Let's get the obvious out of the way: Clive Barker's Hellraiser: Revival is a grotesque game. It puts sex and extreme depictions of human mutilation front-and-center in its first-person perspective, and asks you to face it–even stick your hand in it. It's uncompromising in bringing Clive Barker's vision to a level of fidelity that not even the movies could dream of matching. It looks incredible.

While salacious in its nature, it can be easy–even forgiving–to fixate on Hellraiser: Revival for its lurid subject matter and blaze past its more considered themes of desire, abuse, and the darkest realms that linger in the human mind. But beyond the sensation of Revival's violence is a game that dares to be ambitious in both its gameplay and narrative.

Clive Barker's Hellraiser: Revival can feel like it's wearing the skin of other games at times. Each of its inspirations feeling like a Frankensteined limb attached to another. But by the end of this horror-action survival game, Revival becomes a beast all its own. Although it stumbles through an identity crisis in the early hours of its 10-hour runtime, it is unabashed in its display of grotesqueness and sexuality, and ascends as a game worth seeing through to the end.

Rooted in Clive Barker's original novella,The Hellbound Heart, and the first two films, Hellraiser: Revival takes place 20 years after the first movie. But don't worry--no prior knowledge of the franchise is required to engage with Revival's story. It focuses on Aidan Lynch and his girlfriend, Sunny–two folks from affluent families whose paths crossed in their joint journey to seek taboo and fringe forms of stimulation, by way of sexual desires and substance abuse. Sunny has a particular taste for collecting occult artifacts and manages to get her hands on the Genesis Configuration: one of the many mystical puzzle boxes that opens a gate to an eldritch realm of a neverending concrete labyrinth hellscape, home of the Cenobites–demon priest-like beings who seek to harvest souls and entrap them in an eternal hell of pain and pleasure.

Aidan, ignorant of the Genesis Configuration's otherworldly powers, uses the cube as a toy to evoke (consensual) pain on Sunny while making love, and in the process, triggers the box to summon the Cenobites, who mutilate Sunny in front of him and drag her away into The Labyrinth. Genesis Configuration in hand, Aidan marches into hell to get Sunny back.

It isn't long until Aidan finds himself at the center of the Scarlet Church, a cult of murderous psychopaths who worship the Cenobites and their god, The Leviathan, and seek ascension to become servants of its power. But on his journey, Aidan is haunted by much more than the terrors of the Cenobites, the monsters the realm produces, and the Scarlet Church itself. His own troubled past and vices, torment him too.

The setup for Revival paves way for myriad gameplay styles and design philosophies, and Revival attempts all of them, with the game's opening hours functioning much like a game-design tasting platter.

As Aidan, you'll find yourself stealth-killing cultists one moment, fighting tooth-and-nail with Condemned-like melee combat the next, and, soon after, shooting a machine gun at a horde of monsters, launching sawblades and performing Doom (2016)-esque glory kills. Oh, and there's Resident Evil 4 inventory management. The good news is that it all feels great, but I could also feel the game straining to pace its gameplay ambitions as it ushered me through scenario after scenario.

Sections often felt like self-contained miniature set pieces of what you'd expect in a Resident Evil-esque mansion, involving exploration and backtracking to find several keys in order to progress. But in Revival's case, most of it is confined to smaller spaces like finding toys for a dominatrix in a sex club in exchange for a key to the VIP lounge, or a literal mini-mansion that saw me unlocking one room at a time, each one revealing a key item to the next location. This scaled-down approach works in favor of the game's linear pacing to keep its narrative going over the game's tight runtime. It also demonstrated a clear understanding of classic RE design in a way that pleased my RE veteran brain.

It's all woven into a loop of stealth and white knuckle gun fights with capable and murderous cultists, until the power dynamic shifts as you face off against hordes of spongey Unworthy (zombie-like monsters). Going toe-to-toe with mobs of Unworthy better showcases the Genesis Configuration by using the environment in battle, along with kiting monsters into booby traps. Or, in later sections of the game, using the Configuration to move giant spinning propeller blades around an arena and turn enemies into mincemeat. 

At first, the Configuration functions much like the gravity gun from Half-Life 2–a device that can pick up and hold items from the environment and launch them as a weapon–albeit much more limited in the items it wields, ranging from saw blades, railroad spikes, and metal propellers, which are more like prescribed opportunities to pick up and use, rather than something as dynamic and freeform as the gravity gun. The saw blade, in particular, calls back to Half-Life 2's Ravenholm, and there's even a severed torso propped up on a saw blade in a wall as a direct nod.

With the Configuration's telekinesis gravity-gun-like ability, you can grab deadly items and launch them at enemies, cutting through a crowd and removing limbs, leaving a few poor saps to crawl your way instead. Eventually the Configuration can absorb fire, allowing you to hurl fireballs; move select structures around to solve puzzles or unleash them as deadly hazards against enemies; and unleash Hellchains, an ultimate ability that wraps a mob of enemies in hooks and rips them to shreds. It rules.

This frequent shift from offensive to methodical gameplay involving stealth and considered shots is not unlike the game's motif of power exchange that's hand-in-hand with BDSM culture. And regardless of the role the game puts you in, it feels good.

Revival offers a lot of tools in a fight, and when played well, can lead to a great synergy of violence. Objects like gas cans can be equipped, allowing me to pour trails of gasoline around an arena, strategizing for a fight I anticipated to come, and lay a trap of my own for unsuspecting cultists. In one case, I Home Alone'd a room with bear traps and gasoline, and the result was a satisfying display of dismembered legs, charred bodies, and used shell casings on the floor.

There are a lot of options, and thank the Leviathan that there's no skill tree or perk system to further complicate it. Combat skills evolve with the narrative's progression, and considering the snappiness of its length, Revival uses The Labyrinth to, once again, shakes things up. The Labyrinth often comes in as pacing speed bumps, shifting the focus away from combat encounters and more on traversal and puzzle-solving, functioning as breathing room between fights (despite being suffocating and claustrophobic in its own right). It adds yet another flavor of horror and gameplay, often introducing chase sequences that utilize Aidan's ability to sprint and slide under spiked chain obstacles.

These parts work in what they're trying to accomplish, but their linearity is so cut-and-dried at times that they feel too literal in their purpose–to slow the player down, or act as routine opportunities to dump exposition on the player to add some color to the Cenobites, explain what they are, and reveal their motivations. 

Like many things in the game, however, the game's clunkiness fades more and more as it progresses, especially as Aidan's world collides with the eldritch realm: the cold stone interweaving with the human world; the once neon BDSM club laced with the grey walls of the suffocating Labyrinth. Worlds mesh, allowing me to see earlier areas now wrapped in chains, flesh, and far-off sights of a fantastical maze. 

Among its many balancing acts is how it weighs its depiction of BDSM culture and kink. The taboo subculture is handled with consideration and care, never blurring the lines between people who part take in fetish practices and the murderous cultists who seek to torture and murder others for pleasure. It's emphasized by posters on the wall about consent and respect, as well as the game's dialogue. In one particular scene, Aidan is corrected by the merchant Zora. Upon entering a BDSM sex club, he claims he needs to get away from these maniacs (referring to the cultists), only for Zora to reply, "Careful now, most of these patrons are innocent maniacs, just yearning for something to satiate their desires." 

Furthermore, Revival's reliance on sex and explicit nudity–while plentiful, especially in the game's early hours–doesn't feel gratuitous. The display of sex is used with deliberate purpose, often to paint an image of those who seek physical desire, or, in Aidan and Sunny's case, to develop their characters as well as their motivations. 

Despite being an action-horror romp, the core of Revival is about the relationship between desires and needs, and it's the crux of Aidan's entire journey to go through hell in order to bring his companion back. But as the story progresses, Aidan's motivations are challenged in the process. "I love her, I need her," he claims to Zora, to which she replies, rather matter-of-factly, "Those are two different things." It's a throughline that anchors his arc from start to finish, and pays off well. 

Aidan is a well-realized character that's teetering on camp, but it's a camp that I welcome. Aidan is in ways something like an Ethan Winters from Resident Evil Biohazard and Village–a joe-schmo tossed into the deep end, who is a regular guy one moment, and then a gun-wielding, machete-slashing, herbalist self-healer the next. The difference between an Aidan and an Ethan is that Aidan's skills are explained, being a medical-school dropout seeking an elevation of life's offerings, by turning to a life of crime and joining a biker gang where he learned to use guns and get in fights. Like I said, it's campy, but I'm all for it. It also works because Aidan's backstory plays a part in his journey through Revival, often using his goody-two-shoes-turned-bad-boy nature to inform how he got here. It's the characterization that made me genuinely care about Aidan, his faults included.

Hellraiser: Revival consistently walks a fine line of never taking itself too seriously, without completely derailing its more serious and touchy themes of abuse, both with drugs and in relationships. Most of that heavy lifting is done by its larger-than-life villains who are eccentric cornballs (welcomed cornballs), especially Bruno, the "artist" whose art is mutilating corpses into absurd spectacles of flesh and bone. Revival is colored with a wide array of varied antagonists, including the leader of the Scarlet Church, Marlowe; his companion, the Sister of Mercy; or Charlotte, a young woman who volunteered herself to ascend as experiments to the Cenobites, and turns into a horrible creature that acts as the game's stalker, a la Resident Evil's Nemesis enemy, who terrorizes Aidan. 

Each character, and often the one they surround themselves with, have a surprising amount of depth and characterization. By the end, I knew and understood every villain I fought. 

The most grounded and compelling of these characters is Zora, the merchant who keeps tabs on Aidan. She also serves as Aidan's devil's advocate, questioning his motives around every corner, and forcing Aidan to sometimes question himself in the process. She is an anchor in the narrative, and is as vital to the story as Sunny, the villains, and the Cenobites themselves.

Everything the game attempts to accomplish synergizes so well by the end, that I wanted to start it all over again, which is why I'm let down that Revival doesn't offer a New Game Plus mode. I hope it's added in a future update, especially because the game's harder difficulty feels unbalanced and unfairly punishing. After completing the game on its normal difficulty, which presented a moderate, albeit, approachable challenge, I still yearned for an increased amount of pain to fulfill my pleasure to have my survival skills tested. 

The game's Hard difficulty, however, does not complement the game's existing design. Hard doesn't feature quick saves and has fewer save points, with those save points sometimes being located far apart. The difficulty is altered with the addition of more enemies in any given area, and alerting one will send all of them running exactly to your location. One area involved a lengthy stealth section where one wrong move could send me back 15 minutes, making the experience feel less rewarding of my skill, and more tedious to repeat over and over again. I wouldn't recommend Hard on a first playthrough, or even a second (unless you're truly seeking some masochistic ascension).

By the end, Hellraiser: Revival stood more confident and self-aware than its early hours, shaking off the imposter syndrome for an outfit that fits it just right. And damn, it looks good in it, too.

In a moment where conversations around modern audiences are becoming more averse to sex scenes, and mainstream video games are taking fewer and fewer risks, Clive Barker's Hellraiser: Revival feels like a statement piece in both sex and violence. While explicit, Revival suspends these real-world topics to such fantastical extremes that I find it hard to view it literally. But the topics it tackles, from abuse to sexual exploration, still somehow remain tasteful when wrapped in its otherwise over-the-top depictions. But, hey, that's what made Clive Barker's original novella and the original Hellraiser film so compelling. And Hellraiser: Revival is a well-deserved addition to the Hellraiser legacy.

As the GTA 6 release date creeps ever closer, the now-notorious leaker Cyberleek doesn't seem to be finished showing off unreleased content just yet.

Having been relatively quiet since August's wave of shorter GTA 6 leaks, Cyberleek has released a 25-minute video of new gameplay footage and cutscenes just weeks before the game's release.

A new post on the Cyberleek subreddit has sent Grand Theft Auto 6 fans scrambling after one user claimed to have spotted a new leak and shared an image of what appears to be a newly uploaded file. The original poster said they couldn't download the file themselves.

Cyberleek had been largely silent for weeks after releasing a series of GTA 6 gameplay clips throughout August, but reports earlier this week suggested the leaker could be preparing another release after a mysterious poll appeared on the website with a deadline of October 8. Activity associated with the project's cryptocurrency wallet was also reportedly resumed. At the time, it wasn't clear whether the original person behind the Cyberleek operation was behind the activity or not.

According to comments in the Reddit post, users are attempting to download the apparently 25-minute long video. One commenter claimed the footage includes "new gameplay footage and cutscenes," while another alleged that protagonist Jason can be seen running around completely naked. If true, this wouldn't be entirely surprising since it was confirmed earlier this week that you can see him nude in the shower, Jason and Lucia can explore the more intimate side of their relationship, and there's even a nudist colony.

The ZIP is reportedly titled "Extended Leek," which is an obvious riff on Rockstar's official GTA 6: An Extended Look. That trailer is roughly 26 minutes long and originally aired as a timed exclusive on Netflix.

Cyberleek's original batch of leaks was enough to cause a headache for Rockstar. Showing everything from basketball and vehicle theft to Vice City locations and various NPC interactions, the leaks eventually prompted a response from the developer.

With GTA 6 now mere weeks away, there's not much longer to wait to get your hands on the real thing. Until then, Rockstar's official footage remains the safest way to get a look at the game without wandering into spoiler territory.

The Remothered games are true cult classics in the way that players find them either insufferable or inspired. As a lover of developer Stormind Games' antique perversions, but also a hater of its convoluted storytelling, I regretfully exist somewhere in between. But I know I won't be able to resist the new Remothered: Red Nun's Legacy when it launches later this month, since the horror game legends who helped make the Italian gothic game are way too good. Red Nun’s Legacy will feature legendary Silent Hill composer Akira Yamaoka, and its Red Nun enemy is voiced by Resident Evil alumna Maggie Robertson.

Remothered: Red Nun's Legacy latest trailer, which premiered today during the latest Horror Game Awards showcase, revels in the weathered stone buildings and marble fountain angels of the game's Sicilian setting. Stormind Games' developers are based in Sicily themselves, so recreating the decaying decadence of the island for Red Nun's Legacy was like trying to catch a dream right upon waking: You may never remember every detail, but you know the smells and feelings perfectly, because you lived through them. 

https://youtu.be/R-1jZKgAfYQ

A statement to press explains, "The Sicily that Stormind Games recreated in Remothered: Red Nun's Legacy is the Sicily the team has always lived, seen, breathed. This trailer is a visual journey through the real places, textures, colors, and cultural details that shaped the world of Red Nun's Legacy, stemming directly from the memories of those who developed it."

It looks as gorgeous and imposing as a ballet school built by Dario Argento. But so did the original 2018 Remothered game Tormented Fathers and its 2020 sequel Broken Porcelain, and I don't love them as much as I wanted to. 

I'm getting invested because the darkened glamor of Red Nun's Legacy is enhanced by Yamaoka, whose industrial grooves are just as irrefutable as Mt. Etna's mouth leaking lava in the game's far distance. Plus, actor Maggie Robertson, whose take on the bad vampire mother Lady Dimitrescu made fans delirious for a nibble on the neck, will no doubt inspire the same frenzy with her Red Nun stalker.

With these artists' help, I think Remothered: Red Nun's Legacy could become a true classic--no "cult" necessary. It's out on consoles and PC on October 27, and it's coming to Nintendo Switch 2 on December 3.

The Outlast Trials, Red Barrels' co-op horror game set in its wider Outlast universe, just broke its concurrent-player record, eclipsing 120,000 players. The previous high came when the game launched in Steam Early Access in 2023 and the player count climbed to 36,000. 

Today's new record means the indie horror game reset the bar with a total more than four times higher than its previous best.

Red Barrels credited a few big factors for the record. For one, The Outlast Trials is enjoying a huge discount in the Steam Autumn Sale, on sale for $4--though that sale ends tomorrow (Thursday, October 8), if you're interested.

The studio also revealed that roughly half of the players contributing to that total are from China, as the game is seeing a surge in popularity there. Naturally, the Halloween season helps too, even though it's not one of the new horror games coming out this month.

Red Barrels sent the news out on its social media.

The Outlast Trials made its version 1.0 debut in the spring of 2024. Though it's playable solo, it's intended to be experienced as a co-op game for up to four people. Seasonal content and events have come to the game regularly since then, adding new villains, abilities, maps, and more. 

Up next for the game is its annual Geister event for Halloween, followed by Season 8 in December, which will add another new major villain, or "Prime Asset," as well as a new map and more events.

The Outlast Trials is a favorite on GameSpot, featured in our best horror multiplayer games list and our best horror games (overall) list. In my Outlast Trials review, I said it's "capable of being as terrifying as previous Outlast games, and though you’ll trade away some scares when playing with a bigger group, they’re likely to be replaced by nervous laughs as you and your allies narrowly evade monsters in the dark."

Zach Cregger has another hit on his hands with Resident Evil, and it's set to become his biggest movie ever by revenue at the box office.

According to Deadline, Resident Evil is expected to surpass his current biggest movie, Weapons ($270 million worldwide), by the end of this week or sooner. It currently stands at $247.6 million worldwide.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mNd1gb19A-c

What's propelling Resident Evil higher was its release in China this week--it debuted there on October 5, and it's expected to make $35 million in China for its first week. If this comes to fruition, Resident Evil should pass $280 million globally this week.

The previous Resident Evil movies from director Paul W.S. Anderson also performed phenomenally in China. The last one, 2016's The Final Chapter, made $159.5 million in China alone, making up more than 51% of the movie's worldwide gross of $312.2 million. It's the highest-grossing Resident Evil movie ever. Cregger's Resident Evil still has work to do to catch up.

Cregger's earlier movie, 2022's Barbarian, made $46 million worldwide. Long before that, Cregger made Miss March, and it earned $4.6 million worldwide.

In terms of all video game movies, Resident Evil ranks No. 17, but if it does indeed reach $280 million, it will pass 2018's Tomb Raider ($274.6 million worldwide).

Resident Evil is doing great commercially and scored solid reviews from critics, so people might expect a sequel. That could happen, but Cregger has said he's finished with franchise movies, even though he does have ideas for more stories.

Cregger's next movie is The Flood, a deep-space sci-fi movie starring Jennifer Lawrence. It has nothing to do with Halo, despite bearing a name with ties to Halo.

What likely would have been the big new enemy faction of the Halo universe, the Endless, have been fully revealed, though it's unclear what role, if any, they will play going forward.

As announced last month by Xbox's Matt Booty, Halo is under new management, with the responsibility of the next game in the series going to a completely new team under Activision. Halo Studios, formerly 343 Industries, will remain as a small team to oversee already-released titles like the recent Halo: Campaign Evolved. However, the majority of the studio, 268 people, have been laid off.

In the wake of the news, the latest (and now last) issue of the lore-focused Canon Fodder blog written by Halo Studios community writer Alex Wakeford has now become a parting gift from the studio to the community. In it, Wakeford reveals a glimpse at what the future of Halo might have looked like under Halo Studios' continued stewardship.

A full look at the alien race known as the Endless.

There are plenty of reveals within, including a look at Zeta Halo environments that may have at one time been planned for Halo Infinite DLC. But the biggest reveal is saved for last: an image that is the community's first full look at the Endless. This new enemy faction was teased in Halo Infinite via the Harbinger, a member of an advanced race that was imprisoned by the Forerunners on Zeta Halo due to their ability to survive the firing of the Halo rings.

In the blog the Endless are referred to as the Xalanyn, children of Abaddon. Wakeford doesn't elaborate further, but states that he hopes the image will "spark your imagination and let your canon curiosities run wild with endless questions."

Each member of the Endless looks wildly different. Some appear vaguely humanoid, while others look more like some type of sea creature. Every Endless member appears alongside a smaller creature that is reminiscent of their Endless counterpart. The Harbinger appears in the image alongside a Skimmer, a new enemy type encountered in Halo Infinite. 

The image seems to point towards the Endless being almost a replacement of sorts for Halo's traditional Covenant faction, with each Endless supplying a smaller enemy type the Master Chief would have to battle against. Interestingly, an Engineer, an alien race used by the Covenant and seen in previous entries in the franchise, appears alongside a similar looking Endless in the image. This looks to imply the Engineers themselves were created or in some way linked to the Endless.

Unfortunately, this may be Halo fans' first, and last, look at the Endless. According to Halo insider Rebs Gaming, nobody at Halo Studios is currently involved in Activision's new Halo. Activision may completely disregard Halo Studios' work in favor of a clean slate, though Rebs does state Activision's game, while not a direct sequel to Halo Infinite, also won't "retcon any previously established canon." 

Halo's move to Activision comes as Xbox CEO Asha Sharma has put a renewed emphasis on big franchises as part of her "Xbox reset" strategy that has seen widespread layoffs, game cancellations, and studio divestitures.

007 First Light is already out, but it's still accumulating wishlists on Steam, and now that it's passed 7 million wishlists, a very good boy has been added to the game.

With 7 million wishlists, IO Interactive has added Jack the bulldog to the game via its TacSim lobby for everyone. Jack, as a statue model, made his James Bond debut in the 2012 movie Skyfall, sitting on M's desk. The statue survived when the office exploded, though its face got cracked and Union Jack flag was charred. Jack went on to appear in Spectre and No Time To Die. Now, he's alive, and he's in First Light.

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/zdKJszWAfwc

IO says Jack should be a "warm, loyal presence" for players between missions, and yes, you can pet the dog.

"Gruff on the outside but endlessly good-natured, Jack has quickly become something of a fixture around MI6, with Bond himself growing rather fond of him between assignments," IO said.

Jack the Bulldog.

In other news, First Light's free Extended Operations DLC is out now, introducing New Game+, a new 00 difficulty mode, and a Photo Mode. The update also adds more TacSim content, including a new mission set in Vietnam.

007 First Light is currently 30% off right now on PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X|S, bringing it down to $49. A Switch 2 version is coming in March 2027.

A First Light sequel sounds like a matter of when, not if, but it remains to be confirmed.

This is all happening just after October 5, which is James Bond Day. This commemorates the anniversary of the first movie Dr. No's release on October 5, 1962. Coinciding with this, all the James Bond movies were just added to Prime Video.

C

Star Wars Zero Company released in late August to great reviews, but its launch was bittersweet, as a large chunk of developer Bit Reactor's staff was furloughed, unsure if they would be returning to work. For at least a portion of them, however, that uncertainty is over, as they're back at the studio.

Speaking to Game File, Bit Reactor CEO Greg Foertsch said the studio had "started the process of returning more of our team back to work" but stopped short of giving specific percentages or figures. Game File's sources said the headcount following this return is more than half of what is was pre-furlough, but it's unclear when or if more staff will return in the future. A lawsuit involving Foertsch and co-founder Alison Kelly is currently ongoing, as well.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QmrvlMbozAs

Games in genres as niche as turn-based tactics can sometimes struggle to make a major impact, but Star Wars Zero Company is about as good as these games get. Alongside a surprisingly approachable prequel-era story, the game mixes classic XCOM-style combat with some unique Star Wars twists, like force-pulling enemies out of cover so they can be obliterated by your blasters.

In our Star Wars Zero Company review, Steve Watts called it "the next great evolution of the genre." For a different twist on Star Wars once you're finished with Zero Company, you can now grab the excellent Star Wars Galactic Racer, as well.

Paradox Interactive has announced Cities: Skylines - Expanded Edition, a Nintendo Switch 2 port of Colossal Order's hit 2015 city-builder. While it's great to see Cities: Skylines make its way to a new platform, this announcement also serves as a reminder that we have no idea when the long-awaited console ports of Cities: Skylines 2 will come out.

Cities: Skylines - Expanded Edition was developed by Tantalus Media, the team behind The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword's Switch port. It'll cost $49, include 10 expansions, expand the buildable area to 25 tiles, support keyboard and mouse, and add a map editor, plus better precision placement and environmental controls. Players can choose between a 30fps mode that focuses on visual quality or a performance mode targeting 60fps.

The Switch 2 port launches on October 28 and will be available at a 70% discount to those who already own the Switch 1 version. Holiday Getaways, Mansions & Manors, and Blueprint Beasts Radio content creator packs will be released for the PC, PS4, and Xbox One versions of the game on the same day.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L2HnKgl-HV0

While the original Cities: Skylines continues to be updated and ported to new platforms, Cities: Skylines 2 and its prospective console ports have had a much rockier journey. That sequel was supposed to be released the same day on PC and console in October 2023, but the console ports were pushed back to Spring 2024 ahead of release. When the PC version of Cities: Skylines 2 launched, it was riddled with bugs and other issues, and developer Colossal Order spent months fixing them.

In Spring 2024, the console ports of Cities: Skylines 2 were delayed again, this time to October 2024. Unfortunately, the PS5 and Xbox Series X|S ports were delayed again, and the developers admitted, "We have not yet met the stability and performance targets we set for the console release." Over two years later, the port is still not out.

In November 2025, Iceflake Studios took over development of Cities: Skylines 2 from Colossal Order, teasing that it will do "continuous work on the Editor and console editions." We have not heard anything about console ports of Cities: Skylines 2 since then.

As Tanatlus Media developed Cities: Skylines - Expanded Edition for Switch 2, not Iceflake Studios, it's unlikely the releases are connected in any significant way. Still, the status of the Cities: Skylines 2 console ports remains a mystery, further complicated by this Switch 2 port announcement and the reveal of Lego Skylines for PC and console.

World of Warcraft: Forever players have made their feelings about the game's visual style crystal clear: They love it when things look old.

It's a recurring theme in the Forever beta, where players have continually pushed back against updated high-definition character models and character portraits. While Forever is in many ways a new version of Blizzard's MMORPG, it's built with the spirit and foundation of WoW Classic in mind, even as it includes updated visuals and quality-of-life updates taken straight from modern WoW. One of those new features is an option to use modern WoW's updated playable character and non-enemy NPC models.

According to the WoW content creator Savix, who tested an early version of Forever before it was publicly announced, developer Blizzard didn't originally plan to include the ability to swap between standard or high-def character models, instead only using HD models. The testers, many of them streamers and content creators from within the WoW Classic community, stressed how important it was to include an option for the game's original character models.

https://www.reddit.com/r/classicwow/comments/1wtzd7p/new_quillboar_boss_model_updated_for_classic_wow/

Blizzard thankfully listened, but every other instance of updated character models have been met with similar distaste from among the MMO's community. Whether it was intentional or by mistake, a quilboar boss was found to be using its modern WoW model and was met with backlash from players. It didn't take long for Blizzard to return the enemy back to how it looked in WoW Classic. 

It's a similar story with the game's character creation portraits. For much of the beta, the Forever character-creation screen used HD portraits taken from modern WoW, to the disappointment of the community. Earlier this week that finally changed, with the game now using WoW's original character-creation portraits.

Blizzard seems to have gotten the message. Currently, the game's new playable Skyborne elf race only has HD models. That, too, sounds like it will soon change. In a comment attached to a video exploring Skyborne lore and abilities, Blizzard said to "stay tuned regarding Skyborne models," seemingly implying standard-definition versions of the Skyborne are on the way. 

https://youtu.be/GmCSew3WWQo?si=xZPYzZH9IAniImz1

Even with these options, some players want more. Forever's user interface is a fascinating combination of old and new--cleaner and more streamlined similar to modern WoW, but inspired in many ways by WoW Classic. Currently, there's not a toggle option to swap between Forever's updated UI and WoW's original interface. For those who want the UI as it was 20 years ago, a player-made ClassicUI Forever add-on reverts many of Blizzard's changes to make everything from the game's action bars, spellbook, profession tab, character portraits, bags, and more look as they did in 2004. 

I expect this push and pull to continue. WoW content creators have debated the clash between old and new found in Forever's art style, with many calling on Blizzard to pick a lane. For what seems like the majority of the Forever community, the answer is loud and clear--the older looking the better. 

WoW: Forever's beta runs through October 21, with Forever's full launch coming November 4. A recent RMT controversy in the Forever beta saw Blizzard put its foot down when it comes to illegal gold buying. Meanwhile, Blizzard is asking players in a survey for their opinions on 11 potential new classes that could be added to Forever in the future. 

Gamers hoping for GTA 6 to amp up the realism when it comes to losing their wanted level in the sunny state of Leonida are in luck, with Rockstar confirming in a recent interview that Jason and Lucia can do far more than escape a glowing red zone on the map to shake off the law. 

Speaking to IGN ahead of the Netflix Extended Look back in August, head of development and co-studio head Rob Nelson walked the outlet through a 30-minute gameplay demo in which several new mechanics and locations were detailed.  

The demo begins in Jason and Lucia’s safehouse, one of many interactive personal spaces the player can call home in GTA 6. Here you can switch characters, partake in unique interactions, or even decorate the place to suit your style. However, Rockstar has stressed “this is not their own house, they’re staying in someone else’s house.”

From here, Nelson takes Lucia on a stroll through downtown where an evolved version of Red Dead Redemption 2’s NPC interaction system is used to mess with random citizens, which can range from dangerous gangbangers to normal people jogging in the local park. 

But now these interactions possess significantly more depth and go far beyond saying hello, being rude, or holding someone at gunpoint. Rockstar describes several examples such as eavesdropping on a conversation for too long and being called out, or following an NPC as he goes about his regular routine only for it to blow up into a moment that feels earned and can be tackled in a multitude of ways.

This is where the evolved wanted level system comes into play, although Rockstar has made it clear that you will still have an opportunity to cause untold chaos and murder hundreds of cops if you’re that way inclined, but doing so will come with significantly more variables since Rockstar doesn’t want GTA 6 to make you “all-powerful” like GTA 5 often did. 

After an interaction ends with an NPC pulling a gun on Lucia and a group of people she has just interacted with, dispatch is called and a one-star wanted level star shows up on screen. If you manage to escape the area where the authorities are going to respond, you’ll be in the clear, but Nelson goes on to describe a number of ways this can be achieved. 

“As much as possible, we tried to design the game so that you have options,” Nelson said. “Things can escalate quite quickly if you want them to, or people who don’t want to escalate can try to avoid it. It's not always possible! To me, that supports the narrative. This is a story about a couple on the run. We have tried to make the systems and the design support our narrative when and wherever possible. Meaning, if you hit and run, commit a crime and run, get into trouble and move on before the cops get there, and you don’t start shooting people, don't start escalating – which you absolutely can do if you want to – but if you don’t, you’re generally going to be fine.”

Nelson expands upon this system further after Lucia experiences another NPC interaction that puts the fuzz on her tail. Even if you haven’t killed someone, a stolen vehicle or beaten and bruised pedestrian is still going to raise both eyebrows and your wanted level. You can run away the old fashioned way, or decide to get a haircut, change your outfit, or even split up if Jason and Lucia happen to be travelling together. 

“Again, if I take off here, I should be fine. We’re really trying to encourage this hit-and-run style of gameplay.” Nelson explains. “So, the police are looking for me. We have this heat system, and they know what I look like and what I’m wearing. Here’s a pair of glasses–I'll put on this and this baseball hat. But they still know what I'm wearing, so I would need to go to a clothing store or call my personal vehicle, which has changes of outfits in the trunk.”

The idea of being able to lose the law by dashing into an interconnected network of alleys or blending in amidst NPCs in a random storefront sounds thrilling, especially dynamic systems designed to keep you on their toes are constantly interacting with one another.

Outfits can become compromised, while cops will be quick to recognise what vehicle you’re travelling in or where you were last seen. But Nelson notes that “so long as you don’t draw too much attention to yourself, you should be fine.” Easier said than done in an open world as ripe with possibility as this one. 

GTA 6 releases on November 19 for PS5 and Xbox Series X|S, and according to reports it is already close to 6 million pre-orders more than a month before launch. 

It's the start of a new month, and like clockwork, the next batch of Xbox Game Pass titles has been announced for the subscription service. Gears of War: E-Day leads the new arrivals this month, and it'll be joined by a few more big games: Battlefield 6 and Valor Mortis.

Here's a closer look at everything you can grab in the first half of the month through Xbox Game Pass:

The headline act is the aforementioned Gears of War: E-Day, a pretty great Xbox exclusive if you're looking for something gleefully loud, dumb, and violent. Minecraft Dungeons 2 has also just launched, and while it does have a few flaws, it's a lot more ambitious than its predecessor.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=teClq4qYyzQ

Other notable games in this first wave include the day-one release of Echo Weaver, an adventure game where time is your greatest resource, and Forever Ago, another brand-new release focused on redemption as you set off on a single-player road trip adventure.

Arriving on October 13, Game Pass Ultimate subscribers can check out large-scale warfare with Battlefield 6, while Valor Mortis is a first-person soulslike set during the Napoleonic Wars era. If you feel like something that's less brutal, Deep Dish Dungeon is a survival exploration game with hand-crafted dungeons and metroidvania elements.

Rounding out the first wave of games on October 15, are several more day-one titles that cover a wide range of genres. You can shoot the Heeler family--with a camera, you sicko--in the day-one release of Bluey's Happy Snaps, and Chained Beasts is a co-op gladiator roguelike. You'll fight side by side with your comrade in arms and chains.

Finally, you can build a city on the back of a Space Whale and learn to coexist with it as you explore the cosmos in the day-one release of Beyond These Stars.

Several games are also leaving Game Pass on October 15, so you have only a few more days to try titles like Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 and Evil West.

Xbox Game Pass October Wave 1 Games Now available

• Gears of War: E-Day (Cloud, console, and PC)
• Minecraft Dungeons 2 (Cloud, console, and PC)

October 8

• Echo Weaver (Cloud, console, and PC)
• Forever Ago (Cloud, console, and PC)
• Neon Abyss 2 (Cloud, console, and PC)

October 13

• Battlefield 6 (Cloud, console, and PC)
• Deep Dish Dungeon (Cloud, console, and PC)
• Valor Mortis (Cloud, console, and PC)

October 15

• Bluey's Happy Snaps (Cloud, console, and PC)
• Chained Beasts (Cloud, console, and PC)

October 16

• Beyond These Stars (PC)

New information has come to light about GTA 6, and specifically the partnership of its main characters, Jason and Lucia. In GTA 6, they are both partners in crime and lovers, and physical intimacy will be part of the experience, it seems.

Rockstar North's Rob Nelson said in an interview with IGN that physical intimacy is a "huge part" of a relationship, and that applies to GTA 6. Exactly how this may operate in GTA 6, however, remains a mystery. "It has to be done right," Nelson said.

"Like anything that we do, we have to iterate and try things and iterate on it until we figure out what feels right," he explained.

Lucia and Jason in GTA 6.

GTA 6's ESRB rating says the game will have nudity and strong sexual content, and IGN reported that when switching characters, it can switch to Jason's POV while he is naked and in the shower. An international rating for GTA 6 specifically mentions how the game will have "sex scenes."

The GTA series has had its fair share of sex-related controversy. One of gaming’s biggest controversies ever, the Hot Coffee surrounding GTA: San Andreas saw Rockstar owner Take-Two paying out money to settle suits related to a mod in GTA: San Andreas’ PC edition that unlocked an interactive sex minigame.

As of yet, there is no indication that any sex scenes in GTA 6 would be interactive.

Also in the interview, Nelson discussed Jason and Lucia's relationship generally, saying players will be able to "role-play" their relationship, and "it's amazing."

GTA 6's story is narratively structured around Jason and Lucia, and the two of them working together. They don't have to be a couple, though, and instead can be simply "partners in crime" who are not romantically involved.

"I don’t want to say too much more about this because I don’t want to spoil anything. It really adds a compelling element to things, and it’s one of the reasons we wanted to approach this sort of story, because it's completely different for us," he said. "Could we bring some sort of emotional resonance to GTA for people if they wanted to engage with it? Could we also provide mechanisms for people to just opt out of it if they're not into it? If they feel like, ‘I don't want a relationship in this?’ That's what we're going to find out. It's not something that we want to foist upon players."

Lucia and Jason can get into all sorts of trouble in GTA 6.

Nelson went on to say GTA 6 will not give players "a particular gameplay benefit" if they have Jason and Lucia become lovers, however. But they will always have the benefit of "working together and having each other's back," he said.

"Whether they're romantically close or not doesn't change that. They will still work together. It's really about what you want for them, their story, and how it plays out. Whether you've nurtured the relationship or not will definitely have a bearing on how their story plays out," Nelson explained.

GTA 6 has a dedicated "relationship system" that is separate from a different gameplay system that tracks what sort of a criminal you are, Nelson said. Players can nurture the relationship between Jason and Lucia in the ways you would expect, including spending time together with things like kayaking and mini-golf. Or they can grow their relationship by robbing stores together.

"However players want to spend that time together, it will have a positive impact on the relationship," he said.

GTA 6's narrative setup has been likened to Bonnie and Clyde, the famous real-world criminal couple who met their end in a hail of gunfire. Many are wondering if both Jason and Lucia will make it out alive in GTA 6, or at the least, how their relationship may be tested. Another popular fan theory is that either Jason or Lucia is actually working with the Feds and will turn on the other at some point.

it won't be much longer until we find out, as GTA 6 launches on November 19 for PS5 and Xbox Series X|S.

Just a month after Microsoft said Forza Horizon 6 for PlayStation 5 remained on track to release in 2026, a new report says the game has in fact been delayed to 2027.

Reputable leaker billbil-kun said Forza Horizon 6 for PS5 is set for release on January 26, 2027. The report said there will be a physical disc edition at retail, and the game will also be sold digitally.

In September, Microsoft said in a blog post that the PS5 edition of the popular racing game was due for release in 2026, but plans have seemingly changed. Officially, however, Microsoft has yet to communicate any update to the game's PS5 release date.

Forza Horizon 6 was released in May this year for Xbox Series X|S and PC. The game, which is set in Japan, scored rave reviews, including an 8/10 from GameSpot, and PlayStation fans have had to wait for their turn to play.

The last game in the series, Forza Horizon 5, was a huge hit on PlayStation 5. In other Forza news, Microsoft recently announced that Forza developers Turn 10 and Playground are merging to become one unified studio to support and grow the brand going forward.

After a lengthy hiatus, Gears of War returned this week to Xbox Series X|S and PC with a new adventure set during the cataclysmic events of Emergence Day. For fans of the series, it has been a long wait, as the previous entry in the series, Gears 5, was released all the way back in 2019. Will there be another seven-year stretch between new Gears games? Gears of War: E-Day developer The Coalition doesn't think so, as the new game lays the groundwork for a quicker turnaround for new potential chapters in the IP.

Speaking to the BBC, Coalition studio head Mike Crump said that E-Day provides a "great foundation" for future games, and he claimed that "the next game will not take nearly as long" to make. "What I say to myself, what I say to the team, is we just we need to focus on the things that we can control. For us that's about shipping a great game that people are going to love and I feel like, as a team, we've done that," Crump added in response to questions about the safety of the studio and its institutional knowledge during a period of mass layoffs at Xbox. "We've got a great team here. And the leadership team in particular has worked together for upwards of 20 years. So there's definitely a continuity of knowledge and experience."

So far, The Coalition appears to have been spared the brunt of "Xbox reset" layoffs, but fears remain that the axe might swing their way now that Gears of War: E-Day has launched.

Recent changes at Xbox have seen several studios consolidated under Bethesda and Activision, and even Xbox's high-profile Halo series has not been spared. After being under the remit of Halo Studios for several years, a new team at Activision is now developing the next Halo game, rumored to be a new division within Call of Duty developer Sledgehammer Games.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=teClq4qYyzQ

The future of the Gears of War series likely rests with its commercial performance, but as an Xbox exclusive, there's only so much room for sales before you factor in its availability as a day-one Xbox Game Pass release and its launch during a crowded period on the gaming calendar. Crump sees things differently, believing the true measure of E-Day's success will be its ability to move the needle for Xbox and show what the gaming brand is capable of as it enters a new era, not just sales numbers.

"We measure things like, are we showcasing the platform? Are we pushing the hardware to its limits? Are we showcasing what the Xbox is capable of? Our goal basically is to be the best-looking game on the Xbox and really show the industry what's possible with our hardware," Crump said.

Stadia might be dead, but Google isn't giving up on gaming. The company has rolled out Playground, a platform built around AI that "lets you create, play, and share custom games." It's browser-based and labeled as an "experiment" to start. There's also Unity Spark support, which will offer more development options for people who catch the creator bug. 

Google's pitch claims that this new platform makes game creation more democratic by ending gatekeeping to development. The company states that Playground "lowers the barriers to creation, so bringing game ideas to life can now be as easy as describing it through a few prompts--no coding experience required." The platform also feels like the company's attempt at taking a piece of the Roblox pie--something that Xbox CEO Asha Sharma reportedly wants with Minecraft, too. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dxvrvfyicp0

However, the initial rollout feels pretty underwhelming. The most hilarious part of the Playground experience, so far, is realizing how misleading the cover art for games is after actually playing them. For example, we checked out Volcano Run. The key image shows a sports car racing around a road crumbling; meanwhile, the actual gameplay is a rudimentary rectangular motorcycle (we think) driving in a Tron-like environment. 

One of the Unity Spark highlights is called Horror Story, and the game starts with players following a ghost into a haunted house. How that ghost shuffles into the residence is one of the funnier animations we've witnessed in a game recently. 

The most promising experience we checked out was Steampunk Match, a match-3 puzzle game. Players need to create combos to stop a boiler from exploding. This game felt much better than others that attempted to take a swing at the action-RPG genre, such as Catacombs. 

If you are looking to make your own game for Playground, that opportunity is apparently rolling out to people "soon." However, Google says people can upgrade their Google One plan to get started immediately.

15 Best Free PC Games To Play In 2026 View Images

Rockstar boss Rob Nelson has stated that GTA 6 won't make players "all-powerful" like they were in GTA 5 and the games that came before it. For GTA 6, this means NPCs in the world will have impulses of their own, and could come after you.

Speaking to IGN, Nelson said, "The world will act upon you as well as you acting upon the world." In previous GTA games, except for the police, the player was the only one with an "invisible arsenal hidden away," and everyone in the world would run away in terror. "This world in GTA 6 is not like that," he said.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_vlzIPpyJR0

Nelson went on to say that GTA 6's story, which follows the partners in crime and lovers Jason and Lucia, is about "criminals on the run." However, the game's narrative is such that they are incentized to "do what they need to do while not drawing unnecessary attention."

"So if you're doing things on a mission that you are required to do--or you’re robbing places, or somebody comes and messes with you and you have to deal with them by smacking them down or whatever--that’s all fair game," he said. "It's when you go beyond what is necessary on a consistent basis or you do completely unnecessary stuff consistently that you may start to sway your criminal profile in a certain direction. Maybe you care about that as a player, maybe you don't. There is no right or wrong way to play this."

Nelson said being "overpowered" as a character compared to everyone else except the cops "can be fun but not as fun" as a world in which other people may have "impulses of their own and act upon you."

"You are still powerful and capable, but you are not the only one capable of violence or the only one with weapons or the only crazy person out there," he said. "It makes the world far more unpredictable and interesting. It's something that we started doing in Red Dead Redemption 2, where you are not the only dangerous person in the world. There are gangs that will attack you, things that will happen to you. The world will act upon you. That happens here a lot, and then when it does, you have a decision to make. How do you want to deal with it?"

In GTA 6, the cops are getting upgrades, too. A new "heat" system means the police now know what the player looks like and what they're wearing, so even if players put on a hat or glasses, the cops still know who they are until they change clothes.

GTA 6 releases on November 19 for PS5 and Xbox Series X|S, and it's reportedly already sold close to 6 million copies. A recent report said the game might be available to stream in November, but that's apparently not the case.

After leaving the Xbox Game Studios portfolio, State of Decay 3 developer Undead Labs is now an independent, employee-owned studio. The developer had previously announced State of Decay 3 all the way back in 2020--partly to keep the project and the studio on Microsoft's radar--as the company embarked on an acquisition spree. Now one of several departures from Microsoft's gaming division following the bloody "Xbox reset" that has seen scores of jobs slashed throughout 2026, Undead Labs also had to cut staff as it entered a new era. But was there any behind-the-scenes drama that led to its exit from Xbox?

Speaking to The Game Business, studio boss Philip Holt said that ultimately, nothing went wrong. It was more a case of reading the room and making a proposal to Microsoft that the company accepted. "It was an accelerated period of time for Microsoft's divestiture," Holt explained. "We had a lot of interest. I also thought that because we were so close to being in revenue, the amount of capital that we needed to finish [State of Decay 3] was not an insurmountable amount that we couldn't go raise it ourselves. I knew other studios were doing management buyouts, so I submitted an offer for a management-led acquisition, and Microsoft thought that would be a good idea."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c5--CgCpM7M

Holt also addressed why State of Decay 3 was originally announced so far in advance, as in the eight years that it was under the Xbox umbrella, it never released a single game--but it did drop 38 updates for the popular State of Decay 2. He explained that a small team had been working on the game since 2020--with development picking up a few years later--and that announcing the game so early helped the studio avoid being lost in the shuffle during Xbox's buying spree of publishers like Bethesda and Activision Blizzard.

"I didn’t think Microsoft was done being acquisitive, and I didn't think they'd continue buying small developers; I assumed they'd start buying big things. I was a little worried about getting swallowed up or divested before we had a chance to present to the world what we were working on. So, it was a bit of a marker on the table. I was saying, State of Decay 3, we're announcing it, the audience knows it’s in development, and here’s a trailer to demonstrate our vision."

State of Decay 3 will still launch day-one through Game Pass, and Holt credited the subscription service with helping the horror franchise reach 25 million players. He also said that becoming an independent studio allowed Undead Labs to focus on serving an audience and being profitable. "We need to make a profit, we need to be sustainable, we need to pay ourselves and our partners--and it is a goal. This is not a charity. But it’s not the number-one most important objective."

Undead Labs joins Double Fine and Compulsion Games as former Xbox studios, but the future of Hellblade and DmC: Devil May Cry developer Ninja Theory is looking grim. After deals to acquire the studio fell through, it looks like the studio will soon be shut down.

A good puzzle game needs to constantly find new ways to challenge you, to walk you through skills and reward your observations, and to contain answers that make logical sense without being too obvious, or too obtuse. 

Order of the Sinking Star, the latest puzzler from developer Thekla Interactive and director Jonathan Blow, mostly hits those marks with impressive, cunning, and devious puzzle design. But even when it misses and gets frustrating, the game takes so many swings that it's easy to  head to another level and find another opportunity to bend your brain and stretch your smarts.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cMaW-V42Xwg

In fact, the best and worst part of Order of the Sinking Star is how expansive it is. Thekla touts over 1,000 puzzles to solve spread across an expansive overworld map that's full of discreet dungeon-like levels, mimicking the formula of 1987's The Legend of Zelda. And like the original Zelda, all of those puzzles involve pushing blocks around a grid, seen from a top-down perspective. Finding ways to keep the act of pushing blocks challenging, compelling, and unpredictable for hundreds of puzzles is Sinking Star's greatest feat, but that ingenuity can also make the game a little too sprawling and, at times, unwieldy.

All those puzzles are born of the many smart and intricate mechanics Order of the Sinking Star brings to bear on its simple underlying concept. The game finds you in what appears to be some kind of strange artificial garden facility, and you start by controlling a character who, after being plucked from some kind of battle, at first wonders if she's died and is now in the afterlife. But one assumes Valhalla or whatever would have more drinking and fewer brain teasers. As she sets about exploring, she discovers audio logs left behind by some other person who explored the place ahead of her and recorded his many findings.

Soon after, you enter a massive open overworld, where you can set out in four different directions, each representing a different set of mechanics. Those areas are each inspired by other, smaller puzzle games, and here those games' creators serve as level designers for their specific areas. From the overworld, you can enter different puzzle levels, activated from points on the ground like spaces on a game board. Completing those puzzles opens pathways forward to keep exploring the overworld.

What you soon discover is that each of these sections of the map, with its unique mechanics, represents a specific world in the multiverse sense. Each world has its own characters, whom you control within individual puzzle levels. The idea of different worlds and their denizens being pulled into this strange, ethereal place provides a story reason to include a ton of different mechanics, and then gives Order of the Sinking Star a handy excuse to combine them in fascinating and novel ways as the different worlds collide.

In the north, you run across levels inspired by the Heroes of Sokoban games, sporting traditional role-playing characters, like a Warrior, Mage, Thief, and so on. Each has their own capability: The Warrior can push multiple blocks at once as opposed to just one at a time, the Mage instantly swaps places with other characters or objects when he faces them, and the Thief can't push objects forward but can drag them behind her. The east draws its mechanics from the game Mirror Isles, where mirrors can teleport objects at right angles. The south, inspired by Skipping Stones to Lonely Homes, carries a series of puzzles that have to do with skipping stones across water to create pathways and divert currents, while the west builds on Promesst and is all about using special beams that let characters walk through walls, teleport long distances, destroy objects, and more.

Those individual areas work well as upgrades to and expansions on the original titles that inspired them, and present a wide array of different modes of thinking as you explore, thanks to the array of characters you control as you go. Several can't push things at all but can transform objects or carry them in a pocket. One guy wears a bulky contraption that means he needs empty space around him to turn, so you have to think differently about how he navigates levels than you do with other characters. All those elements make for strong, tough puzzles in their own right, but Order of the Sinking Star raises the bar significantly as it starts to mash the worlds and their mechanics together.

Sinking Star hits best when it's pushing you toward creative ways of thinking with combinations of all those different aspects, and the game deftly teaches you new concepts that build on old ones in mostly intuitive ways. The puzzle design all the way through is impressively tight, and you can always rely on the idea that if you're stumped, it's because you're missing something or you're not using all the included elements. Through my nearly 70 hours with the game, I encountered only one puzzle that could be solved in a way that didn't seem to be what the developers explicitly intended. Sinking Star produces a ton of "ah-ha!" moments as you realize what each puzzle is trying to show you, and you then extrapolate a leap that makes you feel extra smart.

One puzzle featured both a teleporting beam and the teleporting mirrors. Under the right circumstances, the mirrors can create copies of your character that you have to control all at once, and I quickly wound up with four characters to deal with--but this level had only one exit spot, so only one character could complete it. You can't kill any characters and still finish a level, so I had to find a way to zap these four copies back into a single guy, without using the mirrors. When I finally figured out how to fuse all those copies together like Brundlefly, it changed how I thought about all the elements and opened up new lines of thinking for puzzles I hadn't considered.

The drawback of four games' worth of good ideas mixing together is that you have to keep them all in your head at the same time, and things get very complicated the deeper you go. There are a few puzzles that cram so many things together that their challenge is derived from overwhelming you with rules and complexity, rather than forcing you to expand your thinking. 

There were also times when I stared at a puzzle for minutes or maybe hours, only to realize the solution was some simple but esoteric interaction of rules that I'd forgotten because there are so many to keep in mind. In one particularly vexing puzzle, I needed to use a pushing character, skipping stones, and the pulling character together, and figured out what I thought was the solution fairly quickly. But I found myself staring at the puzzle for hours, trying to figure out its second step. I realized much later that I did have the solution, but I'd wasted a bunch of time because I was misremembering a past rule about how the stones worked from puzzles I'd completed hours earlier.

So to some degree, the breadth of Sinking Star's mechanics can work against it, and the game can seem enormous for the sake of enormity. On the other hand, the game is so large that you can always just wander off and make headway elsewhere, because there's always something else to solve.

Sinking Star is also merciful in how easy it makes experimenting with different solutions to a puzzle and undoing your mistakes. An instant undo button dials you back one action, and an action includes moving a character by one grid square. It's extremely easy to just zap back in time to one step before you accidentally shoved some essential item off a cliff or trapped yourself in a corner. There's also a dedicated button for instantly restarting a puzzle with no loading. You can slow down and speed up time at a whim, making it easier to complete puzzles with tricky timing, or to skip the boring parts when you're stuck waiting for something to happen. Sinking Star's highly forgiving nature makes it very convenient to mess around and test ideas, without wasting any more of your time than you already are by being a little dense. More puzzlers should take a page from that design approach when they're able.

While overall, Sinking Star's puzzle design is great and the game is full of inventive challenges and fascinating interactions, it does wear on. The plot elements that are meant to provide you with an overarching drive to explore wind up being pretty thin--at least through the many tens of hours that I played. 

Each character has their own personality, agenda, and motivations, and all get waylaid by stumbling into this strange puzzle world. But the tidbits of story you find for each are never particularly satisfying. The RPG heroes from the north are chasing some evil magistrate, but he's little more than a disembodied voice, if he's present at all. The scavenger from the beam world wants to collect gems for research and personal profit, and I didn't really get what that would be good for. Those mirrors are part of some kind of series of trials and the mirror character failed them at some point in his past; so what? 

All the stories are told in tiny, spread-out tidbits, and mostly feel like they exist as a veneer to justify new puzzle ideas, which makes them more confusing than compelling. And the larger mystery of uncovering what this puzzle place is, why it exists, and who created it, is just as obtuse. There are answers here, that much is obvious, but they require an even bigger investment in plumbing Sinking Star's secrets. After hitting the first of the game's endings with little but more questions and a lot of hanging plot threads, it became clear that the motivation for continuing on in Sinking Star has to come from enjoying the discovery of what new and interesting challenges the developers have in store for you, and not uncovering the narrative that surrounds them.

Often, though, the challenges are enough. I loved realizing I'd learned something that could help me uncover a solution on the overworld, only to open up a whole new area with a bunch of puzzles working with fresh takes on what had already been established--and those takes never seem to run out or get stale. Order of the Sinking Star might work better had it been a bit more curated in deploying its massive pile of puzzles, but the occasional frustration and overcomplication is an affordable price of admission to play around with so many fun ideas.

With Paramount's $111 billion acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery in the bag, details on what this merger means for the Warner Bros. game division have finally been revealed. Warner Bros. Interactive will merge with the newly formed Paramount Games Studio, and it'll oversee projects based on Skydance's rich--and newly acquired-library of IP. That lineup includes Avatar: The Last Airbender, South Park, Mortal Kombat, Game of Thrones, and Star Trek--and that's not even mentioning the treasure trove of DC Comics IP that the company now owns.

The new division will be overseen by Tony Driscoll, president of games and experiences at Skydance, and one of the executives leading corporate strategy and development at the company. Driscoll had previously described video games as a "core pillar" of entertainment, alongside film and TV.

SpongeBob Mortal Kombat crossover when?

"We’re investing in our future growth engines alongside our core ambitions in TV, film and direct-to-consumer: Games, experiences, consumer products, and publishing," Gordon wrote in a staff memo (via Variety). "These are core pillars of our strategy to build engagement and fandom in both the physical and digital worlds. We want to meet consumers where they watch, play, and engage."

It's still unclear what the future plans are for the growing Skydance gaming division, or how hard it'll be hit by looming layoffs. This branch of Skydance will now be the home to some big WBI developers like Avalanche Software (Hogwarts Legacy), NetherRealm Studios (Mortal Kombat), Rocksteady Studios (Batman: Arkham Series and one Suicide Squad game I don't want to talk about), and TT Games (Various Lego games).

Former Activision CEO Bobby Kotick has also joined the board of directors, and Skydance is also producing the Call of Duty movie with Activision, which is scheduled to hit theaters in 2028.