Original Story: Bandai Namco has revealed that the Switch 2 "Tarnished Edition" of Elden Ring will finally launch on August 28. But who cares about that⁠—the company's press release also confirmed that the Tarnished Edition's new goodies will also be coming to the PC version on the same day.

The Tarnished Edition was initially supposed to be a launch game for the Switch 2, but amid reports of booboo performance at preview events, it was unceremoniously booted into 2026 with no firm launch window. No skin off my back, but the delay took the Tarnished Edition patch on other platforms with it.

And there's some juicy stuff in there, like two new starting classes: The big boy Heavy Knight and the dexlord Knight of Ides. The former is an Iron Tarkus-looking lad with new armor and a new weapon, a never-before-seen curved greatsword, but paradoxically, he doesn't have a shield. Heavy Knight had the community in a tizzy with an early peek at his strength build-centric, powergaming-friendly stat spread.

I'm more excited about the Knight of Ides, though, who starts the game with some badass-looking armor and the killer M'lady light greatsword, a standout weapon from the Shadow of the Erdtree expansion that previously took dozens of hours to acquire. I've been holding off on a new playthrough so I could rock with the Knight of Ides.

The Tarnished Edition will also come with other new weapons and armor, like Lucatiel of Mirrah's set from Dark Souls 2, and I've got my fingers crossed that FromSoft has been holding some surprises in reserve.

The face of Ace Combat, Kazutoki Kono, has been working on the game series for a very long time. One of his earliest game credits is 1997's Ace Combat 2 for the PlayStation—he's worked his way up to the role of series brand director from his initial contributions to that game as part of the art team, making textures and bits of the UI. And yet in all that time, across the development of almost a dozen games about doing Top Gun-style stunts in machines that represent the pinnacle of human engineering, he's never once gotten to fly in one himself.

"Unfortunately over the last 30 years of my career I've been appealing, saying 'hey, we want to ride in one of these jets!' but we have not yet had the chance," Kono said in an interview with PC Gamer. "Neither myself, or anyone on the team."

Heartbreaking! How much could it cost to rent a decommissioned fighter jet for a weekend, anyway? Heck, it seems like you can buy a perfectly good one for five million bucks. Bandai Namco probably makes that much on Gunpla model sales every day. Put some of that money to work.

While the game publisher might prefer to avoid cozying up to the military to make their game a la the producers of Top Gun: Maverick, surely there's a way to let Ace Combat's developers experience the majesty of supersonic flight they've been doing their best to capture for all these years. I can't help but imagine Kono having his own Ford v Ferrari moment, where the CEO goes for a test drive and begins spontaneously weeping from the adrenaline. I'm sure I'd pass out before the jet pilot did a single barrel roll, but those first, like, 45 seconds would be amazing.

For Ace Combat 8, the developers have attempted to better convey the feeling of piloting a jet at more than 1,200 miles per hour. "Sound design was a huge part of Ace Combat 8—that oomph when you're crossing the sound barrier is something we pay a lot of attention to," he said. But to determine the difference in feel from one jet to another, the team is drawing on publicly available data like weight and thrust, rather than personal experience.

The Ace Combat team have, at least, gotten up close with some real aircraft, even if they haven't been able to take them for a ride. "We did have the opportunity to sit in the cockpit, so in my mind I was thinking 'all I have to do is push this lever and we're off,'" Kono said.

When I suggested that perhaps very, very good sales of Ace Combat 8 could convince Bandai Namco to buy the Ace Combat studio a jet for research purposes, he deadpanned an alternative idea:

"Well, maybe not for Bandai, but if they buy it for me, it could be my private jet."

Honestly, I can think of far worse wastes of money.

In a blink-and-you'd-miss-it announcement at Sony's State of Play on Tuesday, a game about Norse mythology—not the new God of War—slipped in between the louder and longer trailers for third-person action games. That game was Ace Combat Zero. It is 20 years old, and later this year it will be only the third game in the long-running series to arrive on PC.

Bandai Namco is offering up a port of Ace Combat Zero as a pre-order incentive for folks who splurge on the deluxe edition of Ace Combat 8: Wings of Theve, which is out on both PS5 and Steam on October 1. It was originally a PS2 game, and has never gotten any sort of HD remaster treatment, let alone a PC release. Presumably it'll also be available for sale separately from the pack-in giveaway alongside AC8, and despite its age it may actually be the Ace Combat I'm more excited to play.

Ace Combat Zero sounds cool as hell.

It's got the usual drama and dogfighting that had become staples of the series by that point, nine years in, but it's the Norse mythology and some new underlying systems that make the game stand out in hindsight. Depending on your actions during a mission—basically how many defenseless targets you blow up—you'll earn a reputation as a Mercenary, Soldier, or Knight, which then affects which factions you'll face off against.

Meanwhile, your squadron's name, characters and vehicles pull from Norse mythology and you're duking it out with rival pilots over a chunk of the land nicknamed The Round Table, and the whole game apparently culminates in a 1-on-1 jousting match. It's even more Arthurian themed than it is Nordic, using both mythologies to add a fantastical grandeur to its conflicts.

Ridiculous! I have no notes.

The reputation system brings to mind the other AC, Armored Core, in which the missions you take on as a mercenary in some of the games determine which evil future megacorps thrive and which ones want to see you ground to dust. But what Armored Core doesn't have is flamenco guitar.

Ace Combat Zero doesn't have its own entry on Steam yet, but presumably will be available alongside, or before, Ace Combat 8. The deluxe edition pre-order also lets you jump into one of those annoying early access periods to play AC8 on September 29. You'll be paying $90 for the privilege—a mark-up I would normally say isn't remotely worth it—but getting Zero for free certainly sweetens the deal.

After long-time Tekken boss Katsuhiro Harada departed Bandai Namco last year—having now started up his own studio under SNK—the game director behind the last two entries is now following in his footsteps.

Kohei "Nakatsu" Ikeda has been with the developer for 20 years, first joining the team behind Soulcalibur 4 before eventually becoming the game director for both Tekken 7 and Tekken 8. Nakatsu announced his departure with a lengthy message over on his X account. "Sharing excitement, celebrating together, and spending unforgettable moments with you all became one of the greatest treasures of my life," he said.

"There were joyful moments, and many difficult ones as well. There were times when we celebrated together, and times when I received passionate criticism and encouragement. Yet every one of those moments helped push both myself and the Tekken Project forward."

It seems as though Nakatsu doesn't intend to exit the industry entirely, ending his message with: "As I look forward to the future of Tekken and the FGC, I will also continue taking on new challenges as a game developer. I hope our paths cross again someday."

His departure continues to whittle down Tekken's top brass—producer Michael Murray remains as one of the most visible faces of the series, along with director Yasuki Nakabayashi. Though I certainly wouldn't be surprised if, a few months from now, Murray also walks away from the company.

It's a real shame to see both Nakatsu and Harada's absence for a game that has been so shaped by both of them. I'm sure that Tekken 8 hasn't been an easy game for either of them—bombshell microtransactions that only emerged weeks after launch with no prior notice and caused a huge upset. A near-universally panned second season which plagued the game for an entire year as fans lamented a further push into an already-criticsed aggressive playstyle. Season 3 got off on an equally bad foot after it felt like Bamco wasn't holding up its "back to basics" promise, but recent patches have begun to turn the tides back in the game's favour.

Whether Tekken 8's rocky first years influenced Nakatsu and Harada's decisions to skedaddle or if it's all coincidence, it's understandably causing a little concern for Tekken's future regardless. Seeing two of its biggest figures gone feels like the end of an era. Fresh faces could end up being exactly what the fighter needs, but for now? It's a bit of a bummer.

Katsuhiro Harada may have departed Bandai Namco at the end of 2025—it seems, unfortunately, in favour of opening up a Saudi-funded studio of his own—but he can't shake his 30-year history with Tekken that easily.

During a visit to Atlanta for an appearance at Momocon, Harada made sure to stop by and document his visit to one very important place: Waffle House.

But what the hell has Tekken got to do with Waffle House, I hear you ask? It's been a bit of a running gag in the community at this point, with fans asking Harada over the years to turn the American establishment into a stage for the fighting game. Presumably due to all of the fights that seem to occur in them, a phenomenon that is beyond my understanding as a Waffle House-less Brit. I have to assume it's the equivalent of people scrapping outside a Wetherspoons on a Friday night after one too many two-for-£12 pitchers.

Harada questioned what all the hoo-ha about Waffle House was back in 2024, asking: "Why do some communities send me requests for 'Waffle House'? Please be sure to explain the basis for the request, including the original story, history, and background. I look forward to an explanation from someone who knows more."

A year later Harada then revealed that he'd been trying to get in touch with Waffle House about a potential collaboration, seemingly to no avail. "I've actually tried to make contact through several different channels," he posted to X in May last year. "However, and this is purely my own speculation, I suspect that the lack of response may be due to the fact that the project I am known for revolves around 'fighting-themed video games,'" adding that getting no response was "very rare."

And thankfully, it seems the joke has not died with his departure from the game. "I finally made it to WAFFLE HOUSE," Harada declared on X over the weekend. "The staff are always friendly, and when I asked if they would sell me a menu, they sold me one for $5. Next time, I'll be back at 3 a.m. for fight time."

Harada was kind enough to provide some visual evidence in the form of his classic pose outside the Waffle House, a picture of the food, and one where Harada is wielding a chair as a weapon. I approve.

While I suspect we won't be seeing any Waffle House-adjacent stages appearing in Tekken or whatever Harada is cooking up over at his brand-new VS Studio—apparently during his Momocon panel he once again iterated that he attempted to call their PR apartment but received no answer—I appreciate the little ways he's continuing to stay active in the community he spent so many years being a part of.

A live action Elden Ring movie is in the works, as you may have heard, and as is sometimes the way with these things, it's been a little leaky: Not the whole damned game went out two days early kind of leaky, but rather in the form of behind-the-scenes bits and snippets we're not supposed to see. The latest purported leak comes to us from the nation of Wales, where a clip of an old castle watched over by vaguely creepy soldiers conjures thoughts of, as the caption puts it, "Stormveil IRL."

I say this is "purportedly" Elden Ring because it's not nearly as obvious about it as previous leaks. This one, from April, very clearly features a church of Marika, and this one from later the same month, well, that's definitely the Loathsome Dung Eater.

This new video, shared on Tiktok by mightbeliber (via Culture Crave on X), is more generic: That's definitely an old castle, and those sentries do look an awrul lot like guys I butchered in large numbers in Elden Ring. But nothing about it definitively points to Elden Ring, aside from mightbeliber saying so: Based on the video alone, this could be a reboot of The Lion in Winter for all I can tell.

But that's not all we have to go on. In April, North Wales Pioneer reported on the planned closure of Conwy Castle in order to accommodate filming on a project that the site said "could be linked with Alex Garland," the writer and director of the Elden Ring film. Garland also served briefly as a director of London-based company Katana Films, which sent letters to residents impacted by the closure of the castle and nearby facilities.

So despite the absence of clear and obvious proof (obvious enough for me to pick up on, at least), I would definitely call it a very good bet that Conway Castle here is going to be an Elden Ring castle in a couple years—although specifically which castle remains an open question that is of course the subject of debate in the comments.

As for the real castle in question, Conwy Castle was built between 1283 and 1287 by Edward I during his conquest of Wales; it stood for centuries through multiple wars, until its ruination in 1665. Today it's classed as a World Heritage Site, recognized by UNESCO as one of "the finest examples of late 13th century and early 14th century military architecture in Europe, as demonstrated through their completeness, pristine state, evidence for organized domestic space, and extraordinary repertory of their medieval architectural form."

The Elden Ring film is slated to hit the big screen in 2028. I assume they'll fix the services truck, phone booth, and drone in post.

Japanese fans of the mega-franchise Love Live!, which spans anime, manga, live performances, and games, recently spotted that the domain for the official fan club of Aqours expired and is now up at auction. Top bid? 97.14 billion yen, or $615 million dollars to you, sir.

There are various iterations of Love Live!, all of them being either Jpop groups or solo idols, but Aquors is arguably the most wide-ranging and successful, with over a decade's worth of games, several anime seasons, and live performances. The official Aquors fan club was shuttered in June 2025, which probably explains the timing of this, and fans are fuming that Bandai Namco has let the registration lapse in this manner.

After the shutdown last year, the Aqours Club domain—lovelive-aqoursclub.jp—switched from its previous form to display a fairly standard "thank you and goodbye" message to any visitors. As of May 1 2026, however, that's changed to an auction for the domain hosted by Japanese registration service Onamae. The auction ends on May 27, and obviously is being gamed: either it's Love Live fans making a point, which seems the more likely explanation, or trolls having a laugh.

The main cause of consternation among fans seems to be that a once-official domain being acquired by a third party opens up the brand and fans to malicious behaviour: this may seem pie-in-the-sky, but the domain currently remains linked across many other official Love Live! sites, including the main one.

Japanese news outlet ITmedia writes (thanks, Automaton): "If the domain falls into the hands of a third party, there is a risk that phishing sites mimicking the official fan club could be created. Since the domain is identical to the genuine one, it cannot be ruled out that such sites could bypass browser security features or cause password management tools to automatically fill in usernames and passwords.”

The Aqours fan club ran alongside the second season of the anime focusing on this particular version of the group, and was tied-in to various pieces of merch and games around it: the old "buy a CD and enter this code for a year's free membership" kinda thing.

But I did promise you furious fans. "Is Bandai Namco stupid or what?" asks AkiraReynir (via machine translation). "A fool who discards the domain less than a year after ending service! They've apparently already forgotten that their brand domain got hijacked before, and that there was a series collab on onamae.com. Beyond saving."

Eesh! The Japan DNS Operators Group has previously made calls for "end-of-life planning" when it comes to such sites: "When discontinuing a domain, it is recommended to put it into dormancy, perform reverse SEO measures such as requesting removal from search engines and backlink sites, and removing content from archive sites, and only make a decision [about abandoning the URL] after the number of DNS queries falls below a predetermined 'threshold.'"

Well, that clearly hasn't happened here: though I somehow doubt Onamae are getting their $615 million. But it does prove at least, as PCG's Jessica Kinghorn put it, that Love Live fans are "simply something else."

Since the series' 30th anniversary celebrations last year, Bandai Namco has been doling out remasters of the Tales Of games at a steady clip. Last year Tales of Graces f and Tales of Xillia both got the remaster treatment, and in February we got Tales of Berseria.

The first two were welcome: both were PlayStation 3 exclusives and hadn't been released for other platforms (unless you count Tales of Graces, which released for Wii). By comparison Tales of Berseria felt a little unnecessary: the non-remastered version looked fine, both on consoles and PC.

Thankfully, it looks like Bandai Namco is going back to rescuing entries from antiquated platforms. According to a recent PEGI listing, Tales of Eternia Remastered is the next cab off the rank.

Originally released in Japan in 2000, Tales of Eternia was released as Tales of Destiny 2 in the United States (which isn't to be mistaken for the Japan-only Tales of Destiny 2—an entirely different game!). Like its predecessor Tales of Destiny, Eternia is a 2D pixel art JRPG, which was pretty unusual for a PlayStation exclusive in those 3D-crazed times. It was popular enough in Japan to warrant a PSP port which was also released in Europe and Australia.

I'm slightly surprised this one is getting remastered ahead of other possible contenders, chiefly Tales Of Xillia 2, since its predecessor has escaped PS3 limbo. Surprised, but not disappointed: I'm no big fan of the series but I love to see older platform exclusives made available again.

No word yet on when Tales of Eternia Remastered will release, and currently the PEGI website only lists Nintendo Switch as a platform, but it's highly unlikely to be an exclusive.

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.

2028 is shaping up to be a big year for movies based on videogames. Just days after Activision and Paramount revealed that the Call of Duty film they're working on is set to debut in June 2028, Bandai Namco and A24 have announced that the Elden Ring film will hit screens on March 3 of the same year.

The release date news comes alongside the reveal of the full Elden Ring film cast, and it's... stacked-ish? There are some names in it I recognize, anyway.

• Kit Connor (Warfare, Heartstopper)
• Ben Whishaw (Skyfall, Paddington)
• Cailee Spaeny (Alien: Romulus, Civil War)
• Tom Burke (Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, Black Bag)
• Havana Rose Liu (Bottoms)
• Sonoya Mizuno (Ex Machina)
• Jonathan Pryce (The Two Popes)
• Ruby Cruz (Willow, Bottoms)
• Nick Offerman (The Last of Us)
• John Hodgkinson
• Jefferson Hall
• Emma Laird
• Peter Serafinowicz

I'm not really a movie guy (more of a movie theme song guy, really) so we're not going to go too deep here, but Nick Offerman obviously leaps out: I still see him pretty much exclusively as Ron Swanson from Parks and Recreation, but he's done some amazing work since then, including an Emmy award-winning turn in The Last of Us.

The presence of Peter Serafinowicz, who for some reason ended up playing Darth Maul in The Phantom Menace, is also great: He's known for being tremendously funny, deeply weird, and unexpectedly menacing, sometimes in various combinations of the three, which would seem to make him a great fit for an Elden Ring weirdo.

And of course Jonathan Pryce is a legendary actor who messed up Stellan Skarsgård real bad in Ronin. (He's done a lot of other stuff too but Ronin is really great, so I'm sneaking a mention.) I'm sure everyone else in the cast is very good, too.

Despite not being a big film buff, I'm genuinely eager to check out the Elden Ring movie, or at least to make someone else on the team watch it and hear what they think. Because as someone who loved Elden Ring and played the absolute hell out of it, I had absolutely no idea what was going on throughout the experience, nor what it all added up to when it was over. A divine world brought to ruin by the hubris of the gods something something, I guess?

But in terms of coherent story—the sort of thing a game can live without, but a film absolutely cannot—I stand by my long-held position that Elden Ring is maybe the purest expression of sound and fury signifying nothing. Which I don't mean as a negative, just that it's way past time we all acknowledge that this guy was right:

For the record, that's why I'm not even going to try guessing about who's playing what (the announcement doesn't say), but I'll tell you this much: If I only watch one videogame-based movie in 2028, based on the candidates I've seen so far it's going to be this one. The announcement says production on the Elden Ring film "begins in spring 2026."

Tekken 8 didn't have a very good year in 2025, and it's with a heavy heart that I must report that it certainly doesn't look like matters have improved any. Back in February, our resident fighting game expert Mollie Taylor wrote: "I'm genuinely excited to see what direction Tekken 8 is going to take with its third season, while also desperately hoping that we're not staring down the barrel of another Season 2 misstep."

Unfortunately, it now looks like we were in fact staring down the barrel of another Season 2 misstep. Just taking a look at responses to the Season 3 balance patch notes on the game's subreddit reveals an avalanche of complaints from players who feel like Bandai Namco hasn't done diddly squat to smooth things out:

"I didn’t think it was possible to release another garbage patch after all the feedback they received and the time they had to make things right. Somebody give me my 'I fell for it again reward'," writes one player.

"It might genuinely be over. I cannot fathom how they spent a whole season with no balance patches only to come out with this garbage f*cking thing," adds another.

Steam reviews tell a similar story, with just 24% of reviews in the past 30 days being positive—leading to a recent "Mostly Negative" rating and an overall "Mixed" rating on the platform.

The negativity's so fierce, in fact, that Bandai Namco's gone ahead and issued both an apology and a promise to do better, again, per a news post on the game's official site: "We recognize that the battle experience we intended to deliver has not fully met your expectations.

"Moving forward," says the developer, "we will continue to pursue a battle experience where offense and defense are balanced around the Heat system, allowing players to engage in meaningful mind games and decision-making against their opponents."

Though the promised timeline seems a little long, given the air I get from players who clearly want an overhaul. An emergency patch is imminent to fix "critical bugs and unintended behaviors". Any major balance tuning, though, will have to wait until mid-April or even late spring:

"Fixes that can be addressed in the short term will be implemented sequentially, while changes with significant impact will be introduced step by step through each update after sufficient verification."

It might just be a case of underpromising and (hoping to) over-deliver, but given the doom and gloom I've seen from even just a cursory glance, I'm not sure this post'd fill anyone with confidence. The phrase "balanced around the Heat system" particularly seems out of touch, given how controversial it's been—Mollie called it "one of the game's most dividing new mechanics"—and might be read as doubling down instead of admitting fault. Either way, things aren't looking good.

Tekken 8's second season has not been the most successful for Bandai Namco. The promise of a stronger emphasis on defensive play somehow manifested itself as even more offense and aggression, and has left a good chunk of players begging since last April for something to change.

Well, now that the 2025 Tekken World Tour has finally wrapped up, it looks like Bamco is ready to put the wheels in motion. During the TWT Finals over the weekend, we were treated to a trailer for Season 3 which seemed desperate to tell us one thing: Tekken 8 is going back to basics, promise.

It literally says that in the trailer, too: Season 3 goes back to basics. Refined balance. More conventional. More focused. More deliberate. A fresh start. It's a lot more straightforward and communicative than Season 2, which is certainly a good place to start. It's also exactly the kind of stuff players have been wanting to hear for the best part of a year. Hell, maybe even two.

But how that philosophy will manifest itself remains to be seen. Tekken 8's Heat system has been one of the game's most dividing new mechanics—a way for players to slice through pressure by activating it, temporarily buffing certain moves or allowing for combo extensions through Heat Dash. It's a powerful tool, one that you can activate once a round. It's easily the most pivotal mechanic in Tekken 8's offense-forward gameplay, hence its rather polarising stance.

Knocking that Heat gauge down to once a game rather than once a round would make its use a lot more deliberate—and there we go, that's one of that trailer's key words nailed right there. I imagine there'll be some tweaking of frame data to make certain moves that are plus on block a little less safe.

I'm genuinely excited to see what direction Tekken 8 is going to take with its third season, while also desperately hoping that we're not staring down the barrel of another Season 2 misstep.

Thankfully it's not that long a wait until Season 3 lands. Pre-orders for the season pass—which includes characters Kunimitsu (late Spring), Bob (Summer), and freakin' Roger Jr. (Autumn!!!), along with an unannounced Winter character, open up next week. The actual balance patch arrives on March 16. Will its success determine Tekken 8's future? I'm not sure, but it certainly might be the last chance the game has in the eyes of its most dedicated fans.

If you're looking to imbibe around 2,500% of your FDA-recommended daily limit of anime in one single, lethal dose, then great news: Code Vein 2's release is imminent and unstoppable.

Those of you hip to counting will quickly grasp that this is the sequel to Code Vein, the 2019 soulslike that people mostly found to be 'solidly okay.' This one has guns and a motorbike, mind you, so it's probably the greatest videogame ever made.

As a PC Gamer reader of taste who probably arrived here by Googling something like "so when's Code Vein 2 coming out then," you'll probably want to know when Code Vein 2 is coming out, then. I've collated the game's launch times across multiple regions below, so you can know exactly when you can start veining.

When does Code Vein 2 launch?

Code Vein 2 launches at 3 pm PST on January 29, giving California a good window to get it downloading while it's still at work. Of course, if you got the pricey deluxe edition, then it actually unlocked for you three full days before that time and date, in which case what are you doing here?

Here are the unlock times for regions around the world:

• Los Angeles: 3 pm PST on Thursday, January 29
• New York: 6 pm EST on Thursday, January 29
• London: 11 pm GMT on Thursday, January 29
• Berlin: 12 am CET on Friday, January 30
• Tokyo: 8 am JST on Friday, January 30
• Sydney: 8 am AEDT on Friday, January 30

That applies whether you bought the game on Steam, or if you are one the perhaps seven people who bought it on Bandai Namco Official Store (did you know that existed? Me neither).

Does Code Vein 2 have preloading?

Alas, it doesn't look like it. The only way to get Code Vein 2 onto your hard drive ahead of its full launch is to buy the deluxe edition and get advanced access that way, which is decidedly not the same thing as preloading. If you're stuck with the standard edition, you'll have to wait for the game to actually come out before you can get to downloading.

I've never felt more kinship with a silent protagonist than in Code Vein 2. Just like being stuck with someone rambling all about the Definitely Interesting details of their job, there my little make-a-me was in the early hours of the game, listening to a giant goth mom monologue a string of proper nouns—something like "using Forma and Revenant Jails, destroy the Metagen holding Pathos below the Luna Rapacis in order to open the Hero's Cocoon and MagMell from the Horrors."

I could only pull the time-honored technique to survive any boring conversation: smile and nod. Like many of those one-sided conversations in life, though, dig past all the pretensions and Code Vein 2 is a lot simpler than it wants you to believe—for both good and bad.

A standalone adventure despite the title, Code Vein 2 sets itself in a gothic art deco-tinged post-apocalypse inhabited by the vampiric Revenants, under threat of a double apocalypse unless five legendary heroes of the past are murdered for… reasons.

Your boss Lavinia, who dredges up those same feelings Lady Dimitrescu from Resident Evil Village awoke, tries to make the mission sound awfully complex, but the basic idea is simple: travel back in time to meet a handful of anime hotties and then kill them in order to save the world. Everything else is set dressing, and boy does this game like to dress some sets.

Blood Born

Though Code Vein 2 carries all the hallmarks of the soulslike—limited heals, bonfire equivalents, and invincible dodges that had me somersaulting more than an Olympic gymnast—it often feels more like a pure hack-and-slash than any kind of Dark Souls imitation. Leaning heavily on number-go-up RPG leveling as well as fast, forgiving battles, it's comparatively accessible for those less skilled at timing attacks and dodges, welcoming us lowly button mashers with open arms.

Sure, there ARE heavy attacks if you want them, and specials, and unique life-draining skills called Jails, but I managed to get through near every challenge with nothing but my trusty friend: light attack. Little mutant dog? Mash light until it's dead. Giant undead skeleton centipede grafted onto a rotting masked corpse? Mash light until it's super dead.

There's plenty of customization to dig into for the more minmax inclined: a host of weapons upgradable into various elemental styles, as well as all sorts of stat boosting equipment. I was able to put together builds that played noticeably differently, meaning there's at least some depth to how any given scrap in Code Vein can be tackled. It's a shame it's all largely optional, never giving a palpable reason why I should engage fully with everything on offer when I could take down even the toughest bosses with nothing more than a bit of elbow grease and some extra EXP to make sure my big sword hit extra bigly.

I didn't have to go through my killing sprees alone. Joining me at every step was one of several AI companions acting totally independently. While I was busy hacking away at a health bar, there they were doing their own damage, drawing aggro, and even sacrificing themselves temporarily to refill my HP when I died, giving me a consequence-free second chance to double down on a "fight first, think later" style that Code Vein 2 encourages at every turn.

It all makes for a propulsive experience, but I can't shake the feeling that those soulslike systems, designed for a more methodical pace, end up holding Code Vein 2 back from its full potential. The stamina bar feels more like a leash than a thoughtful constraint, yanking me away at the last second whenever I try to lean fully into the aggression the game asks for.

Still, that so many of the dungeons I spent my time plunging are such lookers helped keep the skeleton skull smashing fresh. From maximum security prisons to abandoned amusement parks to buildings lost underwater, reflections of waves dancing across the walls, dungeons cover a wonderfully wide range of tones. Not all are slam dunks—expect some standard caves and military bases—but their broader visual variety combined with their condensed size meant I was always excited to see what would show up next and never had to wait long to find out. Whether it's fighting or exploring a haunted house, it's all about moving forward in Code Vein 2.

Well, except for when it's about moving to the past, and it's there that things start to struggle.

Empty Pastures

The big switch up in Code Vein 2 from its predecessor is that this time it's open world; there's an entire post-apocalyptic land waiting to be explored to your heart's content. Two, in fact!

Kind of.

While time travel does play an important role in the game and I did get to explore both the past and present of the world map, the difference between the two is trivial. Time and time again, I traveled boldly to a bygone age only to be greeted with the same destroyed buildings and the same flipped cars, none of which had moved or rusted at all in 100 years.

And though the world is refreshingly compact, much of my time spent wandering its prerequisite forests and mountains and—gasp!—green plains, felt superfluous, unneeded downtime littered with upgrade items I already had plenty of and materials for an underbaked, completely unnecessary crafting system.

Even if I liked the idea of rummaging for parts, Code Vein 2's rough performance ensured that I only ever felt dread at the thought. What initially seemed like an easy 60 fps on high settings on my rig (Intel Core i7-13700F, GeForce RTX 3060 Ti) crumbled when I stepped out of the first dungeon and into the wider world. Besides little hangs when entering new areas, I was constantly plagued with seemingly random framerate hiccups that switching to lower settings only alleviated, never solved. My graphics card is slightly weaker than the recommended RTX 3080, but far above the minimum spec.

At their worst these were less hiccups and more framerate vomit, enemies stuttering to catch up like they were suffering bad online lag. Code Vein 2 is a handsome game, but not handsome enough that I should've expected any resistance to getting a consistent framerate going, and its poor optimization only hurts its furious pace and the heavy atmosphere it tries so hard to maintain.

Shallow Graves

It's in the past that most of the story is hiding, a predictable drama aiming for operatic tragedy that never makes too much sense if you think about it for half a second. Code Vein 2 mostly gets away with it by keeping the cutscenes mercifully short. I'll admit there were points where the game yelled at me loud enough to "FEEL SAD, PLEASE, FEEL SAD" that something stirred in my cold heart, but that was more thanks to the stunning soundtrack, all swirling romantic strings and delicate piano melodies, than anything else. Textures having a bad habit of visibly loading in during the most dramatic moments certainly doesn't help the game's tone, either.

The cast doesn't fare any better, which particularly stings because it's the characters that Code Vein 2 seems to care the most about.

There are some exceptions, like Lou, the pale girl with a hole in her chest and a beating gold heart, who suggest an ethereal, horror-tinged side to their design, but a majority of the cast go for by-the-numbers anime looks to highlight only their most obvious characteristics. Josée is small and half-naked but has a big personality, Lyle has a cold elegance but is warm-hearted, and Valentin has huge round glasses (a subtle nod to the fact that he's smart, you see).

They're all written with that level of subtlety, relying on tired backstories and played-out personalities. I respect Code Vein 2's attempts to connect me with them through fighting together, learning their quirks by struggling through dungeons side-by-side, but there's just not enough to latch onto to let those connections bloom, a fault that only multiplies as the story increasingly hinges on caring deeply for these collections of clichés.

Code Vein 2 wants to be a game about connection and choice, about avoiding the easy path and bashing your head against a vicious boss for the sake of others, because it's the right thing to do. But by overstuffing on sugary ideas and underserving on depth, its loftier ambitions go unfulfilled. A satisfyingly fast-paced action RPG hides beneath all its pretensions—just be prepared to smile and nod your way through some nonsense to get there.

Elden Ring: Nightreign has been collecting some dust in my library recently—not for any particular reason, I got 66 hours out of the dang thing, I'm just a human being with limited time, MMOs to keep up with, and, like, chores to do (I am aware this is quitter talk).

I might, however, blow off the dust and give it another whirl, because my favourite boy, the Executor, just got a huge sweep of buffs. Oh, and also, like, Guardians and Revenants and Raiders, but who cares about that—my Sekiro-loving heart just got everything it ever wanted.

I'll just be going through the Nightfarers caught up in the patch 1.03.2 buffs one by one, starting with my favourite: The Executor's Cursed Sword skill, the thing that lets you parry, is now a lot stronger. Higher critical hits, better guard boost, more stagger damage when you deflect, and deflecting successfully while on low stamina won't result in a guard break anymore.

I'm yet to test this myself, but the implication is that even on zero stamina, if your timing's good, you can just ride the lightning and never die. My timing is not good, so I imagine I'll be dying a lot, but the aspiration of a clutch moment or two is something to shoot for. The Cursed Sword's weapon art will now also have Skill Power and Attack Power boosts applied to it correctly.

Lastly, Executor received boosts to its ultimate ability that should make it hit harder—as well as a temporary immortality window while transforming, making it a better 'oh crap' button.

Guardians are a little more straightforward—their guarding's better, go figure. Raiders are enjoying faster attacks, a new effect on their Fighter's Resolve passive that makes them hit harder after taking damage for a short time, and their Ultimate should hit in a wider area, now. And finally, Revenant's summoned spirits now scale with the levels in the Deep of Night mode, making her more useful in high-level play.

All in all, cause for celebration. It's nice to see FromSoftware helping out some of Nightreign's underdogs, and I'm not just saying that because I secretly want to be playing multiplayer Sekiro. I mean, I am saying that, but the main gladness I feel is due to FromSoftware's adherence to the "buff, don't nerf" philosophy. It's better to make underperformers feel powerful than to kneecap what other players are finding fun, especially in a co-op game.

Granted, this is FromSoftware, and FromSoftware is habitually obtuse, so there aren't any specific numbers in these patch notes, and we'll have to find out how effective these buffs are in play. Otherwise? I'll be heading back for a few more rounds of frustration very soon. You can read the full patch notes on the game's official site.

There are two obvious reasons you could already be excited for Code Vein 2. One: it's a soulslike made in-house by the publisher of FromSoftware's Dark Souls series. Two: anime melodrama. If you love characters scream-crying through their emotional beats more than reading FromSoft flavor text like "If the soul is the source of all life, then what distinguishes the humanity we hold within ourselves?", this action RPG holds great potential for you.

I can't say that the anime Dark Souls angle grabbed me in the three hours or so I spent playing it at a preview event in December, but Code Vein 2 is also, depending on how you choose to play it, Dark Souls But You Have a Gun. Now that's got some pull.

It feels like wielding a forbidden instrument. Illicit. I'm harnessing a power typically reserved for comedic punctuation. Do I just think that because I watched Raiders of the Lost Ark at a young age and instantly formed a new personality the moment Indiana Jones Smith & Wesson'd that sword guy into oblivion? Who can say.

Anyway: Playing Dark Souls With a Gun rocks. I spent a good chunk of my time with Code Vein ignoring the timing of my multi-hit combos and reading attack patterns by standing 10 feet away from every enemy and calmly shooting their faces clean off with a rifle. (And yes, I know it's not the first or only soulslike to incorporate firearms, but it's nonetheless still a rarity).

Aside from its proper noun-heavy time travel anime plotting, Code Vein 2 is a soulslike hyperfocused on layered combat systems, with seven distinct weapon classes and a slew of abilities to find and equip to suit your mood, like Elden Ring's Ashes of War. Using those abilities pulls from a mana pool, except here your mana is blood.

To get blood, you have to bully enemies with regular attacks before hitting them with a "Jail" finisher, which slurps up all the blood from their open wounds. A Jail is a whole other category of gear you'll equip, alongside Defensive Formae (types of shields or dodges) and Bequeathed Formae (basically magical ults, like a bigass bow or axe), and Blood Codes.

Blood Codes are anime AI partners bound to your soul, who will fight by your side unless you choose to absorb them into your body to boost your own attacks. Doing so, to me, seems rather rude, but I've never traveled through time to thwart an anime apocalypse so maybe I'm just not quite on their wavelength.

Oh! There's also a whole system for weapon upgrading and customization, more gear for boosting specific stats, and good old fashioned leveling up. Code Vein 2 is mercifully free of the loot barf that plagues Team Ninja's otherwise excellent Nioh games, but otherwise it seems closer to Nioh than Dark Souls in terms of how many dials it gives you to hone in your buildcrafting. Across a full game I think the number of variables to fiddle with here could be quite exciting, but trying to take them in all at once and figure out how much I should care about a weapon's Bleed Factor or Max Ichor is more overwhelming than invigorating.

Hence my enthusiasm for: Gun.

Shoot 'em up

Rifles are the odd man out weapon type in Code Vein 2, offering a light attack bayonet slash in line with a basic one-handed sword but a far more useful heavy attack that charges up a big shot, liable to knock the average enemy on their ass. To balance this out bullets are a limited resource you have to craft and replenish at bonfires mistles, but I spent a good chunk of my preview stepping just close enough to enemies to get their attention and then decking them with a lead hello. It felt like getting a leaping heavy attack knockdown on a Souls enemy to start the encounter, but from far enough away to have my feet casually kicked up on the edge of the desk.

This strategy did not hold up against the first boss I fought, a four-armed behemoth lady who could and did leap across the room to piledrive me straight to hell with a single hit. So, Dark Souls With a Gun is still Dark Souls.

That boss fight forced me to stop bullet cheesing my way through fights and put together a build that required actual effort, eugh. But in the end I had the most fun pairing a set of magical rune blades with an ability that let me suspend them in midair like a buzzsaw, dealing constant damage to the boss while I danced around its attacks.

While Code Vein 2 adds a whole lot of anime cutscenes on top of an otherwise pretty straightforward soulslike setup, it couldn't match FromSoftware's flare for level design in the dungeon I previewed, a quite bland series of steel gangways and corridors. The vibe I got, from that area at least, was that the focus is very much on story and combat and not much in between, the level layouts devoid of much stimulation when walking from one fight to the next.

Code Vein 2 does not have Elden Ring-caliber ambitions, which I would say is fine—welcome, even, if it knows where its strengths are and isn't trying to be best-in-class on every axis. But at $70 and launching just a week before Nioh 3 I think it might be picking a fight outside its weight class, even if it is bringing a gun into the ring.

I've loved Katamari ever since I was a kid. The bright colours and quirky yet hilarious characters stuck with me from a young age. The recent release of Once Upon a Katamari in October revitalised this love. Every single second I've spent jumping back into the series and rolling around my Katamari has been memorable, and I feel like many long-term fans of the series have felt the same way. I enjoyed it so much, in fact, that my online ramblings about my love for the series resulted in my social media feeds being filled with Katamari-related content, yet one TikTok in particular stopped me in my tracks: The King of All Cosmos by Cybertsu.

There's nothing more impressive to me than when someone decides to cosplay a somewhat unconventional character, because you can just tell that a lot of thought and effort has gone into bringing their outfit and persona to life. While The King of All Cosmos does have some vaguely human features, it's by no means easy to pull off. Though saying that, I have definitely seen more cosplays of the Prince than I ever have of the King. So, to learn more about why the King of All Cosmos was chosen, and what the process of making a cosplay that reflected all of his charm looked like, I spoke with Cybertsu.

Cosplay is a fairly new endeavour for the creator, but something about the hobby always intrigued them, especially after growing up with anime and gaming. Cybertsu tells me: "I’ve always loved dressing up whenever I got the chance, whether it was going all out for Halloween or wearing simple, low-key cosplays at smaller local conventions like pairing a Red Ranger helmet with casual clothes.

In 2023, my friends and I decided to visit the Dokomi Convention, and it being my first big con, I had an amazing time. Because I already owned a Red Power Ranger helmet, choosing my cosplay was easy, but I also had a whole list of characters I’d been wanting to cosplay for a while. That’s when I decided it was finally time to start working through that list. I had the pleasure of meeting so many wonderful people, including artists, cosplayers and visitors who just wanted to take a picture. It was one of the warmest welcomes I’ve ever experienced."

So it didn't take long for them to become more involved with the cosplay community, and more motivated to create outfits for themself. When asked why she wanted to take on a Katamari cosplay as a self-proclaimed "cosplay newbie", Cybertsu told me that there was one answer: "I love Katamari. I adored the game as a kid, and I had never seen a King of All Cosmos cosplay before, so I just thought, 'Fine, I’ll do it myself.'"

The King of All Cosmos isn't exactly a straightforward cosplay to build from scratch, especially if you're fairly new to the hobby and you haven't built an entire costume before: "If I’m being completely honest, everything was challenging because I wouldn’t consider myself handy, but I do know how to sew a little by hand. The worst part was definitely the headpiece. Figuring out what materials to use and how to put everything together was an experience. Half the time, I had no idea what I was doing, but somehow it all worked out in the best way possible. I’m really proud of it, especially since it’s the first thing I’ve ever built."

It's not just about the outfit and headpiece for the King of All Cosmos either. One thing that particularly interested me when I first found Cybertsu's cosplay online was a handcrafted Katamari that accompanied the look, which had a mass of items meticulously positioned on it to perfectly replicate what you'd create in the game. Since you'll roll up hundreds of different items in Katamari, I wanted to know if there was a reason behind which items had been selected. Cybertsu shared: "My ideas for my Katamari were a mix of things it would pick up from my desk and miniature versions of everyday items like a rubber duck, coins, food boxes and so on, plus rhinestones.

Keep in mind, the rhinestone idea came last, so imagine me trying to place them around everything that was already glued onto the Katamari. It took me three days until everything was glued down, dried and covered in stones. It was a nightmare, but totally worth it. Even today, I still find rhinestones in random places."

It's safe to say that I'm not the only person who is so impressed by the cosplay, either. On one TikTok using the trending audio Promise by Hirose Kohmi (often referred to as the "Geddan" trend), Cybertsu has received over 139K views, and on another featuring a different audio, just over 104K views. Both videos have hundreds of comments admiring the handiwork as well. In response to that, Cybertsu shared: "I still can’t believe how many people have seen and enjoyed my cosplay. When the Geddan video started getting views, I was totally surprised because it had been out for months, and life had just gone on. I really had no idea what was happening. I’m honestly so grateful for such a kind community."

At the end of every year I always feel impressed by just how many cozy games launched, and more specifically how many I actually found the time to play. Looking back, 2025 was a year where cozy games really broke the mold and appealed to a wider audience.

Notably though, I found that I didn't just spend hundreds of hours in a dozen farming simulators. This might be a conscious effort on my part, because other than becoming infatuated with Story of Seasons: Grand Bazaar, I actually didn't sink much time at all into finding my next farming obsession. So if you want to do the same, here are my favorite cozy games from 2025.

Top six cozy games of 2025

• Once Upon a Katamari
• POCO
• The Guardian of Nature
• Vending Dokan!: Kozy Kiosk
• Out and About
• Hello Kitty Island Adventure

Some other games I spent more time than I like to admit playing, but didn't quite make the top six: Ritual of Raven, Discounty, Instants, Is this seat taken?, and Fantasy Life i: The Girl Who Steals Time.

Once Upon a Katamari

Style: Puzzle

The release of a new mainline Katamari game is always exciting, as someone who's poured hundreds of hours into the series already, and even more so when the game is absolutely fantastic from start to finish. These fast, time challenge levels that give you just one simple objective are incredibly moreish, and never have I felt the "one more run" mindset so hard. The story sends you hurtling through different time periods, never giving you enough repetition to get bored of.

Once Upon a Katamari also introduces new elements, welcoming new players while also refreshing the old experience for series fans. Rolling around has been streamlined through a new control scheme that simplifies movement, and new tools have been added to each level such as a rocket to help you move faster and a radar to pinpoint the location of valuable items like crowns. Anyone can pick up Once Upon a Katamari and have a good time, which I think is one of the reasons why I ended up loving it so much this year.

I wouldn't say that Once Upon a Katamari is your typical cozy game. If anything, it's much more chaotic than the casual, laid-back simulators I'd usually describe as "wholesome" or "cozy". But the amount of joy a few hours in this game provides me is what makes it so worthy. It might not have the lo-fi pastel colored goodness we're used to, but it does pack in simple rules, and adorable characters you get familiar with which in some way makes it a cozy game.

Poco

Style: Point-and-click adventure

Something about cozy games lends itself to unsettling concepts, and Poco is definitely a prime example of that. This free-to-play point-and-click adventure following the story of the world's smallest clown really stuck with me when it launched in May, and I haven't stopped thinking about it since. I've even dipped in a few more times to make sure I saw every possible ending.

It's the world that really enchanted me, which is mostly down to the combination of 2D and 3D elements. Throughout Poco you'll have to use the environment to progress, whether that's picking flowers to turn into paint, or tracking down items to return to the cast of oddities (referred to as Homunculi) who you befriend along the way. The challenges are simple, but there's something so incredibly enthralling about it that you'll be gutted when it's over.

Poco is cozy in its time commitment too: I rolled credits within the hour. It's certainly a game that leaves you wanting more, and if they announced a sequel at any point I would be absolutely thrilled. I feel like Poco was a real hidden gem this year.

Vending Dokan!: Kozy Kiosk

Style: Idle management simulator

2025 has been the year of idle games for me. When I feel like I don't have the time to sink into a full-blown adventure, I've loved having a little desktop pet or idle game running in the background while I work. There's something oddly satisfying about getting passive virtual income from something that slowly ticks away, and Vending Dokan!: Kozy Kiosk was a sleeper hit for me.

After it shadow dropped during the Wholesome Direct showcase, I immediately downloaded it and started stocking my first few machines. Before long, I was raking in cash from an empire of vendos and decorated alleyways for my customers to sit and enjoy. So many idle games I've played, like Rusty's Retirement, Ropuka's Idle Island, and Tiny Pasture tick away whether or not you interact with them. Vending Dokan is a little more hands-on, which kept me more engaged.

You need to keep on top of your stock, order in the drinks your customers want if they aren't available in your current rotation, keep the area clean, and decorate to improve the general aesthetic. It doesn't require your constant attention, and you will spend a lot of time just waiting to earn enough money, giving you an excuse to actually work on the real life to-do list you've been putting off while playing. No—I'm definitely not projecting.

Out and About

Style: Foraging simulator

I may have strayed from the farming simulator this year, but that doesn't mean I've cast all simulators aside. Out and About was on my list of most anticipated games for 2025, and it certainly lived up to my expectations.

In Out and About, you'll set off to start a new life in an incredibly run down town. With a little bit of help and inspiration from the people around you, your skills as a forager help the local square flourish and re-build a community that had been impacted by a devastating storm. You'll learn all about plants and their properties, including what to look for when you're picking them.

Before you can take them back to the kitchen and cook something, you'll need to successfully identify the plants you've found. You wouldn't want to eat anything poisonous by accident. When you have made a mass of items, you can sell them at the market and match their properties to the needs of your customers, and then use that money to reinvest in the town.

What I love most about Out and About is the level of detail that has gone into the foraging mechanic. All the plants you encounter in the game are foragable in real life, and there are tons of recipes that can all be recreated in real life too. From teas and treats to salves and soups, there are over 100 recipes to learn in-game and out, and it's made foraging as a hobby feel a lot more accessible and less intimidating.

The Guardian of Nature

Style: Point-and-click puzzle

The Guardian of Nature is an incredibly peaceful point-and-click puzzle game, but even though it feels relaxing, it tells quite a heavy story. You'll play as Henry, a botanist who can shrink down to the size of an ant or grow back to his regular, human size. You'll use this skill to visit parts of the forest that the human eye may miss otherwise, like burrowing underground to reconnect plant roots or to helping out any animals who've gotten lost along their way.

It's not just about reconnecting parts of the forest though, as some unusual characters have started chopping down trees and using them to build houses for their kind, and you need to put a stop to that before the world Henry's used to changes entirely. Henry never actually speaks, communicating entirely in little grunts, but I wound up feeling so connected to him anyway. The animals you help out are particularly cute too, which helps.

It's the sort of game that can be played for a few hours at a time without feeling like you need to tie up the entire story in one sitting. This feeling is definitely encouraged by the fact it launched in episodes, giving you bitesize chunks to work through at a time, which I definitely appreciated and saw as a welcomed cozy break among the constant releases from the year.

Hello Kitty Island Adventure

Style: Life simulator

It would be a sin for me to not mention Hello Kitty Island Adventure this year. I've been pining for a PC release ever since it launched as an Apple Arcade exclusive in 2023, so I embarked on my adventure to Friendship Island the very second I could. Throughout 2025, I have adored every second spent with Hello Kitty and friends, most importantly my beloved PomPomPurin. Hello Kitty Island Adventure has really patched up the Animal Crossing-shaped hole in my heart.

Island Adventure has all the cozy game hits: crafting, fishing, cute characters, easy enough quests, and a long list of chores to keep you busy. For example, you'll get different visitors every now and then, like friends and family for the islanders, and you'll need to prepare cabins for them. Each character has very specific requirements to meet before they will visit, such as the location of their cabin and what furniture they need inside. Having this to occupy your time on top of quests and befriending the main cast keeps you busy and really brings the island to life.

The release of the Wheatflour Wonderland DLC in September only reinforced my love, and has left me excited to see where the game goes next. Hopefully, we continue to see more development on Friendship Island through 2026, including more characters to befriend and new realms to explore.

Katsuhrio Harada—one of the driving forces behind Tekken and the series head honcho for the last 20 years—is hanging up his fighting gloves at the end of this year.

He announced his retirement in a lengthy X post, saying that 2025 would be his final year at Bandai Namco and as the project leader on Tekken. "With the Tekken series reaching its 30th anniversary—an important milestone for a project I've devoted much of my life to—I felt this was the most fitting moment to bring one chapter to a close," he wrote.

A good chunk of the post is dedicated to his interactions with the community over the last three decades. "My roots lie in the days when I supported small local tournaments in Japanese arcades and in small halls and community centres overseas," he said. "I still remember carrying arcade cabinets by myself, encouraging people to 'Please try Tekken,' and directly facing the players right in front of me."

Harada said that those experiences "became the core of who I am as a developer and game creator," something which continued even as both Tekken and the FGC at large grew bigger. "Many of you continued to treat me like an old friend—challenging me at venues, inviting me out for drinks at bars," he wrote. "Those memories are deeply precious to me."

As for his retirement, he wrote that numerous factors are at play—the loss of "several close personal friends" and witnessing "the retirement or passing of many senior colleagues whom I deeply respect."

I can only assume one of the people Harada is talking about is Dead or Alive creator Tomonobu Itagaki, who passed away in October at the age of 58. At the time, Harada posted to X, saying: "To think that he's gone at just 58 years old… Yes, everyone dies eventually… that's inevitable. But you… isn't it a bit too soon?"

Apparently, Harada even went to former PlayStation boss Ken Kutaragi for advice, writing that "His words quietly supported me in making this decision."

His post continues to say that he's been in the business of slowly handing off responsibilities for half a decade now, concluding: "Each project was full of new discoveries and learning, and every one of them became an irreplaceable experience for me. To everyone who has supported me, to communities around the world, and to all the colleagues who have walked alongside me for so many years, I offer my deepest gratitude. I'll share more about my next steps at a later date. Thank you very much for everything."

It is kind of wild to see Harada finally departing. It's difficult to think of a Tekken without him, and despite the fact that Tekken 8 has been in pretty rough shape in the last year, it'll still be a damn shame to see him go. His close involvement with the community—including always having an ear close to the ground in Western territories—made him stand out among other Japanese fighting game developers.

Aside from a very lengthy Harada-style social media post, he's also gone ahead and dropped a mix on Soundcloud called "TEKKEN: A 30-Year Journey – Harada's Final Mix," an hour-long musical homage to his career. I have been listening to it while writing this, and yeah, it's pretty damn good.

There's no word on who will be taking over in his absence just yet, and Harada isn't totally vanishing straight away. The Tekken X account posted its own statement, saying that Harada will still be making an appearance at the Tekken World Tour 2025 finals happening in Sweden at the end of January.

The post also has a quick paragraph about the series' future. "To our fans, rest assured that we are fully committed to future development and content plans for Tekken 8," it reads. "We will continue to take community feedback on the game and its content to heart to ensure that we uphold the vision and spirit built by Harada-san, dedicating our utmost efforts to ensure the legacy of the Tekken series continues as a fighting game franchise beloved worldwide."

On December 1, Bandai Namco released an assortment of Elden Ring Nightreign player statistics to celebrate the release of The Forsaken Hollows DLC. There are some interesting omissions, like the popularity of each nightfarer (but we can extrapolate from the data we do have), as well as some surprising reveals.

The biggest shock for me is that the memetically terrifying Bell Bearing Hunter isn't even in the top three for deadliest field bosses: He's beaten by Erdtree Avatar, Draconic Tree Sentinel, and Royal Carian Knight in rising order. I'm curious if this is in terms of absolute bodycount or proportional to attempts on the boss⁠—either way, it could very well be that, as word of the Bell Bearing Hunter's difficulty spread, players just stopped trying to fight him⁠—my crew skips him nine times out of ten.

The Erdtree Avatar is an absolutely wild pull for number three. It's one of the slowest, most predictable bosses in the game, but that could very well be its secret weapon: It's surprisingly tanky and hard-hitting in Nightreign versus its original Elden Ring appearance, best saved for late in a run, and I've absolutely underestimated it before.

Draconic Tree Sentinel is a brute, a beast, and a cretin. I hope he chokes on his sniper fireball one-hit kills. As for the Carian Knight⁠—Loretta from the base game⁠—she's certainly challenging, but I never would have picked her for the number one spot. Shout out to the castle-defending Pot Trolls at number five: I hate you guys so much.

The top two emotes make me very happy: The "I'm just gonna take five" Spread Out, and the "T-pose for dominance" Golden Order Totality at second- and most-used respectively. My own Nightreign crew has made it a habit of T-posing at the end of every successful run.

There have been 1.2 billion revives in total, which is a suitably big, impossible-to-imagine number. Bamco laid out the most popular skins for each nightfarer in the blog post as well. If we take them as proxies for the respective character's overall use⁠—assuming no surprise variables like a huge gap in popularity between skins, say⁠—that gives us the following power ranking for the nightfarers:

1. Wylder, 18 Million (Abysswalker)
2. Ironeye, 17.3 (Sellsword)
3. Recluse, 11.2 (Darkness)
4. Duchess, 10.3 (Darkness)
5. Raider, 9.6 (Remembrance)
6. Executor, 8.7 (Darkness)
7. Revenant, 8.6 (Darkness)
8. Guardian, 4.1 (Dawn)

Poor Guardian, I will never play as you. It's hard to imagine the avian halberdier's lot improving either: Both new nightfarers introduced with The Forsaken Hollows whip ass. I was having plenty of fun with the bizarre support/damage hybrid Scholar, but the Undertaker is where it's at: Mobile, powerful, aggressive, and boasting an ultimate ability I hope never gets nerfed.

Life would be so much better if our digital world was more like the one in Digimon Story Time Stranger. Unlike real life, where logging on can feel like walking straight through the gates of hell, my first trip to the land of ones and zeros in Time Stranger is the happiest a game's made me all year. Beautifully paying off several slow burn hours spent exploring the hyper-modern cleanliness of Tokyo and its grungy concrete sewers, the so-called Digiworld is a joyous explosion of life, color, and personality. And it owes every ounce of that joy to its oddball citizens.

Everywhere you look in Central Town, the digital city a large chunk of Time Stranger centers on—every nook and cranny and rooftop and window, inside every trashcan and on every discarded box, floating through the sky and crawling up power lines—are Digimon of every size and shape you could imagine. There’s the squishy Tanemon rushing in and out of a baby-sized door in the wall. Gekomon serenading a crowd. Literal Satan, Devimon, trying to relax with a cold one at the bar.

It’s a place packed dense with nothing but great little guys, weirdo friends just waiting to be made, and its bustling energy perfectly captures what separates Time Stranger from its monster-catching contemporaries, like the Nintendo Switch's Pokémon Legends: Z-A.

There are no balls to chuck at wild Digimon’s heads, no dance of weakening your enemy without knocking them out, no pushing on the down button as hard as you can because some kid on the playground said that makes it easier to catch the bird you want. No, appropriate for creatures born from data, it’s all about the numbers here.

Beating any Digimon—say, the adorable Patamon in Time Stranger automatically raises its analysis percentage. Whoop enough Patamon to raise that number to 100 (or 200 for a stat boost) and you’re free to summon one of your very own, at which point Patamon’s percentage resets and starts again. Rinse and repeat for every single Digimon you encounter; no chance or guesswork required.

Practically what this means is that you’ll be constantly, passively adding more Digimon to your collection simply by playing through its twisty time-traveling story. It's a generously simplified system-turned-blessing when combined with the lack of any storage limit and exp that’s shared between your whole squad, meaning you’re never without a couple dozen creatures ready for a fight.

And what creatures they are. While Pokemon strives for a certain aesthetic cohesion that’s resulted in an army of mascots over the years, Digimon’s always believed more in the kitchen sink style of design. Anything goes in this world, from cute googly-eyed blobs to nightmarish skeletal abominations to… whatever Nanimon is. It’s a design ethos that might feel chaotic at first, even sloppy—why did my cool laser dragon turn into a sexy lady with big honkers?—but it also grants an exciting sense of freedom, an almost anarchic rush of imagination not unlike flipping through the doodles in a kid’s notebook.

You truly never know what you’ll see next.

I’ve got deep memories playing with my own Digivice—the Tamagotchi-like series of toys the franchise got its start with nearly thirty years ago—as a kid, feeding my Veemon, cleaning up his poop, taking him on walks, and, when I didn’t feel like walking, violently shaking the thing to trick it into thinking I was. I almost certainly cared for my digital friend’s wellbeing more than my own.

While the series has evolved in many ways through its move to videogames, it’s never lost sight of the raising-sim focus of those nostalgic toys. Time Stranger is no exception.

Sure, there are traditional turn-based battles where you control a team of three Digimon with three more waiting on the sidelines to be swapped in at any moment. But Time Stranger isn’t particularly interested in those battles being the real focus, as evidenced by how easy it is to switch to a fairly reliable auto-battle and set the speed to x5. No, battles are largely a flashy means to an end here, ways to level up your rapidly growing army with plenty of space in between to tweak and adjust everyone’s stats to the nth degree.

You’ll spend nearly as much time rummaging through menus and editing a host of parameters for each and every one of your Digimon as you’ll spend letting them fight. Nanimon needs higher intelligence if I want to evolve him, and Sukamon is so close to their next stage that I might as well feed them some stat-boost items, meanwhile Gargomon isn’t progressing the way I want them to so I’ll devolve them back down and run down a different evolutionary path, and oh right I’ve got a dozen other Digimon to consider, too. Hardly a moment goes by without a goal achieved and another discovered.

All of that, and I haven’t even touched on the DigiFarm, a sort of boot camp you can throw your Digimon into, or the fact that every ’mon has a personality you can alter through regular conversation for unique skills and attributes, or the way you can combine multiple together for various stat bonuses, or the extra card game that literally uses those classic Digivices of old, complete with sprite art for all 400-some Digimon, or…

Well, you get the idea. There’s a lot.

The result is a game that captures Digimon’s obsessive virtual pet-raising origins within the shape of a more traditional RPG, one that’s as much a large-scale raising sim as an epic story-driven adventure. I won’t spoil the wild places it goes narratively, but it’s much more thoughtful and intense than you might expect, running headfirst into dark, murky places franchises like Pokémon wouldn’t dare go. It’s a game that has ideas piled on ideas about the increasingly blurred, crumbling distinction between the digital and physical in our modern world just as much as it has ideas about monster-catching as a genre.

Like its anarchic monster designs, Time Stranger mechanically points towards a different, more freeform path in contrast to the comparatively structured Pokémon, one busy and complex and always providing new surprises. It’s truly the "Macho Man’s head grafted onto an egg with legs" to Pokemon’s "cute blushing mouse you wanna cuddle," and I think it’s beautiful that we can have both.

Stripped every last bit of meat from Elden Ring's bones? Finding even Shadow Of The Erdtree a bit familiar these days? Nightreign not quite hitting the same high notes? After sinking dozens of hours into long-running, ever-expanding overhaul mod Elden Ring Reforged I've been reminded just how much I loved FromSoftware's sprawling, hostile open world. It might be just what you need, too—especially now that Reforged has its own private multiplayer servers, the headline feature of its recent 2.0 update.

Even more ambitiously than the popular Seamless Co-op mod (which is also fully supported here), Reforged bypasses the original game's anti-cheat systems while retaining bloodstains, phantoms, summons and invasions. Helpful, as there are more than 1,200 collectible stat-boosting rune fragments hidden throughout the entire game like Crackdown's irresistible agility orbs, many of which you'd never find without other kindly players placing glowing, tongue-in-cheek hints. This mod understands that even playing solo, Elden Ring is a shared experience. It just wouldn't be the same without people declaring that every single turtle is actually a dog.

So, what does Reforged change? After years of updates, it's easier to list what it doesn't do, as even Reforged's official Wiki isn't comprehensive. If you're after a completely reworked world you might be better served by mods like Convergence or the recent grim n' gothic rework Graceborne. While Reforged does add a couple new areas and new encounters (see boxout), that's not the focus here. Instead, the mod focuses on refreshing and rebalancing almost every mechanic in the game.

Graceful combat

The combat's been reworked so dramatically that the mod opens with a brand new tutorial. Precisely timed combos increase attack power and save on stamina. Defence involves more than blocking with the biggest shield you can find, as Sekiro-like timed deflections make it possible to no-sell even the biggest attacks shieldless, if you're good enough. Getting guard-broken now hurts you, further discouraging turtling. The seldom-used backstep has been replaced by a snappy duck button, with fewer I-frames than a dodge but much faster recovery.

Spellcasting sees a similar rework, with lighter, rapid-fire spells regenerating FP instead of draining it, so the wizarding-inclined can start blasting immediately and constantly. Reforged tries to balance every weapon, armor piece and Ash of War to be viable, admittedly at the cost of eliminating some overpowered options (spellcasters can't deal quite the same ferocious burst damage anymore). On top of all that, there's a new subclass system called Fortunes, unlockable sets of perks and penalties to really personalize your build.

I set out to play an agile sword-saint, blasting with holy magic at range while fighting with fast two-handed weapons up close—a build I could never successfully pull off in the original game. And by jove, it works! Especially once I re-learned the timing of the early game bosses so I could sassily deflect each combo hit before countering with a full stamina bar. Mistakes were costly due to my low armor, but being able to outright negate damage with well-timed blocks is thrilling.

That's the heart of Reforged, really. Over the years, the Elden Ring 'meta' has become ingrained: Players have optimized routes and builds to a science. Reforged's stated goal is making the game every cave, ruin and dungeon freshly rewarding, and even basic combat encounters unpredictable again.

Enemy groups tend to cover each other more aggressively, will chase you much further, and will remain challenging for longer thanks to partial level-scaling that extends well into New Game Plus, ensuring you'll not outgrow the world even when it becomes familiar again.

There are even some new areas to see. Redmane Castle (previously just passed through for Radahn's festival) is reworked into a full-on dungeon with a multi-phase, fire-breathing end boss based on the giant lion enemies, making Caelid feel a bit more complete. Later, Mt Gelmir hides a new path into The Serpentine Depths, a proper subterranean dungeon full of frenzy-inducing enemies (including the Jailers visiting from Dark Souls 3) and with some tricky platforming over lava. Were I not familiar with DS3's enemy roster, I could have believed this area had always been lurking undiscovered under my nose. That's a true testament to Reforged's quality.

Suffering is optional

Reforged isn't obsessed with being "hardcore" like so many FromSoft mods; quite the opposite. Combat is a little tougher than vanilla Elden Ring, but this mod features—brace yourself—difficulty settings. Loads of them, including separate modes balanced for larger parties if you're running Seamless Co-op. Lower settings still pose some challenge, but a forgiving one with zero death penalties. Higher difficulties give bosses more aggressive AI and even some nasty reworked attacks.

Beyond difficulty changes, Additional Enemies is a toggle that adds some fiendishly placed new encounters to every single dungeon and cave in both the main game and DLC. Adventure Mode heavily restricts fast-travel, making you really live out in the wilds. Most creative of all the extra modes is Eternal Return, which has you trapped in a Majora's Mask-like time-loop, giving only 72 in-game hours to level up and unlock permanent, powerful boosts through completing NPC quests before the world resets again.

Elden Ring Reforged earns my highest recommendation as a mod. It's polished, professionally produced and brings back that first-playthrough magic all over again without sacrificing Elden Ring's offbeat online features. Plus, it's incredibly easy to install. Just download, unzip it to its own directory and click to play.

One of the earliest and most ambitious mods for Elden Ring, which revised and remixed its core systems to facilitate more tailored runs through The Lands Between, has just got a huge overhaul.

Elden Ring: Reforged adds a vast array of new features like difficulty modes, runeforging, new combat mechanics like deflection and ducking, new weapons and bosses, and overhauled magic, weight and stamina systems to improve the viability of certain builds. It even introduces unique game modes.

One thing the original version of the mod didn't offer, however, is multiplayer, due to how FromSoftware prohibits modded games from connecting to official servers. But the recently released 2.0 version of Elden Ring: Reforged addresses this, with the team creating a custom server to enable fully functional, FromSoft-style multiplayer.

Update 2.0 introduces pretty much everything you'd expect from playing Elden Ring with other people. Summoning, invasions, and leaving messages for other players. According to Reforged's Nexus Mods page, it also offers "advanced seamless coop support", so playing with pals isn't limited to boss fights.

Reforged makes one other key change to Elden Ring's multiplayer, limiting PvP invasions to dungeon areas. The team has implemented this because it believes dungeon areas offer "more interesting invasion spaces where players may use the environment and enemies to their advantage".

Alongside multiplayer functionality, Update 2.0 also expands several environments. The Roundtable Hold has a new area called The Gilded Court, where players can participate in duels, while a new dungeon has been added beneath Mt Gelmir. Named the Serpentine Depths, it sees players delve into the history of Praetor Rykard.

There's a mountain of smaller additions too, like extra weapons, spirit ashes spells, including three incantations that come from the "Prince of Death" school. It also further complements Elden Ring's moveset with a sliding manoeuvre for additional evasion functionality.

This was a significant week for multiplayer Elden Ring elsewhere, too, with FromSoftware announcing its first DLC for Elden Ring: Nightreign. Named The Forsaken Hollows, the DLC sees Nightreign's setting of Limveld transformed by an event called The Great Hollow, while introducing two playable characters and resurrecting one of Dark Souls' most memorable bosses—Artorias of the Abyss.

Part of me still believes Shadow Labyrinth is some sort of collective hallucination brought on by humanity's overconsumption of digital cherries, as the idea of a grimdark Metroidvania starring Pac-Man is just too ludicrous to comprehend. Nonetheless, the trailer, the Steam page, and our own Shadow Labyrinth Review all point to this being a real thing that happened.

Sadly, it seems Shadow Labyrinth landed with a bit of a thud (or perhaps that descending wailing noise Pac-Man makes when he dies). It only has a handful of Steam reviews, with many complaining about the experience being hindered by poor controls, sparse save points, and nasty difficulty spikes. But there is some good news. Bandai Namco has released an update aiming to address all these problems, while also adding a new mode that provides greater flexibility in play.

Said new mode is called "explorer mode", which is a fancy way of saying "easy mode" as Bandai Namco explains in a recent Steam post: "This mode significantly lowers the difficulty of combat and exploration, allowing you to better enjoy the story and world." This introduces some obvious adjustments, such as a more durable player character, increased damage output, faster energy recovery. But it also increases the number of save points within the world and tweaks the challenge of the more traditionally Pac-Man maze puzzles.

Meanwhile, Shadow Labyrinth's existing mode has been renamed to "Veteran Mode", with the game allowing you to switch between them at any point—always a welcome feature. As for those control changes, Bandai Namco has improved mid-air control after jumping and added a dedicated button for purely vertical jumps, with the developer commenting that this "reduces the chance of accidental inputs."

Bandai Namco says the update is "designed to enhance your enjoyment of the game", which you would hope goes without saying. Then again, it doesn't address the biggest problem Abbie Stone had with Shadow Labyrinth in her review, namely that the story isn't very good. "While the game isn’t completely humor-free, the self-seriousness of the majority of it is as baffling as it is boring." she wrote in her review, describing it as "An overly-talky technobabble festival, rife with cliches and dull stock characters."

This probably didn't help Shadow Labyrinth in a year where all the metroidvania oxygen has been sucked up by one game—Hollow Knight: Silksong. Which isn't to say there haven't been other good examples of the genre released this year: Possessor(s) and Mandragora: Whispers of the Witch Tree were also fine side-scrolling adventures. But like Shadow Labyrinth, they seem to have struggled to gain much attention in the shadow of Team Cherry's insectoid behemoth.

Once Upon a Katamari announced the first two DLCs during the State of Play Japan stream on November 11, and to say I'm excited is a complete understatement. Even though these DLCs won't add any crazy new levels for you to roll around, they're just as exciting. If you jumped at the opportunity to start customising your character with accessories like I did, then you'll be thrilled to hear this too.

Both DLCs will add five remix tracks and ten accessories each to the game. The first will arrive this month, adding five Dance Dance Remixes to the game alongside its mystery accessories. And, outside of the DLC content, all players will receive a cosplay set for Saki Hanami from Idolm@ster, which is potentially one of the greatest outfits I've seen yet in Katamari.

I hope this also means we can expect more cosplays in the future, as I'd probably sell my soul for a Miku outfit. With that said, this outfit in particular is only available for the Prince, so you won't be able to dress any cousin up in full cosplay. Again, I'm pretty hopeful this will change later down the line as well.

However, the second DLC coming in winter will give every player a set of DJ accessories which aren't just limited to one character. In addition, five Neo Remixes will be added to the game to coincide with the new outfit you unlock, alongside the ten new accessories that are yet to be unveiled. With such a vague release window, I'm certain we won't be seeing the content of this pack until the new year, but hey. I'll just strut around in cosplay until then.

Since one of my favourite features of Once Upon a Katamari is the ability to customise a cousin, new accessories alone are enough to sell me on the idea of a DLC, let alone the fact that free outfits and accessory sets are being dished out regardless of whether or not you've bought any additional content. Even though they won't add any more Katamari chaos to the game itself, they are still incredibly exciting, and I look forward to dressing the Prince in whatever outfits I can get my paws on in the future.

We've been patiently waiting for FromSoftware to say a single word about its plans for Elden Ring Nightreign's DLC, which was meant to include new bosses as well as playable characters. Now we've seen it: in a surprise trailer during Sony's Japan-focused State of Play livestream on Tuesday, the studio debuted The Forsaken Hollows, its first expansion dropping December 4. And one of the studio's all-time great bosses is coming back.

At the 1:15 mark in the trailer above, Artorias of the Abyss from the first Dark Souls appears as a new addition to the pool of bosses you'll have to face before one of the end-of-run Nightlords. He's not the first Dark Souls boss to apear in Nightreign: DS1's Gaping Dragon is in the game, too, as one of the easier bosses to dispatch. Something tells me Artorias will be a bit more of a challenge.

That something is probably my memory of fighting Artorias in his namesake DLC for Dark Souls, Artorias of the Abyss, released in 2012. While FromSoftware's games are quite fast-paced today, demanding quick reflexes in fights against the likes of Malenia, that wasn't the case in Dark Souls. Many of the bosses are lumbering beasts, and even the fastest foes have simple, relatively short attack combos compared to what FromSoftware throws at players today. Artorias was the very beginning of that paradigm shift.

You hear stories about the legendary knight throughout Dark Souls, but it's not until the DLC that you get to face him: a hero corrupted by the Abyss, driven into a mad frenzy. He leaps around his battle arena swinging a huge longsword one-handed. His range is fierce, and he'll punish you for trying to step back and heal. His battle serves as a precursor for the many 1v1 duels FromSoft would later make some of the most memorable encounters in the Dark Souls sequels and Elden Ring.

It was a hard fight by Dark Souls' standards, and also a thrilling way to kick off its expansion after a full game of lore build up. I can't think of a better fit for Nightreign, which FromSoftware is clearly treating as a greatest hits remix for beloved moments (and fearsome villains) from across its RPGs.

How well will this fight translate to a 3v1 co-op fight? I don't know! Artorias might need a bit of an AI tune-up to serve as much of a threat in Nightreign. But my #1 wish for the game since launch has been a deeper pool of mid-run bosses pulled from the older games for the sake of variety. I couldn't ask for a better first pick.

The time has come for Elden Ring Nightreign's DLC. FromSoftware dropped a jam-packed trailer at Sony's State of Play today that has glimpses of a transformed map, new characters, new bosses, and enemies returning from the Shadow of the Erdtree DLC.

It's called The Forsaken Hollows, and the first thing we see is a few quick shots of knights and caves not in the base game. In fact, the entire Limveil map has been transformed by a new event called The Great Hollow.

"A great cavity in the depths of Limveld," is how the post on the PlayStation Blog describes it. It's a big hole with a big crystal and everything down there looks terrifying.

To fight the new horrors are two new characters: The Scholar and The Undertaker. The Undertaker is a strength- and faith-based character who wields a mace and has an ultimate that sends her flying up to attack enemies. The Scholar looks less mobile, but equipped with a tome he can use to lift enemies up in place.

The PlayStation Blog confirms that there are two new Nightlord bosses to fight at the end of each run. One of them is a battalion of angelic knights holding golden spears and the other is, well, some kind of twisted abomination that roars just as the trailer comes to an end. Apparently FromSoft is holding that surprise for when we get to actually jump in and face it.

The Dancing Lion boss from the Shadow of the Erdtree DLC makes an appearance and everyone's favorite fallen knight Artorias has shown back up to fight you too.

If I had to make a guess for what's going on here, I'd say that this DLC will take place after the events of the main game. The new locations and enemies look absolutely ravaged by the toxic rain that's consuming the world, and the big hole in the ground is our ticket to revisiting the enemies from the Elden Ring DLC. Hopefully we'll also be able to utilize some new weapons and spells down there too.

I guess we'll find out next month on December 4 when Elden Ring Nightreign – The Forsaken Hollows launches.

Atari 50: The Anniversary Celebration is one of the coolest games on Steam, and only in part because it’s a robust retro game compilation that introduced me to Yars’ Revenge, the only Atari game I’ve ever loved. It’s also a sort of digital coffee table book replete with interviews, historical blurbs, and quaint reimaginings of the games it archives.

It’s because that core game was so good I’m actually excited to play another compilation of Bandai Namco’s 80s classics—Pac-Man, Dig Dug, Galaga, anything you’d expect to see wallowing in the corner of a local greasy spoon. In a DLC announced earlier this year without a release window, those games and a few others will finally be woven into the collection this Thursday, Nov. 13.

If you’re like me, you have more Namco compilations and miscellaneous ports of Pac-Man than you know what to do with, but this is more than just another re-release. On top of the archived art, photos, and developer interviews, this DLC is set to include three Atari ports of Pac-Man: 2600, 5200, and the version released on Atari 8-bit computers. According to the Steam page, this is the first time these games have ever reared their ugly heads in an official re-release.

It’s not for nothing; they are small potatoes next to the arcade original, Ms. Pac-Man, Championship Edition, and so on, having to work around the severe limitations of old Atari hardware. But given that the Atari 2600 version of Pac-Man sold millions of copies and was a major breadwinner for the console, it’s an essential piece of history for the little yellow… thing. Whatever he is.

If you’d rather learn about good games, there’s always the arcade versions of Xevious and Dig Dug, both of which will be included in the upcoming DLC. If you’re interested, it releases this Thursday on Steam.

The Content Overseas Distribution Association, a Japanese industry group whose members include Square Enix, Bandai Namco, FromSoftware parent Kadokawa Corporation, and Cygames, has issued a formal notice to OpenAI demanding that it stop using its members content to train its Sora 2 video generation tool without permission.

In a way, it feels like this was bound to happen. The day after Sora 2, the latest iteration of OpenAI's text-to-video technology, went live, PC Gamer's Jess Kinghorn described the system as capable of "spitting out all of the soulless, AI-generated Studio Ghibli-style animation one could ever want." Just a few days later, someone posted a Sora 2-generated video of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman standing in a field with frolicking Pokémon, saying, "I hope Nintendo doesn't sue us."

All of this has attracted the attention of CODA, an organization founded in 2002 to combat piracy and promote Japanese videogames, film, music, animation, and television programs worldwide. Somewhat ironically under the circumstances, Nintendo is not a CODA member, although Studio Ghibli is.

"CODA has confirmed that a large portion of content produced by Sora 2 closely resembles Japanese content or images," the org said in a written request to OpenAI (via Game Developer).

"CODA has determined that this is the result of using Japanese content as machine learning data. In cases, as with Sora 2, where specific copyrighted works are reproduced or similarly generated as outputs, CODA considers that the act of replication during the machine learning process may constitute copyright infringement."

No legal action has been taken at this point, but CODA gently hinted that it's not above such things if push comes to shove: "According to media reports, it has been stated that Sora 2 responds through an opt-out system based on requests from copyright holders. However, under Japan’s copyright system, prior permission is generally required for the use of copyrighted works, and there is no system allowing one to avoid liability for infringement through subsequent objections."

Notably, Altman promised after his romping with Pokémon video (and a bunch of others) rolled out that OpenAI will "give rightsholders more granular control over generation of characters [in Sora 2], similar to the opt-in model for likeness but with additional controls." Perhaps presaging the CODA demand, he also acknowledged "the remarkable creative output of Japan—we are struck by how deep the connection between users and Japanese content is!"

CODA's request to OpenAI contains two demands: That OpenAI ensure that CODA members' content isn't used for AI training without permission, and that OpenAI "responds sincerely to claims and inquiries from CODA member companies regarding copyright infringement related to Sora 2’s outputs." I've reached out to OpenAI for comment and will update if I receive a reply.

Katamari is a perfect example of a series I go through phases of being obsessed with playing, sort of like the Minecraft itch most people get for a few months a year. With that said, the last time I found myself utterly consumed by the story of the Prince and the King of the Cosmos was within Katamari Damacy: Reroll in 2019, so it's safe to say a revisit into this obsession has been long overdue. Luckily, Once Upon a Katamari has come along to remind me of the moreish chaos of these games, and quickly reminded me why I have spent so many hours essentially rolling a virtual ball around.

Once Upon a Katamari is the newest mainline addition to the Katamari franchise in 14 years. It's as bright and chaotic as ever, but with a number of new additions to make each of its levels even more engaging. After warming back up to the controls and remembering just how annoyed I get every time I crash into an object I'm not ready to pick up yet, I was fully sucked back into its world.

You're still on a mission to send stars back into the sky after the King of the Cosmos has unsurprisingly destroyed them all (again), much like older games, but this time you're sent travelling through time in a little spaceship called the S.S. Prince to do so. This means going back through history to a variety of different eras to complete quests for man and creature alike, sending bundles of items you've picked up back into the stratosphere to make incredibly odd looking planets.

Unlocking these new eras is easily the most thrilling part of Once Upon a Katamari, mostly because you simply don't know where you'll end up. One minute you're rolling tumbleweeds in the American Frontier, and the next you're being tasked with collecting as many creatures as you possibly can from the seabed in the Jurassic Era, or trekking through the Ice Age, or Edo Japan. Half of the fun is trying to guess where exactly you'll be sent next with nothing to go off but the level's main challenge, which more often than not just tells you what specific item you're being told to collect.

However in an attempt to clear up any confusion, each stage is introduced with a cutscene that vaguely shows you where you've landed. As much as I wanted to rely on this to plan a route, making the most of the time limit by preemptively locating whichever items I'd been tasked with gathering, everything changes once you're shrunk down to the size of the Prince and have to actually start the level. No matter how many times I've played Katamari, I always manage to massively underestimate just how small you are when you begin a round, so all of the larger items you've just spent time planning your path towards will need to be left until you've increased the size of your Katamari.

But things move so incredibly quickly, and there's a constant feeling of frenzied chaos in each round. It never feels like you're under pressure, regardless of how many comments the King of the Cosmos makes about how useless you are, but instead adds to the fun. When you bump into items you're not quite ready to roll up, it can be frustrating but you're still given plenty of opportunities to rectify this and there are plenty of secret corridors or rooms where items are hidden away to help you meet the quota you've been given.

It's easy to be intimidated by the initial figure in rounds where you're tasked with gathering a specific item, like "gather 360 beverages" for example, but before you know it you'll be exceeding that number and tasked with finding even more. Even though this feels like there's no way to really "complete" a level since there's always more to get and not really any limit to what you can roll, this just gave me a push to keep playing levels over and over again to see if I could beat my own personal best.

The Jurassic Era, which quickly became my favourite set of levels, is a perfect example of how there's no limit to what you can roll up either. Although massive dinosaurs stand around as obstacles at the start, if you manage to get to a reasonable size you can easily gather them up in your ball too. Literally nothing is safe from the power of the Prince, and that's where so much of the fun, and the charm of the game comes from.

I lost count of the amount of times I found myself struggling to gather enough items to essentially unlock the ability to roll up something much larger, before making a mental note to come back later. It doesn't take long for you to clear huge patches of the map of any items lying around, even though you started as something tiny. I got a lot of satisfaction from trying to roll as much as I could in the first few minutes of a round, before aiming exclusively for the ridiculously large items just to see if I could pick them up, and subsequently cackling at the fact an entire family and their children have now ended up being rolled around.

New tools also make each run easier, like the magnet which brings any nearby object of the right size to your Katamari, and a rocket which makes you move a lot faster for a period of time. These new additions will definitely help new players with some of the more challenging, more expectant levels. But, they are also just fun to mess around with. It's nice to have a helping hand at the end of the level if you haven't quite got enough to scrape by and move onto the next level, or if you're seconds away from getting the last item you need.

It's an incredibly easy game to pick up and then most likely struggle to put down. I'm usually quite good at sticking to the "one more run" rule once I say it out loud, but Once Upon a Katamari has shown me otherwise. It's hard to feel any sense of boredom when you're bombarded with colours and sounds in a round and given such a small timeframe to work with. If anything, it's just shown me how competitive I can be, even if that's against myself.

The first time I played Little Nightmares, I fell in love almost instantly. Although I'm a total wuss when it comes to horror games, the Coraline-esque aesthetic very quickly sunk its hooks into me, and before long I found myself waiting for the release of the second game in 2021. In the meantime I stayed up trying to find out as much as I possibly could about the characters and setting. When Little Nightmares 2 launched it took me a single day to get through. You literally couldn't have peeled me away from it if you tried. So, when the third game was announced in 2023, the excitement started all over again.

Little Nightmares 3 is the first game of the series to be developed by Supermassive Games rather than Tarsier Studios. Despite this change, it certainly looks the exact same as the other two games. When you begin the adventure, you awaken in a strange environment overwhelmed by a feeling of dread, and everything around you looks gigantic to really emphasise how small you are as a child. The same goes for the various humanlike creatures you encounter, alongside the main villains, all of which tower over you.

In previous games, one of the things that made the villains so scary was how close they were to being humans, yet there was something so unusual and off-putting about them like having an excessive amount of skin, one too many limbs, or having the ability to elongate parts of their body like a neck or an arm, which definitely isn't possible.

They really felt like costumes for an entity which is never quite explained, which isn't the case with Little Nightmares 3. The villains and creatures are still unsettling, but they aren't as uncomfortable so don't push you to stare at them, trying to figure out what exactly they are. You also don't encounter a huge amount of them, which is a shame. There are only four areas, each with one or two enemy types—including what would be considered a "boss".

The less bloodstained design isn't necessarily a bad thing though, especially if you've decided to play through it with someone who isn't as good with gore. There are still moments of Little Nightmares 3 which make you grimace away from your screen, like when one enemy is carving up a body and feeding the insides to his sentient hand puppet, but for the most part you won't spend much time wandering between hanging bodies or wading through entrails like you did before. Instead it's mushrooms and various lollipops in this game. But with all that said, you do have to come closer than ever to most of the enemies you meet.

Combat was never a huge part of Little Nightmares, so I was skeptical when it was shown as a pretty significant thing in the newest game. Aside from swinging the odd pipe to smash clay children, a lot of your experience with the game's enemies was accompanied by running and hiding.

In Little Nightmares 3, there are several instances where your progression is stopped by what I can only describe as 'monster rooms'—small confined spaces where you and your partner have to work together to take down enemies that keep piling in. This includes Low shooting them with an arrow, before Alone runs in and smashes them with a wrench, and when you finally take down the last one your path is conveniently opened up so you can keep exploring.

I can't say I'm crazy about these mechanics, and they feel clumsy in the same way they did on the rare occasion you'd have to use them in previous games. My depth perception failed me on one too many occasions, and since there's no way to lock on your target, you just have to hope you've lined your shot up correctly.

Also, if you're not playing with a friend then relying on the AI companion can be frustrating too, and the number of times I had to retrace sections because my robot friend had decided to jump off a ledge or miss an enemy definitely took away from the experience. Then again, this is no different from the AI companion in the second game simply refusing to be much use with any of the puzzles unless I pushed them around either.

Fortunately, the puzzle solving in the third game is incredibly straightforward. Environments are by no means challenging to explore, and a lot of the time the puzzles you encounter involve pulling blocks around to reach different levels to grab items. Although each environment is completely different, they aren't particularly engaging to explore—another reason the game feels like it could've done with a bit more time in development.

Most of the time you just travel between holes in the wall or vents in the foreground rather than having to use the entire depth of an area. This changes slightly towards the end of the game, but by the time you start getting used to it, you've already finished.

There are collectibles you can find in backrooms, but that's the only thing to push you to go there and a lot of the time I gave it a miss for the sake of progressing to the next area. If I had known that the story would only take four hours to get through, I definitely would've spent a bit more time scouring the corners of each and every area. Even a little bit of lore, be it through an illustration or clue plastered on the wall, would've been enough to push me to explore more.

With only four "chapters" and a story which is only just being set up by the time the credits roll, it's hard to think Little Nightmares 3 is by any means a finished game. It's like you just get to a point where you settle into a rhythm and suddenly everything comes to an end. What story you do get a sense of feels rushed to a close, and there isn't enough content to really justify its price tag.

Besides the clumsy combat, the character and world design feels like a Little Nightmares game, it just lacks in a lot of areas. I'd like to have seen more enemies, more environment variation, and just gotten to know the main characters a bit more. I wouldn't be surprised if more comes in a future DLC, but I don't feel like I'll be waiting with bated breath this time.

The Little Nightmares games are humble in their intent, and that’s what makes them tick. You’re a tiny weakling moving forward through a hostile world. Where are you going? You just don’t know. Why are you there? It's a dream. Why do all these trauma-inducing monstrosities want to kill you? Because you’re there.

These games are not works of narrative genius and that’s entirely to their credit. They’re cinematic platformers in the Inside mould, but they tell you nothing and rely entirely on implication. As far as we know, our freakish little protags have been on the run from diabolical terrors forever.

In Little Nightmares 3 we can glean a lot about the sordid realities of the environments we move through, but we never learn with any certainty what that means to us, or how we fit into it. We’re just running away. When I’m squirrelling through tiny crawlspaces in a horrible industrial candy factory-cum-Amazon fulfilment centre, all the better to avoid a multi-limbed granny who wants to claw me into devon slices, I don’t really care how I ended up there. The important thing is that I get out.

When I get out, I end up in a more horrifying place, from which I also have to escape. This is the reality our diminutive heroes must endure, forever.

Little Nightmares 3 extends its reach beyond the sickly domestic settings the series has formerly waded in, with its four chapters mostly taking place in exaggerated, unreal landscapes whose connection to the material world is loose. This time our little freaks are entirely out of their element, exploring bizarre windswept temples and morbid carnivals among other charming locales. The horror still leans heavily on the visual touchstones of childhood trauma—sickly dolls, exaggeratedly aged adults, evil puppets—but the artists have an exquisite knack for the grotesque that elevates otherwise over-familiar material.

To play, Little Nightmares 3 is functionally identical to its two predecessors, except this time there are two playable characters selectable at the start. Low has a bow-and-arrow, and Alone has a wrench. Commandeering one character will set the other on auto-pilot. Their unique abilities factor into puzzle solving and traversal in pretty straightforward ways that never get complicated: Low, of course, can trigger distant switches or destroy frayed ropes, while Alone can turn cogs and smash through weak walls.

Other tools become available across the four chapters, such as an umbrella, which can be used to ascend wind columns or descend safely, but they don't really alter the fundamentals. It's never less than obvious how these tools should be implemented to solve a problem, and this obviousness endures right until the very end. I sometimes yearned for something trickier, like the often diabolical puzzles in Unravel 2, or the Trine games. Solving a puzzle is rarely gratifying because they don't pose a stiff challenge—they're really just there to provide relief between more tense moments.

Little Nightmares 3 can be played cooperatively, which is apparently something a lot of people wanted from this series. It's a fun idea, but it’s online only, whereas I think local co-op would have worked better in this instance. When two players aren't sitting together but are relying on each other, the game's sometimes tedious trial-and-error elements, and the imprecision of its platforming, are exacerbated.

Nevertheless, it's fun more often than not, and playing in co-op can alleviate the feeling that this has all been done before. After playing the first two games, the formula to which Little Nightmares 3 holds steadfast is overfamiliar now. I know that I'll spend a bunch of time being teased with evidence of a big baddie. I know I'll spend some time wandering through tense, gorgeously decorated rooms, lifting grates, pushing boxes, and hoisting through windows. I know there will be chase scenes, and some stealth scenes, and some puzzle rooms. It really feels like going through the motions at times.

As a result, Little Nightmares 3 is mostly unscary too, though it's still potent on an atmospheric level. Performance was great on my RTX 3060 gaming laptop with everything set to medium. There were no technical stumbles or frame drops at all, and I likewise enjoyed playing at a virtually locked 30 fps on Steam Deck with everything set to low. There are plenty of options to fiddle with if you feel so inclined, including three tiers of ray tracing for more powerful PCs.

Even after three games it's always morbidly fascinating when I finally get to see the big pursuing baddies in all of their disgusting glory. But I never felt tense playing Little Nightmares 3, and part of me wonders if that's the point.

I’ve read people talk about the "cosiness" of horror games, which I take to mean that the pulse of the genre is so ingrained that we know when we can be calm and poke around. We know when shit has hit the fan. We know that the worst that can happen (which is not bad because of course this is a game) is that we’ll be thrown back to a checkpoint. It’s less to do with being numb to frights and more to do with an understanding of genre orthodoxies.

Little Nightmares 3 bottles this sensation, almost to the point of gentrification. It’s cutesy, dioramic horror that looks bleak but isn’t very scary, and it's also basically a rollercoaster game, almost entirely reliant on spectacle. This grants its creators a lot of wriggle room when it comes to gorgeous cinematography, and this entry is arguably even more visually impressive than its predecessors. But when it comes to the things you do with your hands, it feels a little rote.

My Hero Academia, one of the most popular manga/anime series of the last decade, is about a bunch of super-powered high school kids going to class while training to be heroes. Persona, one of the most popular videogame series of the last decade, is about a bunch of high school kids with supernatural abilities going to class while solving mysteries.

I don't understand why Bandai Namco hasn't shamelessly ripped off the latter with a My Hero Academia game that'd make approximately one billion dollars, but its latest videogame adaptation is at least inching in that direction.

At last week's Tokyo Game Show I played about half an hour of My Hero Academia: All's Justice, which is out on Steam next February. It's following a pair of games (One Justice and One Justice 2) that took one of the two default paths for an anime adaptation. They aren't gacha games, which means they're arena fighters like Jump Force: 3D beat-em-ups with relatively simple fighting mechanics compared to a Street Fighter or Tekken, where there's not a lot of meat on the bones beyond the simple pleasure of playing as your favorite characters.

That can be a good time, but it doesn't get the blood bumping the way the upcoming Marvel Tōkon: Fighting Souls does with the promise of a deeply technical fighting game that's also stuffed full of comic book heroes. And the game team at Bandai Namco know that arena fighters can only take them so far.

"We've received a lot of positive feedback throughout the past games, but the comment we were hearing a lot is that players wanted to move freely and experience the world of My Hero a lot more," said producer Aoba Miyazaki. "That's why we implemented Team-up Mission."

That's the name of a new mode in All's Justice, which is effectively the game's campaign. You can now explore a large-scale 3D map as My Hero protagonist Deku, as well as a bunch of his classmates, each with their own movement mechanics. Gravity-defying Uraraka can float to the top of buildings; icy hot hearthtrob Todoroki can slide along the ground on a sheet of ice; speedster Ida can, well, run really fast.

Deku himself plays a bit like Spider-Man, using his whip power ("quirk") to swing between buildings. The world is dotted with My Hero characters to chat with and missions to take on, but rather than this being a direct retelling of the anime's story it's instead a "virtual training ground." So you're basically in the Holodeck, but hey: it's still a step forward being able to play as these heroes in a context other than a 1v1 fight.

The production value here is more Street Fighter 6 campaign than PlayStation Spider-Man, with speech bubbles that aren't always fully voiced, NPCs who just stand around, pretty flat lighting, and so on and so forth; there's no wow, I'm really in the world of My Hero Academia-level immersion here. But it's at least a step in the right direction, as is the "Archive Battle" mode you'll unlock after finishing the campaign, allowing you to play through the series' biggest fights.

And once the fighting starts, All's Justice really is flashy. The combat is full of easy autocombos that dish out a sequence of hits from a few button presses, and you can trigger some absolutely bombastic team-up attacks with your party members when you enter the powered-up "Rising" state.

Miyazaki explained that while the past One Justice games let you have a couple assist heroes in battle, you could never control them permanently, while All's Justice is a proper 3v3 fighter. You can swap characters at any time, and your team composition matters a lot more.

"When there is only one remaining character [on your team] the Rising automatically activates, and that's called Ultimate Rising: it's the most powerful," she said. "So you need to be strategic about which character you'd like to use Ultimate Rising with." There are counters to saving the strongest for last, though: Newly added hero Monoma can actually switch the character that your opponent's controlling, and the same can of course be done to you.

All's Justice looks like a big step forward from the One Justice games, but I still think Bandai Namco's missing a trick by not putting a Persona or even Midnight Suns spin on My Hero. Heck, the company's made a proper One Piece RPG adventure in the past—at 100 million manga copies sold, the audience is definitely out there.

There's a weird dearth of vampire videogames, which is a shame, because I often find myself craving them. This year, at least, we're finally getting Bloodlines 2, but only a few months later we'll be switching sides and hunting vamps down in Code Vein 2.

During Sony's latest State of Play, Bandai Namco gave us a new trailer and a release date for the vampire-slaying sequel. The trailer says January 30, though on Steam it's listed as January 29, which may be down to timezone nonsense.

Now, technically I should be calling Code Vein's monsters revenants, which is how they're referred to in the series, but basically it's the same thing. In most myths and across fiction, vampires are almost always revenants, but not all revenants are vampires. A revenant, specifically if we're talking about folklore, is a spirit or corpse revived from death.

Am I trying to define revenant because I don't actually have a whole lot to say about the trailer? I would never.

OK, I do actually have a few things to say. The abilities? They look awesome. Weird, techno-organic wolves sprouting from your shoulders. A sword made of disgusting sinew. I can dig it. Plus, you get a motorbike and a wee pal who can manipulate time. Sounds like all the ingredients of a fun romp.

And if you're worried that playing a revenant hunter rather than a revenant means no vampire superpowers, don't be; Code Vein 2 sees the return of the blood mechanic, letting you drain blood from enemies so that you can pull off some fancy moves.

Bandai Namco also showed off a gameplay presentation, which walks us through character creation, some story beats and cutscenes—which, judging by what we've seen, I'll be tempted to skip—and a spot of action. We also get to take a look at the pretty decent photo mode.

The fights look like they could be a fun challenge, but I'm not at all vibing with the game's aesthetic, which feels like a bit of a step back from the original.

It's available to pre-purchase now, and there are a couple of pricier options that also come with advanced access, letting you hop into the game on January 26. Though I feel like this is gonna be a wait-and-see kinda game.

My experience with the Little Nightmares series has never been solo. Although both the first and second games only support one player, while I've made my way through the hopeless settings of both, I've always been watched. My sister sat screaming in fear over my shoulder while I navigated the first one, and my housemates in university happily attempted to instruct me through the second. I was fully ready for Little Nightmares 3 to be the first I actually played on my own, until the demo released and I realised it had co-op—foiled again.

Little Nightmares 3 is the first of the series to feature co-op, and after just 30 minutes of crawling through Necropolis, I've come to the stark realisation that the entire series, or at least the sections where there's already an NPC companion by your side, would've greatly benefited from supporting two players.

You still have the option to play with an AI companion if you'd rather go alone. If it's anything like the companion in the second game, then I'd much rather recruit a second player than watch a computer stumble around trying to get in the right position to complete a basic puzzle. Being able to turn to my partner, someone who has never played a Little Nightmares game, during the demo and almost instruct him where to go definitely helped immerse me more into the game.

This also led to me getting spooked a bit easier too, even though I thought playing with someone else would make the game less intimidating. I wouldn't say that Little Nightmares is a particularly jumpy set of horror games, but rather one that relies heavily on being mostly unsettling and occasionally psychological. It does a fantastic job at building its worlds in a way that makes you feel incredibly small, which is perfect, given that most of the time you're exploring as a frightened child. When you're accompanied by a second player, the fear of being alone is replaced by the dread of becoming separated.

The setting of The Spiral, and more specifically the Necropolis, which is where you spend most of your time in the demo, towers over you and even as you make your way through each area, you really start to feel the scale of things. Whether it's climbing a ladder that seems to go on forever, or running out onto a balcony that makes you realise you're so high up you can't even see the ground, it all plays on your mind and instils the fear of being so vulnerable in a setting where it feels like literally everything is out to get you.

Even though the demo is short, you get a good look at how Little Nightmares 3 plans to stack up against its predecessors, too. You've got the classic sequence of walking around, solving quite basic puzzles, climbing, and then running in fear from whatever monster is looming over you (in this case, it's a horrible giant baby). It's as fun as it always has been in the series, though it already feels a bit more high-stakes.

Obviously, some designs differ slightly in Little Nightmares 3 as the game has been created with co-op in mind.

You didn't have a huge amount of leeway in the previous games, and if you missed a chance to hide from an enemy, your chances of making it out alive were incredibly slim. But in the demo, it feels like you have an even smaller window of opportunity, which makes the whole game feel a lot more tense. This is obviously made slightly harder by the fact that two of you need to do it at the same time. If either of you miss a hiding spot, or jump, you will inevitably have to retrace your steps and do it all again.

The emphasis on combat also took me by surprise . You don't have any means to defend yourself in either Little Nightmares game besides the odd moment of crushing enemies with a pipe you've picked up, but the two new protagonists sport different weapons, and it doesn't take long to realise your only means of progression is through working together. There's not enough room to mess each other around without it having pretty detrimental effects on your progress.

There's only one section in the demo where you have to fight back, a room you become trapped in and then swarmed by beetles, but it takes a lot of focus and communication to get right. One person has to shoot the flying beetles down with a bow and arrow, while the other one finishes them off by slamming a wrench down onto them. I definitely wouldn't trust an AI companion to pull this off as seamlessly as it needs to be done, seeing as it took me and my partner a few attempts to even get through.

Even outside of combat, you need to utilise your tools, a bow and a wrench, to solve the game's puzzles. The bow can be used to take out ropes and drop things like boxes to help you reach new levels, whereas the wrench can operate machinery or break down weak doorways. It's impossible to do one thing without the other, and while a lot of the demo has you both working in tandem, I look forward to whatever twisted ways Little Nightmares 3 forces you to separate from your companion and wonder if you'll ever see them again when it launches on October 10.

Around seven years ago now, I got my first taste of Clap Hanz's excellent Everybody's Golf series. I picked up the 2017 game pretty cheap, for reasons I'm not quite sure of—I've never really played or enjoyed sports games, I don't care for golf, and I'd never even heard of the series prior to this purchase.

Maybe it was the promise of anime models that looked like they'd been ripped out of a 2000s online rhythm game or sheer summer boredom, but I'm glad my silly little brain made that decision. Everybody's Golf is an excellent game, and I loved the 2017 version's open courses that I could drive a cart around with my own wee custom character. Also, you know, the actual golfing part was surprisingly good with tight physics and a steep but fairly intuitive learning curve.

It's why I was especially excited to discover that the series was going to be making its PC debut with Everybody's Golf Hot Shots. It's exclusively been a PlayStation thing since the first game released in 1997—except for the one game that made its way to mobile in Japan.

What I wasn't so excited about was the fact Clap Hanz is no longer at the helm. Hot Shots instead has been tackled by developer Hyde, behind games like Digimon Survive and Tamagotchi Plaza.

Do I think it lives up to almost 30 years of Clap Hanz spectacles? Not quite, though I have been really enjoying my time with it. I just wish everyone would shut the fuck up for more than two seconds.

The good stuff outta the way first: I kinda dig how retro-feeling Hot Shots is. Everything is freaking locked, and you have to play through the game's various modes to unlock new characters, balls, golf clubs, and caddies. Is the grind a little tedious? It can be—especially when you realise that generic abilities like using higher-quality clubs and spin power mode are unlocked on a per-character basis with loyalty levels.

But for singleplayer offerings, Hot Shots has a lot going for it. I can play through an assortment of courses in Challenge Mode and face off against characters to then go ahead and unlock them in World Tour, complete with some light visual novel cutscenes.

There's even a Mario Party-style game mode with Wacky Golf where I can chuck debuffs on my opponent while making my own shots far easier to take. I haven't spent too much time in this mode, but I can imagine getting stuck into it with a couple pals.

And while I certainly raised an eyebrow initially at the little note at the bottom of the Steam page saying Hyde was using generative AI for its trees and leaves textures, former GameXplain host (now of Good Vibes Gaming) Jon Cartwright reckons the developer has been a little overcautious with its disclaimers.

But good grief, nobody in this game knows how to let a conversation sit for more than two seconds. God forbid any air is left without someone's gums flapping on the goddamn fairway. And all of this is coming from a self-professed chronic yapper.

Hot Shots starts me off with two golfers Alie and Mizuki, and caddy Hannah. I picked Alie for my first try in Challenge Mode, with Hannah tagging along for the ride with no other options available to me.

Here's what happens approximately every other second:

• "I'm rooting for you, go get 'em Alie!"
• "You can totally count on me!"
• "Yay!"
• "You got this, girly!"
• "Go ball!"
• "Deep breaths, girly!"

It's exhausting. Things only got worse when I unlocked access to German caddy Hugh—whose voice actor I am not entirely convinced comes from Deutschland. If I have to hear "to the right, ja?" one more time, I fear I might crash out.

Do people on real golf courses chat this much? How do they get any actual golf done? How am I supposed to swing my club while dancing around yelling "yay, ball!" for the millionth time? It certainly doesn't help that each character only seems to have half a dozen voice lines to pluck from for every situation, which means I'm forced to hear the same incessant yapping multiple times even in a 9-hole outing.

It's a small peeve, I know, but one that has really grated on me in my initial hours with Hot Shots and sullied what has otherwise been a surprisingly enjoyable time. I honestly wasn't sure I'd appreciate a non-Clap Hanz take on the game after the developer has been at the helm for so long, but Hyde has done a decent enough job that I'll let it slide.

If the studio can take an axe to the voice line frequency ASAP I'll be much happier for it before some poor caddy's head ends up getting shoved down a tornado hole.

Back in 2024, as the soulslike difficulty discourse once again reared its silly head, Elden Ring director Hidetaka Miyazaki said FromSoft "could just crank the difficulty down," but warned that doing so "would break the game itself." That doesn't seem to be a concern going the other direction, though, as Bandai Namco says a new "high-difficulty challenge mode" called Deep of Night is coming to Elden Ring: Nightreign in September.

Now, before we get too far into this, I know, Elden Ring and Elden Ring: Nightreign are two very different experiences: One an almost entirely solo soulslike, the other a co-op focused extraction game. So the analogy isn't exact—difficulty becomes less of a pressing issue when you're travelling with your own personal Let Me Solo Her—but even so I find the whole "We can't go down, but we can sure as hell go up" approach quite funny.

Anyway, Deep of Night is "designed for seasoned players who have navigated through the Night many times," Bandai said. Enemies will be stronger than in other modes, and players won't be able to target specific Nightlords when they set out—you'll get who you get, and good luck to you.

"Ongoing terrain changes are not reflected," Bandai said, which I assume means Shifting Earth modifiers are off the table, and there will be new items exclusive to the Deep of Night mode, including "Depths Relics" and weapons with multiple new—"but also detrimental"—effects. Hey, the Nightlord giveth, and the Nightlord taketh away.

"'Deep of Night' is a high-difficulty mode that provides a thrilling and challenging adventure," Bandai wrote. "We encourage you to try and see if you can surpass Depth 3." If you do, Depths 4 and 5 "will feature an endless battle for those seeking even greater thrills." Deep of Night's difficulty will increase as you descend, but will also "fluctuate based on wins and losses," Bandai said.

If all of this is ringing a bell, it's likely because you read about some Nightreign datamining earlier this month that uncovered information on the Deep of Night mode, including that it will have five "depths," each with 999 ratings—a system seemingly similar to the one FromSoft used for Armor Core 6.

How exactly it will all work out in practice remains to be seen, but players will find out soon enough: Nightreign's Deep of Night mode is set to go live on September 11.

Tales of Xillia released exclusively for PS3 in 2011, and it's been stuck there ever since. It's a widely loved instalment in the Tales Of series, which is no small feat when there are 17 of them. Xillia featured two protagonists for the first time in the series' history, and a combat system people still praise to this day. If you missed it back in the PS3-era, Tales of Xillia is now coming to PC in the form of Tales Of Xillia Remastered.

The remaster applies all the usual polish: expect enhanced graphics, though Bandai Namco hasn't specified exactly what this entails. I've reached out, but I'm assuming we'll be seeing much sharper 4K assets and hopefully support for framerates above 60 fps.

There are a bunch of quality of life improvements too, including waypoint markers, and the ability to toggle off enemy encounters. Other tweaks are minor but very welcome in a sprawling, 50+ hour JRPG, like skippable cutscenes and a much more helpful mini-map that shows item locations, treasure chests and more. All DLC is included, most of which is costumes and items.

Tales of Xillia is set in Rieze Maxia, which you'll explore as either Jude Mathis or Milla Maxwell. This dual protagonist arrangement feeds into Xillia's (take a breath) Dual Raid Linear Motion Battle System, which takes the classic real time Tales Of combat and puts a combo-driven spin on it.

If your first exposure to Tales Of was via last year's Tales of Graces F remaster, you may be pleased or annoyed to hear that Xillia is a marginally more mature take on the series, but it's still as comfortingly cliche as they come: most Dragon Quest instalments look like works of dadaist art compared to Tales Of's determinedly fuss-free approach to the JRPG. That's why a lot of people like 'em.

Tales Of Xillia Remastered hits PC on October 31. It'll release for all the consoles too.

A handful of hours with a preview build of Towa and the Guardians of the Sacred Tree taught me a couple important things about myself: Something activates in my brain when I play anything that remotely resembles Hades, and, despite my experience with the genre, I'm really bad at controlling two characters at once.

Although that last part made playing Towa a real challenge, I had so much fun with everything else that I'm excited to see if I can boost my dual character comprehension skills when it drops next month.

Towa nails the basic parts of a roguelite where you're fighting through rooms full of enemies and picking up random upgrades. I found some that made my dashes whip up tornadoes and my sword set enemies on fire. Like Hades' boons, all of them fit into categories that you'll eventually be able to manipulate into showing up more often through other systems outside of the run.

But here's what makes Towa different: You have two characters to manage, each with their own abilities and life bars. Your main character is the Tsurugi, the sword fighter, and your secondary character is the Kagura, the magic caster. Controlling one of them is easy enough, but the other one is always trailing behind you.

This can lead to some tricky situations where enemy attacks—often telegraphed through red shapes on the ground—can wipe your buddy out, effectively gutting your damage output by halving your available skills. It's even worse if you've invested some of your upgrades into their spells. The added risk makes encounters last longer than a typical fight in Hades as you dodge in and out of attacks trying to keep both of your characters alive.

You can always swap to your Kagura and control them directly, but I found it was much easier to position myself in spots where neither character would get hit. Alternatively, you can play through the game in co-op and blame your friend for sloppily playing as the Kagura.

I can't say I fully adjusted to managing a duo by myself. I was relieved any time I found a campsite during a run to rest at and replenish my Kagura's health. I did, however, find ways to work around the double trouble.

The Tsurugi's twin swords are powerful enough on their own to clear packs of normal enemies without your Kagura's spells. Each blade has a limited amount of uses before it breaks, forcing you to flip between them as you fight (the damaged sword will be as good as new as soon as you swap back). Even in my unluckiest runs, timing my light and heavy attacks was rewarding enough to keep fights from becoming a grind fest. It only ever felt like I had really screwed up when I lost my Kagura during a boss fight. Bosses are relentless and it was hard to win the battle of attrition without both of my characters alive.

Building the blade

There are thankfully ways to build around this problem in between runs. You can craft your own swords through a series of timing-based minigames that determine the strength of various attributes. The first sword I made was a brittle blade capable of dealing one big chunk of damage before breaking.

Because I had to swap between my swords so often, I picked upgrades that increased my durability and enhanced the projectile that you fling out when you switch weapons. To complement it, I made my other sword sturdier but with only a moderate amount of damage output. By the end of my time with Towa I was deleting big enemies with my super sword and clearing out smaller ones with the balanced one, giving combat a dramatically different pace than how it started.

I wasn't able to gather enough materials during the preview to really put the crafting system to the test, but I suspect there will be a lot of room to customize how you want your swords to fit into the rhythm of combat.

In fact, I'm sure of it after getting a taste of how differently each character plays. The Tsurugi and Kagura are roles, not defined characters, and there are multiple to choose from for each job. I stuck with Origami, a lady who sends a massive projectile forward when she slams her sword down, as my Tsurugi. But the other characters can pull out attacks that pierce through enemies or carve through everything around them in a circle.

There were definitely times in the later areas where I wish I had been playing a character more suited for clearing out packs of weaker enemies. I wouldn't be surprised if it's actually a good idea to choose your Tsurugi based on what kind of monsters you're struggling with on a particular run you can't quite beat.

Bittersweet victories

I defeated my first boss with Rekka as my Kagura. Her fireballs and damage reduction aura came in clutch while fighting a dragon boss who spent most of the fight ping-ponging around the room. I thought I had a great combo going with Origami, but then Towa reminded me why we were even doing all this in the first place.

All the characters are scattered throughout time in the game's opening and need to be brought together again to defend the world from a demon. A successful run ends with a ritual that sends your Kagura back to the right timeline and removes them as an option in your following runs. Rekka and her fireballs were gone. My unstoppable duo was shattered and I was forced to figure out how to work with someone else.

As devastating as that was, I kind of love the idea of a fleeting roster of sidekicks who you need to build around to get through each run. As long as it's not too punishing to craft new swords and move around your skill tree upgrades, the temporary nature of your builds seems to be the thing that makes Towa not just an anime Hades.

And honestly, even if it was just that, I think I'd still want to see more of it. My three hours with the preview was nowhere near enough time to explore the upgrades you can stack on top of each other in a run. I found a few little combos, but nothing that felt ridiculously overpowered. I spotted new spells available in the skill tree that can conjure a pillar of water that almost covers the entire room or pull down a boulder that scorches enemies in its explosion, so I expect to have a lot of options deeper into the game.

All the creative buildcrafting is impressive for a game that is only going to run you $30 on Steam when it's out on September 18. Anyone who hasn't been sucked into a Hades 2 hole, or hasn't been bitten by the roguelite bug yet, shouldn't let a game as fun as this slip under your radar.

Fighting games are a full-blown sensory experience: From feeling the rap of buttons under your fingers as you execute your bread-and-butter combo, to the explosive visual effects that accompany counter hits and special attacks, to the weighty audial blast of every punch and kick—all soundtracked to some of the hottest music in videogames.

Like I was saying when talking about rock music in videogames a few weeks ago, the soundtracks we hear are a critical part of how games spin stories. They can prime our emotions before we've even heard any dialogue or seen any text—maybe soft violins ease us into a sad scene, or shrill plucked strings alert us to incoming danger.

Fighters are a little different, though. Sure we have story modes and snippets of lore here and there, but ultimately every battle is taking place in a vacuum. Maybe you're practicing some new moves against a CPU, or more often than not putting your ego on the line to go against a real-life opponent. Maybe that's online, at your locals, or maybe even on the big stage at a tournament.

It's a concept stripped down to its most fundamental parts. No cutscenes to clue you in, no dialogue trees to alter the course. It's just you, one other person, and a mental encyclopaedia of frame data, punishments, and half a dozen combo routes. That's why audio and presentation is so important—visually it has to look exciting while cleanly conveying every hit, which means most of the theatrics end up tucked into every corner of its sound design.

I'm currently at VSFighting in Birmingham, the UK's primo major fighting game tournament. One of my favourite parts about getting to attend is how electrifying the atmosphere is when you're all piled into an auditorium to watch the final eight players duke it out for victory all while the game's sound is fit to burst out of the speakers.

Players will chant along to voice lines, yell "Ey, ey, ey, eyyy!" to every hit in a combo, and sing along to some of their favourite stings in the best fighting game soundtracks. Take Street Fighter 6 and Reinvent the Game. It's the song that plays in the character select screen, before each fighter gets to play up to the camera in a little cutscene. You'll almost definitely find everybody chanting along to "Yeah, yeah!" as a way to get the pre-match hype kickstarted.

I'll also forever have fond memories of Tekken 7's Infinite Azure—a stage that got counterpicked a whole bunch back when the game was current—and the final round theme Moonsiders 2nd. Popular commentator Tasty Steve almost couldn't resist mouthing along to the beat drop, and almost every time I hear the song it's accompanied by him yelling "Bwahm bwahm bwahm bwahm BWAAGH!" Listen to it, you'll see exactly what I mean.

Songs in fighting games aren't just there to serve whoever's fighting their way to victory. It also serves the audience watching, either at home or alongside those taking to the main stage. Whether you're going for character themes like Granblue or Street Fighter, or dedicating multiple tracks to each stage like Tekken, ultimately the goal is the same: get players battle-ready, and let viewers know they're in for a real good fight.

It's a collective experience, one that feels wholly unique to fighting games. From high-octane tracks that pull from EDM, hip-hop, and hardcore influences, to more atmospheric tracks that lean more trance, industrial, and ambient genres. It's music so good that people dedicate entire DJ sets to it—the Tekken World Tour 2023 finals enlisted DJ and fighting game composer Mifumei to spin some discs, and it went hard.

Here are some of my absolute favourite fighting game tracks (with a little help from all my lovely FGC pals) you should be adding to your gym, work, and cleaning playlist. Hell, whatever really. Add 'em to your sleep playlist. I also promise to not make it entirely Tekken, as this list could absolutely be entirely composed of tracks from the series. They're just that good.

Moonsiders 2nd. Popular commentator Tasty Steve almost couldn't resist mouthing along to the beat drop, and almost every time I hear the song it's accompanied by him yelling "Bwahm bwahm bwahm bwahm BWAAGH!" Listen to it, you'll see exactly what I mean.

Songs in fighting games aren't just there to serve whoever's fighting their way to victory. It also serves the audience watching, either at home or alongside those taking to the main stage. Whether you're going for character themes like Granblue or Street Fighter, or dedicating multiple tracks to each stage like Tekken, ultimately the goal is the same: get players battle-ready, and let viewers know they're in for a real good fight.

It's a collective experience, one that feels wholly unique to fighting games. From high-octane tracks that pull from EDM, hip-hop, and hardcore influences, to more atmospheric tracks that lean more trance, industrial, and ambient genres. It's music so good that people dedicate entire DJ sets to it—the Tekken World Tour 2023 finals enlisted DJ and fighting game composer Mifumei to spin some discs, and it went hard.

Here are some of my absolute favourite fighting game tracks (with a little help from all my lovely FGC pals) you should be adding to your gym, work, and cleaning playlist. Hell, whatever really. Add 'em to your sleep playlist. I also promise to not make it entirely Tekken, as this list could absolutely be entirely composed of tracks from the series. They're just that good.

Funky

• Tekken 8 – Twilight Party Cruise (Climax)
• Dragon Ball Z Budokai 2 – Character Select
• Tekken 6 – Karma (Electric Fountain)
• Lethal League Blaze – Ain't Nothin' Like a Funky Beat
• The King of Fighters '97 – Cool Jam ~Stormy Saxophone 3~

Epic

• Killer Instinct (2013) – The Instinct
• Mortal Kombat – Techno Syndrome (Mortal Kombat)
• Street Fighter 6 – The Plunderer (JP's Theme)
• Granblue Fantasy Versus: Rising – Parade's Lust
• Dragon Ball FighterZ - Broly's Theme

Chill

• Tekken 4 – Authentic Sky
• Ultra Street Fighter 4 – Cosmic Elevator
• Skullgirls – Pick of the Litter
• Street Fighter 5 – Theme of Karin Kanzuki
• Melty Blood: Type Lumina – Magician's Night EX

Everyone loves a good rivalry, and Tekken fans have been eating good for a while thanks to Korean player (and long-time Tekken veteran) Knee, as well as Pakistani pro Arslan Ash, who bulldozed onto the scene in 2019 and has been dominating a whole host of fighting game tournaments since.

Things between the two have been getting especially heated thanks to debate around Knee's main character, Bryan. Arslan Ash has been putting a whole lotta energy into some top-tier rage baiting, telling anyone who'll listen that Bryan is one of the strongest characters in the game, which has successfully rubbed Knee the wrong way.

The whole thing hasn't been helped by Knee retweeting an International Esports Foundation ban Arslan Ash recently faced around failing a drug test for anabolic steroid use—something that would ultimately have no sway on his performance in a videogame, but saw him face a two-year ban from IESF-sanctioned events from April 2023 to April 2025 anyway.

It's certainly been veering into proper beef territory (one may even argue drama) at this point, and that hasn't gone unnoticed by both the FGC and the Esports World Cup.

Quick note that I certainly have my thoughts on the EWC—I'm not exactly a fan of a sportwashing event run by a government with some very questionable stances on women and LGBTQ+ rights and won't be supporting it this year—which perhaps makes it even easier to clown on this bizarrely… gooey(?) sticky(?) poster trying its darndest to showcase Tekken's hottest rivalries of this generation.

It shows Knee on the left and Arslan on the right, large shadowy faces on either side. Cool! Pretty neat way to display the rivalry and advertise the tournament. Except it then also has the two walking away from each other while being held together by… an unknown substance.

I don't want to say what I think it looks like, but I'll let this Reddit comment do it for me: "The jizz walk in the middle has no need to be there." As another comment put it, "They look like they had been stuck together for an entire episode and must now work together to defeat their enemies and at the end of the episode, they free themselves and learn a valuable lesson or something."

I can count maybe half a dozen less sticky ways to convey the drama, personally. I do quite like leaning into player rivalries though, and I hope we get to see more glimpses of it at other tournaments in the future.

Anyone hoping for a Tekken Tag Tournament 3 as the genre's popularity ramps up once more is going to be disappointed, since Bandai Namco has unfortunately shredded any hope of it happening.

I never got around to playing Tekken Tag Tournament until I picked up the second one a couple of years ago and had a fab time with it. It's an unbalanced mess full of silly quirks and questionable choices, but it's a lot more palatable when it's not the current game everyone is trying to compete in.

Tag fighters have seen a pretty major downturn in recent years. We've had team fighters like King of Fighters 15 and Dragon Ball FighterZ, but the classic tag style has well and truly gone out of fashion.

Until now, apparently, because we're currently standing before three pretty major tag releases: Riot's 2XKO, Skybound's Invincible VS, and Arc System Works' Marvel Tokon: Fighting Souls. The latter of which is threatening to make us learn four entire-ass mains. Pray for the fact I can barely remember one combo.

It's no surprise, then, that conversations are arising around whether Bandai Namco would bring Tekken Tag Tournament out for a third time. Striking while the iron's hot, and all that good stuff. IGN recently asked directors Kohei 'Nakatsu' Ikeda, Katsuhiro Harda, and producer Michael Murray whether we could expect another 2v2 duke out in the future.

The answer? Not as a standalone experience, no. As Harada points out, Tekken has an incredibly bloated move list. "Each character has so many moves in a 3D fighter, compared to these other games that there's so much to learn for just one character," he said.

Harada continued on to say that while each fighter back in the first Tag Tournament game would've played more similarly to each other, "the characters became more unique in their move sets" as the series progressed, making it "even more involved to try to learn and master a character, and then another one on top of that."

It's a huge knowledge check, even moreso than usual, with Harada saying "there's just so much more knowledge that's necessary to enjoy the game" when you factor in extra characters to fight both as and against. It's something that especially reared its ugly head when Tag Tournament 2 launched on consoles in 2012. "For the hardcore, they ate it up … but for your average player, it was very hard to gain a more casual audience."

Murray echoed the sentiment, adding: "Nakatsu and myself, we probably grew up in the arcades playing while [Harada] was making Tag 1, so we really enjoy the game. I guess we're more on the hardcore side of being able to use several characters and such, and we loved Tag 2. But we are fully aware that there were just so many people that couldn't get a handle on it because of all the knowledge that's involved."

Harada said that if Bamco were to give a Tekken tag fighter another try, it would more than likely be consigned as a side gig. "If we were to do it again rather than have a standalone game, it would probably be better to have it as some kind of separate mode within a normal Tekken [entry]."

I mean, it makes sense. Tekken Tag Tournament 2 was a real fiscal low point for the series, one which actively threatened its future. It was a major factor in Tekken 7 operating on a pretty reduced budget compared to its predecessors, which would thankfully go on to climb its way up to 10 million sales and put things back on the right track.

It wouldn't be the first game to shoehorn in a tag mode on the side, either. It was a mainstay of the fighting games I grew up with like Dead or Alive and Soulcalibur. While I'd love to see it making an appearance during Tekken 8's life, we'll probably be waiting a few years more for the chance of it turning up in Tekken 9. I'm sure it'll be worth the wait.

There's a board game for everything now. Last time I looked in at my local store they had board games based on Oregon Trail, the Iliad, and World War II espionage in the Mediterranean theater specifically. I shouldn't be surprised there's going to be a board game based on that one fighting game where you can be a jaguar man, and that it comes with flash-looking miniatures including one of said jaguar man with extremely well-defined abs.

Tekken: The Board Game is "an asymmetric fighting game" where one to eight players of ages 13 and up can "fight on various stages, and choose between a single match, and an epic tournament." Its crowdfunding campaign was posted on Gamefound with a goal of €50,000 (roughly $US58,311) that it managed to reach in 35 minutes and 45 seconds. It's now blown well past that, raising more than €350,000 ($408,180), or 700% of its original goal so far.

Like most of the board games that become crowdfunding hits, I assume people want it more for the expensive components than the game they'll maybe play twice. The core box for Tekken: The Board Game comes with eight "overscale" miniatures, representing Jin, Kazuya, King, Paul, Jack-8, Nina, Asuka, and Yoshimitsu. It's not classic Paul with the perfectly conical hair, however, so you can count me out.

It also comes with boards representing different stages (sanctum, urban square, descent into subconscious, and into the stratosphere), and decks of cards for each fighter to represent their combos and sweeps, heat activation, and rage arts. Multiple expansions are already planned, each adding four new fighters, with the first promising Panda and the second both Kuma and Heihachi in its lineup.

Sony has struck a "strategic business alliance agreement" with Bandai Namco, further strengthening its ties to Elden Ring and FromSoftware. The partnership was announced on July 24 after Sony purchased a 2.5% stake in Bandai Namco. Both companies have made it clear that anime and manga are the main focus in this partnership.

Sony and Bandai Namco said in a joint statement: "Through this business alliance and Sony's investment in Bandai Namco, as two of the leading Japanese entertainment companies, Bandai Namco and Sony will focus on expanding the fan community for IP such as anime and manga around the world and strengthening engagement, particularly in the anime field where rapid market growth is anticipated, while merging their strengths to create new and emotionally moving experiences for fans, and as a result of these efforts maximize the value of IP."

The statement also mentions "the expansion of works as well as products and services based on IP developed by Bandai Namco." This seems to suggest Sony will have a hand in creating new content around Bandai Namco's IP, which could mean we could get more manga and anime spin-offs of Elden Ring, Dark Souls, Tekken, and other Bandai Namco franchises.

Of course, Elden Ring is already getting a highly-anticipated live-action film adaptation directed by Alex Garland and produced by A24. However, at the time of writing Sony doesn't have a direct hand in that project.

Elden Ring and Dark Souls have both had manga spin-offs, but neither has an anime series yet (despite whispers of a Dark Souls anime back in 2023). Likewise, Tekken got a Netflix anime in 2022, Tekken: Bloodline, but it was met with lackluster reviews.

So, it could be exciting to see Sony adapt some of Bandai Namco's biggest brands into anime and manga series (if done right, of course). This is the second major step Sony has taken in that direction. Back in December 2024, Sony also became the largest stakeholder in Kadokawa, FromSoftware's parent company.

That partnership also emphasized film, TV, and anime adaptations of Kadokawa's IP, with the press release specifically mentioning "initiatives to adapt KADOKAWA's IP into live-action films and TV dramas globally, co-produce anime works, [and] expand global distribution of KADOKAWA's anime works through the Sony Group."

On top of that, Sony purchased the anime-focused streaming service Crunchyroll in 2020 in a $1.2 billion acquisition. Between all three deals, it's abundantly clear that Sony is betting its future on expanding its role in the anime and manga world, particularly through videogame licenses.

As exciting as that could potentially be, some fans are concerned these partnerships could mean future Bandai Namco games will launch as PlayStation exclusives. Sony was the Japanese publisher for Demon's Souls (and published the 2020 remake), so it's certainly possible Sony is aiming to collaborate on FromSoftware games again. However, it's probably too soon to worry about console exclusivity, especially considering Sony has been porting more and more PlayStation exclusives over to Xbox in recent years.

I've watched a lot of Tekken 8 tournaments this year—EVO Japan, CEO, Combo Breaker, the ones that run at my locals every other week—and none have captured my heart like this one which recently took place across a multitude of Japanese retirement homes.

As reported by Dexerto, the tournament was put together by Care Esports. It hosts two events a year, giving elderly residents in care homes across three prefectures in Japan the opportunity to participate in a game, complete with commentary and all the other gubbins you would expect from a primo esports tourney.

A number of virtual shogi and Othello cups have been held by the organiser, but there's been another favourite cropping up in the last few tournaments: Tekken 7, and as of last year, Tekken 8. This year is no different, with eight elderly residents—ranging from 67 to a freakin' badass 93-year-old—duking it out from their respective facilities to become the King of Iron Fist.

The whole thing is straight up wonderful to witness, and I saw some glimmers of very good-ass Tekken: An immaculately timed Rage Art from 93-year-old Sanae Hattori as Lili, some sweet launchers courtesy of 84-year-old Machie Maki's Jin, and 84-year-old Kinuko Watanabe busting out the heat smash with Jun.

Before each match saw the players getting their moment on-screen alongside the commentators, and it's super endearing to see just how into it everyone seems to be. The whole thing's in Japanese (unsurprisingly) so I wasn't able to get a vibe of what was being said, but it seems like there was plenty of support and cheerleaders going round in the facilities and from the commentators themselves.

They even get little post-match interviews—when can we make this a thing at EVO, please? I need that right now—and it's moments like these where I wish I'd kept up with My Japanese Coach on my Nintendo DS.

Eventually just two were left standing: 73-year-olds Yoshie Murabe and Sadayuki Kato, playing Panda and King respectively. The latter opens up into a pretty gnarly string ending with a grab to tornado his opponent, leaving her open to continue the combo. He whiffs that, but manages to snag the first round with an onslaught of classic grappler BS, ending with his heat smash.

Murabe doesn't take that lying down though—she comes back strong in the next round with some nice launcher combos that help secure her the win and gets a wild Rage Art off in the subsequent match to put her up one round against Kato.

Panda clinches the first game, but King comes back strong and secures a point, leaving the two 1-1 with a final game to determine the winner. It's close, too—the final game gets down to the last round, with both players having low enough health to deal extra damage and execute their Rage Arts. Which Panda does, narrowly avoiding a hit from King before dropping him on his head and nabbing the win.

It's a ridiculously fun couple of hours to witness, and I'm just happy to see people playing and enjoying my favourite fighting game. It's also nice to see how seriously it's taken on a production level—it's all fun at the end of the day, but I love to see each player being given their time to shine and commentators to make the whole experience feel like attending a real tournament. The next step is to bring this energy to a full fighting game major. I want an over 60s Tekken bracket, stat.

FromSoftware's Dark Souls games have a unifying theme of great power leading to great corruption and decay—fallen kingdoms, ruined kings, and whatever the hell is going on with the Gaping Dragon. It's fitting, then, that an Elden Ring Nightreign player obtained similar godhood before their own hubristic fall.

As spotted (and translated) by Automaton, a player by the name of mintius managed to continually stack damage until they achieved godhood, then wretchedness—in that order.

Mintius did this via the Marais Executioner Sword, which holds the "Power of House Marais" passive effect. This increases your attack power upon defeating enemies and, apparently, doesn't have a cap. This isn't typically a problem, as Nightreign is a timed game, but FromSoftware apparently did not consider that a player might want to get all MMO about it and grind out Wormface's infinitely-spawning legion of jerks.

Turns out, the monsters that Wormface summons count towards the Marais Executioner Sword's stacking damage buff, as mintius explains: "I hunted Wormface mobs for about an hour with the Marais Executioner Sword to see what would happen. My attack power easily hit the visible damage cap at 9,999 after defeating 725 enemies."

Best I can tell, by "visible damage cap", mintius is referring to the damage on their equipment screen (seen in the screenshot above) as they mention hitting much, much harder than that. "The last damage value I saw for the Executioner Sword was 63,375. After defeating the 727th enemy, I was suddenly unable to deal any damage at all, and my character got killed."

That's likely because of a time-honoured coding goblin named integer overflow. Essentially, computers have a hard time counting upwards forever—you can make them think of a very large number, but you can't make them think of infinity. When a game's code counts, it does so via something called an 'integer', which is usually good enough, letting computers count into the billions.

However, if that number gets exceeded, the game then tends to panic. Or it just loops back around and traps you on a level select screen for two years. Integers can typically represent numbers far higher than 63,375—but I'd imagine there are some other coding shenanigans going on that caused Nightreign to panic and render mintius completely damageless.

As a matter of fact, since the overflow only seems to happen with that stacking damage buff, there are other avenues mintius is looking towards to get their Icarus-style damage fix. They tell Automaton their next test is to plunge onto a Flame Chariot from a great height, which should push their DPS even further. And thus, the cycle continues.

One of the most tantalising additions to Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree was the introduction of the Deflecting Hardtear, a buff that basically turns you into John Sekiro himself. The only problem? It's locked behind a DLC that requires you to push over Mohg, and that boy isn't exactly an early-game boss.

Things looked up for us Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice lovers (there are literally dozens of us!) when FromSoftware introduced the Executor to Elden Ring Nightreign. And while I've come close to scratching my itch, it's still not the same.

For one, Executor's cursed sword stance is more of a defensive option—a cousin of the Guardian's Steel Guard—that lets the Executor plant his feet and swat aside anything with the right timing. But when you're not on the back foot, you need to be slapping things with two status-build katanas to do any real damage.

I'm still left hankering for my fix, because despite the fact that basically every non-FromSoftware soulslike has snapped up Sekiro's timed deflection system, the studio's been hesitant to release a sequel. Well, now we've got the next best thing—the Executor, who is basically Wolf from Sekiro anyway—has been ported by modders to Elden Ring.

The Executor in Elden Ring mod picks up the Executor by the scruff, yoinks him out of Limveld, and plonks him in Limgrave. It replaces katana movesets, giving you the Executor's swordplay while also letting you no-sell Margit like the chump he is—with the correct timing, of course.

The mod's author NinjaRaiden, who made it with help from McKenyu (and links to a separate mod by madao112 to give players the Executor's armor), posted a demonstration video while it was still in development—but you can also watch YouTuber Allence do a full playthrough of the game with the mod enabled below.

NinjaRaiden has plans for a version that'll let you pick which bits of the Executor you'd like ported. For instance, by default, the Executor has the Nightreign sprint—which does bust up the balance of base Elden Rings bosses a tad.

The speed at which the Executor's been ported over to base Elden Ring tells me one thing—I'm certainly not alone in wanting more Sekiro. While the rest of the world might be getting parry fatigue, I'm still a filthy deflection lover and I will not apologise. As soon as I'm burnt out on Nightreign, you can bet I'll be snapping up this mod and heading back to the Lands Between. Me and Promised Consort Radahn have a score to settle.

It had all the signs of a good run. I entered with two onion bro raiders, we hit a good tempo and meandered our way to the Everdark version of the Gaping Jaw. Or Adel, Baron of Night, if you're feeling fancy. I've gotten into a rhythm in my games of Elden Ring Nightreign, to the point where the horrors have become rote. But as some guy in a dark dungeon once said: Overconfidence is a slow and insidious killer.

We knocked down the first night, then the second. We entered through the boss gate, found a familiar desert—and then Adel introduced himself by elbow-dropping me from the top rope with his mouth. Then he summoned a tornado.

After minutes of chipping away at his health, applying and re-applying poison when I got the chance, I had a sudden and eerie thought. Ah, man. I've been playing a 55-hour tutorial.

In case you missed the news, yesterday, Elden Ring Nightreign dropped a new patch with an "Everdark" version of one of its boss fights, Adel, Baron of Night. These are sort of analogous to archtempered monsters in Monster Hunter—suped-up versions of their former selves.

I went in for my first brush with death assuming this'd just mean some big health and damage, but no. Adel's got a whole new set of moves to contend with; a tornado that creates its own storm you need to escape by hurling yourself over its walls with slipstreams. Starting out with his phase two aftershocks. Healing if he manages to grapple you in his maw. And, in a moment of sheer horror, DBZ-style instant transmission.

I don't know who taught this guy to wavedash but I assume they're out to get me, personally.

I'm not the only one giddy with a kind of mortified delight. "We asked for hard and they said fuck you guys here you go," writes one player on the game's subreddit, in a thread aptly named "this… just feels like a lot, man." Others are, in true souls tradition, telling folks to 'git gud'. And they're kinda right. Oroboro's already solo'd this guy, so he's not an insurmountable climb.

Once I've gotten over my first-encounter fear, I'm sure I'll be able to lock in—I definitely wasted a bunch of flasks before realising I was looking at a slipstream, and not a fiery pillar of death—but this is just a sampler. Per the update notes, we've got yoked versions of the Sentient Pest and the Darkdrift Knight to contend with in the future. Get ready to pull an all-nighter, everybody—the real fight starts here.

For quite some time now I have been hearing rumors; scattershot whispers, in hushed tones. The Digimon Story games, they've been saying, are good. Subtitles like Cyber Sleuth would crop up in lists and recommendations from good friends, but I would always brush them off a bit. It's Digimon—surely nostalgia was the driving force of these rumors, I thought, and the RPGs behind them were only worth playing if you could identify MegaKabuterimon in a lineup.

Still, the whispers had me curious, especially when I learned that Suzuhito Yasuda—an illustrator who designed the characters for one of my all-time favorites, Shin Megami Tensei: Devil Survivor—also did character work for the Digimon Story games. I went into my hands-on appointment with Digimon Story: Time Stranger at Summer Game Fest 2025 with an open mind. And I walked out a believer.

This will not be a shock to my insistent friends or others who try to spread the good word of Digimon. But the Digimon Story games? They're good. To y'all, I offer a humble "you were right."

To everyone else, let a Digi-heathen explain why you should think about becoming a Digi-tamer.

Living in a digital world

The story summary preceding my demo was fairly succinct. I was a Digimon tamer, helping the Digimon of the Digital World with some issues they've been having, centered around a tower in the middle of a giant, vibrant residential district. The whole area felt like it was miles high, cobbled together from shipping containers and sheet metal, with rust, paint, and clutter scattered about. It was somewhere between a Splatoon map and Outer Heaven, basically.

As I ventured through the starting area there were Digimon everywhere who I could talk to, to learn more about what was going on. There were some powerful forces at work, and my squad was working with Aegiomon (a half human, half goat "God Man" type Digimon) and Minervamon (another God Man 'mon with a giant sword) to get to the bottom of it all.

All around us Digimon went about their day just doing Digi-stuff. Two tank-shaped Digimon were chilling off to the side, chatting about the weather. Some Pumpkinmon lamented that they couldn't eat a packed lunch while riding Locomon. Where creatures could easily fall into the background as set dressing or simply combat encounters, Digimon Story makes them feel like they exist in the world whether I'm there or not.

The Digital World felt alive in Digimon Story: Time Stranger, and while at first I was worried that having talking monsters would feel a bit strange, it actually made the world feel that much more active. It was neat to see all the monsters hanging out in their habitats, interacting and chatting. Of course, ambient exploration is just one part of the appeal.

Combat in Digimon Story: Time Stranger is going to feel very, very similar to turn-based monster games like Pokémon or Shin Megami Tensei. Different Digimon types and elemental attacks offer different levels of damage depending on the match-up.

I like that Digimon stratifies some of this out into both types and elements. There's a simple triangle of Virus-Data-Vaccine, and also elemental advantages that are easy to intuit, like Water beating Fire. I could get a type-advantage through using a Vaccine Digimon against a Virus one, even if the elements didn't break my way. Or I could use Water to do extra damage to a Fire Digimon, even if I didn't have a latent type match-up. And if I could hit both an elemental and type weakness at the same time, I could do even more damage.

Otherwise fights are pretty conventional. As is the case with most party-driven turn-based RPGs, though, the real draw is in the details that get sorted before and after combat.

Every Digimon has a Digi-volution line, allowing them to potentially Digi-volve into various other Digimon. Rather than a single evolution line or needing to fuse to expand my roster, Digi-volution is all about enhancing one monster and making specific choices over time with it. The developers let me tinker around with some of the base Digimon I had at my disposal, opting to roll the dice on specific Digi-volutions that had various statistical and level requirements. My cute, cuddly Digimon could turn into one of those giant tank monsters, for example, and start pelting my enemies with howitzers in the next big fight.

Seeing the evolutionary lines and potential for training was like seeing the Matrix, but for Digimon. I could see the next 50 hours of game laid out in front of me: Dive into dungeons, battle enemy Digimon, train up my own, Digi-volve them, and construct the ultimate party in the process. Digimon can carry across moves as they Digi-volve too, so I could customize and spec out the best Digimon team I could field.

In Digimon I found the complexity in monster taming I'd been wanting in other creature collecting games, without too much difficulty. To use blunt comparisons, I found it somewhere between Pokémon and Shin Megami Tensei in terms of difficulty, while still containing a host of options for creating my perfect party and manipulating the match-ups. Every system felt like it was playing off itself, letting the player gradually accumulate power and customize as they went.

Add onto all this an absolutely vibrant world, that felt alive with its Digimon and laden in little details. Though I only spent a little time in Central Town, I quickly became enamored with the metal jungle and piled-high towers of sheet metal and concrete, laden with quirky monsters that wanted to chat, fight, or both.

I walked away from Digimon Story: Time Stranger summarily impressed. It didn't matter that I really didn't get a vibe for the actual story. The combat I played was interesting and slightly tough, and the customization, presentation, and overall atmosphere of the digital world completely won me over. When I got home I even checked to see if I had the Cyber Sleuth games on any platforms.

This is a series worth following, even for those who didn't grow up on the older games, series, or movies. There's a strong RPG at the heart of Digimon Story: Time Stranger, and I'm keen to see it through when it arrives this October.

Has this happened to you? You've just finished a kickass Elden Ring Nightreign run. You and your buds—or two strangers—were in top form. Barely any deaths, seven flasks in your pocket, level 15 next to your health bar, and weapons that type against the Nightlord's specific weakness.

You do the customary L1 spam as the victory screen displays, and then—trash. Trash, as far as the eye can see. One relic gives you damage up with three greataxes, improved throwing knife damage, and fire pots in inventory at the start of an expedition as some kind of cruel, cruel joke. You sell them all off, take your murk to the shop, and go gambling. Trash again.

I want to be clear—I'm not being hard on Elden Ring Nightreign, here. It's very clearly a big experiment, and FromSoftware's playing with a bunch of new toys. Given how new the studio is to the game of loot progression systems, I'm not expecting it to have everything figured out.

But as an MMO vet, I can't help but grind my teeth because, well. I've seen these mistakes play out a dozen times already. Elden Ring Nightreign, in its naivete, has walked straight into a common foible that tons of MMOs—and live-service games—have had to figure out the hard way: A little RNG keeps things lively, but purely RNG-dependent loot sucks.

Slot machines ain't it

World of Warcraft once had a system called Titanforging. Essentially, any bit of loot you got could be Warforged or Titanforged—a random percentage chance to bump up the item level of a piece of gear. On paper, as Blizzard explained back in 2019, this was meant to make solid gear upgrades available from lower-tier content.

However, quoting an explainer blog from when the system was removed: "Progression feels less rewarding, as players killing a raid boss on a new difficulty for the first time often disenchant much of the loot because they have equal or better Warforged items from lower difficulties or other sources.

"In addition, the feeling that a given item could have Warforged more and been even better can leave a sense of disappointment at what should have been a clear reward moment. And the sense that these systems are out of players’ direct control makes it harder to work towards a clear goal or state of completion."

Sound familiar? You could swap a few nouns out, here, and it'd encapsulate all of my problems with Nightreign's relic system. Getting new relics should be exciting, but I sell (disenchant) most of them. Even when I get a relic with two solid passives, the fact it could've had three leaves a sour taste in my mouth. And both of these issues are very much out of my "direct control".

That's not to say RNG is inherently bad—Diablo 4 is another Blizzard-made game that's almost entirely dependent on it. But you'll notice that, even there, players still get to have a hand on the lever. You can socket items with gems or, crucially, temper or masterwork gear to adjust or improve affixes.

I wouldn't dare call this system flawless, and I'm sure you Diablo 4 players have a thousand gripes you're keen to tell me about. But it's very telling that Blizzard's still made a key effort to give you some control. You can still turn an item with one or two stats into a solid progression bump while you chase down that god roll or unique.

Diablo 4 isn't a masterclass in live service design or anything, but there's a reason these mechanics are here, and why tons of ARPGs like Path of Exile follow in their footsteps. Or, in the case of PoE2, forget to make loot rewarding and suffer harsh feedback because of it.

A more recent, co-op game example of this is Darktide. It came out with roll-dependent loot, where you could only reroll certain passives a number of times before having to throw those items away. After two years and a bunch of player feedback, that all changed.

Every game that comes out with crushing loot RNG eventually learns to shift things towards the side of player control. There's always a token, tomestone, badge, or doohickey that lets you acquire it incrementally—or some way to turn your bad luck good: an imperfect item into a usable one. It's this kind of system that Nightreign definitely needs.

Learn from the past

I think my gentle frustration with Nightreign is that, while it's a blast to play, its rewards structure hasn't looked to the mistakes of other games—lessons learned in pitched combat with angry playerbases lie completely unutilised. I don't want Nightreign to have a battle pass or anything, but it could copy some of Fatshark or Blizzard's homework.

Recycling a relic could, for instance, have a chance of giving you one of its passives—to then be placed on a relic of your choice for a hefty murk cost. I reckon this ought to be quite expensive, given we're talking postgame build-tweaking, but having an end goal would do a lot to keep me playing.

You could also pay a hefty murk price to swap a relic's colour—got a list of passives that don't fit in your current urn? Drop a cool 20,000 Limveld bux on it, and it'll work just fine with your new build.

Neither of these systems would take away from the sheer and sudden excitement you get from rolling a relic with the perfect passives—since that'd still save you a massive time sink—but it'd stop certain runs from feeling like a massive waste of time.

I want to make the perfect Executor build now I'm done slaying all the Nightlords, but in order to do that, I've got a potentially endless session at the merchant jar bazaar slot machine stretching out before me. I'm not afraid of a grind, but I am afraid of perpetual gamba limbo. One's a mountain, the other's purgatory, and it doesn't have to be this way.