Valentine's Day might not be the only event to get excited about in February, as Sony is supposedly set to host a new PlayStation State of Play next month. Reliable leaker NateTheHate2 answered in the affirmative on X when asked about the possibility. Intriguingly, this comes just mere days after stating he wasn't aware of any plans.

Betting on a PlayStation State of Play for February isn't some longshot. Sony is going on five years in a row of highlighting PS5 games during that month--dating back to 2021. So if this event becomes official, that would make it six years straight. As for what could be showcased, Marvel's Wolverine and Saros seem the most likely, though NateTheHate2 didn't supply any additional details.

The last PlayStation State of Play took place a couple of months ago in November, with the focus being on PS5 titles developed in Japan. Marvel Tokon: Fighting Heroes, Dragon Quest VII Reimagined, and Fatal Frame: Crimson Butterfly 2 were a handful of the games discussed. Meanwhile, Marvel's Wolverine and Saros got the spotlight in the PlayStation State of Play in September.

Following its reveal at The Game Awards on December 11, developer Remedy Entertainment announced that the Control sequel--now known as Control Resonant--will launch sometime this year. And that's all we know about that for now, because any other release date information you may see circulating online is pure speculation, according to the team's communications director.

Thomas Puha has been at Remedy Entertainment for almost 11 years, per his LinkedIn, serving as the Finnish studio's communications director the entire time. It's safe to assume he knows a thing or two about relaying important developer information to the masses, which is why he took to X on January 26 to reiterate that Control Resonant doesn't have a firm release date right now.

"Since some news are crediting us saying something, that we havent," Puha said in an X post. "Remedy has only ever communicated that the release window of Control Resonant is 2026. Anything else is speculation."

Barring any further delays, Rockstar Games will release Grand Theft Auto VI this November, and it's expected to have a massive launch. The title's debut looms so large that some have theorized other developers may change their own plans to stay out of the way. Craig Duncan, the head of Xbox Game Studios, said in an interview that a busy and competitive landscape is nothing new.

He told GamesRadar that Rockstar is "going to do what they're going to do." His job as the leader of Xbox Game Studios is to "do what we should do for the best of our games." He reminded people that there are "always other games" that take up time and attention.

GTA 6 is not just another game, though. It's coming to market with a mountain of hype behind it, and it's projected to sell 40 million copies and generate $3 billion or more in the first year.

Craig Duncan, the head of Xbox Game Studios, has reflected on some of the momentous moves Microsoft made in 2025, which included cancelling games, laying off staff, and shutting down development studios. Duncan said in an interview with GamesRadar that the decision to cancel games like the Perfect Dark reboot and Rare's new game Everwild was "difficult," but he said it was also necessary.

"Sometimes business decisions have to be made, which have wide reach and impact. We don't like doing that. So the lesson is: how do we make sure we don't have to do that? That's really the goal there," he said.

Part of Duncan's job is to perform portfolio reviews, he said, and sometimes these reviews lead to difficult outcomes for specific teams and projects.

Nintendo has announced that the next Nintendo Direct event will take place this coming Thursday, January 29. It will be the second Direct in the past seven days, following the January 25 Nintendo Direct that was focused on The Super Mario Galaxy Movie.

The Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream Direct will take place on January 29 at 6 AM PT / 9 AM ET. The broadcast will run for about 20 minutes and will include "more info" on the new Switch game.

The event will stream in all the usual places, including YouTube and Twitch, along with the Nintendo Today mobile app.

Rocket League released back in 2015, but it's still performing exceptionally well and just recently surged to new heights not seen in years, at least in terms of concurrent players.

Developer Psyonix announced that Rocket League reached more than 900,000 concurrent players across platforms on Friday, January 23. "Today has been a wild ride," the studio said of the achievement. Rocket League apparently surpassed 1 million concurrents over the weekend, and that's the highest concurrent-player count for the free-to-play game in five years.

It's not immediately clear what drove the recent surge in Rocket League players. People are pointing to streamer Jynxzi playing the game recently, but there could be any number of factors contributing to Rocket League's popularity.

Resident Evil players have been dodging chainsaws for decades now, but at long last, the tables have turned. While Leon Kennedy returns to Raccoon City with a pistol in one hand and a hatchet in the other, he can finally do some vicious DIY with a chainsaw of his own. And as Resident Evil Requiem director Koshi Nakanishi explained to GameSpot, that new addition to Leon's arsenal brings a few pros and cons with it.

"Leon, he's an experienced combatant of close to 30 years by the time of Resident Evil Requiem. Leon's actually gone up against so many chainsaws in his history here," Nakanishi said (via a translator). "Isn't it about time that he, himself, used a chainsaw? And so, that's where things started."

Nakanishi did caution that enemies will still be using chainsaws of their own in Requiem, but in surprising ways. "Zombies can use the chainsaws in different ways. They might attack you with it. They might throw it at you," Nakanishi teased. "The zombies do retain some nature of themselves before they became a zombie, and so you see doctor zombies, you see nurse zombies. Actually, depending on the zombie, they might use the chainsaw in slightly different ways."

Recent Resident Evil games have experimented with giving players more freedom, and while they weren't technically open-world games, they did offer more space to engage in both survival horror and action. Resident Evil Village is the notable example here with its interconnected hub areas, but for Resident Evil Requiem, Capcom has gone in a different direction.

Speaking to GameSpot (via a translator), game producer Masato Kumazawa confirmed that Resident Evil Requiem is not an open-world game, but it does have a different direction that the development team considers to be the best fit for it. This direction has led to a game that's heavily inspired by two of the best entries in the series, Resident Evil 2 and 4, and applies the knowledge from modern-day Resident Evil games to evolve them. Resident Evil Requiem features two protagonists--Grace Ashcroft and Leon Kennedy--and their respective gameplay leans hard into classic Resident Evil survival-horror and survival-action.

"Grace's game plays very close to Resident Evil 2, and Leon's gameplay is very close to Resident Evil 4, but when talking about the technical side of things, the portrayal of characters, environments, and things like that, they've taken basically what they learned through 7 and 8, and of course, used that here," game director Koshi Nakanishi said. "Again, the idea was basically to evolve the gameplay that was in [Resident Evil] 2 and 4. Beyond that, expression and artistic direction, a lot of the know-how from Resident 7 and 8 came into play.

Between hulking bioweapon super-soldiers and mutated wildlife, your run-of-the-mill zombie in Resident Evil games is mostly regarded as cannon fodder. But in Resident Evil Requiem, Capcom is aiming to put a fresh twist on its rank-and-file zombies, transforming them into an unpredictable menace that you'll have to approach with caution. Speaking to GameSpot, Resident Evil Requiem director Koshi Nakanishi said that this new breed of infected--who recently succumbed to their viral infection--retain some of their lingering personalities.

"When making a Resident Evil title, the question of how to present zombies is always something that comes up in discussions," Nakanishi said (via a translator). You want to have some variety, but at the same time, if you make too many changes, it doesn't feel like a zombie anymore, so there's always that element or that challenge of designing enemies for a Resident Evil title. In this setting, you're dealing with a lot of zombies who literally just became zombies momentarily or a while ago. It's pretty fresh."

Capcom expanded on that idea, creating zombies with behavior patterns players could exploit, especially when playing as Grace Ashcroft, whose segments are more focused on the classic Resident Evil survival-horror experience. "Part of that fear experience is not knowing what the enemy is going to do when they approach you or when you see them, and so if you just had a standard zombie, you probably by now have an idea of what a zombie's going to do," Nakanishi explained. "But if you had these zombies here that retained some of their memories or behavior from their previous life, then there's more of a mystery element. You're not exactly sure what they're going to do."

With Resident Evil's ninth mainline entry, Capcom finds itself at something of a crossroads. In recent years, Resident Evil games have flitted between nail-biting horror and enjoyably explosive thrills, leaving fans split between wanting the all-out action of Resident Evil 4 and VII's more unsettling brand of survival horror.

When I played Requiem last year, it seemed pretty clear to me which spooky path players were being led down. As junior FBI agent Grace Ashcroft was relentlessly pursued, scrambling to survive while defenseless and alone in a dark asylum, I assumed that Requiem would merely be re-treading the same PT-esque ground it did with Resident Evil VII. After spending another three engrossing hours with Requiem more recently, however, it turns out that I couldn't have been more wrong. Capcom's long-awaited sequel manages to channel both the action-packed thrills of Resident Evil 4 and the raw, disquieting tension that made Resident Evil VII so captivating. Where Resident Evil Village felt like an uneven compromise between action and horror, Capcom does not seem worried about Resident Evil Requiem being either too scary or too trigger-happy--it's just giving players the best of both.

Requiem's final preview kicks off by putting me in the dust-coated boots of the internet's favourite Unc', Leon Kennedy. After pulling into Rhodes Hill hospital in the dead of night, he's met by a nurse who wearily answers the door before showing Leon around the dimly lit facility. As we roam the deathly quiet corridors, she explains that Rhodes Hill is a chronic pain treatment center under the control of one Dr. Gideon, a renowned surgeon who administers "experimental therapies" to patients. We can all guess where this is going. Sure enough, as I'm led up the eerily silent and half-illuminated halls moments later, I come face-to-face with a staff doctor--but he's wielding a blood-soaked chainsaw.

The Head of Xbox Game Studios said the long-in-development State of Decay 3 is "coming on really well," in a recent interview, affirming Xbox's continued backing of the zombie game first announced in 2020.

Craig Duncan, who was previously the Studio Head at Rare and now runs Xbox Game Studios, had a lengthy interview with GamesRadar+ after last week's Developer Direct showcase. To close out the interview, Duncan was asked if we'll see more of State of Decay 3 this year, and said the following in response:

"I think the [PR] in this room will murder me if I give you the answer to that. So here's what I'll say: I have done a number of visits to that studio in the last six to eight months. I have sat and played the game with the team a bunch of times. It's coming on really well. We're very excited about the franchises and its potential. So I will certainly see a lot more of it in the coming year."

A teenage boy has been missing for two weeks after allegedly rushing from his Long Island, New York prep school into Manhattan to meet someone he met on Roblox, according to a statement from the boy's family.

Thomas Medlin left the Stony Brook School on Friday, January 9, at around 3:30 PM ET to reportedly catch a train from the Long Island Rail Road station to Grand Central, where surveillance footage spotted him at about 5:30 PM ET. In an interview with Long Island news outlet News 12, his mother, Eva Yan, said this is uncharacteristic of her son, who excels in school.

"He has never left us," Yan said. "Everyone loves him. With the weather coming [in] cold, you know, we have checked the homeless shelter, looking for the locations."

Ashly Burch, the actor who voiced Chloe Price in the original Life Is Strange, has confirmed that she wasn't approached to reprise her role for Life Is Strange: Reunion.

Last week, developer Deck Nine and Square Enix announced the next game in its long-running Life Is Strange series: Life Is Strange: Reunion. Like with the most recent title, Life Is Strange: Double Exposure, Reunion will once again star Max Caulfield, and this time, she'll be joined by Chloe Price.

Reunion is expected to be the finale in the pair's decade-plus story, and Chloe, who hasn't been featured in the series since Life is Strange's 2017 prequel, Before the Storm, will be a playable character alongside Max.

While Xbox games landing on competing platforms is becoming a regular and unsurprising phenomenon, the actual release dates for these other versions aren't so consistent. Speaking in an interview, Xbox Game Studios head Craig Duncan chalked these variabilities up to development resources.

Speaking to GamesRadar, Duncan addressed the difference between Forza Horizon 6 and the upcoming Fable reboot; both titles are from Playground Games, though Forza is releasing on PS5 after the Xbox launch, while Fable will be on both platforms day-and-date.

"There's always development realities about when these projects start--how big a team is, and what plans we have at the start of development," Duncan said; he also admitted that the Xbox team is somewhat "inconsistent" with its release strategy. "You see some games in one place, some games in multiple places. Just know that we're going to work on that, and we're going to try and be more consistent with what we do."

Return to Silent Hill hit the big screen on the weekend, but this adaptation of the beloved Silent Hill 2 video game isn't doing too well critically or commercially in the US. At the domestic box office, the film opened in seventh place and earned just $3.2 million, the lowest to date for the film franchise. In comparison, it's far below the $20.1 million US opening weekend of 2006's Silent Hill and the reviled Silent Hill: Revelation, which earned $8 million during its domestic opening.

Opening on 2,000 screens across the US, reviews for Return to Silent Hill haven't been flattering. It currently has a Metascore of 33 on GameSpot's sister site Metacritic--based on 13 reviews--while the user score sits at a slightly higher 4.4. While some outlets consider it an average film at best, others say it doesn't do anything new or better than the original video game or its acclaimed remake, and other critics have lambasted it for over-the-top acting, poor special effects, and a chaotic plot.

Quantic Dream is mostly known for its single-player, narrative-heavy games like Detroit: Become Human and Heavy Rain, so it was a surprise when the studio announced a 3v3 arena multiplayer game called Spellcasters Chronicles. Now, the studio has revealed a new NPC named Ozdam Devam, the Chronicler of Ashkenon, who seems to be set up as the keeper of the game's narrative elements.

When Spellcasters Chronicles was first announced last October, Quantic Dream said that it would still maintain its signature story focus through a "community-driven narrative." The Chronicler seems to be another piece of that puzzle, with a press release referring to him as a "mysterious in-world narrator" and an "intermediary between the community of Spellcasters and the world of mortals."

Quantic Dream has released a video to introduce Ozdam and his role, in which the wizened Chronicler addresses player feedback from the first open beta without breaking from his character or the in-game lore. While the video is a cute way to address player feedback and deliver patch notes, it seems to be setting up Ozdam as a character who can translate player feedback or actions in-game into decisions that will impact the ongoing story of Spellcaster Chronicles.

Highguard, the free-to-play PvP raid shooter announced during The Game Awards in December, is out today. However, developer Wildlight Entertainment hasn't officially announced the exact time you can get involved in the action.

Luckily, thanks to SteamDB, we know that--at least on PC--the game will have a singular global launch time. There's no reason to believe that the console launch times will differ, but at this time, we can't verify them.

The Highguard release times in each region are: