS5, Xbox Series X/S and PC on May 1. Despelote is a super stylish soccer game that's secretly about life in the Ecuadorian city of Quito in 2001, and it comes from local developers Julián Cordero and Sebastián Valbuena, and published by Panic.
You play as 8-year-old Julián, and spend your time kicking the ball, meeting people and exploring life during Ecuador's economic recovery just ahead of the unifying 2002 World Cup. The in-game city comprises actual photographs of places around Quito, but the backgrounds are covered in a layer of high-contrast grit, while people and the soccer ball stand out as stark line drawings. The audio was recorded on location, too, and the result is a game that looks and sounds like a soothing memory.
Despelote was announced in 2023 and originally due to land in 2024, but it now has a firm date of May 1. It's already picked up a handful of accolades, including four nominations at the 2025 Independent Games Festival. There's a demo on Steam, if you're intrigued.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/slice-of-life-soccer-game-despelote-kicks-off-on-may-1-234256915.html?src=rss
Blendo Games' latest installment of interactive weirdness, Skin Deep,is due to hit Steam on April 30, after nearly seven years of development. Skin Deep is a first-person sci-fi shooter, but it doesn't look (or smell?) like any of the dramatic space operas or realistic, precision-based games that generally flood this genre.
Skin Deep takes place on a futuristic cargo starship managed by an insurance corporation and filled with its clients' valuables, and you're the cryogenically frozen security officer kept on board in case something goes awry. Space pirates ambush the ship, your body thaws, and a non-linear game of shooting, sneaking, sabotaging and smelling ensues, all presented in Blendo's signature blocky 3D style.
Skin Deep features a mix of puzzles, madcap comedy and action scenes, and alongside the first-person gunplay, there's a sneeze mechanic and a stink system that sometimes leaves little smelly clouds in your wake, alerting nearby pirates to your presence. It's like Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2, but with fewer medieval peasants and way more space cats. Did we mention there are a bunch of cats that you have to save on the ship? Because there are, and some of them are dressed in little cowboy outfits.
For the odor mechanics, players become stinky only when it makes sense narratively, like when they're expelled from the ship's trash shoot alongside all the fish bones and rotten things. Your smell clouds subside once you figure out how to wash up. Sneezing follows a similar in-game logic.
Blendo Games
"If you're crawling through a dusty vent your little sneezy air level will increase, then you'll do a big sneeze noise," Chung told Engadget in 2021. "And there's a bag of pepper that we have. If you shoot it, a big cloud of pepper flies out. You can pick up a pepper bag and throw it at someone and they'll start sneezing."
Skin Deep is the most action-focused game that Blendo has ever made. The independent studio, led by Brendon Chung, has a lineup of award-winning titles under its belt, including Quadrilateral Cowboy, Gravity Bone and Thirty Flights of Loving. These titles tend to highlight clever puzzles and polygonal oddities, and Skin Deep is the first Blendo project to feature first-person shooter mechanics.
That's not to say FPS development is a new idea for Chung. He got his start in game development by customizing levels in Doom, Quake, Half-Life, Quake 2 and Doom 3 when he was a kid, and FPS games are often what he's drawn to as a player. He's still using a modified port of id Software's Doom 3 engine, idTech4, to make Skin Deep.
"I've played like a bazillion FPS games because I just really enjoy them," Chung said in 2021, "but I feel like there's so much that can be explored and that I wish these games would explore." You know, like well-dressed cats and stink systems.
Blendo Games
When we talked with Chung four years ago, the Skin Deep FAQ page read, "Is Skin Deep going to take 4+ years of development time like your previous game Quadrilateral Cowboy?" And the answer was, "I hope not." Today, there's an "(update: oops...)" added to that response. Development on Skin Deep started around July 2018, according to the FAQ.
Skin Deep is published by Annapurna Interactive and it's heading to Steam on April 30. A new demo is live now on Steam, as part of the Steam Next Fest hullaballoo. Steam Next Fest runs from February 24 at 1PM ET to March 3 at 1PM ET, showcasing a ton of fresh game demos and developer insights on the storefront.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/pc/blendo-games-oddball-sci-fi-shooter-skin-deep-hits-pc-on-april-30-173010803.html?src=rss
The most surprising thing about Moroi is its sense of humor. Moroi is a top-down, dual-stick action and puzzle game set in a dungeon of surreal horrors, where each cell contains a unique and grotesque vignette. In the first area of the map, there’s a cell containing a sentient meat grinder that craves human flesh. In another, a dead man is strapped to a feeding tube that’s still pumping slop into his bulbous, pulsing stomach. The next room over, you meet a talking duck with far too many human teeth in its mouth. One tooth would be too many, but this duck has a full, smiling set. And then he rips them all out for you, leaving behind a bloody, empty bill.
And this moment makes me laugh out loud. The gore in Moroi is so ridiculous that it turns the corner into hilarity, tapping into the gruesome absurdity that makes b-horror movies so charming. You don’t expect the duck to have human teeth, but what’s even more surprising is their sudden removal and the duck’s leftover, blood-smeared smile. These shocking moments of levity appear in Moroi at a rapid-fire pace, twisting the vibe from brutality to bizarreness and back until it feels like you’re trapped in a Francisco Goya fever dream directed by Sam Raimi. It’s pretty awesome.
Moroi comes from creator Alex Stanescu and his independent studio, Violet Saint. Though he’s now based in Switzerland, Stanescu is Romanian and Moroi is filled with grimdark takes on his homegrown fairy tales. The game’s name refers to a vampire in Romanian folklore, even. Stanescu was also inspired by David Lynch, Heironymous Bosch, H.R. Giger and Little Nightmares, with a dash of Robert Sheckley and Douglas Adams for humor. But at its core, Moroi is a completely original world of creepiness, Stanescu explained during a media briefing hosted by the game’s publisher, Good Shepherd Entertainment.
“There's a big pool of things in my subconscious from which I pull,” he said. “General grotesquery, maybe carnival art, Bosch and early medieval art, and caricature. I always try to find my own style.” Stanescu later clarified further, saying, “Creepy things. Like, for example, in a puzzle, you have to vomit blood into the mouth of someone else. And you will find reality shifting in some places, like in a room you find someone else than you expect to find, and so on. Let's say dream logic.”
Violet Saint
It’s more like nightmare logic, really. Each of the cells in Moroi is connected — get the severed hand from the autocannibal so the meat grinder can make bone dust, which you can then give to the creepy wizard, who turns it into salt for the witch, who’s then devoured by her own potion, and so on. Eventually in the introductory level, you find a sword, break down a door and continue your quest to escape, but the prison only grows more strange. Every now and then, a voice interrupts your progress, whispering for you to find it. The creatures in the cells seem to know who you are, even though you have no memory of this place. There’s way more going on in Moroi than meets the eye.
“I tell a lot of it through the lore and collectibles, so those will carry a lot of storytelling,” Stanescu said. “The storytelling given by the characters and by the gameplay is pretty cryptic. You have to find and pay attention to what's happening.”
There are no branching storylines in Moroi, but your choices throughout the game will affect how it ends, according to Stanescu. He said the full experience should take about nine hours to complete, but this can be extended if you hunt down all of the secrets.
Violet Saint
Combat in Moroi is fast and fun, and heavy metal replaces the game’s moody dungeon music at the beginning of each fight, setting an appropriate tone of chaos and carnage. Dungeon guards are the main enemies and they appear in waves of five or so at a time, some with more powerful moves than others. I ended the hour-long demo with an enhanced sword and a gatling gun in my arsenal. With a sword, you have basic and heavy attacks, plus a finishing move that builds up as you deal damage. The gun doesn’t require ammo but it runs on a cooldown mechanic, and it has a basic shot and a finisher. Dodge rolls round out your moveset in the early game, and the balance in these battles feels just right. On top of dodging and attacking, there are fiery cores scattered around the environments that you can explode for AOE damage — but be warned, if you’re too close to the boom, you’ll get hurt, too. The end of each battle is marked by piles of intestines and busted corpses — hopefully not yours — littering the cobblestones.
The amount of blood-soaked surrealism, frantic combat and body horror in Moroi’s first hour is impressive, and I’m amped to discover all of the secrets in the full game, no matter how many exploded corpses I have to dig through. Or maybe even because of all the exploded corpses.
Moroi is due to hit PC pretty soon — “early 2025.”
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/pc/moroi-preview-a-grimdark-action-game-thats-actually-pretty-funny-150009465.html?src=rss
Sorry, beefcakes, but this review isn’t for you. All the fighters and rangers out there will still get a sense of how phenomenal Avowed is, the lushness of its environments, the clarity of its combat systems and the depth of its conversation trees — but at its core, this is the review for Avowed players who want to spend their time in the Living Lands learning how to become a master of mushroom-powered magic. This is the Avowed review for wizards. And, sure, all of their friends.
To be clear, I would happily play Avowed as any mixture of classes, and I’m likely going to boot up a new campaign and do exactly this very soon. But in my first runthrough, I wanted to see if the game would let me live out my fantastical spell-slinging dreams, and it absolutely did.
Avowed is a first-person, open-world RPG from Obsidian and it’s a spin-off of the studio’s Pillars of Eternity series, but it introduces an entirely fresh storyline and map, and doesn’t require any existing knowledge of that universe. You are the envoy to the powerful Aedyran empire and you’ve just landed on the shores of the Living Lands, a lawless region occupied by outcasts, criminals and refugees from the wider world. Aedyr and its goon squad, the Steele Garrote, are making inroads in this land and attempting to wrest control of its settlements in the name of law and order. You know, classic colonizer shit. However, that’s not why you’re here — you’re on a mission to uncover the source of the Dreamscourge, a rapidly spreading illness that consumes the minds of people and animals, covering their bodies in bright fungal growths and turning them into rabid killing machines. It’s kind of like cordyceps in The Last of Us, but with rainbow face mushrooms and rambling spiritual breakdowns preceding the full zombie phase.
The Dreamscourge’s growths look eerily similar to markings on your own face, but you’ve carried yours since birth and they signify you as a godlike, someone who’s been touched by one of the many deities of this world. This is a rare and special status, and part of your journey involves uncovering the identity of your god, a mystery that’s haunted your entire life. What’s more, as you interact with aquamarine pillars of spiritual power called adra, a booming voice interrupts your thoughts and dreams, begging you to trust it and claiming it can help cleanse the world.
Obsidian Entertainment
This complex foundation forms a tapestry of twisting, interlocking narrative threads that span politics, military strategy, religion, occultism, science, trust, relationships, duty and identity over 45 hours of playtime. That’s for a fairly focused run, too — I skipped plenty of sidequests in the interest of finishing the game before my deadline, and a full, leisurely playthrough could easily have tacked on 20 more hours and oodles of narrative intrigue. The lore runs deep in Avowed and each of its storylines is handled with supreme care, as are all of the notes, letters, poems and plaques scattered across the Living Lands. There are thousands of completely optional pieces of writing to find here, and each one is delivered in its own voice, serving its own purpose. Avowed is full of life and its history was written with a deft hand.
After creating my character with purple and pink hair, yellow freckles and big coral mushroom paddles across my eyes, I chose to be a Court Augur — the most mystical option — and started building out my interpersonal and mana-generating stats. Mana in this game is called essence, and you also have health and stamina gauges. Leveling up certain characteristics unlocks their associated dialogue options in conversations, and throughout my playthrough, I focused on Perception, Intellect and Resolve because I hate being made to look a fool. Also, as the game progressed, I realized I needed as much stamina and essence as I could get.
The Living Lands comprise four main regions: Dawnshore, Emerald Stair, Shatterscarp and Galawain’s Tusks. Their landscapes range from lush, water-logged forests dotted with iridescent fog and glowing mushrooms, to blackened, craggy spires and bone-like structures in a hellish volcanic wasteland. Each area is gorgeous in its own way and packed with people to help, bounties to secure, secrets to unravel and so very many shiny items to pick up. As someone who absolutely can’t resist a glowing outline or the tinkling of a nearby lockbox, Avowed is a buffet of delight. The game encourages you to pick up absolutely everything in sight, and though there is an encumbrance limit, it’s generous and never caused me any real problems. There also seems to be no such thing as “stealing” with your character, no matter how destitute or hostile the surrounding NPCs may be.
Obsidian Entertainment
The dialogue system offers ample opportunity to forge a distinct personality and apply it to every scenario, whether you want to be a hardline government simp, religious zealot, socialist vigilante or some combination of all three. The choices you make in conversations with townsfolk, your companions and the voice in your head ripple across the campaign, altering the outcomes of major narrative points in tangible ways. Treat each decision as if it really matters, because in this game, it probably does.
Avowed let me live out my anti-colonization, pro-contraceptive, magical underground rebellion fantasy, but I found it just as enjoyable to talk to kith — the humanoid creatures of the Living Lands — just for the sake of talking. My favorite dialogue moments happened while standing around the fire of my party camp, learning more about the lives of my companions, shaping my own personality and swapping scary stories. Also, the way the firelight glints off of the slick turquoise scales of my companion Kai’s chest is endlessly mesmerizing.
Ahem, speaking of — there is no romance in Avowed and I have to say, I didn’t miss it. Horny characters abound in the Living Lands, so there’s no shortage of flirty dialogue options if you care to partake, but there’s enough happening at all times that a roll in the hay never feels like top priority. Your party maxes out with four companions: the aforementioned Rauataian nomad Kai, the mountain dwarf and tracker Marius, the defiant animancer human Giatta, and the talented wizard-in-training Yatzli, a hearth orlan with pink hair and big, fluffy ears. I know who I would start a romance with — Giatta and I had some lovely fireside chats — but more than anything, I’m happy to have these characters as my friends and reinforcements throughout the game.
Obsidian Entertainment
Some of Avowed’s best storylines are sidequests about your companions’ lives, fleshing out their personal demons, helping them find closure, and providing context for their behaviors and beliefs. Kai’s sidequest involving his old friend, Tama, stands out as a particularly moving vignette. Play it when you see it.
You can take two companions at a time on your adventures, and the campaign touches on their backstories in turn, making certain party members more useful in specific missions. Kai is a tank with a fire-starting gun; Marius has a bow and shadow-step assassin ability; Giatta heals, shields and buffs; and Yatzli uses magic to control crowds and deal devastating damage.
Once I realized that playing as a wizard meant I didn’t have to use a grimoire to cast spells, I was completely committed to maxing out that class tree, ignoring the fighter and ranger skills entirely. There’s also a godlike ability tree that fills up as you discover memories of your past lives in hidden locations around the Living Lands. Godlike moves include things like passive boosts, area-of-effect spells and attacks. Finding one of these is a treat, because it triggers a moment of introspection between your character and the voice in their head: A beautiful, hand-drawn image of an ancient event fills the screen and the voice asks how you acted in past moments of extreme tragedy and triumph. These conversations nurture your relationship with the voice and help establish your personal history, and they’re quietly, deeply satisfying.
Obsidian Entertainment
In combat, I ended up with two main loadouts: A wand and one-handed staff as my main, and a flaming sword and pirate-y gun in the other. Every now and then I swapped my secondary loadout for a bow, which takes two hands to fire but never runs out of arrows, and I had a lot of fun landing headshots from afar. I upgraded my chosen weapons and armor at the party camp throughout my adventure, and added enhancements to the objects that could handle them. Upgrading and enhancing is its own little game, and this feature made me feel less insane as I ran in the opposite direction of my waypoint marker, compulsively picking up every single shiny thing on screen. This is for upgrades, I whispered to myself while gathering my 166th twig. Yes, yes, upgrades.
The action wheel was also a critical tool. Opening it during combat pauses the scene, allowing you to browse consumables, godlike abilities and, most importantly for a young wizard, spells. I mapped health and three spells to the D-pad, but the rest of my magic abilities were added to the wheel as I unlocked them. It became second nature in the heat of battle to pull up the wheel, down some wild mushroom stew and then pick a spell to fling at incoming enemies, whether ice, fire, lightning or pure magic damage, laser-focused or area-of-effect. And then, I’d watch my foes fry. Truly, I loved being a wizard. Managing my stamina bar, essence meter and health gauge was the trickiest part of combat, but I quickly fell into a groove of stabbing, dodging and spell-slinging that worked against a range of enemy types. My overall combat tip is simple: Kill the healers first.
By the end of the campaign, I really did feel godlike.
Obsidian Entertainment
Enemies in Avowed don’t level up relative to your own experience. This means those level one lizard bros in Dawnshore will always be level one, and the level five beetles in Galawain's Tusks will always be level five. I appreciate this approach because it’s immediately clear when you need to spend some time grinding, and it’s easy to plan future raids and sidequest runs. That said, I’m a fan of grinding (hey-o), so this choice plays into my open-world RPG preferences nicely.
My time in the Living Lands wasn’t without bugs, of course, and I’m not talking about the giant spiders. I played on Xbox Series X and experienced four hard crashes in 45 hours, and three of these were in the same area, which happened to be a big boss fight, so that definitely wasn’t ideal. I restarted the game each time and didn’t lose any real progress. There were also consistent animation issues with close-up dialogue scenes, where it seemed like the game had trouble rendering characters based on how much hair they had — Yatzli was particularly stuttery from a visual standpoint. The flame animation on my Fan of Flames also cut out sometimes, but the damage kept spewing out, so this wasn’t a huge deal. None of these issues ruined the game and none of them are above further optimization from Obsidian, hopefully in a day-one patch. But honestly, by the time the end credits rolled, I’d forgotten that any of these things had happened. I simply felt warm and fulfilled, like I’d just completed a fantastic game.
The third line in my review notes says, “I would like to be a mushroom witch pls,” and Avowed let me be exactly that. I played the game as a kind and self-righteous chaos demon, but if I’d wanted, I could’ve been a staid enforcer of colonial expansion, a hubristic wannabe king or something in between. The Living Lands easily support all of these realities, thanks to a universe filled with fabulous writing, exciting secrets, breathtaking views, intriguing characters and smooth mechanics. Though Avowed is set in the world of an existing franchise and it’s yet another entry in the stacked genre of open-world fantasy RPGs, it feels like the start of something new.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/xbox/avowed-review-elder-scrolls-i-dont-know-her-140057830.html?src=rss
As I sat down to play the 90-minute South of Midnight preview, I had one major question: Why does the framerate look like that? The trailers display a purposefully choppy animation style that’s meant to be reminiscent of stop-motion, but it wasn't clear how this effect would be applied in the game’s cutscenes, combat and traversal moments. After playing the preview, I’m still unsure.
I should state my bias at the top: I am super primed to enjoy South of Midnight. I’ve been a fan of Compulsion Games since the studio debuted Contrast in 2013, and I eagerly followed the development of its follow-up, We Happy Few, through 2018. Compulsion’s games are stylish, with an emphasis on polished 3D graphics and lanky characters in fabulous outfits. Microsoft acquired Compulsion in 2018 and the studio has been working on South of Midnight ever since. My intrigue has only grown in the past year, following a drip-feed of trailers with luscious Southern Gothic settings, a bluesy soundtrack and the game’s magic-weilding protagonist, a young Black woman named Hazel.
First, let’s talk about what the game does well. The preview begins at chapter three, after Hazel has discovered the basics of her magical abilities but has not mastered the power flowing through her veins. Hazel is a Weaver, capable of manipulating the invisible strands that hold reality together, and she’s looking for her mother, Lacey, after a hurricane swept through their hometown of Prospero in the American Deep South.
If Hazel is the main character in South of Midnight, the environment is her co-star: The swamps of Prospero are lit with a rich, golden hue and they’re buzzing with surreal life. Towering cypresses, lush ferns and thorny vines the size of tree trunks weave their way through the forest and its cloudy pools. The houses, half-demolished shacks connected over the bayou by crumbling wooden platforms, are filled with rotting trinkets and faded photos, and many have eviction notices stuck to the front doors. Car-sized peaches dot the landscape, plump pinkish skin sticking out of the swampwater and buried at the bases of trees. This land is drowning in magic.
Compulsion Games
Though Hazel is on a linear journey to find her mom, there are plenty of opportunities for light exploring around Prospero. Chapter three features a handful of hidden paths that conclude with glowing bits of Floof, the game’s currency, for Hazel to collect. These alternative routes are positioned in plain sight, but they’re integrated into the landscape off the beaten path, so they’re easy to miss if you’re not paying attention. Hazel explores by running, jumping, double jumping, gliding and wall running, and her movements through the world feel utterly natural. Her abilities build on one another nicely and they’re perfectly responsive, creating a mini parkour flow that I didn’t expect in this game. At times Hazel uses magic to turn ghostly objects into tangible platforms, and her double-jump and glide combo is particularly fun.
Hazel always looks cool, regardless of the framerate. She moves her long, thin limbs with the haphazard confidence befitting a teenage track star, and her clothes — a waffle-stitched sweatshirt tied around her waist, denim jeans, a tank top with a sports bra, leather arm bands and a holster across her chest — are heavily textured, lending each piece a tangible feel. Hazel’s dialogue is delivered with a hefty amount of adolescent snark, too, and I laughed out loud when she met the giant talking catfish and immediately was like, “Nope,” and turned to walk away. Actors Nona Parker Johnson, who performs Hazel’s motion-capture and stunts, and Adriyan Rae, Hazel’s voice, have done some fabulous work here.
Compulsion Games
In the preview, Hazel encounters an eccentric local, a few magical creatures and at least one powerful ritual, and she eventually finds herself chasing the ghosts of two brothers, one of whom died after being stuffed inside the trunk of a tree. As she hunts their memories and traps their pain in a blue bottle, banjo music trickles into the scene until it becomes a full-on folk song recounting the brothers’ tragic story. It’s a unique and effective mechanic. The world around Hazel is composed of dark and surreal beauty, and after seeing (and hearing) this sliver of gameplay, I’m eager to uncover all of Prospero’s hidden stories.
Combat in the South of Midnight preview takes place in contained stages, with spiky vines blocking off the exits as soon as the fight begins and the haints — ghosts, in Hazel’s vernacular — pop up. The enemies in this chapter come in three basic forms: tall floaty haint, stationary haint nest and floaty blob haint. The enemies are made of gooey black tendons and red magic, and they attack in specific ways depending on their type. The tall one moves quickly and rushes forward, the nest spews out exploding bugs and the floaty blobs shoot parryable projectiles.
Hazel has a basic attack, dodge, healing move and four magical abilities: weave, strand push, strand pull and a final locked move. Weave freezes an enemy in place, while strand pull and push can be used to throw objects back in the haints’ faces. Each combat stage starts out with a healing totem that Hazel can tap into once, as long as she can reach it and (on Xbox Series X) press Y. She also receives health regen by pressing Y near a pile of freshly killed haint meat, unraveling their essence for a little boost. These piles are only available for a few seconds after each kill, so there’s some light strategizing involved in staying alive mid-battle.
Compulsion Games
The fights flow just fine, and a lock-on system allows Hazel to swap her attention among the haints on the fly. Parrying projectiles is the toughest ability to master in the preview, but with a little more time to practice, I think it’ll become second nature. South of Midnight is not an open-world RPG or anything, but Hazel has a small skill tree with three upgrades for each of her magical abilities and nine slots to unlock moves like ground slam. A second screen contains Hazel’s collection of magical objects (five slots), patterns (six slots), readables (104 slots) and storybooks (14 slots). By the end of the demo, I’d collected four magical objects and one readable. Just looking at the menus, it seems like South of Midnight is a contained, sub-20-hour experience.
Now, let's talk about the game’s animations. South of Midnight begins with a gorgeous, handcrafted stop-motion intro movie that brings Hazel and her storybook adventure to life, but after that, the game’s stop-motion conceit only half-works. Hazel’s movements and the world at large are supposed to render at 60 fps, while her facial expressions in cutscenes render at something closer to 15 fps, mimicking the “animated in twos” style of Into the Spider-Verse. This appears to be true for anything in the game with a face, and it’s particularly apparent with the catfish character, which is basically all mouth. When it all comes together as Compulsion intended, the effect looks and feels very cool. Unfortunately, this is a rare occurrence.
In practice, the stop-motion effect is inconsistent during third-person exploration moments and close-up cutscenes, and it tends to feel less artistic, and more like the game simply has an erratic framerate. It’s possible to turn off stop-motion effects and I tried this, but honestly, I couldn’t spot the difference. Even with stop-motion turned off, Hazel is rendered at an unpredictable rate that often dips well below 60 fps. The framerate issue appears across characters and vignettes, and it’s especially shitty during brightly lit memory scenes, where NPCs appear in front of Hazel as glowing white ghosts, filled with particles and visually stuttering all over the place.
South of Midnight targets 4K/60 on Xbox Series X, but my preview at times felt like it struggled to maintain 30 fps. What’s more troubling, though, is the screen tearing that appears throughout the preview, spawning from the game’s use of a-sync. The tearing often appears close to the center of the screen, suggesting the game is far away from its performance target. Of course, Compulsion is still working to optimize South of Midnight and there’s some time to address these problems before the game comes out on April 8 — but they’re cutting it close.
I think the stop-motion effect is a grand idea and it would work well if Compulsion committed to the bit. If the framerate is supposed to be low, keep it low, rather than popping in and out of higher framerates, which makes everything feel like a mistake. Consistency is the key, and South of Midnight hasn’t nailed that yet.
This is Compulsion’s first attempt at building a game with all of the resources and attention that Xbox provides, and the studio has crafted a beautiful, mysterious world with an ambitious mechanical conceit and a badass protagonist. The stop-motion effect is still hit-or-miss, but that doesn’t detract from the game’s other successes. I remain incredibly stoked on South of Midnight.
South of Midnight is due to hit Xbox Series X/S, PC and Game Pass on April 8.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/xbox/south-of-midnight-preview-stopped-motion-160003119.html?src=rss
Doom: The Dark Ages is set to come out on May 15 for PC, PS5 and Xbox Series X/S. It’s a single-player sandbox experience with an emphasis on exploration, bloodshed and upgrading skill trees, introducing massive mech battles and a ridable cyber dragon that spits fire on command.
Doom: The Dark Ages is the largest Doom game id Software has ever made, but to be perfectly clear and possibly assuage some fears, it’s not open-world. In fact, the directive for developers was to edit down everything — controls, levels, menus, upgrade paths — in order to emulate the reactive rush that made the original Doom games so addictive. According to executive producer Marty Stratton and game director Hugo Martin, Doom: The Dark Ages is a refined and thoughtful return to the series’ classic loop, set in the medieval wastelands of Hell and starring a super tanky Doom Slayer.
In The Dark Ages, the Slayer has three basic inputs: shield saw, melee and gun. The shield saw is a critical tool, allowing players to parry and block incoming attacks, and also acting as a boomerang-style projectile that can embed itself into enemies to rip through their demonic flesh. Parrying is a massive factor in the new game, and it’s also one of many aspects that players can customize in the difficulty settings. You’ll be able to change the size of the parry window, adjust the actual game speed and fine-tune a dozen other factors to make each run feel just right.
The Slayer has a choice of three melee weapons and he carries just one at a time. There’s an iron flame, an electrified gauntlet and a spiked mace, and each one can be upgraded as you make your way through Hell. The final main input is the trigger, which controls all of the gruesome guns. There’s a wondrous array of weapon-based brutality on display in The Dark Ages, including the Skullcrusher, a gun that eats the bones of murdered enemies and uses the shards as ammo.
Certain levels will support skyscraper-sized Atlan battles and allow the Slayer to ride on the back of a cybernetic dragon, spraying flames on the gathered demons. These abilities won’t be available at will, and are instead contained to specific regions of the map. There are also swimming levels — which, speaking as someone with a phobia of deep water, is possibly the scariest thing in the new game.
id Software
The Slayer in Doom: The Dark Ages is beefy. He’s thick, heavy and armor-plated, and as he hunts demons through the medieval wastelands of Hell, he’s going to feel different than the Slayers in 2016’s Doom and its 2020 follow-up, Doom: Eternal. In terms of development mottos, Doom was “run and gun,” Eternal was “jump and shoot,” and The Dark Ages is, “stand and fight.” Strafing and twitchy teleportation-like abilities are still on the menu, but the emphasis this time around is on holding your ground and strategizing while shooting.
“What people didn't like in 2016 was that it was too repetitive,” Martin said in a media Q&A before Thursday’s Xbox Developer Direct, where id showed off new bits of the game. “And in Eternal, some people said it was too hard. I actually think it's too complex. I think that the complexity of the control scheme led to unnecessary difficulties. You really want to be fighting the demons, the bad guys, not your controls.”
Martin and Stratton emphasized the importance of streamlining the core loop in The Dark Ages, while also building the largest, most adventure-feeling Doom game that id has ever made. There are skill trees, currency and more secrets to find than ever before, but there’s not a lot of filler — everything has a purpose and there are no unnecessary frills in the actual mechanics of combat, resource-collecting and upgrade paths.
id Software
“There is a lot of exploration in this game, and it's for power,” Stratton said. “That's one of the things that is really important. You're finding resources and other things that allow you to improve yourself, upgrade your guns, upgrade your shield, your melee. So it isn't just the secrets, just the toys, that kind of thing. It really is an exploration for power.”
Martin added, “I want to feel strong. It's got to be a good amount of speed and exploration and power, but I'm okay with you changing what that power fantasy is, especially if the change you make brings it back closer to classic Doom. I'm super down for that.”
The points of inspiration for Doom: The Dark Ages include Batman: Year One, Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight, and the film 300, specifically that iconic tracking shot of Leonidas slamming and stabbing his way through hordes of Persian warriors at the Hot Gates. Miller's The Dark Knight was a particularly poignant source for Martin.
“He drew an older, more powerful, thicker Batman,” he said. “And I just love that comic so much. And I always thought it would be so interesting to just, instead of a Ferrari, you'd be more of a monster truck. And that's what we’re working on, we've been talking about that for years and years.”
Doom: The Dark Agesis due out on May 15 for PC, PS5 and Xbox Series X/S, including Game Pass.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/doom-the-dark-ages-hits-pc-ps5-and-xbox-on-may-15-190015221.html?src=rss
CES 2025 was a fantastic show for companies making good on the promises of years past. At these events, we’re used to seeing booth after booth of gadgets in concept and prototype phases, with vague details about final designs and release windows of “eventually.” This year, however, the vibe was way more release-ready. A handful of high-profile projects that debuted at previous CESes are back with concrete plans and actual release dates, and many of these products are available right now. It’s a veritable CES miracle.
Remember Ballie, the rolling robot that Samsung debuted in 2020 and then brought to CES 2024? This is exactly the type of thing that we’d expect to never see again, doomed to forever haunt the consumer-electronics graveyard, but this year Samsung revealed Ballie’s final form and set its release window in the first half of 2025. Ballie is a cute yellow robot about the size of a bowling ball, with an Among Us-style cutout housing a projector that allows it to beam images and videos onto your walls and floors. This is a fun one from Samsung, and even though we don’t know an exact price or release date just yet, the news that it’s actually coming out this year is a welcome update.
Sony Honda Mobility
Sony Honda Mobility’s Afeela 1 is officially available to preorder right now, nearly five years after Sony announced its intent to enter the EV market. The Afeela 1 started out as the Vision-S concept car, which Sony unveiled at CES 2020, and it picked up the Afeela name in 2023 after Sony and Honda established their joint venture for EV manufacturing. At CES 2025, Sony Honda Mobility opened up reservations for the Afeela 1 Origin and the Afeela 1 Signature, which respectively cost $89,900 and $109,900. Reservations are only available to customers in California for now, and the first vehicles will be delivered in mid-2026. It’s definitely cool to see Sony’s EV ambitions manifesting after half a decade of build-up.
One of the headlines we published this year with the word “finally” in it was dedicated to Displace TV’s wireless 4K OLED screens with suction attachments. First revealed at CES 2023, Displace’s suction-cup TVs are now ready for mass consumption, and they’re available for pre-order with shipments expected in March. Displace is selling two models, the Basic and the Pro, both with 4K OLED displays and screen sizes of 27 inches or 55 inches. They all support rudimentary gesture controls, too. The 27-inch Basic model goes for $2,500, while the 55-inch Pro is $6,000, with the other prices in between.
LG
Speaking of TVs, the hottest bit of home entertainment tech at CES 2024 was LG’s transparent OLED T — and this year, it’s officially on sale. LG brought the OLED T to CES 2025, just a few weeks after the display hit the market at the eye-watering price of $60,000. The OLED T is a 77-inch, 4K, transparent TV, and even though it costs as much as a fancy car, it’s stunning in action.
Here’s another idea we were prepared to forget about forever: Lenovo’s rollable laptop. A handful of concept products with rollable screens have hit CES since 2019, and Lenovo has been talking about its rollout laptop idea since 2022. At CES 2025, the company showed off its first market-ready model, the ThinkBook Plus Gen 6 Rollable. It has a vibrant OLED display that expands from 14 inches to 16.7 inches at the press of a button, and we found it to be shockingly elegant in person. The ThinkBook Plus Gen 6 Rollable should go on sale this spring, expected to start at $3,500.
It should be noted that this list isn’t limited to things that fit inside your home — some products hitting the market after previous CES appearances are actual houses themselves. Pebble brought its Flow all-electric RV trailer to CES 2024 and even opened up pre-orders that year, but at CES 2025, the company shared its final design and officially kicked off production. The Pebble Flow should ship out this spring, starting at $109,500 and topping out at $175,000.
Amy Skorheim / Engadget
AC Future brought concepts of its transformable RV home to CES 2024, and at the 2025 show, the company unveiled its finished product. AC Future’s Ai-TH line comes in three models: a deliverable pod (Ai-THu), a pullable trailer (Ai-THt) and a drivable EV RV (Ai-THd). The RV expands into a 400 square foot apartment with one bedroom, one bathroom, a living room, and a kitchen with a full-sized refrigerator, two-burner induction stovetop and microwave. There’s even a washer and dryer in the bathroom. Production on the Ai-TH range will begin as soon as the AC Future gets home from CES 2025, and pre-orders are live now, priced at $98,000 for the pod, $138,000 for the trailer and $298,000 for the EV RV.
It’s always nice to see innovative concepts like these become real products. The glut of actual release announcements out of CES 2025 is a relief, and it feels like a positive sign for the current consumer-tech production cycle.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/general/ces-2025-was-more-shoppable-than-conceptual-160010350.html?src=rss
RollAway combines the luxuries of a high-end hotel with the freedom of camping, all in a drivable, eco-friendly package. RollAway is a camper-van rental service that offers an on-demand concierge who can plan your trip, direct you along the way, provide tips about the best spots to visit, and keep your space equipped with five-star amenities. The van has a seating area that transforms into a queen bed, a kitchen with a sink and dual-burner stovetop, a shower, toilet, lots of storage, and a panoramic roof. When the van’s rear rolling door is pulled down, it acts as a screen for the included projector.
But that’s just all the built-in stuff. RollAway also comes with a lineup of top-tier amenities, including Yeti coolers and cups, Starlink satellite Wi-Fi, locally sourced breakfast packages, Malin+Goetz toiletries, fresh linens, and a tablet loaded with hospitality services. The tablet gives you access to a live virtual concierge and the Hospitality On-Demand app, which houses your itinerary, room service and housekeeping requests. In the future, RollAway will offer a full housekeeping service, but that feature isn’t live quite yet.
RollAway
Best of all, RollAway is a sustainability-focused, zero-emissions endeavor. The vans are fully electric, courtesy of GM’s EV subsidiary BrightDrop, and they have a single-charge range of more than 270 miles. They also have a fast charging option. The vans have solar panels, a waterless toilet, and low-waste water systems for serious off-grid trips, or they can be fully hooked up at RV sites.
We took a quick tour of a RollAway van at CES 2025 and found it to be as luxurious as advertised. The kitchen table slides into the seating area when it’s not in use, creating a fairly open hangout space at the very back of the van. The kitchen felt plenty large for camping purposes, and the most cramped space was the bathroom, which held a toilet and a sliver of a hand-washing sink. All of the finishing touches seemed sturdy and looked sleek. We were deeply tempted to drive right off the show floor in the thing.
Engadget
RollAway just started booking trips in late 2024, and the service is almost fully reserved throughout 2025. Reservations cost around $400 a night. It’s available only in the San Francisco Bay Area for now, but more cities are coming soon. RollAway had a successful funding round on Indiegogo in 2023, raising more than $47,000 of a $20,000 goal.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/transportation/evs/rollaway-is-a-rentable-ev-camper-van-with-a-concierge-service-and-luxury-amenities-130025021.html?src=rss
Longstanding solar generator company Jackery is leveling up the US’ roof game with the introduction of XBC curved solar shingles. Debuting at CES 2025, Jackery’s curved solar roof tiles come in terracotta or obsidian, designed to match some of the most common house styles in the country. While solar shingles definitely already exist in the US, these are the first with a wavy aesthetic. It sounds like HOA presidents everywhere just lost one more excuse for preventing your rooftop solar installation.
Jackery
The new tiles deliver a cell conversion efficiency of more than 25 percent, and they’re built to withstand extreme weather conditions, including hail, high wind and temperatures between -40 degrees F and 185 degrees F. They’re designed in line with traditional roofing installation practices, featuring a modular setup that allows for flexible, piecemeal maintenance. Jackery provides a 30-year warranty on the tiles, too.
The Jackery Solar Roof system integrates with the company’s existing in-home solar solutions, including the HomePower Inverter, Battery, Hub and Hub Plus, and the Solar Generator 5000 Plus and Smart Transfer Switch Kit.
There’s no word on specific pricing or availability for the new tiles just yet, even though Jackery was highlighting them in a big way at CES 2025. Jackery, founded in Silicon Valley in 2012, is one of the leading names in portable generators and whole-home solar kits, a market that's becoming more accessible by the year.
Engadget
Also at this year's show, Jackery showed off its first Solar Generator RV Kit, the new 3000v2 backup generator, and its full-coverage HomePower Energy System.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/home/smart-home/jackerys-curved-solar-roof-tiles-are-so-normie-even-your-hoa-might-like-them-000009034.html?src=rss
How are you ever going to improve your Elo if you can’t stop shivering or sweating in your gaming seat? Razer’s latest innovation is Project Arielle, a gaming chair that sports integrated temperature controls, plus the company’s signature pretty lighting of course.
Evolved from the Fujin Pro, Razer’s breathable mesh chair, Project Arielle uses a bladeless fan system to either warm up or cool down the entire frame. The side of the seat features a touchscreen control panel where you can change the three-speed fan settings and swap between warm and cool airflow. The edges of the seat and backrest have RGD lights that change dynamically from blue to red as the temperature changes, too. The bladeless fan is housed in a cylinder dangling off the base of the backrest like a little stubby tail, and a cable runs from this same area, connected to a sizable power brick.
Razer says Project Arielle can reduce the perceived temperature by 2 to 5 degrees C in dry environments, and its self-regulating, energy-efficient heater delivers warm air of up to 30 degrees C (86 degrees F).
Razer
In action, Project Arielle is surprisingly effective and quiet. I had a chance to experience — not just sit in — the chair at CES 2025, and it functioned even better than expected. With the warm setting engaged, I felt a breeze of heated air swirl around my head, neck and upper back, and the temperature change was tangible even in a hot room. The cool setting provided instant relief, with the airflow particularly noticeable along my back, neck and under my arms. The fan was noiseless in the demo room, which contained about a dozen people and a handful of laptops and PCs. I strained to hear the fan running in this environment, and even then, it was barely noticeable as a soft hum.
As someone who’s always chilly, especially in sedentary situations, Project Arielle is an incredibly attractive chair. Instead of piling on sweatshirts and blankets to warm up my frozen bones, I’d be happy to just switch on the heating function and bask in the warm air. The cute lights certainly don’t hurt, either.
Project Arielle is just a concept for now, but Razer has a pretty good track record when it comes to turning its experiments into actual products. Just look at the Project Esther haptic gaming cushion, which debuted at CES 2024 and then went on sale nine months later as the Razer Freyja.
Will Project Arielle help boost your rank or shave seconds off your speedrun? Maybe, maybe not. But it’ll definitely keep you cozy while you try.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/razer-reveals-project-arielle-at-ces-2025-its-first-temperature-controlled-gaming-chair-140053028.html?src=rss
In a sea of smartphone gaming controllers with chunky grips, obtrusive analog sticks and rigid backplates, the MCON by Ohsnap stands out. It’s a gamepad that essentially turns any phone into a supercharged Xperia Play, complete with Hall effect joysticks, silent buttons and handles that can extend out of its base. It also has bumper-style triggers and actual bumpers. When it’s attached to the back of a phone, the MCON creates a slightly chunky but uniform profile that slides into a pocket without fuss. When you’re ready to start playing, the phone pops up from the gamepad with a satisfying flick.
The MCON communicates with your smartphone via Bluetooth, no cables or plugging in required. It uses MagSafe to connect to iPhones, and for Androids, there will be a MagSafe adapter included in the box — this is simply a disc 2 millimeters thick that sticks to the back of your phone or case. That covers essentially every smartphone out there, and it’s possible to stack multiple connecting pucks to create space for awkward camera bumps. Ohsnap's goal is to support iOS, Android, Xbox, PC and Mac, with PlayStation as a platform pipe dream.
Ohsnap
Ohsnap and MCON creator Josh King showed off the gamepad at CES 2025 with a nearly finalized prototype. The final version will have silicone tops on the analogue sticks, a cover for the spring mechanism and more finesse all around. King said he wasn’t quite satisfied with the D-pad yet, either. But even in its current form, the MCON is a sweet little peripheral. It feels nice — lightweight but sturdy enough to support and fling a full-size smartphone — and it folds into a compact rectangle that’s satisfying to hold.
Snapping it open involves pressing two buttons on the top of the controller, behind the attached phone, and it requires just the right amount of finger strength and angling. It took a few tries for me to successfully deploy the pop, largely because I have long manicured nails, but I was able to use my actual nail tips to make the magic happen.
Ohsnap
When King spotted my Samsung Z Flip 6, he immediately started troubleshooting ways to make the foldable work with the MCON. You’d just have to move the attaching puck over slightly, so it could connect to the lower back quadrant of the phone rather than on the central hinge, he explained. He was confident he could make it work, and said he’d already ensured the Galaxy Z Fold was compatible with the MCON. King’s goal is for the MCON to support absolutely every smartphone.
The MCON Kickstarter went live on January 2 and, four days later, it’s collected more than $740,000 of a $25,000 goal. King’s concept has enjoyed a bit of viral fame over the years, and he eventually took the idea to Ohsnap, an established MagSafe-focused accessory manufacturer. By their powers combined, the MCON is on track to ship in August at a price of $150.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/mobile/smartphones/i-adore-this-clever-mobile-gamepad-with-hall-effect-sticks-and-a-snap-up-design-110007990.html?src=rss
This is not a phone. The Comet by Mecha Systems is a modular, Linux-based handheld computer built for hobbyists, engineers, students, artists and roboticists of all kinds. The Comet is a chunky palm-sized device, and it has a 1.8 GHz ARM64 Quad-core processor, 4 GB of memory and 32 GB of on-board storage, though this space is expandable. Most of the Comet's features are customizable, in fact.
The Comet's magnetic snap interface allows users to clip on a variety of control panels, called extensions, transforming the handheld into whatever device you need. For now, Mecha offers three standard extensions: a gamepad with a soft-press D-pad and four input buttons, a GPIO panel with access to 40 pins, and a keyboard with ABS keys.
The whole thing runs on Mechanix OS, a custom Debian-based Linux distro, and its graphical user interface is powered by Mecha's open-source Mechanix Shell, "making it among the few small-screen touch interfaces available today for Linux," according to developers. The Comet's screen is an IPS LED display with capacitive touch and it's 3.4 inches on the diagonal. The handheld has a 5MP camera with auto focus, a mic, speaker, two USB-A ports and an ethernet port, plus Bluetooth 5.0 and 2.4 GHz wireless slash 5 GHz 802.11ac capabilities.
The Comet can take any Raspberry Pi-based HAT and any mikroBUS Click board. It's designed for people to play with every part, especially its internals. The back of the Comet pops off for easy tinkering and there's even an Allen wrench embedded in the device to encourage exploration. The screen also comes off with a few quick screw turns — basically, if you see something on or inside the Comet, it's customizable. All of its housing parts and extensions are available as 3D-printable files.
"Comet was built over the past 3 years with a vision to create a versatile computing platform for building in the real-world," Mecha Systems said on its website. "Our target audience includes students, hobbyists, creatives and engineers."
At CES 2025, Mecha Systems developers demonstrated a handful of apps running on the Comet, including a Chrome browser, notes page and camera reel, and they also showed off a video of the handheld being used to power a little wheeled robot, which was very cute. Other potential uses include a drone launcher or remote, car communicator, nano satellite, AI assistant or long-range radio transceiver, but those are just the ideas that Mecha has offered up. The truly unexpected innovations should come from users themselves.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/mobile/mecha-comet-is-a-modular-handheld-linux-computer-with-snap-on-extensions-131057589.html?src=rss
Samsung is kicking off 2025 with a lineup of new AI-enhanced televisions. At CES 2025, Samsung unveiled the Neo QLED 8K QN990F and QN900F, plus the Neo QLED 4K QN90F, QN80F and QN70F. The TVs come with glare-free technology and a suite of AI features driven by Samsung Vision AI.
The Neo QLED 8K QN990F is Samsung’s top-of-the-line model and it features a super-slim, minimalist footprint and an NQ8 AI Gen3 Processor. Its AI abilities include proprietary 8K upscaling, frame-by-frame HDR remastering, adaptive sound, color boosting and AI Mode, which automatically optimizes picture and sound based on the content on screen. These represent updates to existing Samsung AI efforts.
In line with the minimalist aesthetic, Samsung is also shipping a Wireless One Connect Box for the QN990F, allowing users to keep their TV space wire-free. This is similar to LG’s Zero Connect Box, and it’s a clever bit of clutter-clearing equipment. Samsung claims the Wireless One Connect Box works at a distance of up to 10 meters, even with obstacles in its transmission path.
Meanwhile, Samsung’s QLED 4K line features an NQ4 AI Gen3 Processor, 4K AI Upscaling Pro, improved picture quality and a 165Hz refresh rate. The QN80F has a 100-inch option, while the QN90F comes in 115 inches.
Samsung’s AI ambitions cover all of its 2025 TVs, with Vision AI delivering new personalization and optimization features across the board. Click to Search can identify people, places and products on-screen and then provide relevant information about these things in real time. Identify the actors in a scene, specific pieces of clothing or the displayed location, for instance. In a similar vein, the new Samsung Food ability can identify the grub on your TV and even provide relevant recipes. This feature can also analyze the contents of your connected Samsung fridge and build specific shopping lists, or prompt you to order groceries or takeout from the TV using third-party apps.
Samsung AI Home Security turns your TV into a house-monitoring hub. It leverages the built-in microphone and connected cameras on your Samsung TV, and can detect unusual sounds and movements. It then delivers alerts to your phone or directly on the TV. Live Translate delivers real-time subtitle translations, and Generative Wallpaper allows users to create dynamic, personalized art canvases.
In OLED land, Samsung is introducing the S95F, S90F and S85F. As the flagship in this line, the S95F includes an NQ4 AI Gen3 Processor, improved glare-free technology, a 165Hz variable refresh rate and a brighter display than ever before.
There's also The Frame Pro, a TV so special that we have a separate story all about its new features.
As usual, Samsung is primed to reveal more details about pricing and availability of its new hardware during CES 2025.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/home/home-theater/samsungs-ces-2025-tv-lineup-includes-8k-ai-enhancements-and-a-wireless-connect-box-030058512.html?src=rss
When it comes to new horror games, there are times of feast and famine, and this past year we gorged until our bellies bulged and our mouths dripped with gruesome grease. In 2024, we received a rich spread of dark experiences from solo creators, indie teams, AA developers and AAA studios in a vast array of genres and visual styles. There was a fantastic Silent Hill 2 remake and beefy updates to contemporary classics like Phasmophobia, Alan Wake 2 and The Outlast Trials, and there was also a steady cadence of brand-new horror franchises expanding the genre in unexpected ways.
First, let’s take a moment to celebrate a sampling of the year’s fresh horror universes. In 2024, we got the following new titles:
Crow Country from brothers Adam Vian and Tom Vian at SFB Games
This is not a comprehensive list of new horror franchises in 2024, but it’s a suitable demonstration of how vast and varied the offerings were this year. Indie studios are leading the charge when it comes to fresh ideas and original mechanics, ofcourse, but there are also plenty of references to early-2000s graphics and PS1- or PS2-era survival horror on this list. The combination of innovation and nostalgia is particularly potent in titles like Fear the Spotlight, Crow Country, Mouthwashing and Hollowbody. These games infuse blocky 3D worlds with modern sensibilities and smooth animations, resulting in experiences that illuminate the staticky memories of Resident Evil and Silent Hill that lurk in our heads. This is how we wanted those games to feel, fixed camera angles be damned — or, in the case of Hollowbody, lovingly embraced.
Fear the Spotlight
Cozy Game Pals
It should also be noted that Fear the Spotlight marks the debut of acclaimed horror-movie maker Blumhouse as a video game publisher. Fear the Spotlight is the first release in Blumhouse’s lineup — which includes future titles from EYES OUT, Half Mermaid, Perfect Garbage, Playmestudio and Vermila Studios — and it’s an excellent exploration of low-fi teenage drama and dread. The horror-game revolution is upon us and Blumhouse is absolutely going to snag a piece.
The least horror-like game on the above list may be Kunitsu-Gami: Path of the Goddess, and it also happens to be the only title from a AAA studio. I’ve included it because, as a dedicated fan of horror games, I think Kunitsu-Gami checks plenty of boxes: It features huge, disgusting demons and a lethal blight that envelops whole towns in skeletal yet strangely juicy organic material. Its monster designs feature colorful displays of lechery and body horror, and there’s comfort to be found in its tense strategy-action gameplay loop. Kunitsu-Gami wasn’t marketed as a horror experience, and it certainly contains just as many scenes of stunning beauty as it does grotesquerie, but I heartily recommend it to any horror fan. I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised.
Kunitsu-Gami: Path of the Goddess
Capcom
INDIKA is another entry that straddles the genres of horror, camp and religious satire, but it definitely features a few scenes of soul-piercing terror. Plus, the literal devil is your friendly companion throughout the game, and that has to count for something. Among scenes of grief, inhumanity and devastation, INDIKA is a laugh riot, and it’s a preeminent example of mature themes handled well in video game form. An additional genre-bending standout from 2024 is Simogo’s Lorelei and the Laser Eyes. It contains incredibly satisfying logic puzzles in a hotel made out of mysteries — but phantoms haunt the hallways, there’s a corpse in the back garden and every scene drips with palpable unease. Lorelei and the Laser Eyes is one of the best and most unsettling games of the year, period.
Still Wakes the Deep, meanwhile, offers a familiar and beautiful brand of monster-stalking horror on an oil rig in the middle of the angry North Sea. It’s a must-play game for any horror fan, acting as a vessel for The Chinese Room to show off its skills in building authentic worlds and cultivating ceaseless tension with a paranormal edge. Plus, it's one of the best-looking games I played on PS5 all year. Slitterhead is another one for the action-horror players out there, presenting a supernatural mystery in a version of Hong Kong that’s been infested by body-snatching demons, featuring buckets of blood and frantic close-range combat.
Still Wakes the Deep
The Chinese Room
The year began with the release of Home Safety Hotline, a simulation of a 1990s call center where players help diagnose and treat household pests, which include otherworldly threats like Bed Teeth, Fae Flu, The Horde, Laundry Gnome, Mirror Nymph, Toilet Hobb, Unicorn Fungi and others. Home Safety Hotline really was the amuse bouche of 2024’s horror game lineup — and Mouthwashing is the dessert.
All the horror kids nowadays are playing Mouthwashing, a polygonal first-person romp through a stranded space ship filled with doomed crew members steadily losing their minds, overseen by a maimed captain with a maniacal, bandaged smile. Mouthwashing is strange and claustrophobic, and it’s a fabulous way to end the year in horror gaming.
Silent Hill 2
Bloober Team
But we haven’t even talked about the existing franchises yet. The Silent Hill 2 remake from Bloober Team, the Polish studio behind Layers of Fear and Blair Witch, was a brilliant success, even in the face of exacting standards from longtime series fans. The remake looks and feels like the game that players remember, only spit-shined and smoothed over, and Silent Hill 2 remains just as terrifying in 2024 as it originally was in 2001. Maybe even more so. Bloober Team had a lot to prove with this one, and they made us elder-Millennial horror players proud.
Alan Wake 2 was one of the best games of 2023, horror or otherwise, and it received two significant batches of DLC this year: Night Springs landed in June and The Lake House went live in October. Each bit of content not only keeps Alan Wake’s hellish world alive, but it adds depth to the cross-franchise universe that Remedy is building between Control and Alan Wake. Personally I always want more Alan Wake, and in that regard, 2024 didn’t disappoint.
The Outlast Trials
Red Barrels
Two live-service indie games, The Outlast Trials and Phasmophobia, also saw major updates in the past 12 months. After entering early access in May 2023, The Outlast Trials studio Red Barrels has been working to establish a solid cadence of new content drops, and this year they really got into the groove. The Outlast Trials launched in full in March 2024 and it’s received multiple updates since then, introducing new enemies, maps, game modes and limited-time events for the players trapped in the Murkoff Corporation’s secret Sinyala Facility. The amount of work that Red Barrels puts into The Outlast Trials is endlessly impressive, especially considering there are only about 65 developers at the studio.
Phasmophobia has an even smaller team than Red Barrels, but they’re making big moves. The crew at UK studio Kinetic Games have kept Phasmophobia alive since its Steam launch in September 2020, and this year, they finally brought the ghost-hunting game to consoles. Phasmophobia hit PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S on October 29, and it also came to PS VR2. Kinetic Games has grand plans to keep supporting and expanding Phasmophobia in 2025 and beyond, so even though the console release happened four years after launch, this is really just the beginning.
Lorelei and the Laser Eyes
Simogo
There it is — our humble ode to horror gaming in 2024. It’s been a dozen months of indie innovation and gorgeous gore, with a side dish of fabulous remakes and sizable updates. Some new horror games push against the boundaries of the genre, expanding our ideas of what’s scary and why, while others find fresh ways to dissect classic tropes. It’s a case of modern cuisine vs. comfort food, and on my plate, there’s plenty of room for both.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/dang-2024-was-a-great-year-for-horror-game-fans-160009640.html?src=rss
The Game Awards are over — congratulations to Team Asobi for Astro Bot taking home the Game of the Year award. Our review of Astro Bot earlier this year called it "one of the best games Sony has ever made," and it seems the industry and game-playing public agree.
As always, the long, long stream was a hybrid award ceremony, advertising reel and game announcement marathon.
There were countless announcements interspersed throughout the awards, including all-new games like Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet from Naughty Dog, The Witcher 4 from CD Projekt REDand Split Fiction from It Takes Two studio Hazelight. It was also a show of revivals, with long-dormant franchises like Okami, Onimusha, Ninja Gaiden and Virtua Fighter returning.
You can view all of the winners at the Game Awards' official site. And if you missed it, you can watch a the Video Game Orchestra's GOTY medley; it's always a highlight of the show and watching them fit Astro Bot and Balatro in this year was a vibe — praise the keytar!
Here are our top announcements from the show, in no particular order — you can watch all the trailers below, or click on one of the headlines to get the full story.
Well, let's be honest: I don't think any of us expected to see CD Projekt Red preview The Witcher 4 any time soon, and yet the studio did just that, sharing a lengthy cinematic trailer for the upcoming sequel at the Game Awards. Even if there's no gameplay footage to be found, fans of the series will love what they see.
Naughty Dog is pivoting from post-apocalyptic fungal drama to interstellar sci-fi bounty hunting with its newest game, Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet. The studio revealed its new title with a cinematic trailer at The Game Awards on Thursday. Intergalactic takes place thousands of years in the future and it stars bounty hunter Jordan A. Mun, played by Chilling Adventures of Sabrina actor Tati Gabrielle. Jordan finds herself stranded on the planet Sempiria, which has been cut off from the rest of the universe for more than 600 years. She's on a mission to escape Sempiria, but it looks like some vicious robots are going to get in her way.
Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree is just barely in the rearview mirror and FromSoftware already has a new game in the wings. The first trailer for Elden Ring Nightreign, a standalone co-op action game, at The Game Awards 2024.
Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio delivered a meaty one-two punch at The Game Awards. First came the news that the Like A Dragon studio is behind a revival of the Virtua Fighter series. Not only that, but the forever-busy studio (which, you may recall, has a Like A Dragon spinoff coming in February) is also making a Like A Dragon-style game set in the 1910s.
There were several major surprise announcements during this year's edition of The Game Awards, but perhaps none was quite as out of the blue as word of a sequel to Okami. Not only that, the original game's director, Hideki Kamiya, is at the helm.
It’s only been a short few months since Gearbox announced Borderlands 4, the next game in its long-running looter shooter franchise. Back in August, all we had was a cryptic teaser, but at today’s Game Awards, we got a proper look at the new game.
We told you back in 2021 that The Outer Worlds 2 was a thing that existed, and now, more than three years later, we have evidence in support of this claim: a gameplay trailer.
2K’s consistently sporadic Mafia series will return in 2025. Mafia: The Old Country is set in Sicily in the 1900s, and will explore the origins of organized crime. Developer Hangar 13 announced that a new Mafia title was in development back in 2022, but gave few details beyond that. The game's first trailer is a melodramatic affair complete with a patriarch monologuing over candlelight, horses galloping across the plains and opera music as a backing track. This is drama, people.
Swedish indie studio Hazelight is synonymous with co-op gaming, so of course its next project is built for two players — but this time, it also features two genres. Split Fiction is a co-op adventure where players leap between sci-fi and fantasy worlds in a bid to escape the clutches of a greedy publishing corporation. It supports local and online co-op, and, fittingly, it plays out in split-screen.
BrawlersAbsolverandSifuput Sloclap on the map thanks to their memorable looks, slick action and crunchy animations. So naturally the next project for the French studio is [checks notes] a 5v5 arcade soccer game. Uh, sure! Rematch, which is slated to arrive next summer, perhaps makes more sense for Sloclap than first meets the eye. The studio says the title falls within its remit of making challenging action games with a stylized look.
Thick as Thieves is a new project from the team of immersive sim and stealth-action icons at OtherSide Entertainment, which includes Deus Ex creator Warren Spector, Looking Glass Studios founder Paul Neurath, and Thief: The Dark Project lead Greg LoPiccolo. Yes, that's a stacked lineup. Together, the OtherSide crew has created or worked on the System Shock, Deus Ex, Thief and Ultima Underworld series, and (along with Doug Church and Ken Levine) are largely responsible for the existence of immersive sims as we know them.
One of the highlights from The Game Awards was the moment Breaking Bad star Aaron Paul and voice actor Laura Bailey took the stage to reveal Dispatch. Set to arrive in 2025, the narrative game is from AdHoc Studio, founded by former Telltale Games developers, and features a stacked cast including Paul, Bailey, Jeffrey Wright, Erin Yvette, Jacksepticeye and others — a mix of A-list Hollywood talent and top-tier game voice actors.
There are two cool pieces of news here. First, the indie studio behind the Overcooked series, Ghost Town Games, is working on a new title called Stage Fright, and it'll support both online and couch co-op. Rad! Second, Stage Fright is being published by No Man's Sky studio Hello Games, a move that marks Hello's first foray into publishing other studios' projects. Double rad! Stage Fright is built around co-op, and its mechanics bring Overcooked-style chaos to a series of escape rooms in a spooky, Luigi's Mansion kind of world.
Capcom has announced Onimusha: Way of the Sword, the first new Onimusha game since the original 2001 PS2 version was remastered in 2019. Revealed at The Game Awards 2024, it reveals a modern take on the classic dark action game, minus the fixed perspective. The trailer for the single player, Wordplay action game shows an unnamed Samanosuke-like hero as he takes on samurai zombies in bloody combat, collecting golden orbs as before.
Resurrecting a beloved gaming series like Ninja Gaiden is always a tricky proposition. Anyone who might have worked on the franchise in its heyday has likely moved on to other projects or left the industry entirely. But judging by the talent working on Ninja Gaiden: Ragebound, the new series entry revealed at the Game Awards, I think it's safe to say the franchise is in safe hands. That's because Ragebound unites two companies who know a thing or two about making quality games.
Update, December 13, 3:00PM ET: This article was updated to include a couple more stories that rolled in after we originally published. Enjoy the Dispatch and Onimusha trailers! (The headline was also updated from "13" to "15" because math is important.) We also added a link to view all of the award winners, a shoutout to our Astro Bot review, and a link to the Game Award Orchestra's GOTY medley, just because.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/the-game-awards-2024-the-15-biggest-announcements-and-new-trailers-including-the-witcher-4-and-elden-ring-043849098.html?src=rss
And now for something completely different. Naughty Dog is pivoting from post-apocalyptic fungal drama to interstellar sci-fi bounty hunting with its newest game, Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet. The studio revealed its new title with a cinematic trailer at The Game Awards on Thursday.
Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet takes place thousands of years in the future and it stars bounty hunter Jordan A. Mun, played by Chilling Adventures of Sabrina actor Tati Gabrielle. Jordan finds herself stranded on the planet Sempiria, which has been cut off from the rest of the universe for more than 600 years. She's on a mission to escape Sempiria, but it looks like some vicious robots are going to get in her way.
The reveal trailer is gorgeous, even if it is just in-game cinematics. It shows glittering galaxies and Jordan being sassy with her superiors in a Porsche spaceship, all set to droning lo-fi tones and upbeat '80s tunes. Once the camera reaches the planet level, there's a huge, multi-armed robot with a glowing red sword. Jordan pulls out her own weapon and the fight is on.
This is the beginning of a new IP for Naughty Dog — it's the studio's first game that isn't Uncharted or The Last of Us since 2005. Game director and Naughty Dog studio head Neil Druckmann shared just a little more insight into the game's story on the PlayStation Blog:
"What we can tell you is that this game lives up to the Naughty Dog tradition of creating an emotional, character-driven epic journey. Our narrative goals are rivaled only by our gameplay ambitions. This will be the deepest gameplay in Naughty Dog’s history, taking our learnings from our previous franchises and pushing them beyond anything we’ve ever done before."
The soundtrack for Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet is being handled by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross (at least when it's not literally just Pet Shop Boys).
Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet is in development for PlayStation 5 and it doesn't have a release window yet.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/playstation/intergalactic-the-heretic-prophet-is-a-new-sci-fi-game-from-naughty-dog-042920073.html?src=rss
2K Games’ consistently sporadic Mafia series will return in 2025. Mafia: The Old Country is set in Sicily in the 1900s and will explore the origins of organized crime. Developer Hangar 13 announced that a new Mafia title was in development back in 2022, but gave few details beyond that. Now, we know it's heading to PC, PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S in summer 2025.
The game's first trailer, which debuted at The Game Awards on Thursday, is a melodramatic affair complete with a patriarch monologuing over candlelight, horses galloping across the plains and opera music as a backing track. This is drama, people.
Mafia: The Old Country is a linear, narrative-driven game with stealth and gunplay mechanics in purposefully cinematic environments. It stars Enzo, a new, original protagonist. Here's how publisher 2K Games describes his journey: "Enzo has survived a childhood of indentured labor in Sicily’s hellish sulfur mines. Now, through a twist of fate, he has the opportunity to join Don Torrisi's crime family, and will do whatever it takes to carve out a better life for himself. By swearing an oath, Enzo has committed himself to the Torrisi family's code of honor, with all the power and hardship it entails."
The Mafia series started in 2002 as a more serious take on the GTA formula, set in a 1930s nod to Chicago. Mafia II landed in 2010 and took place in a fictionalized version of post-World War II New York City. Another long gap led to 2017, when Mafia III flashed forward to the '60s in not-New Orleans.
In 2018, 2K merged Hangar 13, the developer of the third title, with 2K Czech, the team that made the first two games, and that combined studio is now working on The Old Country. A 2025 release window will give us eight years between Mafia installments, which is right on target for the series.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/mafia-the-old-country-is-a-sicilian-prequel-arriving-summer-2025-034422942.html?src=rss
There are two cool pieces of news here. First, the indie studio behind the Overcooked series, Ghost Town Games, is working on a new title called Stage Fright, and it'll support both online and couch co-op. Rad! Second, Stage Fright is being published by No Man's Sky studio Hello Games, a move that marks Hello's first foray into publishing other studios' projects. Double rad!
Stage Fright is built around co-op, and its mechanics bring Overcooked-style chaos to a series of escape room environments in a spooky, Luigi's Mansion kind of world. It doesn't have a release date but it's available to wishlist now on Steam.
Overcooked and its sequel have helped re-energize the co-op genre in recent years, serving up frantic restaurant gameplay that always feels more fun — and shouty — with a friend. Overcooked supports cooperative couch play and Overcooked 2 introduced online co-op to the series. Stage Fright represents the culmination of everything that Ghost Town has learned about co-op gaming from Overcooked, complete with local and online play.
"Nothing else really played like Overcooked when it came out and Stage Fright is just as innovative, but in a really different direction," Hello Games publishing lead Tim Woodley said.
Ghost Town Games has a core team of just three people, founders Oli De-Vine and Phil Duncan plus writer Gemma Langford. They've been developing Stage Fright under the codename Project Attic — because they've literally been building this game in their attic — and their website lists six additional contributors. There's also the Hello Games of it all.
Ghost Town Games
De-Vine and Duncan have been friends with the Hello Games crew — including founders Sean Murray, Grant Duncan, Ryan Doyle and David Ream — for years. After Hello found success with Joe Danger in 2010, they helped connect Ghost Town with the eventual publisher of Overcooked, Team17. Overcooked came out in 2016 and the rest is culinary co-op history.
"Phil and Oli came to visit us for advice with the very earliest demo of Overcooked about ten years ago," Woodley said. "We have such fond memories of the four founders of Hello playing that Overcooked demo, screaming at each other about onions — it was instantly obvious this was something special."
Hello Games is currently developing Light No Fire, a cooperative survival and exploration game that takes place on a fantasy planet as large as Earth, offering a mix of role-playing and sandbox mechanics. The studio is also still very much supporting and expanding its breakout hit, No Man's Sky (and things seem to be going really well). Stage Fright will be Hello's debut as a third-party publisher, but it doesn't mean the studio is pivoting to publishing full-time.
Ghost Town Games
"Hello Games has a bunch of experience we can lend behind the scenes, support we can give, but if we’re honest it really appeals to us to have fun working with a bunch of creative people we just love spending time with," Woodley said. "When we played an early version of Stage Fright we got the same buzz as we had with Overcooked all those years ago. It’s just something we wanted to be involved in."
Expect more information about Stage Fright over the next 12 months.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/the-overcooked-team-has-a-new-creepy-cute-co-op-game-called-stage-fright-030009063.html?src=rss
We told you back in 2021 that The Outer Worlds 2 was a thing that existed, and now, more than three years later, we have evidence in support of this claim: a gameplay trailer.
The new trailer, which debuted at The Game Awards, shows off a vibrant universe of flora, fauna and firearms, with a layer of classic Obsidian cheekiness. The joke here is that The Outer Worlds 2 is just more of the original game — more action, more weapons, more graphics. You get the idea.
All chuckles aside, that's not a terrible pitch for a new game. The Outer Worlds came out in 2019 and offered an engaging universe filled with quirky characters and strange adventures, complete with dystopian sci-fi vibes and a helping of dark satire. Obsidian is the studio behind Fallout: New Vegas, Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic II and Neverwinter Nights, and The Outer Worlds 2 is an RPG in a similar vein.
Notably, today's trailer confirms The Outer Worlds 2 is definitely heading to PlayStation 5. Obsidian is owned by Microsoft and, until now, it wasn't entirely clear whether the sequel would be exclusive to Xbox platforms. The Outer Worlds 2 is set to hit Xbox Series X/S, Game Pass, PS5 and PC via Steam in 2025.
Obsidian is also working on Avowed at the moment and it's looking like a fabulous entry in next year's lineup of fantasy RPGs. Avowed is due to his PC and Xbox Series X/S on February 18, 2025.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/the-outer-worlds-2-gameplay-trailer-reveals-its-coming-to-ps5-as-well-as-xbox-022608769.html?src=rss
It’s only been a short few months since Gearbox announced Borderlands 4, the next game in its long-running looter shooter franchise. Back in August, all we had was a cryptic teaser, but at today’s Game Awards, we got a proper look at the new game.
Gearbox says the new Borderlands game will arrive with four new Vault Hunters with "the deepest and most diverse" skill trees in the series' history. The game's story will focus on the Timekeeper, "a ruthless dictator who dominates the masses from on high." As with all the Borderlands games, 4 will support solo or co-op gameplay with up to three players.
The last Borderlands game was 2019’s Borderlands 3, which debuted on PS4, Xbox One and PC. It was well received — though less so than the first two mainline games — and sold over 5 million copies. Since then, Gearbox also developed and released Tiny Tina's Wonderlands, a fantasy-infused spinoff with a sizeable contingent of diehard fans, and took over development of Risk of Rain 2.
Gearbox was acquired by Take-Two Interactive in March 2024, following the extended and expansive implosion of its former owner, Embracer Group. Borderlands 4 will be Gearbox's first release since the acquisition and there's something about this that feels like coming home, considering Take-Two's label 2K Games is the Borderlands series’ longtime publisher.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/borderlands-4-gameplay-trailer-shows-four-new-vault-hunters-having-a-bad-day-021532109.html?src=rss
