Capcom has announced a new release date for Onimusha: Way of the Sword: instead of September 25, the PS2-era reboot will now release on September 4. It's the second time Capcom has pulled this move in 2026, because Pragmata also got moved forward at the eleventh hour.

But unlike Pragmata's April release window, September is pretty damn busy. Previously Onimusha was butting heads with Silent Hill: Townfall and Control Resonant, both of which are scheduled for September 24. Now its only meaningful competition is The Blood of Dawnwalker, the debut action RPG from Rebel Wolves, a Polish studio helmed by former CD Projekt devs. It's definitely wiser for Onimusha to go up against a new series rather than two beloved ones, though Rebel Wolves might see things differently.

And look: I thought this Onimusha reboot would be a pretty niche concern, but my PC Gamer colleagues are pretty impressed by what they've seen. Morgan Park thought it was the best thing he saw at the 2025 Summer Game Fest, so much so that he went back for more this year. The recent demo was received well by the public.

That said, a certain kind of RPG enthusiast won't let a Capcom parry-fest get in the way of Blood of Dawnwalker, which lets you kill any NPC you like. If that's not incentive enough to stick with the vampire RPG, I don't know what else to say.

If you happen to have pre-ordered Onimusha already, or plan to, that arrangement has changed slightly: the pre-order bonus is now called an "early adopter bonus", and is available until September 25.

September is busy, October is busy, but November? No one's going up against GTA 6, except Devolver and this delightfully '90s looking base-builder.

Hideki Kamiya cut his teeth on the Resident Evil games, working as a designer on the original and director of Resident Evil 2 before moving on to other things, like Devil May Cry, Viewtiful Joe, Okami, and Bayonetta. Ironically, he's not a big horror guy—he recently expressed a desire for a "non-scary mode" in Resident Evil games—and so understandably is not very interested in returning to the Resident Evil series.

But if he ever did, he would do things very differently. He would make it cozy.

"If I made it, it'd turn into a game where retired Leon goes fishing in the countryside, forages for wild veggies, bakes bread, walks the dog, tends a home garden, drives 50 km to the general store for supplies, invites old buddies over for a barbecue, fixes the neighborhood grandma's oven at her request, sells homemade lemonade at the local festival," Kamiya wrote on X (machine translated) in response to a request for a new game that continues the story of Leon and Claire. "But that'd be cool, right... ?"

I think it would be cool, actually. It's an aspect of videogame action heroes that's not often explored—what do you do when you're not doing this?—and it's also a fun way to introduce the series to newcomers who might not be into the usual zombie survival horror thing.

Besides, if we can have a dating simulator inspired by the Cthulhu Mythos, why not a cozy Resident Evil spinoff?

Despite a history of Twitter trolling, Kamiya does seem earnest about the suggestion. "Capcom, there are a lot of voices out there saying they want something like a [Resident Evil] that's not scary," he wrote in a follow-up tweet. "So if you have some free time, please consider making it... I want to play it too."

I'm not a Resident Evil guy myself, but I think I'd give this one a look, too. And never say never: As announced at The Game Awards 2024, Kamiya is currently working on a sequel to the 2006 Capcom classic Okami at his new Clovers studio. Even if he doesn't want to make the game himself, maybe the suggestion will give Resident Evil's current stewards at Capcom a nudge.

And a semi-relevant side note: If you think 'horror' and 'cozy' are an ill-suited match, I would urge you to check out Creature Kitchen, one of my favorite little indie games in ages: It's 20% off in the Steam Summer Sale, so just $6.39/£5.35/€6.23, and there's also a demo so you can get a good taste of what it's all about before you commit.

Being as I was assembled in a factory in Sverdlovsk in 1928, I am generally quite bad at identifying or following celebrities. But even I have a profound love for Kyle MacLachlan, the longtime David Lynch collaborator who starred as Dale Cooper in Twin Peaks, Jeffrey Beaumont in Blue Velvet, Paul Atreides in the Dune we don't talk about and, of course, papa Hank in the Fallout TV show.

Well, here's an additional role I didn't know he had (and likely neither did he): Jill Valentine's possibly-maybe boyfriend in the original Resident Evil 2. You see, back when RE2 first released in 1998, players found that Jill Valentine's desk in the Raccoon City Police Department had a picture on it. Inspect it and you get the message "It's a picture of a young man. There's a good chance it's her boyfriend…" Unfortunately, there were only so many pixels to go around back then, and the identity of the man in question—or, well, his model—was impossible to ascertain.

• We're keeping track of all the Amazon Prime Day PC gaming deals here

Until now, anyway. Thanks to Resident Evil fan Morio on X (via Polygon), it's clear that, yup, that sure is Kyle MacLachlan alright. Specifically it seems to be an image of MacLachlan taken from an early-'90s issue of Japan's Roadshow magazine, which often covered western media like Twin Peaks and was, indeed, quite keen on the series.

Precisely who the figure in Valentine's photo was has been a mystery since 1998. Morio said, upon revealing their discovery: "Alright, that's it then. The guy from Jill's desk is Kyle MacLachlan. Years of searching finally over." Incidentally, Morio found that a similar mag picture of Winona Ryder is used for Barry Burton's daughter.

If you're wondering, the answer is no: Capcom didn't use a 4K MacLachlan for the version of this photo in the Resident Evil 2 Remake. In fact, they didn't use a person at all. Valentine was officially un-shipped—the shot of a young man on her desk replaced by a photograph of a dog. Which would be an upgrade were we discussing literally any other man but Kyle MacLachlan.

A week removed from Summer Game Fest, one of the demos I can't stop thinking about is Onimusha: Way of the Sword. The behind-closed-doors demo was different from the one that's available on Steam—it took place slightly later in the game and showed off one of the game's "open areas" within Kyoto.

Several things stand out in Onimusha: The art, the methodical movement, the sword-wielding zombies, but most of all, it was the swordplay. For all of the comparisons to Sekiro that this reboot is likely to receive, let it be known its melee combat is in another league.

Slices and stabs connect with slow, bone-splitting followthrough. Blades clash, drag, deflect, and spark as if they're laced with fireworks. After years of a FromSoftware brand of floaty, spammy sword swinging dominating the action game, Capcom has dumped resources in the opposite direction: extravagant animations, feedback, counters, and cleaving limbs from their bodies.

It was a great demo—enough that I now can't wait to play the whole thing in September—but it was also too easy.

That was after going out of my way to play on "Action" mode instead of "Story," which my demoist advised against at first. Against the might of Musashi Miyamoto and his Oni Gauntlet, rank-and-file Genma troops weren't much of a threat. They went down quickly, didn't attack all that often, and rarely challenged me to counter instead of dodge. I didn't struggle much at all until the boss fight that ended the demo—a many-armed monstrosity that handed me my ass twice before I figured out his gimmick.

This is where I have to add that I'm not particularly skilled at this sort of game. So I wonder: Is Onimusha too easy? Many seem to think the same of the public demo, so I took the question to the source—game director Satoru Nihei—after my hands-on.

"Both the demo and also the version you've tried here today are early on in the game. So there is that kind of sense that a lot of basic enemies are going to be a bit easier just because of where it sits in the game," Nihei told PC Gamer through an interpreter. "But on top of that, especially with the demo that we released, Musashi comes fitted with a lot of skills and abilities that are not going to be accessible at the beginning of the game."

Nihei noted that the demo build I played in Los Angeles also had button reminders over enemy heads that don't exist in the full game. That's good to call out, because the specific advice offered by these in-world prompts made that final boss easier to solve. Capcom decided to juice Musashi's abilities in these demos so that players can get a "feel for the full range of action" in the final game. He's aware this caused issues with balance, but the team isn't concerned about the final product.

"We're quite confident that with the release version, especially with the progression, because abilities will be given gradually to Musashi and enemies will scale up in difficulty. For the [full] game, we feel more confident fans will be satisfied with the difficulty."

That said, don't expect a plethora of difficulty options at launch. Capcom confirmed that Way of the Sword will have just the two presets I chose between in the demo: Story and Action. Onimusha is out on September 24, one of a terrifying wave of games coming before GTA 6.

Dragon's Dogma 2 is a great bit of fun—a chaotic, sometimes overtly cruel action RPG with a great sense of physical humour and some really tactile combat. It also got absolutely hazed during its launch period back in 2024 thanks to some utterly baffling microtransactions.

As I personally covered back then, the entire thing was mostly optics. Yes, it was very silly for Capcom to put a bunch of these items up for sale as microtransactions; especially given they were easily available in-game from shops and the like. None of the amenities, such as wakestones, portcrystals, or camping kits, were particularly rare. You'd get 'em just by playing the thing.

And yet, Capcom decided to sell a bunch of them, which gave DD2 the whiff of pay-to-win despite being anything but. One particularly egregious example was the character editor, which gave players the impression that Capcom was arbitrarily locking post-creation customisation behind a paywall.

In fact, you could just buy the same book for 500 rift crystals in game. It was purely all bad optics—well, bad optics and silly decision making from Capcom, given it could've simply chosen not to try and squeeze a couple extra bucks out of its player base for completely attainable items.

Anyway, all that'll be going away, two years later.

The deluxe edition, alongside a whole host of those other silly microtransactions, will no longer be available come June 25, as announced on the game's official X account.

That includes the character editor thing, portcrystals, the wakestones, the harpy snares—again, all available on the relatively cheap once you're actually playing. The only exception is the camping kit, but again. It's a central, core mechanic. You absolutely do not have to buy one. There's lots in-game already.

Anyway, I cannot tell you why Capcom decided to put these ill-advised things in the store in the first place, and I cannot tell you why Capcom waited two whole years before removing them now—but it's as they say, better late than never.

It has been two years since Dragon's Dogma 2—the unlikely sequel to an unlikely RPG—emerged from its Riftstone, and it just got a fairly mondo new patch. Released on June 10, Dragon's Dogma 2's latest title update brings fast travel tweaks, pawn futzing, bug fixes, and plenty else besides. Oh, and it's part one of two: the second part will come at the end of August, just ahead of DD2's October Dark Arisen expansion.

They're both doozies (though, with its additional weapon skill slots, the upcoming August patch may be doozier), but let's get into June's patch, since it's the one that's, you know, here.

First on Capcom's big tweak list is changes to the game's fast travel system. DD2 kind of delights in making fast travel a bit of a hassle (something I generally very much endorse), but I guess Capcom got tired of people moaning about it, because the game now hands you an Eternal Ferrystone "after talking to Brant during the quest Seat of the Sovran," which is pretty early on.

Instead of hauling your bones into a trundling cart that will inevitably be attacked by every cyclops on the map, you can now use your Ferrystone(s) directly from the map by hovering over fast travel spots. Which even I'll admit is how it should already have worked.

There are also more portcrystals (the crystals you, uh, port to) in Melve, Checkpoint Rest Town and the Volcanic Island Camp. And you get a bonus one as a reward for the quest Monster Culling.

Basically, Dragon's Dogma 2 is now a baby game for babies. You hate to see it.

To me, that's the headline item of June's patch, but spare a thought too for changes like a free camera in photo mode, disabling random pawns approaching you outdoors and asking for a job, which is good, because there's genuinely nothing more immersion breaking than encountering a pawn who looks like Kratos from God of War on the road and having him ask to party up.

The patch also disables high fives from your own pawns (monster), adds a new "Guardian" specialisation for your pawns, and changes the game's map to make it a bit more parseable. Here are the full patch notes:

Dragon's Dogma 2 patch notes from June 2026

Fast Travel/Movement Adjustments

• Added the fast travel item Eternal Ferrystone.
  * The Eternal Ferrystone will be automatically acquired after talking to Brant during the quest Seat of the Sovran.
  * If you have already completed this quest, the item will be placed in your inventory.
• Added Portcrystals to Melve, Checkpoint Rest Town and Volcanic Island Camp.
• Added a Portcrystal as a reward for the quest Monster Culling.
  * If you have already completed this quest, it will be placed in your inventory.
• Added Oxcart Stopovers.
• Reduced the time until the Doze Off command becomes available when riding an Oxcart.
• If an Oxcart happens to be close by, an Oxcart icon will be displayed on the mini map.
• Extended Oxcart Station departure hours. Oxcarts will now depart from morning till evening.
• Decreased the amount of stamina used when dashing outside of combat.

• Selecting Load from Autosave after defeat will no longer result in loss gauge accumulation.
• Improved the stats for some equipment found when exploring dungeons.

Options Additions/Adjustments

• Added the Free Camera option to Photo Mode.
• Added the option to toggle the display of patterns left on equipment strengthened in wyrmfire.
• Added the option to toggle the display of head armor.
• Changed the wording of the Set to "Examine" Only option in the Button Mapping settings to make it clearer that it does not include Dash.
• Added the option to enable/disable unhired pawns to approach you and offer their services.
• Added the option to enable/disable high fives from pawns after battle.

Reward Adjustments

• Changed the content of some treasure chests and some enemy item drops.
• Increased the rewards (mainly gold) for some quests.

UI Adjustments

• Added the option to use a Ferrystone from the map by moving the cursor to a Portcrystal.
• Improved the visibility of the player icon on the map.
• A notification will now display if your camping kit was destroyed in an ambush.
• When shopping, you can no longer purchase more than you can hold of a specific item.
• The stat boosts for Pawns inflicted with dragonsplague will now be reflected on the status screen.
• Multiple item types can now be transferred at once between the Arisen and Pawns.
• The Art of Metamorphosis has now been moved to the top of the Pawn Guild Vendor's product list.
• The order of Lantern and Lantern Oil has been changed at each shop so that Lantern Oil appears first.
• An hourglass icon will now appear on timed quest notifications.
• Quest progress will now be displayed for priority quests after loading saved data.

Pawn Adjustments

• Added Guardian specialization.
  * Enables the pawn to prevent oxcart raids from occurring while they accompany the Arisen. Also enables the pawn to singlehandedly repel smaller foes that attack the camp, and to reduce the Health of larger ones before the Arisen joins the battle.
  * The Guardian's Tome can be acquired in the following ways.
  - Bought from the Nameless Apothecary in the Nameless Village.
  - As a reward for the quests Claw Them Into Shape and Readvent of Calamity.
  * If you have already completed these quests, they will be placed in your inventory.
  * Added a tutorial for the Guardian specialization.
• Adjusted behavior when moving, making it harder to fall from cliffs.
• Increased the stamina recovered when Pawns help you after becoming exhausted.

Shop Adjustments

• Reduced inn fees for staying at the inn in Melve, Excavation Site, Nameless Village, Borderwatch Outpost, Vernworth and Harve Village.
• Reduced fees for all barberie services.
• Lantern (Fueled) price changed from 1000 G to 800 G.
• Ferrystone price in Normal Mode changed from 10000 G to 5000 G.
• Ferrystone sale price changed from 99 G to 900 G.

Text/Tutorial Display Adjustments

• Replaced Monotype Fonts
• The loading screen has been changed to show tips instead of quest progress.
• The tutorial for loading from an autosave has been adjusted to reflect the changes to the loss gauge.
• Added a tutorial explaining the "!" symbol that displays on the minimap.

Other Adjustments

• Adjusted the camera angle when approaching a pre-existing Portcrystal.
• Adjusted the quality of the camera angle when returning from a zoomed view.
• Added the Hollow Cape to the product lineup at Celeste's Smithy in Checkpoint Rest Town.

◆ Bug Fixes

Vocations

【Mage】

• Fixed a bug where the Arisen's position would slightly move if no input was entered after drawing their sword.

【Sorcerer】

• Fixed a bug where Prescient Flare would not affix to enemies in certain areas of the Tomb of Ku'Myage.

【Trickster】

• Fixed a bug where the effect of the ability Enlightenment would activate without it being equipped.

Pawns

• Fixed a bug where the Arisen and allied pawns would be afflicted with debilitations when hit by an unhired pawn's elemental weapon.
• Fixed a bug where a pawn's appearance would become unnatural when moving.
• Fixed a bug where a different pawn would speak when a pawn saves the Arisen from falling.
• Fixed a bug where a pawn would guide the Arisen to the Rocky Lair as if it was undiscovered, even though it had been fully explored.
• Fixed a bug where after the pawn Luksa was summoned in the Riftstone, Luksa would not disappear even when searching for pawns under different conditions and it would become impossible to interact with them.
• Fixed a bug where pawn commands would flash rapidly and pawns would not respond.
• Fixed a bug where pawns would sometimes not dash when far from the Arisen.
• Fixed a bug where a pawn would stop guiding the Arisen towards a quest immediately after they started.
• Fixed a bug where the "!" symbol that appears after a pawn discovers a movable boulder would remain on the map, even if the boulder has moved.
• Fixed a bug where the "!" symbol that appears after a pawn discovers a treasure chest would remain on the map, even after the chest was opened.
• Fixed a bug where pawns would not use Barrage Shot towards small enemies.

NPCs

• Fixed a bug where NPCs would enter your private dwelling in Bakbattahl.
• Fixed a bug where some NPCs would not be registered in the NPC Logbook.
• Fixed a bug where NPC voices would not stop when they die.
• Fixed a bug where NPCs that died during a quest would be revived after waiting 999 days in game.
• Fixed a bug where you could buy the Saurian Tail from Emerich even if you did not have the required amount of gold.

Enemies

• Fixed a bug where an enemy's appearance would become unnatural when held in place by Forbeding Bolt.

【Goblin/Hobgoblin/Chopper/Knacker】

• Fixed a bug where the hit effect would display incorrectly when the Arisen was hit by a burning club or torch.

【Harpy/Venin Harpy/Gore Harpy/Succubus】

• Fixed a bug where the Arisen's behavior would become abnormal when airborne near a wall's surface.

【Ooze】

• Fixed a bug where pawns were unable to avoid explosions.

【Undead/Fat Undead】

• Fixed a bug where enemies would not flinch after a Fighter successfully used the ability Deflect or True Deflect.

【Phantom/Phantasm/Specter】

• Fixed a bug where the simulacrum's behavior would become abnormal after it possesses a foe.

【Cyclops】

• Fixed a bug where unintended behavior would occur when startled while laying down.
• Fixed a bug where damage was not taken when recovering from a downed state.

【Minotaur/Goreminotaur】

• Fixed a bug where damage taken was greatly increased if hit with Counter Slash or Tidal Fury while charging.
• Fixed a bug where the enemy would continue to exist in a transparent state when destroyed while petrified.

【Goreminotaur】

• Fixed a bug where the enemy would repeat the same actions after certain conditions were met.

【Skeleton Lord】

• Fixed a bug where the enemy would attack skeletons and other unintended beings.

【Lich/Wight】

• Fixed a bug where enemies could attack for a period of time after death.

【Dullahan】

• Fixed a bug where damage was not taken for a period of time after a grab attack.
• Fixed a bug where the target being grabbed was not blown away at the end of a grab attack.
• Fixed a bug where the Thief's Easy Kill counter did not work and damage was taken when used.
• Fixed a bug where the Arisen's actions became abnormal when countering an attack with Warrior's Tidal Fury.
• Fixed a bug where the background music did not transition as intended when the battle situation changed.

【Drake】

• Fixed a bug where magic attacks were generated embedded in the ground.
• Fixed a bug that caused an unnatural appearance after dying while only the chest is glowing.
• Fixed a bug where death lines sometimes played when drakes aren't around.
• Fixed a bug where destroyed body parts sometimes reverted back to their pre-destroyed state.

【Drake/Lesser Dragon】

• Fixed a bug where destroyed body parts sometimes reverted back to their pre-destroyed state.

【Medusa】

• Fixed a bug where, at low frame rates, if the enemy was caused to flinch during a specific attack, they would be unable to move afterwards.

Quests

• Fixed a bug in the quest Nesting Troubles where Lennart would sometimes be inflicted with the blighted debilitation.
• Fixed a bug in the quest Monster Culling where the wagon would disappear when approaching the location of the soldiers near the Nameless Village.
• Fixed a bug in the quest The Caged Magistrate where the Arisen would unintentionally move to a different location when using a Sealing Phial.
• Fixed a bug in the quest Saint of the Slums where Elena would be outside her cell after being imprisoned.
• Fixed a bug in the quest Hunt for the Jadeite Orb where Offulve wouldn't disappear when progressing along a certain route.
• Fixed a bug in the quest The Guardian Gigantus, where if the player were to approach the bridge just as the Talos destroyed it, the Talos would still throw a spear towards the bridge during the resulting cutscene.
• Fixed a bug in the quest The Guardian Gigantus where if the Talos was petrified right after destroying the bridge, a cutscene would play as if the Talos was still alive.
• Fixed a bug in the quest The Guardian Gigantus where progressing to the location where the scene changes at the same time the Talos throws the spear resulted in multiple instances of abnormal behavior.
• Fixed a bug in the quest A Scholarly Pursuit where, when getting close to the Battahl Purgener, the Arisen's appearance and hitbox were misaligned.

Gimmicks

• Fixed a bug where fragments would spawn at their original location when destroying rolling rocks.
• Fixed a bug where the game would crash when re-spawning rolling boulders after they were destroyed.

Equipment

• Fixed a bug where the character's neck was sticking out when wearing Creedbound Armor.
• Fixed a bug where, when wearing Monarch's Crown, the part that covers the neck would disappear after using a ferrystone.
• Fixed a bug where body hair was poking through when wearing Robe of the Enlightened.
• Fixed a bug where protrusions appear to stick out of the ring part of the Tribal Brace armor.
• Fixed a bug where shields were not sorted properly when sorting by strength.
• Fixed a bug where only the armor spikes remained when equipping cloak-type equipment while wearing Intrepid Scalecoat.

Display

• Fixed a bug where rain entered certain buildings.
• Fixed a bug where wounds were not displayed when attacking an enemy.
• Fixed a bug where lanterns would flicker constantly despite being filled with oil.
• Fixed a bug where the model for Panacea would differ from that on the field.

UI

• Fixed a bug where some riftstone names differed between the one displayed on the map and the one displayed in the rift.

Sound

• Fixed a bug where, when equipped with a bow, the quiver sound effect would continue to play even after changing weapons.

Other

• Fixed a bug where the game would crash during processing.
• Fixed a bug where falling into water in some places would not result in the activation of The Brine, allowing the player to move along the bottom of the water.
• Fixed a bug where approaching the Riverside Cavern would trigger a map transition and dialogue as if the pawns had entered the cavern, despite not actually being inside.
• Fixed a bug where selecting certain head options in the Character Creator would result in the appearance of holes beneath the eyes.
• Fixed a bug where items could not be obtained by performing the Investigate action after defeating enemies, and subsequently prevented further Investigate attempts.
• Fixed a bug where certain facial animations did not play in some cutscenes.
• Fixed a bug where obtaining multiple items simultaneously from a treasure chest while inventory space was insufficient would result in some items being unobtainable.

In February 2026, Monster Hunter series producer Ryozo Tsujimoto confirmed that a "large scale expansion similar to Monster Hunter World: Iceborne and Monster Hunter Rise: Sunbreak" was in the works for Wilds. In a reveal at tonight's SGF showcase, Capcom pinned a name on its next hunting expedition: It's called Ascendance, and it's coming to Wilds in 2027.

Based on what was shown in the trailer, Ascendance—a "massive" expansion, in Capcom's words—will have hunters leaving the now-familiar regions of the Forbidden Lands and heading skyward into the floating ruins of the Wyverian civilization. That journey will seemingly entail a notable risk of aerial lizard bombardment. You've been warned.

As is typical for Monster Hunter expansions, we can expect new creatures to clash with, new zones for questing, and expanded weapon movesets for facing the elevated challenge of Master Rank hunts. Based on the gameplay footage shown, hunters will be able to bolster their weapon movesets with jet-propelled mechanisms embedded in their forearm-mounted slingers: A great sword hunter was able to launch themselves into a string of strikes that—for the heavy weapon—were surprisingly nimble.

Most exciting for veteran MonHun sickos is the glimpse of a long-absent silhouette at the end of the teaser. Lao-Shan Lung? Now that's a name I haven't heard in a long time.

Ascension will be Wilds' best chance at securing a salvaged reputation, as Capcom only managed to substantially alleviate the PC release's dire performance issues in a January 2026 update—almost a year after its February 2025 launch. Ascension has the potential to be a crowning conclusion to the Wilds redemption arc, or a backslide into dysfunction.

Looking at Iceborne and Sunbreak as a track record, however, there's plenty of reason to hope.

Monster Hunter Wilds: Ascension launches in 2027.

Resident Evil and the devs working on the series are currently rolling off the high that was Resident Evil Requiem's launch. As the fastest selling RE game ever, and with some glowing reviews (I gave it a 92 in our Requiem review), it's abundantly clear that the fans want more. And while nothing's been confirmed, the devs have been sharing some ideas.

In a recent interview with Japanese news site Futaman (via Automaton) producer Masato Kumazawa revealed that amid all the brainstorming for future projects, a Resident Evil game set in Japan has crossed the minds of the dev team.

"I think a Japanese setting is something every Japanese Resident Evil fan has thought about," Kumazawa says. "And I’ve also considered it myself. Since the development team is primarily based in Japan, I think every member has given it some thought. While Japan hasn’t appeared as a game setting so far, it might make an appearance at some point in the future."

"If we keep releasing the same kind of game over and over, players will eventually get bored, so we’d like to keep taking on new challenges moving forward."

Kumazawa goes on to explain that the devs aren't massively concerned with following any strict rules for the location of Resident Evil games, or even the timeline for that matter: "We do adjust the timeline based on the assessment that present-day stories help players feel more immersed. The timeline also changes depending on the characters and story we want to portray in each title. Even in Requiem, we have scenes set eight years prior, as well as even earlier periods. So, where the timeline goes from here will depend on the specific title."

Apparently, the team only started portraying characters aging with Resident Evil 4. Requiem is the most obvious case of this with an aged-up Leon initially sending shockwaves through the fanbase.

But just because there's no solid ruleset to follow doesn't mean the devs are going to get too wacky with it. Kumazawa promises fans that they "won't compromise the core elements of the series" such as characters and the events that unfold and will "continue to preserve what the series holds dear". Which I'm guessing means allowing eccentric scientists to keep getting hold of the T-virus, make some disgustingly violent creature with it, and then leave the pen open for it to escape and wreak havoc—you know, classic Resident Evil stuff.

I've grown weary of 2.5D games in the past few years,⁠⁠ with most of my fatigue stemming from the "HD-2D" look Square Enix has embraced with the Octopath series and remakes of its old games. Seeing a pixel art guy ambling around a 3D village with the bloom cranked up just doesn't do it for me anymore.

Which is why seeing the upcoming hack 'n slash Dungeon Lurker in action felt fresh: Instead of dinky little Final Fantasy guys, this 3D world is populated with huge, lovingly-dithered comic book-style sprites with buttery-smooth animation. It's giving "arcade perfect" more than "we love the Super Nintendo," a level of craft I mostly associate with latter-day 2D fighting games like Marvel vs. Capcom 2.

It's the little things that really wowed me, like how much the knight protagonist bounces and shifts even in his idle animation. He'll turn his head from side to side, adjust his grip on his sword, even rustle his loincloth a bit. How many frames of animation does one man need? It's madness, decadence. I love it.

The craft and quality of this art is matched by some inspired direction, pairing the comic book, arcadey cartoonishness with a real Berserk or Dark Souls sort of dark fantasy. I love the monster at the beginning of the gameplay trailer, the "Mammothian Colossus" according to its health bar in Dungeon Lurker's other trailer.

It looks so tortured and wrong, a noble beast harnessed for war with bondage gear. Best of all: I didn't even notice at first that it has a little rider in golden armor hanging off its back. I love everything I've seen of this game's art.

Even though it's a roguelike, Dungeon Lurker's Steam page promises that it will have no procedural generation, but "over 30 unique levels to conquer and explore." I was also intrigued by this tidbit: "Decipher forbidden knowledge in the game's manual⁠—it contains more secrets than you might expect."

Manuals are a small but welcome trend: I'm seeing them in games like Tunic, Lunacid: Tears of the Moon, and Psycho Patrol R, and I'm definitely game for whatever Dungeon Lurker has cooking on that front. But the only thing to do now is wishlist and wait: Dungeon Lurker's release date is "to be announced" on Steam, while its trailer estimates a release of early 2027.

Pragmata is one of my favorite games of the year so far, and a big part of that is down to the relationship between protagonists Hugh and Diana, a deeply normal in-over-his-head guy and a wide-eyed, enthusiastic young android. Banter that could so easily come off as infantilizing, and a story that could easily come across cloying as Hugh instinctively protects Diana, are instead handled with a deft touch.

This hasn't stopped Pragmata from being lumped into the "sad dad" canon alongside The Last of Us and God of War in some reviews; I agree more with Kotaku's Kenneth Shephard, who wrote "Pragmata reads like it was made by people who think that fatherhood rules, actually, and that getting to provide a young mind with insight, fun, and dreams is a meaningful thing that enriches a person’s life."

When I think about Pragmata's dad-ness, I'm also thinking about the people behind the game, given that the sad dad narrative has been shaped by game directors becoming parents. Pragmata may also be shaped by its director Yonghee Cho, but in an interview with PC Gamer he said there's an obvious reason it's not a sad dad game: He's not a sad dad.

"I have a daughter who's about Diana's age, and an older son as well," he said. "I don't think it would fit into the sad dad category, and one of the reasons I think that is because I'm not a sad dad, I'm a very happy dad. When I was creating the story and the actions of the characters, I put myself in the shoes of the characters a lot, and I consider myself pretty happy."

Cho added that while there are obviously elements of a parent-child relationship between Hugh and Diana, it was more meant to highlight companionship—a "buddy type feeling" of cooperating and helping each other out.

"That's a very conscious thing that the development team did. It's not just a parent and child dynamic. If we focused solely on that, players who don't have children might have more difficulty resonating with that, but having that buddy element in there allows a great range [of players who can relate], and a more lighthearted feel."

When I asked Cho if he had kids, he also shared his daughter's reaction to a dramatic moment in the story; she turned to him and said "You can't leave me alone!", apparently identifying with Diana.

"I told her, 'it's okay, Hugh's not your dad—I'm your dad! I'm here," Cho said, while miming patting his daughter on the head reassuringly.

Who knows what we can expect from Cho's future games, though. Once his kids become teenagers, maybe he'll be ready to lean into the angst.

If you've played Pragmata, there's a slight chance you've noticed it resembles an action game from the Xbox 360/PS3 era. By 'slight chance', I mean the connection has been made by anyone who has looked at Capcom's third-person shooter for more than five seconds.

Yet while this may have been considered an insult a decade ago, today it is anything but. Not only does the similarity appear to have been a key factor in Pragmata's commercial success, its developers have been utterly thrilled by players making the comparison.

In an interview with GamesRadar, Pragmata director Yonghee Cho and producer Naoto Oyama were asked how they felt about players comparing their sci-fi adventure to the golden age of third-person shooters, and apparently they began to beam even before the Japanese interpreter had finished translating the question.

"The dev team has heard similar comments from both reviewers as well as players," Cho responded. "Honestly, it's a huge compliment. I really enjoyed games during the PS3, Xbox 360 era, and games before that era as well, so hear that it has a similar feel, that's basically an honour, a huge compliment and I appreciate the sentiment."

What's interesting, though, is that neither developer confirms that the era of cover shooters and chainsaw bayonets was a direct inspiration. In fact, Oyama suggests that the comparison is being made because the 360/PS3 era represented a period of innovation:

"Maybe the reason people might feel that way is because, during the PS3 and Xbox 360 era, a lot of different developers and publishers were experimenting with new types of games and just completely new games. Maybe that's what causes people to feel that way," he says. "Because the Pragmata dev team, as well, they put a lot of passion into creating something new."

Frankly, I think it might have more to do with the fact that Oyama and Cho made a linear, single-player action game that doesn't overstay its welcome at a time when such games are vanishingly rare. Well, they were vanishingly rare until this year. 2026 has delivered a couple similar titles, like Resident Evil: Requiem and 007: First Light. Both those games have sold extremely well too, further signalling that players are hungry for the days when triple-A games were bold, brash, and (relatively) brief.

Which isn't to suggest that Pragmata lacks for new ideas. Its distinctive blend of third-person shooting and hacking minigame went down well with Justin Wagner in his Pragmata Review: "It's the ace up Pragmata's sleeve that makes the whole package a winner," he wrote back in April. "You aim at an enemy, navigate a small tile maze with a controller's face buttons or by holding down a side mouse button and using the cursor, then blow them away as normal."

We rather like Resident Evil Requiem here at PC Gamer—our own resident horror expert, Elie Gould, gave it a stonking 92% in their Resident Evil Requiem review, claiming it provides "excellent action set pieces accompanied by great weapon handling, some truly horrendous horror, and satiates my love of classic Resident Evil puzzles. All within 10 hours."

That's some hefty praise, but now you don't just have to take their word for it (though you absolutely should, they know their stuff), because despite the fact it came out three whole months ago, Requiem now has a playable demo.

"The demo version allows you to play part of the game's early stages. Please note that save data from the demo version cannot be transferred to the full version of the game," Capcom states. The demo itself follows Grace Ashcroft waking up in the Care Center, but it also gives you a taste of Leon, if that's what you're into.

It's an interesting move by Capcom, given Requiem wasn't exactly struggling for sales. Back in April, it was revealed that the game had sold seven million copies in just two months—a number that's likely only increased. For comparison, the Resident Evil 4 Remake took a whole year to pull those numbers.

Maybe it's just a means to keep the ball rolling. After all, if the word-of-mouth about your game's pretty good, a demo's a good way to turn prospective players into buyers. Pragmata enjoyed a huge amount of buzz due to its demo, so Capcom might just be looking to repeat that trick here.

It'd pair nicely with Capcom's seeming desire to stack value on top of the game, too—adding a surprise roguelike mode called Leon Must Die Forever earlier this month. First twink death, now this—I almost feel sorry for the guy.

You can try out Grace Ashcroft's very bad time now via Steam or the Epic Games Store. Or, if you happen to be one of those PC Gamers with a console or two kicking around, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, and the Switch 2.

There's a chance that, if your games have been stuttering with DLSS frame generation enabled, it's because you have VSync on and didn't know the two don't always play nicely. If you're one of the unlucky few, you might want to try updating your Nvidia drivers.

Game Ready Driver 596.49 has reportedly enhanced smoothness when the two are working together. When the discussion thread opened up on the Nvidia subreddit, this fix immediately met some support. As of the time of writing, the top upvoted comment says, "Huge if true, gargantuos if verifiable."

Another account responds to this comment saying, "I can confirm it". Previously, on their RTX 4090 rig at Ultra settings with 2x frame generation, they reportedly saw noticeable micro-stutter and hitching and had to swap to FSR to fix the issue. Now, they claim 2x frame generation "works perfectly with vsync enabled."

Not everyone is having such a great time, with one user saying it's still an issue for them and another saying Monster Hunter Wilds performs poorly for them. However, a third user points out that Monster Hunter Wilds performed poorly for them even without VSync and swapping to FSR helped.

Capcom seem to get mentioned quite a lot in the thread, with some claiming Pragmata and Resident Evil Requiem stutter less now, and others claiming things are just as bad. However, it's hard to verify with every one of these cases that the problem lies at the feet of Nvidia's shiny new drivers. Still, some success is a good sign and worth updating your drivers over.

You can download the driver by the driver's direct download link or by doing so in the Nvidia App. My download of the drivers by themselves sits at under 1 GB, and there's not too much else to them, other than that one fix. It includes compatibility updates for Forza Horizon 6, Directive 8020, and Subnautica 2, and comes with a fix for a Foundry Mari 7.0v2 flickering issue.

As always, if something is playing up in your rig when you try to play games, updating your drivers is a decent first step.

The Devil May Cry animated series has done halfway decently for itself, renewing for a second season after its release back in April. And despite some mixed reception—particularly from diehard fans—Netflix seems to be chalking it up to a success. So much so that it's making merch for it.

Alas, there's been a blunder—as spotted by DMC superfan @vergildearest on X (thanks, Eurogamer), a now-removed t-shirt sees Dante and Vergil split clean down the middle. Only it's apparently not Vergil, but Virgil. Or Publius Vergilius Maro, an ancient roman poet and guest star in Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy, whose name is sometimes spelled Virgil.

You're probably wondering why I'm talking about roman poets, and it's because it is genuinely relevant to the typo in question. Devil May Cry is heavily inspired by the Divine Comedy. And by 'heavily', I mean the main character is directly named after the guy who wrote the dang thing.

Vergil's not the only character named in reference. There's also Trish, coined after Beatrice, who guides Dante through heaven in the Divine Comedy. Beatrice is also Dante's ideal woman, and Trish in the game resembles Dante's mother, which is deeply psychosexual and also something I'm not going to interrogate at 11AM on a Thursday.

Basically, what I assume happened here is some put-upon graphic designer tasked with drumming up a t-shirt for Netflix was auto-corrected to Virgil and, being that Virgil is a real name of a historical figure, likely assumed that everything was hunky-dory and pushed it through to manufacturing.

Either way, it's been pulled off the Devil May Cry merch store. You can still buy other stuff, though, like a baseball cap that says "see u in hell" and a thermos where Virgil—crap, sorry, Vergil—glares at you the entire time you're sipping your hot chocolate. Clearly, there's only one thing Netflix can do now. Re-release the shirt with Vergilius' full roman name clipping horribly outside the box of the graphic. I know what the fans want.

It has been another very good year for Capcom. The company just released its financial results for the fiscal year ended March 2026, continuing a streak of record profits by completing its 11th consecutive year of operating profit growth over 10%. Those profits were driven by year-over-year increases in games sales—particularly the breakaway success of Resident Evil Requiem.

Aside from detailing the last year's wins, Capcom's financial report also lays out its growth strategies for the years ahead. Those grand plans, it says, aim not just to strengthen its "leading brands"—like Resident Evil, Monster Hunter, and Street Fighter—but also to elevate its other series so they can deliver similar results. And it offered a glimpse of which franchises it might be focusing on next.

In an inspiring display of investor-speak, Capcom calls its strategy "a flywheel-driven business model for continuous IP value expansion." In human terms, that essentially means it seeks to develop and sell good games, so that those brands can enable secondary offerings like anime, licensed arcade games, and merchandise to further expand the company's fanbase, so it can then develop and sell even more games.

It's not groundbreaking stuff, but based on the company's sales figures, it's clearly been paying off for the last decade: In a slide showing its series' cumulative sales, Capcom says just its three best-selling brands—Resident Evil, Monster Hunter, and Street Fighter—have sold almost 400 million units to date.

Unsurprisingly, Capcom's keen on the idea of strengthening its other brands to deliver similar successes. In another slide titled "ongoing maximization of IP value," the company illustrates which other game series it has in mind in its plans for "nurturing brands to be the next engine of growth." Here are the Capcom series listed in the report as opportunities for "sequels, remakes, ports, etc.":

• Mega Man
• Devil May Cry
• Dead Rising
• Onimusha
• Ace Attorney
• Dragon's Dogma
• Okami

Some of these aren't surprising, as they're tied to projects that Capcom has already announced. Onimusha: Way of the Sword is coming later this year. Mega Man: Dual Override, the first mainline Mega Man entry since 2018, was revealed at the last Game Awards, and an Okami sequel was confirmed to be in the works in 2024.

Seeing the other brands on the list is tantalizing, however, because it's a reiteration that Capcom intends to do something with them, echoing a December 2025 statement from Capcom COO Haruhiro Tsujimoto saying the company wants to "grow these into core IPs."

For the long-suffering Ace Attorney fans in the world, this should be welcome news—or the beginnings of yet another heartbreak. As a card-carrying Dragon's Dogma sicko, however, I'm just glad to see it mentioned. It's nice to know that Capcom's thinking about it. [I wish I could say the same for Maximo and Lost Planet. —Ed.]

Less tantalizing is what follows two slides later, where the company provides an illustration of how generative AI usage will contribute to its growth strategy by decreasing "time used in routine tasks within development process" like research, draft generation, error checks, and clerical tasks while increasing "time invested in true value creation."

Thankfully, the company doesn't seem to believe generative AI can serve as a substitute for its human employees. According to its outlined human resources strategy, Capcom plans to increase its developer workforce "by over 100 people annually."

Resident Evil Requiem has received a new bonus mode in a free update, and by golly it's fabulous. It also has a great name: Leon Must Die Forever. And I'm sorry to say for all the Leon-fanciers out there that, yes, you're going to see Mr. Kennedy dismembered in many different ways.

The mode requires you to have completed the game's story, after which it appears as an option on the main menu. It's a feature-packed roguelike that offers multiple paths through various of the game's environments, on-the-fly 'enhancements' that change up Leon's abilities, new enemy variants, multiple boss fights, and an overarching meta-structure that sees you earn points on each run and unlock abilities, weapons, and costumes for subsequent playthroughs.

The goal is to reach and defeat big bad Victor Gideon, but it's a lot easier said than done. On my first runthrough I got to the second area before being careless with a blister-head which wasted no time before biting Leon's face off. On my second I reached the Super Tyrant before getting absolutely clocked by a flying car and swiftly bisected by his claws. My third… look, it's not called "Leon Must Die Forever" for nothing.

Capcom's notes say that "multiple difficulty levels are available, including an extreme high-difficulty mode for only the most confident players", which presumably unlocks once you've completed a runthrough or two (I haven't yet gotten close). Each time I played the weapons I found were different, the enhancements changed, and I suspect that once you start completing runs other elements will change-up too.

There's also a time limit, which I didn't find especially onerous, but that's also probably because I died on every run without getting close to running out of time. There are weird little gold spiders that scuttle around which reward more time when shot, and you also get time bonuses for killing certain enemies in certain ways.

The enemy variants are colour-coded and reward particular strategies. Red enemies are more resistant to gunfire, for example, but weaker to melee and hatchet attacks. Blue enemies have giant health pools, but are super-vulnerable to being parried and hatchet-ed. And then in amongst these are scattered the game's various mini-bosses and tougher standard foes.

As for the enhancements, some of them are simple buffs while others offer trade-offs, and you earn points towards your next choice by just killing stuff. Some are fairly straightforward: I had one that increased headshot / weak point damage by 50% but decreased damage when you just hit the body. Others lock you into a particular playstyle, like a perk that massively increases grenade damage and gives a chance that a grenade won't be consumed when thrown, but also debuffs all of your firearms. Which led to a fantastically explosive run that ended unceremoniously when I ran out of… erm, grenades.

Finally, you choose your routes by where you exit your current stage, with big red doors dotted around the environments, rather than choosing from a menu: so get ready for some exploring. The first stage is relatively gentle, as this mode goes, and does seem to be more about starting on a particular build and gathering a few weapons, but after that it ramps right up and doesn't stop until Leon's a bloody corpse.

First impressions? Yes please and thank you Capcom. The Leon combat in Requiem is just outstanding, and this builds it out in multiple ways while throwing everything plus the kitchen sink at you. I've been banging my head against Insanity mode since completing Requiem and, while I'm ever-so-slightly disappointed this isn't Mercenaries mode, Leon Must Die Forever is a really well thought-out and meaty addition to what was already one of the year's best games. Now if you'll excuse me, I'm off to get eviscerated again.

Our first look at Leon Kennedy in the lead up to Resident Evil Requiem's release was a momentous occasion. Many fans had theorised his return to the series ever since we realised Requiem would return to Raccoon City, but seeing a 50-year-old Leon in the digital flesh still made almost every fan giddy with excitement.

My biggest concern, however, was that Capcom would break my heart by killing off Leon in Requiem, as it was stated very early on that he'd be pushed to his limits. Luckily, that wasn't the case (sort of), and while he was a little slower and certainly more hunched over Leon defeated everything that came his way in Requiem.

The final cutscene even hinted at the possibility of another Leon escapade, or perhaps just a reunion with Chris, and by the sounds of things director Koshi Nakanishi doesn't see why we couldn't have many more years worth of Leon's one-liners and suplexes.

"I think Leon is really appealing in his current form," Nakanishi rightfully explains in an interview with Eurogamer. "And who knows, we could bring him back when he's 70, and I'm sure he'll still be a great character." Well I'm certainly sold, playing as a 70-year-old Leon Kennedy sounds sick.

Nakanishi follows this up by addressing the future of Resident Evil games and how "it's not a cast iron rule that whenever we come up with a new game and we decide to release it here, that we have to exactly age everyone up to match it or anything like that." It doesn't seem as if Capcom feels "the need to replace [its most recognisable faces] with younger characters ... we don't really think of it in those terms."

Honestly, that sounds pretty good to me. All the scenes with Leon were excellent in Requiem, and while I did miss Grace in parts, racing through Raccoon City on a motorbike may have been some of the most fun I've had in a Resident Evil game in quite some time.

"We did want to gradually introduce [humour] so it isn't like as soon as Leon appears, he's just wisecracking constantly and slightly breaking the horror spell," Nakanishi explains. "So I think we kept his one-liners and whatnot to relatively few near the start. And as his scenes ramp up in intensity and he becomes more accustomed to the situation, we let him off the leash a bit more, and a bit more Leon-style craziness starts to happen, building up towards the end of the game.

"You want to decide which scene is going to be the maximum amount of peak Leon craziness, then keep it as the top level and not go any further, because you do need to balance it with other more serious scenes. So while Leon does motorbike up the side of a skyscraper and has a sort of crazy vehicle chase, he also then has more reflective scenes: where he arrives at the destroyed Raccoon City Police Department and is thinking back to his first day on the job; the scenes about his infection. We want to try and include the fun craziness, but also then have it conclude and give players a chance to get a bit more engaged in the serious storytelling aspect of the game."

You get a fair amount of 180s in Requiem, especially as Leon progresses through Raccoon City. On one hand he's cracking jokes, launching himself off of skyscrapers, and taking on Shelob-like spiders without a hint of fear. And then the atmosphere shifts all of a sudden, such as when he found the remains of Emma Kendo.

I loved getting to play as an older Leon Kennedy in Requiem, and I'd be well up for more adventures with my favourite grey and grizzled protagonist. Although I'm sure at some point Capcom will do to Leon what it did to Jill and inject him with something that slows his aging or perhaps even stops it entirely—anything's possible with the T-virus.

The biggest draw in Resident Evil 9 was undoubtedly Leon Kennedy, but if I'm honest the zombies came in a close second. With yet another mutated strain of the T-virus, these infected are freaky in a whole new way, with many retaining their original memories and habits.

"It's creepier to see that they're slightly more human in the sense that they're repeating certain actions," director Koshi Nakanishi says during an interview with Eurogamer. "It almost looks like you could go up to them and talk to them and ask them what's happening. But of course, they wouldn't be able to reply. And that unsettlingness of them being almost human, but not quite, is something we wanted to use as the core of making them scary this time around."

We had cleaning zombies that would scrub furiously at the walls and floors (and your face if you got caught), chungus zombies that couldn't stop eating, and a couple of BSAA soldiers turned undead that would pepper you with bullets if you got too close.

As Nakanishi explains, the biggest draw of this T-virus strain was really to offer something new for longtime fans who've gone through every iteration of the Protenitor virus thus far: "This terrifying idea they were once human, but they're not anymore. And seeing that reflected back on the person is what makes it scarier than just a monster that was never related to a human being. But we've seen so many zombies over the years that if we can't make them do something a little out of the ordinary or unpredictable, then they start to become more difficult to make consistently scary."

These new zombies were slightly more unpredictable than previous infected I'd come across—whether that meant taking an IV stand to the face or learning that these infected can not only operate military mortars but are actually pretty accurate with them. I was humbled quite a few times throughout Requiem, but I was better for it—it kept things interesting.

"We want to try and push things in terms of horror and fear," Nakanishi adds. But there is such a thing of pushing horror too far, and with that in mind finding the balance between these zombies was integral to the flow of Requiem.

"We don't want it to be so scary and so unbearable that a large swathe of the fan base doesn't want to play the game or can barely keep going," Nakanishi says. "So there's always a sweet spot to try and hit where it's an addictive kind of fear, where you're scared, but you want to keep going, to keep having that thrilling experience."

"It can be scarier in scenes where there aren't any zombies yet," producer Masato Kumazawa adds. "Because the tension of not knowing where they're going to come from, or if they're going to appear at a particular moment, can be scarier than the specific moment you actually encounter a zombie. So that pacing of when to introduce a zombie into a scene or into a section of the game is really important; I think maintaining that tense fear throughout is what I'd say is scarier to me than just a jump scare or having constant threats."

Rhodes Hill Hospital was by far the scariest part of Requiem. Everything was still fresh, unknown, and playing as Grace in first-person during these early stages provided some of the worst (and best) scares I've encountered in a Resident Evil game. Leon's sections balanced this out with masses of unapologetic action, and as time went on the zombies became less scary and more predictable, but it was fun while it lasted.

Marvel's profitable relationship with Capcom began with arcade beat 'em up The Punisher in 1993, but quickly switched to fighting games with X-Men: Children of the Atom in 1994. The X-Men were mega popular at the time, so it made perfect sense. One problem, however, was that Marvel was more protective of its characters in the '90s.

"I remember it was pretty challenging," Takuya "Tom" Shiraiwa, a former localization lead at Capcom, recently told Time Extension, "because they had very, very specific rules about their characters, like their behaviours and their personalities, right?"

The first round of conversation was always about which characters would be allowed. Just because Spider-Man appeared in some X-Men comics doesn't mean you can have him in your X-Men game, for instance. It didn't stop once the full cast of characters was decided on, though.

"When we came back and started working on the character," Shiraiwa said, "we usually submitted all the character animations on videotape to get approval. And when we submitted Juggernaut, they said, 'No, Juggernaut can't jump. He's too heavy.'"

A significant villain for the X-Men, Juggernaut is Professor X's stepbrother who got superpowers from a demonic gem. (Comics!) Those superpowers make him a tank-sized Übermensch who is literally unstoppable, though I've never read a comic that suggests he can't jump. At one point he leapt out of a plane without a parachute, though I suppose that was more of a controlled fall than a jump.

It was Shiraiwa's job to convince Marvel to let Juggernaut shoot the J. "I was like a middleman at the time. So I remember I reasoned with them, 'Okay, but what's he gonna do when he finds a big hole in front of him? Like a big gap? Will he be able to jump then?' But they said, 'No, in that case, he will simply fall into the hole and just keep running when he lands' I was like, 'Okay, that's fine, but this is a head-to-head fighting game; he needs to jump.'"

Capcom eventually got its way, and in X-Men: Children of the Atom and its follow-up, Marvel Super Heroes, Juggernaut absolutely jumps. Which is important, because one of the selling points of Capcom's superhero fighting games were their extra-high levels, with plenty of vertical space for pulling off aerial combos. When several of the characters can fly, it makes sense.

"We had lots of headaches at that time", Shiraiwa said. "The funny thing is, though, after Capcom released maybe one or two Marvel head-to-head fighting games, and they were extremely successful, they were like, 'Anything goes. You can do whatever you want.' So that made me wonder why they had been so strict with us in the first place. But I guess money changes everything."

Things are obviously different these days, and games like Marvel Rivals make it plain that modern Marvel isn't nitpicky about who can jump, or twerk. If you'd like to go back to the old days, the Marvel vs. Capcom Fighting Collection: Arcade Classics you probably bought just to get Marvel vs. Capcom 2 also includes the brutally difficult X-Men: Children of the Atom. (Magneto can go and do one, frankly.)

Just quietly, the surprise highlight of that collection was The Punisher, a goofy and ultraviolent beat 'em up that lets you bring a gun to a knife fight. Since half your enemies are cyborgs and ninjas, I think that makes it fair.

We just got our first look at the upcoming Resident Evil movie which is being directed by Zach Cregger yesterday, and despite looking surprisingly good fans seem to be wondering how exactly it fits into the canon of the games.

"My rule for this movie was to try and make a movie that felt like my experience of playing the games, that could live in the world of Resident Evil," Cregger says in an IGN trailer breakdown. "This movie takes place alongside the events of Resident Evil 2, I like to think that everything going on inside the police station could be going on in this world; it's just another dude, on another mission on the other side of town."

A crucial piece of information, though, is that Cregger isn't incorporating any of the videogame protagonists, so while Leon is doing his thing in the police station his path won't intersect with the film's protagonist, Bryan: "It's an alternate storyline that takes place on the periphery of the hero’s storyline, so it’s a story that could be happening without necessarily breaking the universe of the story the games are telling."

We're seeing a very opposite experience of Raccoon City's fall through the eyes of Bryan. "It’s like if I were thrust into a Resident Evil video game," Cregger says in an IGN interview. "I’d be totally unequipped. I’m not good with guns. I’m totally out of shape. It would just be me panicking from one situation to another.

"I think it's just fun to be following someone with no combat experience whatsoever as they're walking through hell with a machine gun."

Instead of trying to create a carbon copy of the games this film will be honouring Resident Evil in a different way: “What’s important to me, that I’m honouring from the games, is the narrative structure and following one character from point A to point B, and the concern with resource management, ammunition conservation. We start with a pistol, we graduate to a shotgun, we graduate to an MP5, and things are just getting progressively more intense, and we’re encountering weirder and weirder monsters.”

Throughout the trailer you can see Bryan searching for ammunition, stumble across an exact replica of the green herb from Resident Evil 4, and at one point even try to grab some keys off a corpse, although that doesn't go too well. "On of the other things that's in this movie that comes from the games is the need for keys and padlocks being barriers," Cregger explains.

But one of the best ways in which Cregger looks to take inspiration from the games is in how the film is shot: "What was really fun for me was to try and shoot this visually the way these games are told. I shoot in on a wide lens in an over-the-shoulder for most of the movie, so it feels like the way you play a game where we’re kind of perched on his shoulder, and as he turns a corner, we turn a corner with him. So I’m using video game visual language. First of all, it’s very inherently cinematic, but it also makes things scarier."

One way in which it will deviate is the bombing of Raccoon City, that won't happen, at least not in this film: "I know that Raccoon City gets nuked and I'm a little fuzzy on the timeline of when the nuke drops versus the day Leon sets foot in the police station—that nuking doesn't happen in this movie. This exists like day one in Raccoon City."

That could still line up, though. Resident Evil 2 takes place over a single chaotic night but seeing as the bomb is dropped roughly a day after Leon and Claire escape it wouldn't mess with the canon to not see a mushroom cloud at the end of this film.

If I'm honest, though, I'm not that concerned with this being a faithful adaptation, I'd rather it just be a great movie. This is the most excitement and hope I've ever felt for a Resident Evil film, and I really do believe Cregger when he says that this movie is "a love letter to the games, that I fully, fully obsessively love".

Capcom's got a huge collection of big-name franchises, amassing them like Infinity Stones in a way that would make any game publisher jealous, and the latest addition to that roster is Pragmata. Sure, it was never going to top the likes of Resident Evil—which just revealed a trailer for its new (potentially good) movie—or Monster Hunter, but selling over one million copies in two days is an undeniable success story. Especially after three delays dragged development out by an extra four years.

The videogame giant sees this early success as a starting point for a potential franchise, according to Rob Dyer, COO of Capcom USA, speaking at the Interactive Innovation Conference in Las Vegas this week. Shared by Game File via GamesRadar, Dyer said the following: "We’re to a point now where we’ve got another IP that Capcom—and god bless them, has an arsenal—that we can continue to go down."

It's by no means confirmation of a sequel yet, but it's certainly cause for hope that Pragmata's not just a flash in the pan. As much as I enjoyed Pragmata, it felt like the kind of game where a sequel would really perfect the lofty ambitions. As to where a potential follow-up would go, though, that's a tricky question given the rather cut-and-dry ending. Perhaps Pragmata is more about the unique hack n' shoot gameplay than it is specifically a story about Hugh and Diana.

Speaking of the rocky development Pragmata endured—originally announced in 2020 for a 2022 launch, but multiple delays pushing it back to 2026—Dyer reckons that "it was worth the effort" in the end.

Capcom's been on a streak as of late (I mean, it's had 12 straight years of growth, in part thanks to PC), with Resident Evil Requiem selling seven million copies in two months and Monster Hunter Wilds pushing 10 million in a month. Of course, it's also got Street Fighter and Dragon's Dogma in its arsenal, as well as the upcoming Onimusha: Way of the Sword.

Resident Evil Requiem managed to snag the spot of my favourite modern Resi game on release. At just 10 hours long it managed to have me hooked for every zombie jumpscare and complicated puzzle. I didn't think it could get much better, but now I'm finding out that there was even more to it.

"I've mentioned in interviews before that there was a phantom 'Chapter 2' for Resident Evil 7 that was cut during development," director Akifumi Nakanishi explains in an interview with Denfaminicogamer. "It was a scene where you move from the first annex to the main building. But actually, there was also a phantom Chapter 2 for Resident Evil Requiem.

"In the process of finalising the game's structure, we make a lot of choices, like 'Let's move this scene further in the story,' 'Let's cut this part out completely,' or 'Let's add a different element here.'"

Nakanishi doesn't explain in any more detail what this phantom chapter could have entailed, but it likely would've slotted between Grace leaving Rhodes Hill Hospital and Leon's segment shooting his way through the derelict outskirts of Raccoon City. This means it could've been something minor like us getting to drive around in Leon's shiny new Porsche or even perhaps even a trip to the Arklay Mountains, although that's probably worth a whole game in and of itself.

"We don't just suddenly cut things out at the end of development; we often make repeated revisions during the initial, rough draft stage," Nakanishi adds. "In that process, it's quite common for entire chapters to disappear. It's similar to editing text or video. We shoot a lot of footage, arrange it, and think about whether the intended message comes across, how the tempo and interest are, and then we cut out anything that's unnecessary. Surprisingly, sometimes the overall result is better if certain elements are omitted. Subtraction is really important.

"Having a lot of information can change how users perceive things. When I first started working on Resident Evil, I was told, 'Resident Evil may look difficult, but it has to be understandable even to casual gamers who don't usually play games.'"

While I don't actually have many complaints about subtracting or even the length of Requiem—I quite liked the fact that, alongside many other Resi games, it was doable in a weekend—I do think that an extra chapter slotted into Leon's Raccoon City ventures would've been great.

Don't get me wrong, I love playing as Leon as much as the next Resi fan, but I found Raccoon City lacked some of that horror/action balance that the Hospital section managed to strike. I missed playing as Grace and destroying my blood pressure.

"Of course, the person who produced it will be disappointed and may even get angry, but if the result is good, everyone will be satisfied," Nakanishi says. "Conversely, that means we have to take responsibility for the result." The end result was certainly nothing to turn your nose up at, so while I do wish we could've had a little more time with Grace or even another character, I think that structure that Requiem ended on worked well enough.

PC Gamer Editor-in-Chief Phil Savage is a man of impeccable taste, but I still hold a tiny grudge against him for not breaking the seal on PC Gamer's 98% review threshold to award Vanquish, the Xbox 360-era PlatinumGames shooter brought to PC in 2017, an unprecedented perfect score. "Beyond the laser-focused core loop, there isn't much to Vanquish. You start with knee-sliding acrobatics, and end the same way—around six or so hours later," Phil wrote in his 80% review when Vanquish arrived on PC.

True enough, past Phil. But also: the Vanquish knee slide is the sickest move ever programmed into a videogame, followed closely by the second sickest move ever programmed into a videogame, in which at the press of a button Vanquish hero Sam Gideon pops off the helmet of his super suit, blasts a cig, and then flicks it away. There's an achievement for distracting robots with a cigarette before you shoot them. Only the Pope could do it better.

I'm afraid the math is clearly on my side here: that's a 100/100 right there.

On a superficial level, I've seen some chatter in the last couple weeks that Capcom's excellent Pragmata has a bit of a Vanquish vibe to it. I get the comparison, in that it's a pretty straightforward third-person shooter made by a Japanese developer, also starring a guy in a white astronaut-style space suit. You can do little jet-powered dashes in Pragmata, though nothing as prolonged or flashy as Sam's rocket knee slides in Vanquish.

Having finished Pragmata, I don't think the two games are particularly similar in tone or pacing or even how the action feels in the hand—but I understand the comparisons anyway. Because what Pragmata reminds the Vanquish faithful of is the sensibility of all-killer-no-filler action games circa 2010. "We didn't know how good we had it," and that sort of thing. By recognizing Pragmata in 2026 for its earnest and unpretentious focus on shooting robots with one neat trick up its sleeve, we can right the wrongs of Vanquish and games like it not selling as well as it deserved way back when.

(Let's be real: It's mostly the suits, though.)

Whatever the reason, I'm excited to report Vanquish's numbers on Steam in the wake of Pragmata's release are up. Way up. If, uh, you go by percentages and only look at the last couple months of activity. According to Vanquish's SteamDB page, it's up an impressive 34.8% in peak players over the last 30 days, for a gain of 16 whole people knee sliding in simultaneous bliss. Meanwhile, the average player count is up even more, at a 52.9% increase—that's 26 more people playing Vanquish every day on Steam, on average! Twenty six people whose lives are for certain better this month than they were in March.

Is this MONUMENTAL increase in active Vanquish players actually due to Pragmata's release? Is it, in fact, even noteworthy? Rude of you to ask for a reality check, frankly. I'm not a "data guy" or even what they call "good at math," but I'm also not a liar, so I have to admit that this spike is pretty much in line with Vanquish's history over the last few years, and it saw even more players jumping back in in September 2024, September 2025 and even this February.

You could maybe attribute each of those bursts of interest to recent Steam sales, though they don't seem to happen during the sales themselves. Vanquish is, coincidentally, on sale right now, for 70% off, a discount Sega has been throwing at it every couple months for most of the last decade. But the shape of the player chart for the past few weeks is noticeably a touch spikier, and exhibits slightly higher troughs, than its past lows. Given the fondness Pragmata has stirred up for Xbox 360-style shooters, I think the correlation just barely holds water.

But even if it doesn't, you could make it so by replaying Vanquish right now, or buying it for $6. Despite now seeming quintessentially of its era, it was almost a send-up of other third-person shooters in its day, with over-the-top gruff hoo-ra American heroes battling against evil space Russians, as written by Japanese developers. It has QTEs that were becoming overdone and garnering a player backlash, but you can't hate the QTEs in Vanquish because they're so damn cool. It's a cover shooter that actively discourages you from spending time in cover. I don't think I will ever play the first couple Gears of Wars again as long as I live, but I hope to slide my ass around in Vanquish many more times before I die.

It may be an 80% game, but it's the most 100/100 80% game of them all.

Between getting beaten up by blister head zombies and running for dear life from The Girl, I spent a great deal of time, perhaps too much time, trying to figure out how the hell I could solve The Final Puzzle in Resident Evil Requiem.

After hours and hours of staring at a bunch of numbers that somehow corresponded to the moon, star, and sun symbol, I gave up on figuring it out myself and opted to wait for the masses to take a crack at it.

It only took four days. With the help of a little datamining, that is. But even still, the accomplishment was so great it even managed to surprise the dev team.

"Wow, that was quick," director Akifumi Nakanishi said in an interview with Denfaminicogamer. "We did something similar with the 'doll's finger' puzzle in the demo for Resident Evil 7, and even then I was worried that nobody would be able to solve it. But when we actually released it, it was solved in half a day.

"So, regarding this 'final mystery,' I intended to design it as something that would last at least two weeks. Even within the development team, people were saying, 'I don't think anyone will notice this.' But as you can see, the result was very fast."

Producer Masato Kumazawa even added: "When I heard about it from Nakanishi, I said, 'No way, nobody will be able to solve this!'"

There were many outlandish parts to The Final Puzzle, but the most ridiculous was undoubtedly the grinder part. After completing all the prior steps perfectly, once you reached the conveyor belt and grinder in the basement you had to wait there for 15 minutes until the belt ran out of bodies to put in the pit. Only then is the stage set for you to jump in and try to survive several more minutes of the grinder running—while avoiding all the zombies that stand up, rather than killing them.

Some fans theorised that the point of this arcane process was supplying enough blood to the grinder to flood the system and bring the doll floating up to the surface, but Capcom has yet to confirm that theory, or the reasoning behind the next absurd step. After surviving the grinder you had to go back to the Hospital's bathroom and flush the toilet eight times.

What do you mean that's convoluted? There's a picture of a dead body in a toilet stall with the number eight scribbled in blood next to it—sort of—so obviously that means you need to flush the toilet eight times to flood the system, to get the doll, to reunite the doll and Emily in the next playthrough, to complete the symbol puzzle with the doll and Emily, to get a little message and 20,000 in-game currency, god. Keep up will you.

Resident Evil Requiem offered up two protagonists, two ways of playing its horror game, and two perspectives, with the choice to switch between first and third person at any point throughout the game players could finally decide just how scary they wanted to make things.

If I'm honest, I reluctantly did my first playthrough as intended: Grace in first person and Leon in third. But then as soon as I started my subsequent playthrough I switched to third person throughout. I told myself it was so I could experience all the stumbles and falls that make Grace's third-person so unique, but frankly I'm just a coward, plain and simple. What's worse than being a coward, though? Finding out no one else is.

Director Akifumi Nakanishi recently revealed in an interview with Denfaminicogamer that a minority of players switched to third person while playing as Grace: "Looking at the data from about a month after release, we can see some interesting trends. First of all, for the first playthrough, about 90% of people play Leon's scenario in TPS mode. On the other hand, in the Grace chapter, 60% of players play in FPS mode, while 40% switch to TPS mode."

Playing through Grace's sections in first person was truly horrifying. The basement section took at least five years off my life, what with all the monster jumpscares, flickering lights, and stealth sections; my poor blood pressure will never recover.

I know I'm not the only one to have given in to the appeal of third person (it helps me dissociate). But really the choice whether to go first or third person is just a preference, driven by what other games players have experience with.

"In fact, there are clear differences in this data depending on the platform and region," Nakanishi explains. "Players in Japan and other parts of Asia tend to prefer TPS games, while on PC, the number of players who play FPS games increases."

"I think familiarity with the game genres that players are used to playing is a major factor," producer, Masato Kumazawa adds. "From the development side, the results were largely as expected."

The beauty of having two protagonists in Requiem, though, was that it would push players towards different styles. There was the action-oriented side which favoured third person for its strategic view of the battlefield which made taking on larger groups easier. Then there was the horror, which was largely Grace's domain, and which worked well with first-person because it made the action feel more chaotic and suffocating.

"In this game, we chose to feature two protagonists, Leon and Grace, who have very different gameplay styles," Nakanishi adds. "Because we were confident that this would allow us to create a wider range of emotional fluctuations for the player than ever before."

That it certainly did. Although my range of emotional fluctuations went from B-lining down dark hallways as Grace in first person with my heart in my mouth, to hunting down any and every zombie that crossed my path as Leon with absolutely no fear. There wasn't much in between, if I'm honest.

If you needed any further proof of the terrifying cultural potency of Leon S. Kennedy, here it is: Resident Evil Requiem has sold over 7 million copies in just under two months. The latest in a string of Capcom sales successes, the milestone makes Requiem the fastest-selling Resident Evil game to date.

While Capcom hasn't circulated a press release officially confirming the figure, the milestone was shared on game director Koshi Nakanishi's Instagram (via Twisted Voxel), where he posted a photo of Capcom staff honoring the achievement with a pair of celebratory Resident Evil-themed cakes.

Capcom also hasn't circulated a press release confirming the quality of the cakes, but we can presume they were delightful.

Resident Evil has already been setting series sales records for years: In 2021, Resident Evil Village sold 3 million copies in four days. In 2023, the RE4 remake smashed that success by selling the same amount in half the time. By selling 7 million copies since its February 26 launch, however, Requiem needed just two months to cross a sales milestone that the RE4 remake took a year to accomplish, having sold 6.48 million units in February 2024.

Earlier this week, industry analyst Mat Piscatella shared some additional context about Requiem's impressive sales performance: According to Circana sales data, Piscatella said "Requiem now ranks among the top 5 best-selling Resident Evil games in all-time US dollar sales," with only Resident Evil 5, the RE4 remake, Resident Evil Village, and the original Resident Evil 4 still ranking ahead of it in lifetime US sales.

Content - After just two months in market, Resident Evil: Requiem now ranks among the top 5 best-selling Resident Evil games in all-time US dollar sales. It trails only Resident Evil 5, Resident Evil 4 (2023), Resident Evil: Village and the original Resident Evil 4.

— @matpiscatella.bsky.social (@matpiscatella.bsky.social.bsky.social) 2026-04-24T21:02:56.905Z

It's not just Resident Evil that's posting admirable numbers for Capcom, either. The company announced on Monday that Pragmata, its Xbox 360-core scifi shooter, had sold over a million copies in just two days. And given that Monster Hunter Wilds is poised to culminate its redemption arc with an expansion reveal this summer after finally addressing its glaring performance issues, the company can probably expect to see another sales bounty in its future.

Everything, it seems, is coming up Capcom.

Tifa Lockhart might be a Final Fantasy 7 character first and foremost, but another community has been wishing for her presence for a hot sec now: the Tekken community.

I always used to associate guest characters with Soulcalibur's zanier choices like Yoda, Ezio, and our very own PC Gamer mascot Geralt of Rivia. But other fighting games have been stuffing all sorts of weird outsiders into their rosters for a good while now. Tekken 7 had freakin' Negan from The Walking Dead, for example. But that game also had another guest character, one Noctis of Final Fantasy 15 fame.

It means that it wasn't totally out of the realm of possibility that Tekken 8 could end up with another Final Fantasy character, and the one everyone campaigned for the hardest? Tifa. It makes sense! She's a brawler, and her vibe feels perfect for a 3D fighting game. The only other character I saw people going so hard to bat for was Yakuza's Kiryu.

And then at the end of the first season, we got our Final Fantasy character. Except, erm, it was actually Final Fantasy 16's Clive Rosfield. A cool character in his own right, but he's no Lockhart.

The chances of a second Final Fantasy character are slim, but now they might be none if the latest rumours are anything to go by. Whispers are bouncing around the FGC that Tifa might actually end up in Capcom's own Street Fighter 6. A rumour which has left myself, and the Tekken community, in shambles.

"The Tekken bros shouldn't have asked for Tifa," one Reddit comment joked, before referencing the former Tekken head's mantra of Don't Ask Me For Shit: "Harada was very clear." Another comment on a different post said "If this is true then this is a big fumble for Tekken."

Another redditor summarised my own feelings pretty well: "I just never ever imagined in SF’s 30+ history, we would potentially be getting Tifa as a playable character. The one character Tekken fans have been asking for since 8 came out no less."

The secret, tiny possibility is that Tifa could arguably be in two fighting games. Nier: Automata's 2B is in both Soulcalibur 6 and Granblue Fantasy Versus Rising. That's a 3D and a 2D fighter! That could be Tifa! But they're also two fighting games from different generations unlike Tekken 8 and Street Fighter 6. But hey, a girl can always hope.

And of course, rumours are always exactly that: just a rumour. Nothing's confirmed, so we'll just have to wait for Capcom to reveal the next season's fighters in its own time.

Videogames love pitting players against the moon or otherwise convincing them it's a big problem, and while I loved Pragmata, it only saddled me with more lunar trauma. David Menkin, the actor who played protagonist Hugh, has always loved the big grey rock, but as he mentioned in an interview with Polygon, he had to keep his excitement for the recent Artemis 2 mission under wraps while he was working on Capcom's shooter.

It's not that the embargo specifically forbade him from talking about the moon, but he wanted to post about the coincidence that Artemis 2 and Pragmata's release date were so close together. The full suite of embargoes and restrictions was such a tangle, and Menkin is such a self-described "bad liar," that he felt he had to "fully boot down" so as to not let slip any top secret info.

“I didn't want anyone from Capcom to be like, ‘Excuse me, is that a picture of the moon or is that a picture of our moon?’” he told Polygon.

The article points out that Menkin has a lot of experience playing a spacefarer, whether it's Luke Skywalker in Lego Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga or Neil Armstrong, who he's played in both a short film called Moths to Flame and an audio series about Buzz Aldrin. “I've done all the famous quotes, Neil's famous quotes … I know so much about the fucking moon,” he said. "My entire career has been around the moon."

He went into the process behind Hugh and Diana's dynamic as well, which began with a table read but didn't involve Menkin and Diana actor Grace Saif recording together. Instead, they'd record their lines in separate locales, as Menkin pointed out is standard in the industry, and they'd perform using the other's recordings.

While Saif got ahead of him in recordings at one point, Menkin said he "made sure" he never quite caught up so "he could hear her amazing performance at all times.” While he told Polygon it was sort of like playing opposite a CGI character in a live action film, he commended everyone involved for making it work.

“I have zero transferable skills. All I can do is act … Thank God there are all these people making sure I can feel safe enough to do my job and then at the end it all comes together and it works.”

Like all of Capcom's modern action games, Pragmata is a highly polished experience befitting the legendary developer's reputation: There are hours of motion-captured performances to enjoy, detailed ray (even path) traced environments to admire, and enormous things to blow up in a variety of spectacular ways. There's also a generous selection of post-credits modes to play and extras to unlock—exactly the sort of thing anyone would hope to find in a shiny new game that clocks in around a dozen hours.

But there's a "secret" side to Capcom games that often goes underappreciated, one that I've been powerless to resist since the original Resident Evil: Speedrunning.

When I'm speedrunning a Capcom game I politely put all of that business about plot and lore-soaked emails to the side and treat a new release like one of their old arcade hits, something to replay and practice until I can tear through it at the speed of light. While there may not be a formal 'time attack' mode to select in Pragmata, this is more than some self-imposed entertainment for nerds. The games themselves quietly support this behaviour, so long as you know what to look out for.

The clear time listed on a completed save file.

The occasional "Would you like to skip the playable intro and get straight to the real game?" messages on later runs.

The freedom to skip those expensively made cutscenes entirely, ensuring I get back to the action as quickly as possible.

Everything that appears on my monitor is something I can learn from: Pragmata's deliberately artificial sci-fi setting makes it easy for a UI full of time-saving information to feel natural and welcome. Status effects are clearly labelled and displayed, scanned weak points are marked with targeting reticles, pixel-accurate AoE markers allow me to dodge and weave through a particle shower of deadly attacks. My entire arsenal is conveniently divided into clearly defined, colour-coded roles. The tools needed to lock into a flow state and blast through the game are all there—I just have to want to try.

But why bother when all of this self-inflicted stress doesn't actually "count" for anything, not even so much as an achievement?

The short answer is "Because it's fun." The longer answer is "Because playing in this way changes Pragmata so much it feels brand new again."

Although the end result is a faster finish time (if I'm lucky), speedrunning isn't about superficially skimming through a great game and choosing to miss all the best bits; when I'm speedrunning I'm engaging with the game so deeply I'm using dashes to cancel lengthy recovery animations, refusing to heal until I absolutely have to because (as in Monster Hunter) it's a slow, vulnerable act, and generally getting myself into lots of otherwise avoidable trouble that, again, is fun. It changes the entire tempo of the game, and introduces new challenges in what would otherwise be safe and straightforward places.

When I'm speedrunning I rush towards a robot the size of a house and try to dodge every close-range attack it throws at me instead of tactically picking it off from a safe distance. I allow a dangerous enemy to give chase as I boost towards my current objective, rather than carefully disabling it before moving on. A swarm of missiles approach my position and I calmly hack them while they're en route to my face, sending them back to whatever fired them for free additional damage instead of merely shooting them out of the air.

With practice, towering robots that used to stomp me into a fine paste are quickly prioritised and then left so confused they attack their allies, making it easy to walk up to them and unload exactly the right kind of weapon on weak points I no longer even have to think to look for.

Much like Capcom's Devil May Cry, it's not the upgrades to my guns or the extensions to my health bar in Pragmata that make the biggest difference when I'm replaying an old level. It's how I'm using everything I've always had in more skilful ways, learning to anticipate enemy behaviour and how they interact with their environment. I'll move through the game faster if I remember which enemy groups I can completely ignore, which weapon I should hang on to for an upcoming fight, and the best way to tackle a room full of laser beams—and I can prove this is more than hollow theory by attempting to speedrun the unlockable "Lunatic" mode.

This difficulty makes enemies hit incredibly hard and also forces me to reacquire all upgrades from scratch, every run initially as fresh and weak as my first. The inescapable difficulty, coupled with a speedrunner's mindset, leave me with little choice but to play smart and try to find some life-saving synergy in the options available.

When's the best time to use a gun that increases the presence of helpful hacking nodes? How can I work a particular position-activated mod into my usual combat routine?

Do I want to knock enemies down, temporarily stun-lock them in place, or should I focus on triggering the overheat state instead, leaving robots on their knees and open for a powerful special attack?

I managed to shave a little over two hours off my initial 6 hour, 18 minute clear time on my second Standard difficulty run thanks to these questions and some practice, and after that I tried on Casual and got it down to about 2hr30m. That means I'm already dashing through Pragmata fast enough to comfortably clear it twice in one working day, long lunch breaks included.

That sounds like a terrible thing to say about a brand new release, doesn't it? But here's the thing: This is a game I want to clear twice in a day, even now, even though I already know how it plays from beginning to end to unlockable bonus stages. Repeat runs are more exciting, not less, because I'm constantly getting myself into scrapes I didn't before, and I'm thrilled when things go wrong because it's an explosion-filled chance to prove I have the skills to get myself out of this unplanned mess. There's always some new trick to learn, some way I can refine my run—and that means there's always plenty to look forward to, both in Pragmata and almost certainly in whatever under the radar speedrunning challenge Capcom decides to create next.

The first trailer for the upcoming Street Fighter film is out, and I'll tell you this: It looks very Street Fighter.

It seems that the friendship between Ryu and Ken has gone a little off the rails, as have the men themselves: Neither of them are looking especially sharp as the trailer begins. Fortunately for all, Chun-Li steps in to reunite them, perhaps not entirely willingly, for the 1993 World Warrior Tournament, "a brutal clash of fists, fate, and fury."

But why? Well, this tournament isn't the pure Kumite of days gone by: "Behind this battle royale lies a deadly conspiracy that forces them to face off against each other and the demons of their past. And if they don’t, it’s GAME OVER!" So it's up to the three of them to clean house, I guess. Shades of Mortal Kombat, maybe?

Anyway, while the drama is high, the movie is clearly not going to be shy about embracing its videogame roots. Here, for instance, is Ken about to get his ass suplexed through a taxi from 20 feet up by an oddly Donald Sutherland-looking Zangief:

There's also a clip in the trailer of Ken beating the hell out of a car, knocking the hood flying with a single kick while a crowd hoots, hollers, and cheers him on. Hey, the '90s was a weird time.

But while there's cheese a-plenty, this Street Fighter flick looks more knowing about it than the classic 1994 original—or at least it shows the potential—and that could elevate it to an actually good movie, rather than one that's merely accidentally entertaining.

The trailer serves up a pretty good look at just about all the street fighters in Street Fighter, and I have to say that casting David Dastmalchian as M. Bison is a brilliant choice.

Will he say the line? Man, I hope so.

The one notable semi-absence is Jason Momoa as Blanka: He's arguably the biggest name in the cast, but he's only seen near the end of the video, in a very brief clip obscured by dust and motion. Other characters have smaller showings too, but in terms of raw star power, Momoa is the big hook, especially after his turn in A Minecraft Movie. Is Street Fighter holding something back for the next trailer?

This is about as clear as it gets:

So it looks like it might be fun, hopefully in the "actual fun" way and possibly in the "so bad it's good" way. Hopefully the former, but we'll find out later this year: Street Fighter hits the big screens on October 16.

Pragmata, a game about feeding USB sticks to a small child you've found on the Moon, releases in mere hours. This is good news, because—writing for the illustrious PC Gamer dot com—Justin Wagner rather liked it in his Pragmata review, scoring it 87% and declaring it "a snazzy late aughts throwback elevated by a terrific sense of feedback and momentum."

Soon, you will be able to experience that sense of feedback and momentum on your own personal computer. How soon? Great question, which I've answered by compiling all the Pragmata unlock times that are fit to print just below.

Oh, and when you do get stuck into Pragmata, remember to check back in for our tips and tricks on getting started with the game. Our Rory Norris has been beavering away at helpful guide after helpful guide recently. Please don't make Rory sad.

When does Pragmata launch?

Pragmata launches at 12 am EDT / 5 am BST on Friday, April 17. That's 9 pm PDT on Thursday, April 16 for the Angelenos and other assorted westerners among you. As someone who's written more than a few release time articles in his day, it feels kind of novel to have the dateline cut through the US and not Asia. Does this signify anything at all? No, but I take my entertainment where I can.

Here are the full Pragmata release times across the globe:

• Los Angeles: 9 pm PDT on Thursday, April 16
• New York: 12 am on Friday, April 17
• London: 5 am BST on Friday, April 17
• Berlin: 6 am CEST on Friday, April 17
• Sydney: 2 pm AEST on Friday, April 17
• Wellington: 4 pm NZDT on Friday, April 17

Do bear in mind which side of the dateline you fall on, or else you may end up arriving unfashionably late/early to Pragmata's Moon party.

Does Pragmata have pre-loading?

Yes, Pragmata has pre-loading, meaning if you've already pre-ordered the game you can happily get it all downloaded and ready to play in the remaining hours until it releases properly. You won't even have to chew on a thumb drive to do it, though you still can if it's your preference.

Resident Evil: Requiem is my favourite Capcom game in years, and one reason for that is it gets genuinely scary at times. That's not just in the Grace sections either: Leon might be a complete badass but, on Insanity difficulty especially, the game doesn't hesitate to swarm you with teeth and claws, alongside some truly horrible death animations.

So if it all gets a bit much, might I suggest just making all those nasty monsters super small? It's hard to be scared by a cleaver-wielding zombie chef when he doesn't even come up to Grace's kneecap, after all. Such joys await thanks to the straightforwardly named Enemies Scale Modifier from modder lucablight83

The mod requires RE Framework installed to work, but after that the script will let you modify enemy size in both directions: you can shrink them down to 10% of their original size, or scale them up to 300% larger. The effect is toggled with an in-game button and slider that should apply any changes instantaneously, though of course there are some glitches with things like enemy clothing when you suddenly make a room full of zombies into miniature zombies.

The mod's creator also notes that "sometimes, when the enemies are killed, there are weird physics glitches, like the bodies move on their own (or even fly away...)"

One side effect of this mod is that it actually makes Requiem both funny and much harder at the same time. Leon's opening scene now features a load of normal-sized NPCs fleeing in terror from tiny zombies which are quite difficult to shoot and, while it's hard to feel intimidated by a pint-sized doctor with a ludicrously billowing coat, it's also not easy at all to put him down. As for the likes of Chunk, he ends up looking almost cute. Almost.

Pair this up with the mod that turns Leon's Porsche into a driveable hamburger, and we've almost made Requiem into a comedy. If you want a mod that's a little more serious about how it ups the challenge, how about one that makes zombie bites actually infect you. And for the true sickos, yep, there's already a mod that lets you play the whole thing in VR: no thanks!

When Led Zeppelin's "Black Dog" starts playing, do you wince or start banging your head while applying extreme stank face? I think your answer will reliably predict how much you get out of Pragmata, a game that simultaneously manages to be a very familiar homage to Xbox 360-era linear third-person shooters and one of the most entertaining adventures I've played in ages. Like Capcom's other recent left-field one-offs, it feels like a cult classic in the making, and buddy, I'm jonesing for the Kool-Aid.

You play as Hugh, an astronaut stranded on a collapsing moonbase crawling with hostile robots, and Diana, a mysterious and powerful childlike android who doesn't remember why she was created. Diana can remotely hack a heat-seeking bomb to fly back into the drone that shot it out, but doesn't understand stuff like birthdays and sunsets. Hugh, on the other hand, is way out of his depth but quickly takes on the role of her father and protector (even as Diana points out she could easily be rebuilt from spare parts).

He's eager to teach her about Earth and how humans have more inside them than guts and bones, she's eager to learn, and they cultivate a shared homesickness in-between sick robo-shootouts.

I sort of love the pair, even if Hugh is kind of… vanilla? He's not got a lot rolling around in-between his ears aside from a burning love for humanity and a duty to his adopted daughter. He's aspirationally simple in a 'dudes rock' sort of way, always saying stuff like "What the heck?" and "Hell yeah!" I wish the game did a little more showing me why humanity is great instead of letting Hugh tell Diana in a blunt, prosaic way, but the two's enthusiasm proved infectious.

I thought all I wanted from this game was some mindless shooting, but before long I yearned to see this duo make it home safe.

AI am walkin' here

The story doesn't go in any surprising directions, and big bad IDUS (the malicious station computer) doesn't have the charisma nor the one-liners to join the pantheon of great evil AIs like GLaDOS, AM, and SHODAN. But Pragmata's rudimentary plot is complemented by arresting music and presentation. Visually, it feels like a more successful execution of Starfield's proposed "NASApunk" aesthetic, juxtaposing the gleaming spires of hope I associate with space exploration against ugly spikes of 3D-printed filament and a tinge of mecha flair.

It speaks to the moment science is having right now, where proponents of real progress share space travel with ethically empty technocrats and businessmen. Pragmata's impressively varied stages left me awash in my own malaise regarding the future: an overgrown terrarium populated by holographic animals, a desolate crater ruled by an automated driller worm gone awry, and even what's basically an AI-slop imitation of New York City, complete with motionless taxi cabs melting into the sidewalk.

Wherever the in-game Delphi Corporation uses AI to recreate what arose on Earth organically, whether through evolution or human collaboration, the result is an abortive house of cards—Diana embodies the opposite instinct despite being artificial herself, and nurtures her own budding humanity. The story may have been penned before generative AI became such an all-encompassing problem for us terrestrials, but it remains resonant.

Its critiques of reckless technological advancement aren't subtle—the lunar installment's towers are literally labeled "Babel"—but taking on this sleek, AI-powered hellscape while trying to protect a lost child who longs to understand why the ocean is beautiful hit me somewhere deep anyway.

Between fights, the game offers rest stops in an upgradeable shelter where you can restock, upgrade, and gaze at digital clouds through huge LCD screens. Diana runs off to color in a reconstructed facsimile of a child's play area, occasionally cajoling Hugh to play hide-and-seek. In these fleeting breaks I felt mournful, dispirited by the AI-poisoned future we are handing our children in the real world. Poignant moments like these help Pragmata's narrative punch above its weight.

Hack and shoot

Unexpected pathos aside, the shooting is the real headliner and I fell head over heels for it quickly. The weapons sound off with satisfying snaps and roars, but they probably wouldn’t be enough to carry the game on their own—thankfully a novel hacking system sits atop the core action, and it's the ace up Pragmata's sleeve that makes the whole package a winner. Hugh's crummy 3D-printed guns don't do much on their own, but Diana can hack enemies from afar to expose their gooey weak spots—you aim at an enemy, navigate a small tile maze with a controller's face buttons or by holding down a side mouse button and using the cursor, then blow them away as normal.

There's a real 'walking and chewing gum' aspect to it: the most dangerous thing in any encounter was my own tunnel vision. It's easy to get hypnotized by the hacking UI and stop looking out for enemy attacks, but forego hacks and your bullets turn into marshmallows. As the game goes on you get upgrades and guns that encourage you to push your multitasking further—when I was up to the challenge, the game rewarded me with delightfully absurd damage numbers.

On a given hack screen you can always just beeline for the destination tile and open up your foe. But if you take a longer route through special nodes that show up randomly once equipped, you can pile on extra effects: more damage, armor shred, friendly fire, immobilization.

Just as these nodes change how you shoot, the guns change how you hack, like with sticky bombs that shrink the hack screen so you can complete it faster, or a decoy gun that lets you distract especially dangerous bots.

It's a game of spinning plates and keeping calm, not unlike blasting a necromorph's limbs off in Dead Space. Guns are disposable and thrown away once you run out of ammo, so I was always adjusting my approach either because I had no other weapons to choose from or to better handle a particular bot. Certain enemies have huge hack screens that require extra attention, while others put up shields that wall off different corners of the hacking UI.

The sense of frantic improv combined with the thunderous, crunchy sound effects made for one of the best-feeling shooters I've played in awhile—instead of Pragmata reminding me of the endless big-budget adventures I've played with a chatty NPC companion, I truly felt like I was inhabiting two characters.

In brief sections where Diana (and as a result, the hacking system) were inaccessible, it suddenly felt like I was drumming with a hand tied behind my back. It cemented their bond into gameplay in a way that I adored.

Space oddity

Once you find the rhythm, it's euphoric. The sheer juice factor of triggering slow-mo with a last-second dodge into a panicked hack followed by a shotgun blast to the face takes Pragmata from a comforting throwback to an all-original action game.

In later stages where I had to kite a variety of enemy types, jet boost around to avoid ground hazards, swap guns as I spent them, aim, and hack all at once, I was impatient to pick another fight as soon as the last one ended. The game is never frustrating or even particularly hard on standard difficulty, but you always know you can be more efficient, and that feeling speaks to the prominent nook in my brain that loves pinball and Bayonetta.

Every time combat ended I wondered about what little optimizations I could have made, and as the game added new status effects to keep track of and new weapons to toy with—as well as the capability to lug around half a dozen at once—it hit me that I was going to want to replay this game as soon as I beat it.

Pragmata seems well-suited to this instinct, since the campaign is pretty short: I beat it in under 10 hours and I wasn’t exactly rushing. But there's a delectable suite of postgame challenges, including New Game+, an endgame mission mode that has you returning to cleared areas to unlock new costumes and weaponry, and "Lunatic" difficulty for the lunatics out there. I'm dying to see a speedrun of this game—the manageable length and sky-high skill ceiling make it a prime candidate.

Pragmata's final climactic set piece doesn't live up to the fun of all that came before it, and it could have used a bigger variety of enemy bots (especially boss fights, of which there are precious few). It probably could have been twice as long and I'd have still come back for the postgame. I wish IDUS had even one memorable line. Despite my minor gripes, Pragmata is a gorgeous and polished bite-sized delight that plays the hits with a flavorful twist that had me subconsciously solving tile puzzles in my sleep. Lucky for me, I love the hits.

It's no secret that arcade fighters reward absurd precision and reaction times, and that means you need robust netcode if you want to play these games online and have a good time. While rollback netcode has recently become the standard for big name fighters, the communities behind older games are understandably eager to see it come to the classics—so much so in one case that there's a big pile of cash in it for capable modders.

FGC streamer and YouTuber Maximillian Christiansen (known online as Maximilian Dood) is prepared to make it raaaain for anyone who can "solve the issue of making rollback netcode work in Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3," which is on Steam but uses less responsive delay-based netcode. If you're not sure he's good for it, just take a look at the Marvel vs. Capcom Infinite mod he'd put nearly $30,000 into as of 2024.

It's hard to overstate how transformative the tech can be for a fighting game—it's so prized that players will drown out its announcement with cheers and applause. Where delay-based netcode won't honor your button mashing until both players receive the input data, rollback netcode predicts what will come next and will quickly, you know, roll things back if it was wrong. It's as good a solution as has been cooked up for a genre where every frame of information matters, and it feels much better than the sluggish stretches that characterize a bad match played with delay-based netcode.

Christiansen reposted a stream highlight on X sharing his announcement. "I want to do something special," he said. "We've done a lot for the modding scene of Marvel vs. Capcom, I just am willing to put my money where my mouth is. Maybe just maybe we can move beyond this Parsec era of Ultimate Marvel 3 online."

Parsec is a third-party application that allows players to remotely use local play features through streaming, not unlike Steam's Remote Play Together. While it can be an improvement over delay-based netcode if all parties have a strong internet connection, Christiansen wants more for the venerable fighting game.

"The Smash Melee community did it, man. They did it in a freaking emulator wrapper. Somehow, they made matchmaking, they had rollback netcode," he said. "I'd be willing to put my money towards it to help support this community, and to help support this game for the long run."

The Steam Deck seems like a lovely machine for tackling retro games, since they tend not to guzzle storage space. That doesn't mean their Steam versions are always deck verified, though—if you've hit this wall trying to replay Capcom classics like Dino Crisis or the OG Resident Evil games, you'll be pleased to hear better days are coming.

A report on Steam Deck HQ shares yesterday's Proton Experimental patch notes, which see a bunch of games getting promoted to "playable" status. From Dust, Metal Gear Survive, Warhammer: Vermintide 2 and a few others are included, alongside Resident Evil (1996), Resident Evil 2 (1998), Dino Crisis, and Dino Crisis 2. These old-but-gold survival horror games finally arrived on Steam this year after a very long wait.

Granted, this is only if you enable Proton Experimental and the games aren't yet verified, so it won't be a perfect experience. The above Steam Deck HQ states that Dino Crisis 2's FMV cutscenes still aren't working as intended without community fixes. But if you've been itching to get jumpscared by a dog leaping through a window while riding the train or during a work Zoom call, now's the best time to make that happen.

It's good to see the old-school Resident Evil games getting some love, even if both remakes of the original are impressive in their own right. While the bigwigs at Capcom might not understand why I'd want to try the OG games when the new ones are right there, it seems completely obvious to me: sometimes a thing that was good in 1996 is no less good in 2026. And even if it sucked, you can't have those snazzy remakes without the original to crib concepts from—that I can play the classics on the go these days just sweetens the pot.

Mass Effect Legendary Edition's photo mode was a constant temptation, pulling me away from dramatic moments to check how they'd look with vignetting turned off and maybe a filter. So I'm kind of glad I finished Resident Evil Requiem before its photo mode was patched in. Firing it up today, I lost a chunk of my morning to checking out all of Leon and Grace's poses and stickers and how they look kicking like a maniac.

While the amount you can move the camera away from the characters is limited—maybe something for modders to fix—this is a decent time-killing photo mode. It could do with a way of changing light sources though, like the one in No Man's Sky that lets you move the sun wherever you click, because otherwise you're just cranking the brightness up and hoping details in the background become visible before the foreground gets washed out.

Photo mode was added as part of a patch that also fixes some bugs, though the patch notes are incredibly vague. "Fixed a bug that caused progress to be impossible under certain conditions." OK, that's good, I guess. "Fixed a bug that caused the game to crash in some circumstances." I would love to know more? "Character expressions in some cutscenes have been adjusted to better convey emotion." I hadn't noticed a lack of expressiveness, but maybe I was too busy being freaked out myself to check if Grace looked properly afraid.

Now, of course, I can give Grace a cheery smile in every photo, as well as make her look like she's skanking in the direction of danger. And I can make Leon look like he's adjusting his hair every five minutes, which just makes sense.

To bring up the photo mode press Escape and then R, or select it from the pause menu. If you're in the middle of a canned animation you won't be able to move the camera, but you'll still be able to apply filters and tweak the lighting.

Where do I even start? Street Fighter has, historically, featured some pretty weird storylines, but I don't think anyone was prepared for incest. Then Alex came along. This new DLC fighter for Street Fighter 6 (who first appeared in Street Fighter 3: New Generation) arrived on March 17, and let's not beat around the bush here: the dude is incestuous.

The beanie-wearing brawler's storyline concludes with the revelation that he marries and knocks up his second cousin (who is also his adoptive sister), Patricia. It's really, really weird. Maybe in this post-Game of Thrones world, Capcom thought incest was trendy. Unsurprisingly, players have emphatically said "No thanks."

Incredibly, though, Capcom's managed to find a way to make things a lot weirder. Rather than acknowledging the fact that this is creepy as hell or doubling down and defending this bizarre storyline, it's opted for… gaslighting?

It's hard to read the response (spotted by Eurogamer) in any other way. Here's what Street Fighter 6 director Takayuki Nakayama had to say on X: "We apologize for any confusion that recent topics regarding Alex's story may have caused." So we're just confused? What are we missing here?

Nakayama continues: "While we have not changed the characters’ backstories, after internal review by the development team, we plan to revise certain text passages that may have been misleading in the near future."

To be clear, there is nothing to be confused about. Patricia is Alex's adoptive sister and second cousin. Capcom is not disputing this. It's all there in the storyline. But Capcom is insistent that we're misunderstanding the relationship, which has now been cleared up in what reads like a hastily-written bit of fanfic titled A Toast Between Fathers.

And when I say "cleared up", I really mean the short story just reiterates that Alex has known Patricia since she was a baby and is now married to her. It also notes that the pair grew apart for a while, but it also doubles down on the idea of him being a protective big brother.

If anything, this makes the whole thing even creepier. Capcom isn't simply presenting an incestuous relationship and leaving it at that—which would be weird enough—it's actually holding it up as a positive thing. This is romantic, apparently. And it's totally OK because they spent a few years not hanging out.

I've reached out to Capcom for more details regarding potential changes and what it thinks people are confused about, and I'll update this story with any new information.

Anyway, 2026 is nuts. And it's only March.

The premise of Pragmata may seem utterly unfathomable right now so I'll try and break it down for you: an evil AI takes over a lunar research station, and being evil, it tries to eradicate our human protagonist Hugh and his android companion Diana. Ok, that's actually pretty fathomable right now.

Funnily enough, the hardest part of bringing an evil AI to life was mimicking what the world it inhabited would actually look like. "It mirrors reality, but its unique appeal comes from the setting errors and how they feel out of place, such as taxis sinking into floors, or buses sprouting from walls," producer Naoto Oyama says in an interview with 4Gamer (via Automaton). "Although the premise is that it generated by AI, actually, our human developers painstakingly worked to incorporate mechanisms that express this AI-like uncanny feel.”

The infected lunar base has all of the above. With glitching billboards showcasing generic advertisements for burger joints or cars, it all just looks a bit off, as it should. "For Pragmata, we set the premise as 'a fake New York generated by AI,'" director Cho Yonghee adds. "When familiar locations appear, players can relate more easily. On top of that, to make it clear that this isn’t the real New York, we wanted something slightly distorted."

Cho continues that the focus was on recreating "AI errors" which you'd usually see in AI generated art. You know, the classic six fingers, inconsistency, and general slop that we're used to seeing in whatever an AI tool vomits out.

It seems like an easy enough task, but the reality is vastly different. Weirdly, recreating these errors can be difficult, not only because human artists simply know better but because too many mistakes or errors could potentially be misinterpreted by players.

"Distortion is when something takes a shape that people have never seen before, and things unseen before are considered unique," Cho says. "But if the shapes are too unusual, players might think they’re related to puzzles or that the terrain has some hidden meaning. Balancing distortion to be both unique and merely background was difficult."

So there you have it, recreating the slop that AI shits out is, in fact, quite difficult. Not for lack of any skill, mind you, but because mimicking stupid when you're not is harder than it looks.

Earlier today, Capcom published its summary of a February 2026 online investor information session. Asked during the briefing to detail its plans for AI usage in game development, Capcom said it won't use game assets generated by AI, but intends to "actively" use generative AI to improve its game development workflows.

"We will not incorporate assets generated by AI into our game content," Capcom said in its investor Q&A summary (via machine translation). "However, we do intend to actively utilize such technologies to enhance efficiency and boost productivity within our game development processes."

Capcom said it is "currently evaluating potential applications" of generative AI technologies "across various disciplines," including graphics, sound, and programming.

While it's tempting to read the timing of the company's AI statement as an attempt to distance itself from Nvidia's DLSS 5 reveal—widely panned for its turning the protagonists of Capcom's Resident Evil Requiem into unrecognizable, yassified ghouls through the power of generative AI—the session took place on February 16, a full month before DLSS 5's unveiling. Still, the publication of the session summary is likely a welcome reassurance to investors who might've gotten anxious after seeing the intensity of contempt that Grace's AI beautification produced.

And though I'm glad to have the frightful notion of AI-generated Monster Hunter creatures dispelled—for now—Capcom didn't specify where it draws its line between efficiency enhancement and asset implementation when it comes to gen-AI use.

We've seen how quickly defining generative AI use becomes a complicated problem, especially if the company is using generative technology in graphics and sound production. Would Capcom approve if its animators use machine learning to streamline transitional movements between motion-captured animations? What if its artists used AI-generated images as initial concepts that were then reworked into final assets?

The former is pretty inoffensive; the latter—well, Capcom is already doing something similar. Previously reported by GameSpark (via IGN), Capcom technical director Kazuki Abe explained in January 2025 how the company had created a Google Cloud-based technology to generate initial visual references to ease the burden of producing concept illustrations for the "hundreds of thousands of ideas" necessary to fill out a game's world.

It's been a common defense offered by game companies using generative AI in art production, but it hasn't spared studios from backlash. Pearl Abyss provided a similar rationale over the weekend when players started noticing AI art scattered throughout Crimson Desert, claiming that its art teams use generated assets "as part of early-stage iteration using experimental AI generative tools" to help "rapidly explore tone and atmosphere in the earlier phases of production."

Pearl Abyss issued an apology, and insisted that "our intention has always been for any such assets to be replaced." If nobody had noticed, we can only guess whether they would be.

Do you want to play Resident Evil Requiem in VR? If so, seek help. Your fear gland may be broken and next you'll be jamming a fork into the toaster just to feel something. In the meantime though, go ahead and download a mod that lets you be Grace Ashcroft, an FBI desk jockey so out of her depth when she gets back she'll have the bends, in senses-shattering virtual reality.

I enjoyed Resident Evil Requiem a lot, sticking to the default viewpoint options of first-person for Grace and third-person for Leon. (I have to point out you can change these in the menu because if I don't some chucklefuck will be along to explain it as if we don't know already.) Seeing things through Grace's eyes that way was scary enough, especially when she was seeing the shadowy outline of something far too large slithering out of a hole in the ceiling at the end of the hallway I needed to get through.

After a bit of that, bouncing back into jolly third-person to watch Leon S. Kennedy's bulging biceps (the S is for the size of his shirts) as he hatchet-murders a dozen zombies then says a quip is an ecstatic relief. It's a perfect formula for a series that's often struggled to reconcile its survival horror roots with its shift to action-movie dopiness, making one the dessert you enjoy after the meat-and-potatoes of the other.

Anyway, if you're made of sterner stuff than me and played Alien Isolation in VR while chewing gum and generally not giving a shit, then go ahead and download RE9VR as well as its requirements ViGEmBus and REFramework. You will apparently need to pop your headset off and play flatscreen to solve puzzles at computers, but otherwise you should mostly be able to experience Resident Evil Requiem as if it's really happening to you. You maniac.

Resident Evil Requiem's Hamilton watches aren't the only product placement in Capcom's latest action-horror thrilltime. There's also Leon Kennedy's Porsche Cayenne Turbo GT, which he hoons around in when there isn't a convenient motorbike nearby. But if you'd rather not see your middle-aged action hero in a high-performance SUV, modder SinderyMonk is here to help.

The Patty Wagon mod swaps that souped-up sports car for a drivable hamburger right out of SpongeBob Squarepants, so that you can rep for Krusty Krab rather than Porsche. Seeing Leon's ultra-serious face grimly staring over a Krabby patty elevates every scene it's in.

We've already pointed out the first sexy Leon mod, but in the last couple of weeks the shitpost modders have really been busy. There's a mod to replace Chunk with Shrek, one to replace The Girl with a chibi character from Umamusume Pretty Derby, and for the arachnophobes there's one that lets you swap the giant spider for modder favorite Thomas the Tank Engine.

It's not all gags and memes. We recently highlighted a mod that makes Insanity mode even more brutal by turning zombie bites infectious. Like all of these mods, you'll need to install REFramework first to load it.

Calamitous Elder Dragons are the toughest bosses in Monster Hunter Stories 3. These legendary creatures only show up once certain conditions have been met, and you can even add some of them to your team once you've beaten them.

Each Monster Hunter Stories 3 region is home to one Calamitous Elder Dragon. You can make them appear by defeating a bunch of monsters at night. When you've beaten enough battles, a short cutscene will play to let you know that an Elder Dragon has appeared somewhere in the world.

You'll need a strong team of Monsties and plenty of items to beat these Elder Dragons, but you'll be rewarded with the best gear in the game for your efforts. Here's how to beat all four Calamitous Elder Dragons in Monster Hunter Stories 3.

Namielle

• Recommended Level: 75
• Elemental Weakness: Fire, Dragon, Ice
• Elemental Resistance: Water, Thunder
• Ailment Weakness: Poison, Burn, Blastblight, Darkness
• Ailment Resistance: Paralysis, Sleep, Bleed

Introduced in Monster Hunter World's Iceborne expansion, Namielle makes its Monster Hunter Stories debut as the Calamitous Elder Dragon threatening the kingdom of Azuria. You can find it flying above Mirror Lake once you've summoned it.

Malzeno is the best Monstie for this battle. It comes with powerful dragon attacks that'll demolish Namielle's health bar, and it resists Namielle's electric and water attacks.

Namielle swaps between three forms during this battle. It begins with Water Mantle activated, so use red Power attacks to counter its green Technical moves. It'll then swap to Abyssal Charge after a few turns, starting to use electric damage and swapping to blue Speed attacks.

Namielle will unleash devastating AOE attacks during Abyssal Charge, so buff your defenses and make sure your HP is topped off. If you survive Abyssal Charge, Namielle will enter its Water Depleted stage and become much more vulnerable. It'll perform red Power attacks in this state, so win those Head-to-Heads with blue Speed attacks and try to whittle down its Wyvernsoul gauge.

Make sure you come equipped with armor and decorations that reduce thunder and water damage to survive Namielle's attacks. Namielle's water attacks can inflict a status that stops your stamina from recovering, so bring Nulberry Elixirs to cure the ailment.

Yama Tsukami

• Recommended Level: 60
• Elemental Weakness: Dragon, Ice
• Elemental Resistance: Thunder, Fire
• Ailment Weakness: Darkness, Bleed
• Ailment Resistance: Poison, Paralysis, Burn, Sleep, Blastblight

After you've faced it during the main story, Yama Tsukami will be waiting for a rematch in Tarkuan. It's one of the easier Calamitous Elder Dragons, but it's still a tough opponent.

Malzeno is the best choice for this Elder Dragon, too. Its powerful dragon attacks are just too strong, and with genes like Self-Heal further boosting its parasitic heals, you won't have to worry about this Monstie going down very often. Lunagaron or Aurora Somnacanth are also great picks.

In its normal state, Yama Tsukami will perform red Power attacks and slam its tentacles down on your part. Focus on breaking its tentacles and keeping everyone's HP topped off. All of Yama Tsukami's attacks deal normal damage, so bring armor and decorations that boost your defenses.

Once the tentacles have been broken, Yama Tsukami will open its mouth. After seven turns, it'll perform a deadly AOE attack called Yama Tsukami Pull that's basically guaranteed to wipe your party. You need to break its mouth before that happens.

At this point, just repeat until you either repel or defeat Yama Tsukami. This fight is a breeze as long as you can tank its tentacles and deal enough damage to the mouth to avoid the AOE.

Wind Serpent Ibushi and Thunder Serpent Narwa

• Recommended Level: 85
• Elemental Weakness: Fire, Dragon (Ibushi) / Ice, Dragon (Narwa)
• Elemental Resistance: Ice, Thunder (Ibushi) / Thunder, Fire (Narwa)
• Ailment Weakness: Bleed (Ibushi) / Poison (Narwa)
• Ailment Resistance: Sleep, Paralysis, Blastblight, Burn

This is the hardest fight in the entire game. You have to face both Ibushi and Narwa simultaneously, and they both have one-shot kill attacks that'll decimate even a max level team.

Fittingly, Magnamalo is the best Monstie to use for this encounter since it can unleash powerful dragon attacks to capitalize on both Elder Dragons' weaknesses. It resists thunder damage—which helps with Narwa—but a slight weakness to dragon will make it take more damage from Ibushi. Luckily, Magnamalo has higher defense than other Monsties as well.

This is a battle of attrition more than anything. Even with great gear and genetically-modified Monsties, Ibushi and Narwa can (and probably will) still destroy your party.

Try to ride your Monstie whenever you can. If you get knocked off after a big attack, you won't lose any of your hearts. You can only use so many Vital Essences per battle, so keeping those hearts is crucial.

Narwa and Ibushi will constantly buff themselves and debuff your team during this battle. Make sure to remove your debuffs as soon as possible and hit the twin Elder Dragons with your own set of debuffs to reduce their strength. Malzeno's E. Dominance Egg Skill is your best bet here, so put that on your favorite Monstie via the Rite of Channeling.

During this fight, the two Elder Dragons will take turns on offense. One of them will have the Mind Connection status and focus on support while the other will be in the Thunder/Wind Mantle state and deal heavy damage. Focus on attacking the one with Thunder or Wind Mantle. They'll have more parts to break and give you more opportunities to deal Wyvernsoul damage.

Since these two Elder Dragons are so connected, dealing Wyvernsoul damage to one will also affect the other. Don't try to hit both of them with AOEs. Focus your attacks on a single target!

When Ibushi has Wind Mantle activated, it'll use red Power attacks. When Narwa has Thunder Mantle active, it'll use green Technical attacks. Both Elder Dragons use blue Speed attacks when using Mind Connection. They'll use a lot of AOEs, but make sure you're using the right color of attacks to win those Head-to-Heads.

Even with the perfect strategy, you can still end up wiping just because of an unlucky run. To maximize your chances of survival, bring armor and decorations with Divine Blessing, Anti 1-Hit KO, Tenacity, and other defensive buffs. Dodging attacks will make this fight much easier too, so Evasion Ability is a must-have for your Monsties.

Velkhana

• Recommended Level: 75
• Elemental Weakness: Fire, Dragon
• Elemental Resistance: Ice, Water
• Ailment Weakness: Burn, Poison, Blastblight
• Ailment Resistance: Paralysis, Sleep, Bleed

Monster Hunter World: Iceborne's flagship monster Velkhana is the fourth and final Calamitous Elder Dragon you can encounter in Monster Hunter Stories 3.

Ratha is actually the best all-around Monstie for this battle because of its ice resistance and solid fire attacks, but you can bring any fire Monstie as long as it's not super weak to ice. Make sure your chosen Monstie has an Ice Def Boost gene along with some genes that increase Kinship gains.

Velkhana begins the fight in a normal state and uses green Technical attacks. It'll protect itself with an Ice Mantle shortly after and start to use blue Speed attacks. Once the Ice Mantle is finished, Velkhana will cover itself with a Freezing Fog Mantle and use red Power attacks. Win those Head-to-Heads to reduce its Wyvernsoul gauge!

Velkhana can inflict you with a special status called Frostblight, which can be cured by winning Head-to-Heads or launching Double Attacks with your Monstie. If you ignore Frostblight, you'll get toppled and lose a turn.

Because Frostblight is a key mechanic for this fight and it can only be removed with Head-to-Heads or Double Attacks, Velkhana will spend a large portion of the battle using single-target attacks that you can counter for massive Wyvernsoul damage.

That's the key to victory here. Bring a hammer with skills that deal extra damage to monster parts and send your Monsties on Excursions to unlock Egg Powers like Battle Thirst that increase Head-to-Head effectiveness. You're basically trying to bully Velkhana into submission.

Velkhana also has quite a few AOE attacks in its arsenal, and its icy blasts can easily wipe your team if you're not careful. If you see Velkhana preparing for one of these AOE attacks, use a Kinship Skill to interrupt it. If your Kinship Gauge isn't full, boost your defense and hope for the best.

As long as you use the right attacks to win Head-to-Heads and bring gear that resists ice damage, you'll take Velkhana down in a few tries.

Capcom CEO Kenzo Tsujimoto says PC will soon surpass consoles as "the world's leading gaming platform", and that it is already driving most of the publisher's own game sales. The company's latest annual report features some truly world-class management speak about things like Capcom's "value creation strategy", more charts than you can shake a stick at, and a not-unjustified pride in the publisher's 12th straight year of growth.

"In the fiscal year ended March 31, 2025, Capcom achieved its 12th consecutive year of increased operating profit, 10th consecutive year of 10%-or-better operating profit growth, and 8th consecutive year of record highs across all profit indicators," reads the report.

One major takeaway from the results is that PC increasingly accounts for most of Capcom's game sales, continuing a trend that has seen the publisher increasingly prioritise PC versions of its marquee titles. Capcom's COO said in 2021 that PC is now the main platform for its games and, in 2024, the platform dominated its digital sales, making up around 60 percent in total.

For FY 2025 that ratio was slightly down, but sales overall were up, with PC accounting for "approximately" 50 percent of sales, with the report adding "we expect this ratio to continue increasing." Over the nine month period covered in the report, Capcom sold 19.1 million PC games. Notably this period does not include Resident Evil Requiem, which launched day one on Steam and has sold like hot cakes.

CEO Kenzo Tsujimoto chimes in under the heading "Strengthening our presence in the PC market," and says the following:

"I believe that the PC will further establish itself as the world’s leading gaming platform, which will serve to increase the value of the PC market. As mentioned above, the Group has been working on the PC platform from an early stage, but in addition to that, we will work to gain a deeper understanding of the characteristics and trends of the PC market and PC users, and bolster our game development and sales strategies with that in mind."

This follows on from the positive noises made in its recent financial report, and it definitely seems like the days when games like Monster Hunter World would take eight months to make it to Steam after console are long gone. Capcom in fact addressed Monster Hunter Wilds' PC performance issues, saying that "the technical expertise gained from addressing increasing program complexity and performance challenges in Monster Hunter Wilds will be applied to future title development."

The publisher has been slow with the fixes but, as PCG's Lincoln Carpenter noted, the most recent patch actually made a difference. The game's reviews now sit at "mostly positive" on Steam, after a period where they were decidedly mixed (and most of the negative ones were about the performance).

Finally, Tsujimoto says Capcom intends to "step up our investment in and utilization of movies. As a more familiar medium than games, movies serve as a means of conveying the worldview and appeal of our content. They also act as a gateway to our IP for people who have never played our games.

"Going forward, we will actively invest in the production of movies featuring our IP, and by having them viewed by audiences around the world, we hope to increase the visibility of our games and expand sales."

Which is not surprising: even the older Resident Evil movies were a billion dollar franchise, and later this year will see the release of a reboot from Weapons director Zach Cregger. But even the likes of Devil May Cry have benefitted from this strategy, with the Netflix series significantly boosting sales of DMC5.

Among the many debates surrounding Nvidia's DLSS 5 announcement is one about artist autonomy and creative freedom. Effectively, the question is 'do these tools hinder or contribute to artistic direction?', and developers are pretty mixed on that one, to put it lightly. Where the likes of Bethesda boss Todd Howard and Capcom executive Jun Takeuchi seem to be in support of it, many developers are anxious, disgusted, or even blindsided by it.

According to Insider Gaming, a Ubisoft developer said, “We found out at the same time as the public”.

It's not clear who this developer is, which department they work in, or how widespread that secrecy is at Ubisoft, but Assassin's Creed Shadows was one of the games used to showcase DLSS 5 during its reveal earlier this week.

As well as Ubisoft, developers at Capcom reportedly told Insider Gaming they were shocked by the announcement, as Capcom had historically been "anti-AI". Resident Evil Requiem's shot of Grace Ashcroft is among the most highly criticised from the DLSS 5 reveal, with our own Tyler Wilde arguing it 'clearly overwrites game characters with AI beauty standards.'

Jensen Huang has said devs have 'artistic control' and Bethesda argued the same, though with mega corporations getting access to these tools, it begs the question 'who really gets to decide if developers use DLSS 5?'

A company as large as Ubisoft couldn't possibly tell all its artists, designers, and producers of the DLSS 5 announcement without a lot of paperwork and likely NDAs to go with it. So, would it check whether individual developers are comfortable with generative AI tools like DLSS 5 before implementation for the public?

Still, it's worth noting that DLSS 5 won't launch until later this year, and the demo shown this week likely won't be the final product. DLSS 5 seems to offer the ability to toggle and customise the strength of its AI generation to some degree, and that's before noting that generative AI imagery has vastly improved over the last few years in terms of technical quality.

Generative AI has been criticised not only for its quality but for its ethics, and that's a debate sitting near the core of this announcement. There are concerns about both the work models used to train and how their output is used. If executives believe there's more money to be made in generative AI assets than handmade ones, what's to stop them from employing fewer real artists?

DLSS 5 is not intended to add new textures, but the underlying philosophy of making existing textures more photorealistic is a concern for many developers. At the very least, the devs might have taken the news better if they knew ahead of time.

Resident Evil Requiem may be a brilliant game, but it brought some awful news for Leon S. Kennedy's army of thirsty fans. In several of Requiem's cutscenes you can see what looks like a wedding ring on his finger, and unlockable concept art makes it crystal clear: everyone's favourite horror dilf has tied the knot.

Dry those eyes ladies. We don't know Leon's sexuality for sure, but given his mad flirting with Ada over multiple games it seems reasonable to assume he's heterosexual, and so the fan theories largely fall into one of two camps: it's either Ada Wong, or his Resident Evil 2 co-star Claire Redfield. Naturally it could also be some random civvy we've never met, or even Chris Redfield, but Ada and Claire seem the most obvious options.

While most would be happy to leave it at that, not so Eurogamer, who asked Capcom to clarify who put a ring on Mr. Kennedy's finger. Amazingly enough, no less than Resident Evil Requiem director Koshi Nakanishi stepped in to… well, not give an answer, but go on a bit of a love-bombing spree himself.

"The answer will become clear some day, but not just yet. What we wanted to convey in the final scene is simple: Leon now has a 'place to go home to', and we hope you can imagine the peaceful moments he spends there," said Nakanishi.

"Leon is a man who says very little about the things that truly matter, but he would sacrifice himself without a second thought to save a life right in front of him. So what does his ring signify? Resolve? Or a vow?"

Erm… could it just signify he met the right woman and settled down? And while this was never really in any doubt, Nakanishi is also confirming that the 'good' ending for Requiem is canon. I'll avoid outright spoilers but Requiem has two endings, and they go very different ways for our boy. As for whether the ring represents resolve or a vow…

"He may never voice the answer himself," says Nakanishi. "But for now, after finishing a long battle, he has a 'place to go home to'. Isn't that enough?"

Not for some in the PC Gamer office it isn't: but it'll have to do for now. Perhaps we'll get some firmer answers in the upcoming story expansion, though it will apparently "take some time" before we see it (Mercenaries mode, please). There will be no shortage of takers: earlier this week Capcom announced Requiem has sold over six million copies: "the fastest that a title in the series has reached this milestone."

There are just some things that lend themselves to being great villains. There's snakes and Brits (aren't they the same thing, aha!) but there's also been the long-used theme of an artificial intelligence that gains sentience and then immediately realises that humans suck, and so tries to do away with us all.

We've had infamous cases like HAL-9000 from 2001: A Space Odyssey or AUTO from WALL-E in movies, or GLaDOS and SHODAN in videogames. There's certainly a lot of examples as to why humans probably shouldn't be racing to perfect the next thing that'll probably dislike us.

But now we have another game to add to the list, Pragmata. You see, in Capcom's newest series, the big bad is none other than an AI, specifically an AI program called IDUS. This is what has taken over the moonbase where protagonists Hugh and Diana find themselves stuck. It doesn't seem like the AI particularly hates them, it's just reacting like a white blood cell would to a foreign body.

It's also important to note that Pragmata's antagonist wasn't inspired by what we're experiencing today, at least not intentionally. "The time that the game's concept was originally being created, we're talking back in like 2020, or so, it hadn't quite reached the heights that it has right now, of the sort of the AI revolution," director Cho Yonghee tells me. "And how much we're seeing in the news as a force for both good and bad.

"We took a different approach that in this game, there is the the AI Nemesis that's part of the background of the storyline and the problem you're trying to overcome, but also the presence of an AI character like Diana, who is not only helpful, but is also able to teach you certain things from her perspective that maybe Hugh doesn't have from his perspective as a human character."

Hugh Williams, the guy in the high tech suit and the primary protagonist, is a human, but he's joined by Diana, an android AI that looks like a little human girl but can hack robots, destroy crystals, and is the key to getting around the moon base. Together they make a very fun and lethal team who work together to overcome the evil AI.

"It really just illustrates that this kind of technology or tool is something that can be used for good and bad purposes," Yonghee adds. "Within this story context, you'll see how the relationship with AI that Hugh has takes on different forms, whether it be the AI itself and how it's trying to take over, versus the naivety of Diana and how she learns to cooperate with a human being.

"In a way, she sort of grows up into a more human-like presence. And those themes are something that, as I said, we were thinking about them quite a while before they became so such a daily concern in this day and age. But perhaps that shows how they're eternal themes as well."

Zach Cregger (of Barbarian and Weapons fame) is currently helming the next Resident Evil film which is planned to release later this year. He's already admitted that it won't intersect with any of the games and that it also likely won't resemble any past films, mainly because he's not watched any of them. But even still I'm nervously confident that he could be cooking.

Cregger has made no secret that he's a fan of Resident Evil, having put in "thousands and thousands of hours" into various games in the series. But now we know he's been keeping up with everything Resi as he's revealed that he's not just finished Resident Evil Requiem once, but he's done so twice (via GamesRadar). Good going.

"I fulfilled a lifelong dream of meeting the whitest kid I know, Zach Cregger and talked to him about Resident Evil Requiem (he said he beat it twice already)," Deadline writer Destiny Jackson said in a social media post.

I completed Requiem in just over 10 hours, and my second playthrough clocked in at over seven hours (although that wasn't helped by me trying to complete the final puzzle) so completing Requiem twice already is certainly doable. But that's still a considerable amount of time to dedicate to a game, especially as Cregger seems like a busy guy, what with the upcoming film and all.

While Cregger has clearly put time into the Resi games, he hasn't managed to complete all of them. Apparently Resident Evil Village was just too scary for him to get all the way to the end: "He said the scariest one is RE8, he noped out." If he found RE8 scary I'd hate to introduce him to RE7, that's for sure.

I'm just happy to have a director of Cregger's pedigree who is also clearly such a fan of the series take a crack at a Resident Evil film. I'll watch it regardless of what the reviews are like and honestly I'll probably enjoy it even if it turns out to be Resident Evil: Afterlife 2.0.

Remember what it was like to come back from school, no worries, no responsibilities, and just get on your Xbox 360 or PS4 and play the night away with friends, good times. Well Pragamata isn't even fully out yet and players are already saying it has some of that same magic of old.

"We have seen a lot of those types of comments saying that, you know, in a good way, it feels like an old school game," director Cho Yonghee tells me. "That's something that we're actually really pleased with."

Players have cottoned onto Pragmata having this old school vibe mainly thanks to its shtick of being a shooter with something extra added on, in this case hacking. Before Hugh can properly damage enemies with his weapons, you need to utilise your companion Diana's skills to hack enemies. Depending on what you have in your arsenal, you can inflict various debuffs against said enemies which makes them easier to kill.

"Personally, I'm someone who's got a lot of happy experiences and memories from that generation," Yonghee continues. "There were a lot of really unique and interesting games that came out back in the Xbox 360 or PS4 generation. And I think if people are feeling that we have something of that magic in the game, that's definitely a positive thing. So it's very good feedback to hear."

Pragmata's premise isn't exactly groundbreaking. You're trapped on a moon base alongside an android child and the both of you have to work together to defeat the evil AI which has taken control of the base to get a message out and reach freedom. But even so, the addition of hacking makes the combat avoid feeling like your bog standard third person shooter loop that you could find in any other game.

I also have a weakness for sci-fi dystopia, so exploring the abandoned (and slightly topsy-turvy) moon base was great fun. Because many areas have been destroyed or strangely altered by the AI, there's a lot of interesting traversal and platforming to be had while getting from one area to the next. Whether that be jumping onto bridges that emerge from thin air or dashing through lasers to get to a hidden item box mid-fight.

"Ultimately, as producer and as a team, we want to have a satisfying gameplay experience at the end of all this design process," producer Naoto Oyama adds. "So, we will start off with things like say that the core concept and the visuals, and we'll develop the characters from there, but then we obviously look back and we will think, Okay, well, how does the characters we created tie into the gameplay, and how does the gameplay affect how we're going to depict the characters?

"It's an ongoing process that takes a few cycles for us to kind of flesh out exactly what experience we want, but we hope that it feels cohesive at the end. Regardless of where we started, in the end, the experience you have feels like it was very intentional, and that you get that sense of authorship of this story we're telling."

When I joined PC Gamer, my life changed significantly. I set fire to my PS5 and took an axe to my Switch, but one thing I couldn't bear to get rid of were all of my controllers. I don't often use them while playing on PC, but they sure do come in handy from time to time.

There are a few games where playing on a controller is a must for me: any FromSoft or Resident Evil game, cosy games like Cult of the Lamb, and even the odd deckbuilder like Bloodletter. I just find it to be more comfortable and intuitive, and now, after playing the preview and the demo, Pragmata has joined those ranks.

"We put work into the control scheme on both types of systems," director Cho Yonghee tells me. "So whether it be the button, the key assignments for the keyboard itself, and the speed and sensitivity of the mouse and how that relates to the hacking controls, we've tried to make sure that it works as effectively as possible."

Like I said in my Pragmata preview, the hacking element of this game, while very fun, feels infinitely more pleasant on a controller. Using the D-pad instead of holding down your side mouse button and moving your cursor across the screen is just faster and restricts your movement less. It's certainly the most obvious divide between controller and keeb I've come across in a while.

"They are undeniably quite different experiences between keyboard and mouse and controller," Yonghee continues. "I think that's true for a lot of games, but particularly so in this case. If it's possible for people to compare, I'd encourage them to do so. For example, if you're able to play through the demo on a controller and then go through it again with a keyboard and mouse, I think you can find which one you prefer, and it is something of a personal preference."

The free Pragmata sketchbook demo is still available, so if you're gearing up for Pragmata's release I'd highly recommend checking it out. Not only does it act like a tutorial and shows you how to do all the basics like shooting, hacking, and using your side arms/abilities, it's only about 20 minutes long so you can easily play it a couple of times on keeb or controller to figure out which one you prefer.

"There are some people who find keyboard and mouse too tricky," Yonghee says. "There are others who definitely prefer it, and that goes for us on the team as well. My son, in particular, prefers keyboard and mouse hands down. So I think it's a bit of a personal choice, but we've tried to make sure that whichever one is your preference, that we've done our best to optimize the controls so that you get a great experience either way."

Playing on mouse and keyboard certainly wasn't a deal breaker for me, and I doubt anyone will find it so bad it puts them off the game, but it's certainly worth a thought. Especially as Pragmata's hacking is integral to not only the fights but also getting around the map as you use it to unlock doors and access terminals. Just do what works best for you, and you'll quickly get the knack for ripping apart AI-controlled robots.

If I had a nickel for every videogame set in an extraterrestrial location or protagonist who is forced to look after a child NPC, but then slowly comes to rely on them practically and emotionally as both parties form a sort of impromptu kinship with one another I'd have so many nickels I'd probably be able to stop writing about all of them. In walks Pragmata to weigh down my pockets even further.

Pragmata is Capcom's newest game. With no prior series to weigh it down, it's the publisher's chance for a fresh take. While it doesn't have a particularly new setting or character dynamic going for it, it still managed to grab my attention during my hands-on preview, and it's all thanks to its combat.

On the surface Pragmata can seem like your bog standard third person shooter. The main protagonist Hugh is a human kitted out in a high-tech suit with a futuristic gun alongside other sci-fi weapons. But there's a twist. Before you can start dealing any real damage to the AI-controlled robot enemies, you need to utilise the skills of your android companion Diana to hack them into submission.

"The mechanics came first," director Cho Yonghee tells me. "The original concept was, we're going to make a science fiction shooter, but we want to add something extra, something new you haven't seen before, on top of that basic concept. And so the idea of combining hacking mechanics with third person shooting was where we got started."

I played the preview on controller and the demo on mouse and keyboard. Hacking and shooting during combat using a controller is incredibly intuitive. It doesn't feel like just some needless addon. The hacking is more of an extra step in a fight rather than an interruption to it, adding another layer for players to master. However, I found this slightly more finicky on a mouse and keyboard.

Once you focus in on an enemy, a grid comes up which you can navigate either using the D-pad, or by holding down the side mouse button and then just using your mouse. You then select different squares, some of which have special hacking power ups in them, guiding your cursor to the end point on the grid. Once you hit that end point, the hack is complete and you'll start doing huge amounts of damage, killing enemies in a fraction of the time.

I picked hacking up way quicker with a D-pad as you just press whatever button for the direction you want to go in (triangle for up, circle for right and so on). Mouse and keyboard were slightly more difficult, mainly because after pressing the side mouse button and dragging your mouse over the squares I wanted, I'd encounter an unwelcome flick as I transitioned from directing the hacking to directing my point of view.

You're also not able to move your point of view as freely when hacking with a mouse and keyboard which restricts your movement a little bit. It wasn't enough to make me completely fall out of love with hacking, but it is something to keep in mind if you're wondering what to play Pragmata with.

"It was a long process balancing the two elements," Yonghee says. "We have had times during development where actually hacking was even more essential than it is right now. And we've had times where we were more focused on the shooting and hacking felt like a sort of an optional element. We really worked hard on considering what proportion or what frequency of hacking moments within any given action scene or combat sequence was just right.

"We don't want it to be so optional that you just don't bother and you continue shooting, because you can get on without it. But at the same time if it becomes a lot of work and you're forced to do it before you can get to the good bit of the shooting, and then it just becomes a kind of a grind element, that becomes frustrating for players.

"As you can imagine, finding the sweet spot has been one of the main focuses in development. We want there to be a kind of pleasure in mastering this for players, and then they'll feel like it makes absolute sense as a game design element, and doesn't feel like it's been bolted on to a shooter as an afterthought."

I hacked enemies every chance I got. I found it to be a fun way to inflict some damage and a great way to run through lower level enemies without spending too much ammo. Without the hacking Pragmata's action would fall short for me as it would simply be a bog standard third-person shooter. But with the addition of hacking it feels like a shooter of old that has an interesting twist that isn't just necessary but also a joy to use.

Besides the average humanoid robots called Walkers and flying drone-like robots called Watchers there's also something called a Crusher, a huge orb robot that smashes its body into the ground to kill you, a Sector Guard which is like a tank on legs, and a huge beast of a Kaiju that I had to fight right at the end of the preview. You won't take these down quite as fast as smaller enemies, but in cases like these hacking really is the only way to make a dent, at least before a permanent dent is made in you.

You'll need to utilise absolutely everything in your arsenal for these all-out fights. Hacking, primary fire, and all your sidearms. Like the Statis Net which electrocutes enemies within a small radius, and the Charge Piecer, that shoots out a big energy beam, both of which are an absolute must for bigger fights. But character and ability upgrades are also a big part of Pragmata, meaning you can prioritise whatever works for you.

"That balance that we've just discussed, it's not something that's set in stone, because you're able to upgrade your character and your abilities throughout the game," producer Naoto Oyama adds. "You're able to bring hacking as something that helps you defeat enemies or get through these sequences more effectively, but as you start to upgrade your character and their abilities, I think the player has an ability to somewhat customise that balance.

"So if you want to go all in on the more shooter elements and upgrade those parts of your character and focus more on shooting with hacking as a nice side to have, then that's something that players can push towards that direction. Whereas others might focus on having the hacking become more effective and decide that they're going to fall on that side of the line. So it's a balance that you get to help decide as you progress through the game."

But hacking isn't just confined to fights, it also comes in handy when just getting around the map. Opening doors, activating beacons, destroying weird shiny rocks that block your path are all done via Diana's android functions, meaning she's not just put to one side and forgotten between the action.

In case it's not clear yet, I don't think I would've found Pragmata quite as interesting or as fun if it weren't for the hacking. While I'm not sure how long the novelty will last in the full game, the snippet I played was enough to convince me that it's certainly a game worth trying. If only to see what other interesting mechanics the devs could have up their sleeves.