A brutal Action RPG in pure Sword & Sorcery style. Lead King Xodan and the Oracle Queen Yanah in their desperate quest to save their people and free their daughter Sharyn from Zordax the Inhuman. Live an epic Sword & Sorcery tale inspired by the fantasy classics of the 1980s.

A Metroidvania x Roguelite where you journey with the aid of a cursed hat. Use a variety of magic or possess your enemies to reach the lowest levels! Bring back loot, build new facilities in your village, make a living and strengthen yourself for the next battle! Supports up to 4-player multiplayer.

A massive ghost ship hangs in low orbit over a lost colony. The 30,000 souls who called this world home have disappeared without a trace. Strange signals hint at rumors of mysterious artifacts, long-dormant AI, and troves of untold riches. You are a cybernetic mercenary - a Runner - and your destination is Tau Ceti IV. You are one of many, working solo or with a crew, venturing into the unknown and facing the unimaginable in a fight for survival, for riches, for fame... and for infamy. Who among you will write their names across the stars? Become a Runner in Bungie's new sci-fi PvP extraction shooter. Compete for survival, riches, and renown in a world of evolving, persistent zones, where any run can lead to greatness.

In one of Esoteric Ebb's chambers lies a chest. Above it, a sign: "Not a mimic." Snell, your goblin companion, deduces the most obvious outcome: The sign is the work of some prankster who's hoping to get one over on whichever unsuspecting rube decides to saunter into this secreted away room, ignore the sign, and loot the chest. Mimics are often "chest-shaped" like this--the game's joke, not mine--and seeing as how they are a trick as old as fantasy itself, it doesn't take a genius to piece together how such an encounter might end.

Esoteric Ebb is a lot like the mimic in this scene. It looks and sounds like things it takes the shape of--some more obvious than others--but delights in playing with expectations one might have of it. Just when you think you might have it figured out, it contentedly throws another wrench in your understanding of its tone and aspirations. It's a fun ride. It does not veer wildly off course in the process, but it is a stylistic and colorful detour that is nonetheless a riot worth your time.

In Esoteric Ebb, you are the Cleric, a bumbling idiot and magical savant sent by the magistrate to investigate the absolute hornet's nest that is an explosion of a tea shop in Norvik. The timing couldn't be any worse, since Norvik's constituency is voting on a referendum. Should it stick by the Urth-worshipping Nationalists who've governed and shepherded the city through its founding decades, consequently hardening the attitudes and beliefs that have called its rule into question at this very moment? Should it instead ally itself with the deep-pocketed Freestriders who are clearly strong-arming their way to a victory? Or should the city consider other policies, like the dwarven-born egalitarian platform of Azgalism?

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Marathon's open server slam has concluded and its full release is imminent on March 5. If you're ready to jump back into Tau Ceti for the full experience of Bungie's new extraction shooter, here's when you'll be able to start playing.

Marathon global release times

Marathon will have a simultaneous launch in all regions and across platforms, which includes PC via Steam, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X|S. The simultaneous launch means Marathon won't launch until early on March 6 in some time zones. Check out the release time in your time zone below:

March 5

• 10 AM PT
• 12 PM CT
• 1 PM ET
• 6 PM UTC
• 7 PM CET

March 6

• 3 AM JST
• 5 AM AEDT

Marathon had a free open server slam over the weekend, attracting a peak of 143,000 players on Steam in its first day. While player numbers dropped as time went on, with some players seemingly put off by the complexity and sometimes steep learning curve of the extraction shooter, Bungie reported that players were having more fun with the game the deeper they got into it.

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Surgent Studios has revealed its next game: FixForce. Sticking to the studio's pattern, FixForce is completely different from what Surgent has done before--unlike grief-driven metroidvania Tales of Kenzera: Zau and surreal first-person horror game Dead Take, FixForce is a chaotic cooperative game in which you play as a team of robots charged with repairing a post-post-apocalyptic world.

Designed for up to six players, FixForce sees you and your friends each take control of a robot and do your best to complete repair jobs within a time limit. Viewed through first person, you primarily complete assignments with a tool that allows you to telekinetically pick up, rotate, and throw junk or machine parts scattered throughout the environment to solve environmental puzzles. Your tool can also affix items to others, allowing you to construct makeshift bridges, ramps, and towers to aid in exploration.

To confound your team's efforts, each of you spawns in with a battery representing your health, and hazards will chip away at that health if you're not careful. You can't survive being in water, for example, and occasionally enemy bots will latch onto your character's chassis and begin sucking away your battery. Allies can help you--making a walkway for you to get out of a pool you accidentally fell into, for instance, or pulling off the energy-sucking enemy bots and tossing them away--but they can harm you too. With a simple click (purposeful or by mistake), you can push an ally off a ledge to their demise or steal their battery to power something you need.

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In trying to understand something new we have a tendency to draw comparisons to the familiar. That's probably why, in a 30-minute showcase of Control Resonant's gameplay, attendees mentioned Dark Souls, the Batman Arkham games, Alan Wake 2, and Bayonetta. Everyone has a lens they want to look through to bring the unfamiliar into focus.

Remedy insisted that the biggest influence on Control Resonant is its predecessor, Control. The only influences that director Mikael Kasurinen and combat designer Sergey Mohov overtly acknowledged were Neon Genesis Evangelion and Sucker Punch's InFamous: Second Son.

The former, a story about a traumatized boy defending a city from alien incursions using a biomechanical humanoid mecha in the hopes he will be able to understand himself and earn approval from others, is an apt point of reference for Control Resonant's protagonist Dylan Faden. Dylan, the brother of Federal Bureau of Control's director Jesse Faden, is a powerful parautilitarian who has abilities by way of a connection to an otherworldly entity called Polaris. Despite showing huge potential, Dylan was deemed to be unstable, going so far as to kill or cause the deaths of other FBC agents. In the events of the first game, Dylan was left in a coma after having The Hiss, another hostile entity, purged from his body.

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