For the uninitiated, Isekai refers to an anime or manga that primarily focuses on its main character being transported to another world, dimension, universe, what have you. In Sword Art Online, to use Koster's example, the main characters are trapped inside of a virtual reality video game while their real-life bodies are in a state of suspended consciousness. If they die in the game, they die in real life, and the only way out is to essentially beat the game.

Of course, vaguely similar ideas have been explored in other forms of media since at least the 1800s with books like The Wizard of Oz and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, but Koster is obviously referring more to the relatively recent explosion of modern Isekai anime and manga.

Talking to GamesRadar+, Koster points to the Isekai boom as evidence that people are hungry for transportive virtual worlds.

"It's a fantasy of a more immersive parallel world, and players crave it, we think," Koster said. "Like, we see you. Look at, for example, all the Isekai anime, the Sword Art Onlines, and all of those. When you look at those, like the games that they show are not theme park games. They are immersive alternate realities, right?"

As someone who's made lifelong friends playing Ultima Online specifically, Koster is speaking straight to my soul here. I love the idea of a modern, more immersive, more interactive sandbox with the same depth to the social elements and open-ended PvP as Ultima Online. I don't know if that's what Koster is working to achieve with Stars Reach, but he's definitely taken notice of the popularity of another, wildly different game: Animal Crossing.

"When you look at the rise of all of these other sandboxy forms of gameplay done at smaller scale, it's super clear, right? I think you know, the way that something like Animal Crossing went really viral during COVID is indicative of that. So, yeah, bringing those things back into the context, we think there's a huge, huge appetite for it."

The nod to Animal Crossing might sound a little out of place at first, but I think in the context of the COVID pandemic, when people were desperate to escape a bleak reality and immerse themselves in a very different world, it does help to clarify what Koster is aiming for with Stars Reach.

Stars Reach will be the debut project from Koster's studio Playable Worlds, which he co-founded with fellow RPG veteran Eric Goldberg in 2019. The game, which is billed as a "sandbox science-fantasy MMO where you explore deeply simulated living worlds in a shardless galaxy", with "a fully player-driven economy full of peaceful ways to play." Basically, it sounds a lot like a modern sci-fi spin on Ultima Online, which I'm 100% down for. A release date has yet to be announced.

Meanwhile, for the first time in 28 years, the ancient MMO Tibia is adding a new class.

As spotted by Wario64, SteamDB was recently updated with a new listing for "Dungeons & Dragons Neverwinter Nights 2." The changelog goes back to early December of 2024 and has been updated as recently as this afternoon.

Now, this could either be some weirdly specific but meaningless update on Steam's backend, or more likely, it indicates a Neverwinter Nights 2 remaster is on its way to Steam at some point. It wouldn't be unprecedented; Neverwinter Nights: Enhanced Edition launched on PC, PS4, Xbox One, and mobile platforms back in 2018, so the same treatment for the sequel is actually a long time coming.

Neverwinter Nights 2 is based on the D&D 3.5 edition rules and its story is largely isolated from the first game in the series. If you've played Baldur's Gate 3 you'll be broadly familiar with the character creation process, companion system, die-rolling, RNG, and turn-based combat.

Only because I just brought up Baldur's Gate 3, it's worth noting that while generally very well-received, the Neverwinter Nights games don't have quite the same beloved legacy as the Baldur's Gate series. With that said, if you are a big fan of D&D-based RPGs and haven't played Neverwinter Nights or its sequel, they're still very much worth playing, particularly if the sequel does end up getting a remaster.

There's a reason Baldur's Gate 3 occupies the coveted top spot on our list of the best RPGs to play right now.

How do I get FC 25 Season 5 Ladder Players?

FC 25 Season 5 is running across February and March, and tagged 'The Future Is Yours'. Many of the cards on offer are from the FC 25 RTTF (Road To The Finals) campaign, meaning they can earn upgrades as the real-life season unfolds.

You build towards them by gaining SP across Ultimate Team, Manager Career, Player Career, and Clubs. Each 1,000 SP you collect completes a level on the ladder, and there are 40 levels in total. To see which previous rewards were available, jump into our FC 25 Season 1 Ladder Players, FC 25 Season 2 Ladder Players and FC 25 Season 3 Ladder Players guides.

Who are the best FC 25 Season 5 Ladder Players?

The ultimate reward here is Roberto Firmino (CAM, Al Ahli, 92). But even if you don't make it all the way to unlocking the former Liverpool man, there are tantalising choices to tackle en route. For instance, you can grab Euro 2024 superstar Inaki Williams (RM, Athletic Bilbao, 88) at Level 20 – but it means missing out on a colossal Samuel Gigot (CB, Lazio, 88) item to slide into your back four. The choice is yours alone.

What other FC 25 Season 5 Ladder Rewards are there?

There are 40 FC 25 Season 5 Ladder Rewards in all – an increase of five over the FC 24 Season 4 Ladder Players list. They're largely focussed on Ultimate Team, but with a few other cheeky treats mixed in. For instance, Level 12 grants you three FUT items, 15,000 Clubs Coins, and a new tie for your manager career. For help unlocking these, dip into our FC 25 tips and FC 25 Player Roles guides.

Where is the full FC 25 Season 5 Ladder Players cards list?

The complete FC 25 Season 5 Ladder Players cards list is as follows. An asterisk means you need to choose one of the two options. Once you've unlocked them, keep these guys and girls looking their best using our FC 25 best kits guide.

Yes, that's right: BioticNova defeated the ancient evil that is Shadow of the Erdtree's final boss Radahn twice simultaneously, with their attention torn between a PC monitor and a PS5 monitor, and their hands fluttering around two different controllers. I hardly made it out of my scrap with Miquella's consort, and I kept both of my – admittedly infirm and cowardly – hands tight around just one single controller. BioticNova's clearly capable of some next-level multitasking.

"I wasn't sure how we were gonna do Radahn," the streamer says modestly on Twitter, "but we did it!" In the accompanying clip, we see as BioticNova shifts their attention from one game to the other, seeming to only press a controller when their eyes are on the game it corresponds to. Using the Sword Lance and Blood Tax Ash of War, which helps trigger boss-melting bleed buildup, BioticNova ultimately slices through the two Radahns within 30 seconds of each other.

"Totally first try, guys," BioticNova says sarcastically during the three-hour stream. "That was rough. [...] I wish it was a little bit more smooth." Sorry, I didn't notice any issues – I was too distracted by the fact that you beat two copies of Shadow of the Erdtree at nearly the exact same time.

Now we know that BioticNova's ability to destroy Dark Souls 3 boss Pontiff Sulyvahn on, again, two different games simultaneously wasn't just luck like we thought in 2023, but also is an otherworldly skill that will no doubt make Nightreign matchmaking impossible.

Elden Ring Nightreign beta codes are finally being sent out, but many PS5 and Xbox Series X players are reporting the same issue – they've seemingly got access to the wrong platform

If you've played Battlefield 3, you'll no doubt remember the thrilling jet mission, which, I'll have you know, has an actual name. It's called Going Hunting, it's the fourth mission in the main campaign, and it puts you in the army boots of Lt. Jennifer "Wedge" Hawkins for a stunning airborne battle in the stormy skies of the Persian Gulf. It's arguably the most memorable mission from Battlefield 3 and one of the series' most celebrated gameplay sequences overall.

Things is, while you can use the jet's shooty things to take down enemies, you don't actually get to fly the plane, even though that was the original plan. In a tweet, Battlefield 3 lead designer David Goldfarb said technical limitations prevented DICE from implementing "free fly" in the mission.

"We did want to make this mission free fly initially, it just wouldn't have been possible to make the assets and stay at quality, plus lots of player education debate," he said. "We wound up going 'fuck it just make an awesome cinematic jet experience' but def wished freefly happened."

Goldfarb ended up leaving DICE in 2012 shortly after Battlefield 3's release. He was with Overkill for two years after that, where he directed Payday 2, and since 2014 he's been creative director at The Outsiders, the folks behind the Doom-inspired rhythm game Metal: Hellsinger.

If you're a fan of Battlefield 3, you'll be happy to know: Battlefield boss says the next game is ditching Specialists and returning to modern day because 3 and 4 were the "pinnacle of Battlefield."

Speaking to GamesRadar+ about how much the devs watch or play the beta, Monster Hunter Wilds director Yuya Tokuda says, "A lot," actually. Tokuda shares that the Wilds team spends a lot of time reviewing people's beta streams and videos to "see feedback that we can't really get internally" – something the chief designer of the Lance found useful especially.

Mind you, not all feedback gathering is done from afar. Tokuda says the devs play the beta for a closer look at how everyone gets on with the game.

"So on my own personal console, I took part in the beta," he shares. "You can't tell it's me from the username, but there are players out there who'd have no idea to this day that they were actually playing with the director of the game.

"I would go online and put an SOS flare up, and that would mean that a couple of players would join my party, and that gives me a chance to see – whenever staff play the game at the company together, there's a certain amount of 'we all know the game inside out' – getting a chance to see real players on how they react to the content is really important to me, to understand if it's working or not. That was a great opportunity for me as well."

It's not just Tokuda, either. Monster Hunter series producer Ryozo Tsujimoto says he'll return to the beta "straight away" after finishing some travel to promote the game. You'd better keep those monster-hunting skills sharp, pals, as Capcom is watching.

In good news for Tokuda and us, then, Capcom is extending the next Monster Hunter Wilds open beta for an extra day as the "test period was cut short."

Andrei "Meddler" van Roon and Paul "Pabro" Bellezza explain why the choice was made in a dev update, but it still hasn't gone over well with fans.

Meddler says Hexchests, which were part of a system that rewarded good plays and nice behavior with components you could use to unlock skins, were "A great player experience, but it was not sustainable for League in the long term."

Pabro adds, "Increasing the number of skins we can make each year was good for both the business and the player experience, but eventually we ran into meaningful diminishing returns."

So, the decision was made to remove Hextech chests entirely, meaning you have to spend money if you want new skins. This has been done to "ensure League remains a great, fully free-to-play game," but it's irritating nonetheless.

"Just wanted to mention how some of the best Rioters ever got tired of the company and left to make a superior game with a friendly monetization system and unique gameplay," writes one fan of Supervive in a quote tweet response to the dev update. "With league imploding, Supervive is worth your consideration! Give it a shot," writes another, sharing a video of a new Supervive patch that went live the day after League's dev update.

Supervive is a "MOBA battle royale meets hero shooter" that launched in November, 2024. However, despite this "play Supervive" campaign, its player count hasn't gone up by that much these past few days.

According to SteamDB, since February 7, where the concurrent player count was 2,921, it rose to a height of 3,875 on February 10. It's a respectable increase, but the game had just over 4,000 players on January 26.

The player count is fairly steady, consistently over 2,000, so if you do want to give it a go, you shouldn't have any trouble finding a match. It's a free-to-play early access game that you can download from Steam.

In the meantime, check out some of the best online games you can play right now.

Elden Ring Nightreign – FromSoftware's shiny new co-op spin-off to the brutal action RPG behemoth we all know and love – is set to launch later this year, but it's getting a network test later this week that'll give players the chance to check it out early. PS5 and Xbox Series X|S fans had to register before January 20 for a chance to be picked, and invites have been so in demand that some scalpers have tried reselling them for hundreds of dollars. Yikes.

Despite the fact that players could only pick between playing on PS5 or Xbox Series consoles – no PCs allowed, apparently, despite the fact that the game is set to launch on there too – reports on Twitter suggest that a lot of players are running into trouble trying to redeem their codes. Some PS5 users claim they've been sent Xbox codes, and vice versa – it's immediately easy to tell if something is up since the former are supposed to be 12 characters long, whereas the latter should be 25 characters.

"I received an Xbox code but it's too short. Xbox codes are meant to be 25 characters long and the one I received was 12," one Twitter user writes. "Same problem for me too… I registered for Xbox and the mail says platform: XBSX but the code is too short for Xbox," says another. "Same here. I received a 25-digit code but need a 12-digit code for my PS5," another chimes in.

At the time of writing, neither FromSoftware or publisher Bandai Namco has posted publicly to acknowledge the problem – hopefully those without suitable codes could be given an alternative, but at the time of writing, it's not clear if that's an option when access was limited in the first place. With the first three-hour network test session set to kick off on Friday 14 February, here's hoping something can be sorted out before then.

Elden Ring Nightreign's map will sometimes see "large-scale changes" to terrain including procedurally appearing volcanos, forests, and yes, swamps.

It boils down to one fact: console exclusivity as we once knew it is well on its way out. I suppose it also helps that I happen to be patient, perfectly content to have waited it out for Marvel's Spider-Man 2 and Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth's eventual PC launches last month before cashing in on the hype experienced by PS5-goers over a year ago. But that's just it. Almost every PlayStation game I've ever wanted to play – bar Bloodborne, of course – has eventually made its way to one of my other platforms-of-choice. Staggered PC releases allow for a period of console exclusivity rather than a lifetime of it, benefitting not only developers and publishers keen to rake in more audiences, but those of us less urgent to play the newest games as soon as they hit shelves. It speaks to a change in how publishers are approaching sales, no longer relying on exclusives to sell consoles, but prestige points instead. Maybe that's why Nintendo is hanging in there – what would the Switch 2 be without its exclusives, after all?

Levelling up the playing field

The "console wars" are well and truly dead, but I'm still waiting for lingering bad attitudes to follow suit. It stands to reason that console exclusivity, while still intrinsic to the existence of separate publishers at all, can be taken as more of a punishment than a privilege when they encourage us to "pick a side." Thanks to eventual PC launches, I never feel the need to.

It hasn't always been this way. Historically speaking, exclusives encouraged gamers to purchase specific consoles or forego entire game franchises completely – take my favorite PS2-exclusive Resident Evil game, for example. There's always been a degree of brand loyalty about it, but at the end of the day, we knew what we were missing. With each new console came a meaningful technical improvement – and many people might've bought a PS2 just to have a DVD player. But as tech leaps become far less dramatic from generation to generation, it's hard to argue against the fact that this divide between platforms has morphed into all-out bullying in recent years, separating fans into camps of unquestionable allegiance to companies over the actual games they publish. Personally, I'm over it, and you should be too.

PC gaming offers a peaceful reprieve. There seems to be very little value in permanent console exclusivity in 2025 because there are simply so many games to choose from. The competition for our attention is rife, incentivizing publishers to cast wider nets than ever by way of delayed (yet much appreciated) PC ports. As a result, I never feel punished by not being able to play the latest PS5 game, and nor do I feel that Sony is trying to punish me for not buying its console. I can simply go through my Steam backlog, or make use of Xbox Game Pass, or replay Baldur's Gate 3 for the billionth time while I wait. Meanwhile, the once Xbox-exclusive Forza Horizon 5 is coming to PS5. Square Enix is looking to broaden its platform horizons with Octopath Traveler. This paradigm shift indicates that publishers have recognized the largely hit-and-miss return investment of targeting new players through exclusives; it's just not as lucrative as simply giving the people what they want, when they want it.

I'd sooner pay $60 for a PC game than shell out $500 for a console I'll use once a year. But I have two big exceptions to that rule in mind here: GTA 6 and Nintendo. With GTA 6 reported to be a console exclusive for PS5 and Xbox Series X, its status as a global phenomenon is likely to give PC stalwarts a nudge in the gamepad direction – even if it does end up "normalizing" the $100 price tag. Similarly, the humble Switch is the only way to get your hands on Nintendo-exclusive IPs like Zelda Tears of the Kingdom and the best Mario games. With many upcoming Switch 2 games almost certain to follow that trend, the hybrid handheld's popularity seems to be here to stay. These two outliers don't change my views on how permanent platform exclusivity is less necessary than ever. Rather, it provides some variety – and in Nintendo's case, tradition.

Variety really is the crux of it all. That, and player choice. Gamers don't lose anything when their favorite games launch on other platforms. It shouldn't devalue your love of the PS5 to know that Death Stranding finally made its way to Xbox four years later. The industry's moneymaking moves are constantly evolving – and if it allows more people to play more games, the slow death of console exclusivity could benefit the many and the few.

Check out all the upcoming PS5 games I won't be playing for at least one year - though I'm keen for you to.

If you're looking for some more general pointers, then check out our Civilization 7 tips and tricks to build your empire.

How to get merchants in Civilization 7

Merchants in Civ 7 can be trained after researching a specific civic or technology. Once you reach a new age, you’ll lose the ability to train merchants and will need to unlock them again by researching a different bonus. Here is what you need to unlock in order to train merchants:

• Antiquity Age: Research Mysticism and Discipline in the Civic Tree, then research Code of Laws
• Exploration Age: Research Economics in the Civic Tree
• Modern Age: Research Steam Engine in the Tech Tree

Once you have unlocked merchants, you will be able to train them. Merchants can be trained as part of your city’s production, or bought with gold at any city or town.

How to set up trade routes in Civilization 7

We recommend finding another settlement to trade with first, before you train a merchant. You’ll be able to set them up in another leader’s town or city, so take a look around the map and find a suitable place to send them. You can also trade with Independent Powers, however you need to be a suzerain of their city state in order to set up a trade route. Once you’ve discovered a few possible settlements to trade with, select one of your cities or towns and train a merchant.

Once you have a merchant, you’ll notice a toolbar pop up on the side of the screen when you select them, showing all the possible settlements you can trade with and the resources you can get from them. This is handy if you’re unsure where to send them, as you’ll be to click on them to jump to the settlement.

You can’t set up a trade route until the merchant has gone to the city or town, so once you’ve settled on where to send them, move the merchants to the location. It’ll probably take a few turns depending on how far the town or city is from yours. Once they arrive, you’ll get a prompt to allow them to set up a trade route.

How trade works in Civilization 7

Once you’ve set up a trade route with another settlement, your merchant will follow a road back to your settlement with a share of their resources. The other leader will receive gold as a result, and can send their own merchants on the same path to you, ensuring a mutually beneficial agreement.

On the next turn after each successful trade, a screen will pop up showing which resources the settlement is offering up for trade. From this screen, you can allocate the resources for your merchant to take back to one of your towns or cities. Resources come in three types: Empire Resources (they go to your whole empire), City Resources (they can only go to a city), and Bonus Resources (they can go to either a City or Town).

The number of trade routes you can have depends heavily on your relationship with the other leader. If you’d like to increase your trading potential, you need to head over to the Civ 7 Diplomacy screen and use the action Improve Trade Relations. Both parties will need to agree to this, so if the other leader doesn’t like you enough then they may not agree to these terms. So, it’s best to keep on their good side.

While the Civ 7 trade system is designed to be as low maintenance as possible to reduce micromanaging, it’s still worth keeping an eye on your trade routes. You won’t need to continuously train merchants to keep up the flow, but they can be targeted by enemy forces. Consider moving a few military units along these roads to act as guards, should that happen.

© GamesRadar+. Not to be reproduced without permission.

Dr. Doot has provided the internet with some of the most entertaining Elden Ring content around, including a hitless run of the game using only an electric saxophone and a boss speedrun that even saw Malenia fall to the power of jazz in less than a minute. As for how it works, a pitch bend knob on the back of the instrument doubles as his left analog stick, while the notes he plays are mapped to a regular controller's buttons, meaning he has to doot and toot in a variety of ways to pull off even the most basic inputs.

Enter Monster Hunter Wilds, and Capcom has been cooking up a weapon that practically has Dr. Doot's name written all over it. Specifically, you can get your hands on a Hunting Horn weapon in the action RPG's open beta – the Hope Horn, to be exact – that's literally just a massive saxophone. The streamer first found out about its existence way back in August last year, when he responded: "OH MY GOD THERE'S AN ACTUAL SAXOPHONE WEAPON IN MONSTER HUNTER WILDS?"

Now though, his time has come. Last week, he expressed his excitement over the fact that "MONSTER HUNTER WILDS LETS ME HUNT MONSTERS WITH A GIANT SAXOPHONE," and thanked the devs for "CREATING DOOT-BASED GAMEPLAY," and now he's finally shared what we've all been waiting for – his controller in action.

"Everyone asked 'Will you use the giant saxophone weapon in Monster Hunter Wilds with [the] saxophone controller?'" he writes on Twitter. "The answer is yes (obviously) but no one told me it would be this much FUN." Attached is a short but sweet clip of his skills in action – taking out the beta's frog-like Chatacabra monster with a series of well-timed doots. I can't even begin to fathom how much practice goes into these sorts of challenges.

Hopefully, this won't be the last of the streamer's antics in Monster Hunter Wilds if his tweet is anything to go by. The action RPG's next beta session kicks off on February 14, and will run for an extra 24 hours to make up for last weekend's PlayStation Network outage. After that, we don't have too long to wait for its full launch on February 28.

20 years on, Monster Hunter Wilds' devs reflect on the series' co-op journey: "The world caught up with our vision."

Samantha Béart, who shot to fame as in their role as Karlach in 2023, tweeted "To the next studio that tries this: if your 'spiritual successor' to Disco Elysium does not involve creator Robert Kurvitz, then save both of us some time and miss me with that casting call." Ouch.

Béart clearly holds a lot of respect for Kurvitz and his work if they're not even willing to entertain offers from any Disco Elysium-related games that aren't involving him. Disco Elysium is a fantastic game, one I thoroughly enjoy, but it's wild to think it's had such an effect on people that they're willing to turn down work because the original creator isn't involved. I suppose when you're Karlach you get your pick of the jobs, though.

Disco Elysium was conceived during a drunken night in Tallinn, "We were just hanging around in total squalor and poverty," Kurvitz says. It went on to become a hit, but then the studio fell apart and many of the game's developers went their separate ways.

In just one day, two spiritual successors to the critically acclaimed RPG were announced. Neither of those studios have Robert Kurvitz working with them. The Disco Elysium creator set the game in the same world as his novel, Sacred and Terrible Air, which is an incredible title. It didn't do well, though. "It sold 1,000 copies," says Kurvitz. "So after that I succumbed to deep alcoholism."

Kurvitz made a new studio with DIsco Elysium lead artist Aleksander Rostov, Red Info. It's backed by NetEase, which did a u-turn on its Marvel Rivals mid-season rank reset just hours after it was announced.

If you want to play more things like Disco Elysium, check out all the best RPGs you can try now.

While a stop-motion effect is enabled by default in the upcoming Xbox Series X game, Compulsion knows this element might not be for everyone. "It's a normal framerate," says art director Whitney Clayton of South of Midnight's solid 60 frames-per-second action, with individual character models and environment assets toggled during production to "have different amounts of stop motion treatment."

The goal? "To sell the impression that you're still in this handcrafted world without making it, you know, too nauseating in certain instances" – though accessibility settings can help players tailor the experience further.

As a Southern Gothic action-adventure infused with folkloric myth and legends, a thematic visual style was always a key design pillar propping up South of Midnight – and Compulsion had something specific in mind. "If you tell people, oh, we're making miniatures that feel made by hand, you could get people thinking, 'Oh, is it like Wallace and Gromit or Gumby or something?' And that wasn't the direction we wanted to go," says Clayton. "We found this animation called Madame Tutli Putli [by Clyde Henry Productions], which had this really atmospheric, mature, kind of creepy style to it, and we loved it."

When the stop-motion production company (and fellow Canadians) had Compulsion's art team visit their studio in Montreal, Clyde Henry became instrumental in realizing South of Midnight's handcrafted dreams. "On the left was a real maquette and then on the right was our reverse engineered digital 3D model, where we were trying to figure out how to apply rules that made things feel handmade," says Clayton of the learning process. "We applied this to everything in the game – the creatures, the characters, the environments, and the people."

Creating a stop motion effect on the fauna and flora wasn't as easy as simply dropping the framerate in the environment. "You had to have a slightly different treatment for each thing to get that stop motion feeling, which is a combination of animation styles. We used tech art and VFX to emulate the flickering of materials that you would see in a real stop motion, when people's thumb prints are moving on something."

To smooth out gameplay, Clayton outlines protagonist Hazel's movement and combat encounters as two areas where stop motion effects were minimized during production. They have been left more pronounced elsewhere – particularly in the environments. "The foliage does move in a specific way, and certain built-in animals and other elements of the game move more obviously as a stop motion thing," Clayton says. "But if we applied that equally everywhere, I think it would be too jarring."

Setting the scene

While South of Midnight features a broad range of accessibility settings – including a "boss skip" mode and "combat skip" mode – one area is off limits. The short cinematic intro by Clyde Henry, as seen in the stop motion trailer, can't be turned off. "We needed an intro video, or an intro cinematic, to set the stage," says Clayton. "And we thought, no better treatment for this type of cinematic than doing the real stop motion. And there were no better people to do the stop motion than Clyde Henry – if they happen to be free and available – and we were really lucky that they said yes."

The process to create this single animation took "the better part of a year," posing a hefty new challenge for the animation studio. "Like Whitney explained, her challenge was to take all these assets and try to translate it [to digital] for a handcrafted aesthetic," says Clyde Henry's art director Brigitte Henry. "For us, it was the inverse. We had to take all the CG assets and translate them into handcraft environments." Clyde Henry co-founder Chris calls it their "great challenge, to take them out of the computer and back, literally, into this world of physical, handcrafted puppets."

"And each one of them was a different problem," explains Maciek Szczerbowski, particularly Hazel's puppet. "Every little stroke looks like it could fill up half the cheek. You have to be very careful to make it not look like a Barbie by not doing enough, or to make it look [unrecognizable] if you go too far."

Check out the 50 most anticipated video games of 2025 we can't wait to get our hands on.

"It's 10 to 12 hours," gameplay director Jasmin Roy tells GamesRadar+ of the average time it will take to beat South of Midnight's 14 chapters. "That was kind of the target, I think, [though] maybe a bit bigger than we thought, but it is pretty much in the ballpark of what we thought at the beginning. We don't like to necessarily put numbers on it."

"We always knew it was going to be a game that had a momentum of narrative," Roy says of the Southern Gothic adventure, with the game encompassing "a 24 hour period which also informed us of the kind of scale of the world we wanted to build. Because, you know, you're trying to find your mother. She disappeared. There's a kind of urgency to it that makes it feel like we do want you to explore, but it needs to support the momentum of Hazel's journey."

So, South of Midnight is "a day in the life of Hazel – a very strange day," according to Roy. In terms of how this single day pans out, art director Whitney Clayton describes it as "a linear game with some bits of exploration through the sections, and you go through various different types of locations in the deep South, all the span of one day. So you start your adventure in the morning, and it ends at midnight."

This means the game will take players through different environments as the clock ticks forward, each with "their own really specific mood, which would then reflect the type of story being told in that moment." Compulsion has already outlined four biomes in a half-hour documentary that premiered last year – the swamps, the Delta, the Appalachians, and a New Orleans-inspired area – but it's news to us that she'll be encountering them all across such a snappy timeframe.

Despite its shorter length, the reverse-engineered 3D modelled world of South of Midnight was no simple feat to develop. According to Roy, "it's [taken] around five years, I'd say, from the first few concepts." He references the extensive research, planning, and iterative prototypes throughout pre-production phases, though "the bulk of the game has been made in the last three years."

South of Midnight is one of our most anticipated games of 2025, and there's more where it came from

South of Midnight makes a strong first impression. Then again, titles from developer Compulsion Games always have. There was Contrast in 2013 and We Happy Few a few years later, experiences defined by their visually evocative worlds and deliberately modest scale. "We've always been ambitious with all the projects that we create, within the means that we've had," says Compulsion founder Guillaume Provost. Although the studio head is aware that expectation has shifted underneath the studio in years gone by.

Seven years on from its acquisition into the Xbox Game Studios group, Compulsion is larger than it has ever been before – having nearly tripled in size since work concluded on We Happy Few – and hungrier than ever to show to the world what it is truly capable of with this upcoming Xbox Series X game. "Within Xbox there was a certain amount of expectation, with regards to the level of quality that titles need to bring to the table. We all wanted to execute at a level that we felt good about when sitting in the room across from our peers and industry giants who have a lot of experience making games."

Welcome to the Deep South

The further Hazel burrows into Prospero the stranger things seem to become. Her hometown ravaged by a hurricane, the life that she used to know swept away in a single moment etched in time. And so into the rabbit hole of the American Deep South she dives, where local folklore seems to have a way of slipping beyond the seams of superstition and into the fabric of her reality. South of Midnight follows Hazel through "one very strange day," laughs Jasmin Roy, game director.

This is an action-adventure which takes place over 10-12 hours of playtime, "your adventure starting in the morning and ending at midnight," says art director Whitney Clayton. This frame affords Compulsion the opportunity to whisk Hazel along from one lush, decaying environment to the next as she heads off in search of her mother. "Different landscapes correlate with different times of the day. Each has its own really specific mood, which then reflects the type of story being told in that moment," she says. "It's a curated experience, which is a complete reaction to us having a game that was procedural before."

South of Midnight feels worlds apart from We Happy Few. That's not only a result of Compulsion shifting away from a roguelike structure in favor of a more linear presentation, but because of the general vibe that's being cultivated. Where the studio once channelled the dystopia of Terry Gilliam's 'Brazil', it's now grappling with the high-strangeness of Ethan and Joel Coen's 'O Brother, Where Art Thou?' albeit through a distinctly southern gothic lens – stark realism colliding with a series of increasingly off-kilter events. "I don't know about you, but if a catfish started talking to me I would probably freak out a little," says narrative director Zaire Lanier. "But Hazel needs to find her mother; so while she will acknowledge that this is all a little weird, her reactions are also subdued."

That balancing act is at the heart of South of Midnight, a journey which is able to whiplash between smiles and sadness with relative ease. What you'll explore here is 14 chapters of a folktale – the titular South of Midnight – which tells of a world wrought with collective trauma, manifesting as knots in the grand tapestry, and of mournful monster kings who roam the land waiting to be tamed. You'll follow this path equipped with Hooks and Spindles, the tools a Weaver can wield to channel powers bestowed upon her by the land, and a Distaff, which lets Hazel tap into echoes of the past.

South of Midnight is exceptionally smooth in motion. The game runs at a stable 60fps on Xbox Series X as Hazel gracefully double-jumps between platforms and glides over hazards, oversized brambles and toxic waters. The stop-motion animation effect applied to all of the foliage and fauna in the world is actually a clever visual trick, where Compulsion uses a concoction of "tech, art, and visual effects to emulate this consistent, handcrafted stop-motion feeling in the world," says Clayton.

Compulsion tells me that the studio stopped short of applying this stop-motion effect to the entire gameplay experience because the style is not only "polarizing" but can induce nausea in some players prone to motion sickness. Clayton says: "We wanted to make something that felt nice to play whilst still maintaining a distinctive style." Roy adds that "the stop-motion effect is on by default, because we consider it to be the ideal way to experience the game, but there are accessibility options to turn it off if you want or need to."

The roots of this pain run deep

There's a pattern to the way South of Midnight plays. The hopes of a reunion between mother and daughter propulse the narrative forward, but each chapter sees Hazel attempt to bring some peace to the land. "Players move from these moments of contemplative exploration, traversing the world and discovering little points of interaction to build up the lore of the space naturally, and then they get trapped in these areas with evil spirits that haunt the place," says Roy.

Haints, angry creatures born of pain and stigma, make quick work of your health if you aren't able to successfully control the baying crowd. Combat is fluid, Hazel able to execute a five-strike combo and a charged-attack from range. You do, however, have limited options in the defense department. "The system is centred around dodging," Roy continues. "This was a conscious decision, even from our early prototypes; we wanted Hazel to be an agile character." Enemies are quick to press any advantage, so timing a precision dodge to unleash a shockwave Strand Blast is key, as is swinging the camera around to track surrounding spirits.

When that isn't enough, there are powerful spells at your disposal. Weave immobilises enemies, causing them to take increased damage for a short time; Strand Push repels enemies and disrupts attacks; and Strand Pull yanks smaller Haints towards you, or allows you to quickly close the gap with larger ones. "Spells are really powerful and using them is important," says Roy. "We didn't want you to spend too much time without them, but we also wanted to give players a resource to manage."

That's where Unravel comes into play. There's a brief window of opportunity to 'Unravel' a defeated enemy – reeling in the spirit's energy with spellbinding hostility, echoing a system seen in the 2007 PS3 exclusive Folklore. This action not only replenishes a fraction of your health (one of the only ways to do so) but kickstarts spell cooldowns, giving encounters this frantic push and pull. Roy tells me that this system was not present in earlier prototypes, although the team quickly fell in love with the dynamic it lends to combat. "We thought it was really enjoyable, so we just followed the fun at that point," he says. "There's a few upgrades that you can get later down the road that let you interact with Unravel as well."

Compulsion wants to be clear on this point: "South of Midnight is not an RPG, it's an action game." The upgrade path is minimal, with a nine-slot tree for combat abilities and twelve-slots for spell upgrades – unlocked by collecting 'Floofs'. That's the in-game currency; so named because Hazel has no other word for what she's seeing or experiencing, and earned primarily through leaving the critical path to go exploring the wilds of the world, a reward for completing light traversal puzzles.

"You're not necessarily going to see a linear climb on your damage output," Roy continues, "because the upgrades are really about adding new functionality to your spells and abilities." Strand Pull, for example, can be upgraded to unleash a timed Tethered Strand attack once an enemy is pulled within range, while Aerial Rend adds a ground slam attack to Hazel's arsenal.

There is some risk that South of Midnight's combat could become a little repetitive over time. It's fun, but I get the sense that it may lack the depth and dynamism necessary to avoid falling into routines. Still, Hazel will gain access to a fourth and final spell by the time you reach Chapter 6 – Crouton, an old rag doll that Hazel is able to control and reach new areas within the environment. Roy adds: "In combat, the puppet becomes the puppeteer, turning one of the Haints on your side."

How to overcome your demons

Once certain battles conclude, you'll encounter an Echo Knot. Unravelling these concentrated centres of trauma reveal a painful memory tied to the area, along with a pattern piece. This is how South of Midnight handles its narrative arc, through small vignettes that gradually help Hazel understand her purpose in each of the places she travels. Collect enough pieces of a pattern, trapping the painful memories within special blue bottles, and you'll be able to face the Monster Kings – "folkloric, mythical creatures that are the centerpiece to that particular biome," says Clayton.

"Some of them are going to be more confrontational – boss fights," adds Roy, speaking to two encounters with two mythical creatures glimpsed in South of Midnight trailers; Two-Toed Tom (a gigantic alligator) and Huggin' Molly (an equally gigantic spider), each based on real southern American folklore. "Others will focus on traversal." Lanier adds: "What connects them is that they each have their own haunted backstory. The gameplay loop is discovering why a creature is the way that it is, and then using that information to acquire a pattern and untangle them at the end of certain chapters."

What stuck with me since my time with South of Midnight is how connected all of these elements feel, with the experience of tapping into echoes of the past and collected pieces of these magical patterns so naturally woven together with both the visual design of the environment and the soundscape which envelops it. This is undoubtedly one of the most impressive aspects of the game.

"When you learn something about these creatures you get to listen to a part of their song, and through it you'll start to understand their trauma," says audio director Chris Fox. "And once you reach the final encounter, whatever that should look like, you get the full picture – to hear the full song about their life and story." And let me tell you, it's a delightful flourish.

The future is what you make it

South of Midnight is, in essence, the exact sort of experience Microsoft Gaming needs right now. After a generation cycle that's been largely defined by its fits and starts, the Xbox Series X is about to receive an adventure that is quite unlike any other – a big idea that's being delivered with bold, fearless execution. While my concerns of repetitious activity do remain, particularly with respect to the power of that core narrative loop and the scale of combat encounters over time, there is every chance that Compulsion will rise to meet the moment here with its first Xbox exclusive since the acquisition.

After five years of development, South of Midnight is content locked – the studio focused entirely on polishing the game ahead of its release on April 8, 2025. It's enough to put studio founder in Guillaume Provost in a reflective mood. "One of the reasons I was drawn to South of Midnight as a concept is that the setting isn't one that you typically see in video games."

"That has always been a priority for the studio. Whether it's from a mechanical, story, or a setting standpoint, we want to create video games that have a distinct voice, and that people can see it, and recognise it for what it is immediately. This team is hungry for making things that spell out our love for the craft," says Provost. "I feel confident about where we are with South of Midnight, and I can't wait to get it out into the world."

It turns out, if you dress Henry appropriately, he'll be more competent at specific tasks. If you choose to get a job with the blacksmith, Henry is given a room to stay in that comes with a blacksmith apron and some leather gloves. Pop them on and you'll get an extra five points to your craftsmanship skill.

This was spotted by a redditor who noted that other leather gloves have the same effect. They also noted that "The Spectacles that you can find add +5 to scholarship, which will speed up your reading of books!"

As well as hidden bonuses on clothes, there are perks you can gain by simply spending time on certain vocations and hobbies. Lab Dweller can be earned after spending "countless hours at the alchemist's table" and makes the effect of potions last longer and hangovers go away sooner. Handy if you're getting Henry on the ale.

There's another perk like this, Resistance, that gives you a permanent plus two to your Vitality if you spend "a lot of time on herbalism," so get gathering those nettles. One commenter noted that you get a similar perk by blacksmithing for a long time. It's called Hammerer and it causes heavy weapon attacks and blocks to use 10% less stamina.

[KCD2] Little Blacksmithing tip: Wear the Blacksmith Apron(+3) and leather gloves (+2) to gain a hidden bonus to craftsmanship! Any other hidden bonuses? from r/kingdomcome

Another commenter has discovered that if you ride Henrig a lot, the horse you get from the main quest in Trosky, you'll get a hidden perk that boosts the stallion's stats. This also works on Pebbles, so try it with whatever horse you've found. Apparently you need to ride for around 35 km, so give it a while.

One player got a perk called Bushman that reduces the noise you make when moving through bushes by 50%. You get it by "following a Cuman through the woods a long way."

If you're enjoying Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2, check out some of the other best RPGs you can play right now.

Word about the next Subnautica first surfaced back in 2023, and with the highly anticipated sequel set to release in early access at some point this year, hype is building. With that in mind, you can understand why some particularly excited underwater explorers might not hesitate if they were sent a link to a playtest via Steam, but Unknown Worlds is making it very clear that it would "never" reach out to anyone this way.

"We've been made aware that fraudulent links to a Subnautica 2 playtest are being sent to our community on Steam," a new tweet reads. "Please be aware that we will never contact anyone by Steam DM for any potential playtests. Stay safe out there, Subnauts!"

Unknown Worlds has elaborated slightly on this situation in the official Subnautica Discord server, where community manager Donya Abramo clarifies: "Any contact regarding studies or playtests will only ever be sent by email from an Unknown Worlds address." Furthermore, while the devs recently invited players to sign up for a "User Research Participant Pool," the official link to it is only available on the Discord server.

If this warning has come too late for you, Abramo advises anyone who's already clicked one of the fake Steam playtest links to "change your password immediately to secure your account" and consider enabling two-factor authentication for some extra security.

For now, anyone eager to dive into the sequel will just have to hold on a while longer – in the meantime, there's no doubt that dedicated fans will have their eyes on its predecessor for more hidden teasers like we saw last year.

You can also check out our roundup of the best survival games for even more to play.

"State of Play is back tomorrow, February 12," Sony says in its official announcement. "Tune in live for news and updates on great games coming to PS5. The show celebrates a creative and unique selection of exciting games from studios around the world."

This will be a "40+ minute show" that begins February 12 at 2pm PT / 5pm ET / 10pm GMT. You'll be able to tune in via the official PlayStation Twitch and YouTube channels.

Sony has not provided any official indication of what games will be at this event, but with Ghost of Yotei expected to launch in 2025, it's a likely candidate for the showcase. Hideo Kojima has also been teasing a new trailer over the last few days, and with Death Stranding 2: On the Beach set to be another Sony-published title launching in 2025, I wouldn't be at all surprised if it also shows up here.

Other notable upcoming PlayStation titles, like Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet, Marathon, and Marvel's Wolverine, are a bit further out and less likely to be shown here - but certainly, nothing's impossible. It's worth reiterating that this is being branded as a State of Play event, as opposed to one of the PlayStation Showcases where Sony typically hosts its biggest announcements. Still, the last State of Play is where Ghost of Yotei was first unveiled, so it's always possible that Sony has something major in store.

These are the best PS5 games to add to your collection.

Having gone hands-on with Monster Hunter Wilds previously, we noticed more of a traditional kind of RPG experience compared to previous games regarding the kind of front-facing story and structured chapters you get. Given the chance to speak to Tokuda lately, we ask if there was a push for this type of content to appeal to or help guide players unfamiliar with Monster Hunter to get into the game.

"The concept that I had from the start of the game was humanity as part of the ecosystem, and realizing that humans weren't something on the outside of it looking in, they were part of it, and they had an effect on it," Tokuda answers. "And that naturally led to an increased focus on story. Because, you know, the storytellers, the humans, are actually right in there amongst it.

"It just made sense to me to have the story more upfront than in past titles. So it was a natural evolution of that concept, and it spoke to all the other elements of the game, such as the learning curve of which monsters you face in which order as you get started in the game, and how they teach you the necessary skills to play the game, how that interacted with a chapter-based story structure of which one you were going to meet next.

"It all sort of flowed naturally from that original concept, rather than being the idea of, as you said, let's just make it more like an RPG on that basis."

As for the chapter structure, Tokuda says it makes a lot of sense as "it's easy to follow" and gives players a clear sense of how far along they are.

"The result was, it looked like, as you said, 'Oh, are you trying to go for RPG players by imitating that structure?' But really it was just a natural outcome of our other decisions that hopefully makes sense to players."

Monster Hunter Wilds is due to release later this month, on February 28. The good news, though, is that you don't have to wait that long to try it, as we're in the middle of the second Monster Hunter Wilds open beta test. While the first leg has come and gone, the second kicks off on February 13 at 7pm PT, with an extra 24 hours courtesy of the recent PSN outage, too.

Monster Hunter Wilds will give you one free character edit, which is great for Fashion Hunters, but frustrating for everyone who's sick of paywalled customization.

Ever since the very first Monster Hunter on PS2, joining forces has always been one of the series' most defining features. "It was a very early online game," says director Yuya Tokuda. But, PS2 internet requiring jumping through a lot of hoops to utilize, it was the series' handheld games that really made Monster Hunter the phenomena it is today. For many, it's these portable titles, getting together with friends, that got them into the series in the first place. "The subsequent PSP games kind of introduced in person local LAN, as it were – WLAN play – as a new feature, that was maybe more suitable for portable play. So whenever we kind of went online after that, we were kind of getting back to the series roots if anything," Tokuda continues.

Got no strings

Monster Hunter Wilds is the culmination of a long, storied legacy. Whether it's some of the earliest online gaming the PS2 offered or wireless handheld multiplayer, Monster Hunter's earlier titles were always ahead of the curve. "At the time Monster Hunter was released – we just had our 20th anniversary recently, so it's over 20 years ago now," reflects producer Ryozo Tsujumoto. "There weren't really that many online games like this, in the console space at least, so it was a relatively unique proposition, and I think the infrastructure wasn't really where it needed to be at the time."

To play online on PS2 on a base model, you needed to scoop up a PS2 Network Adapter to slot into the expansion bay, and a good enough internet connection for the era. In addition, publishers themselves would then have to run their own servers, support for which varied between regions (many years later, PlayStation Network and Xbox Live would provide their own glue to bring this together – greatly simplifying the proposition).

"So even if you wanted to play the game, having a sufficient broadband connection and equipment to connect your console to the internet was not necessarily a given back then for most consumers," says Tsujimoto. "In the meantime, while the infrastructure and the world caught up with our vision of playing the game online together on consoles, [we moved] to a portable approach" – a tactic he calls "bring your own network".

"It kind of helped us deal with that lack of infrastructure, and in the meantime infrastructure caught up," Tsujimoto continues. "The work we did on making the game work on portables with local networks really benefited the design of subsequent online games. So it definitely wasn't a diversion. It was more like just a realistic approach to catering to the needs of players given the limits of infrastructure at any given time."

Making sure Capcom is in tune with what players want, and how they expect to be able to connect, has been core to ensuring Monster Hunter remains enduring, and has helped inform Monster Hunter Wilds' goal of releasing globally across all platforms, while supporting crossplay between all of them. Essentially, removing barriers. "We worked very hard to achieve that this time around," says Tsujimoto, acknowledging that PC is a growing platform worldwide, including in Japan. "That means the choice is yours on which platform you want to play with, and then [you can just] go online and hunt with your friends."

Monster Hunter can be a complicated series with plenty of depth, but its values are as clear as day. I ask what, across the years, best defines a Monster Hunter. "It's an obvious answer given the series name," says Tokuda, "but I think hunting monsters, particularly large monsters, cooperatively with other players in an action context, is something that, if we ever compromise on any of those aspects, it's not really what we think of as a the core DNA of Monster Hunter anymore." Now, with Monster Hunter Wilds making it easier than ever for players to connect and slay those monsters together, no matter how they choose to game, that DNA is stronger than ever.

Want to jump in and can't wait? With so many games in the series, where should you begin? Perhaps our best Monster Hunter games list could be of assistance.

Predicting where Imamura's ideas will take him next is a fruitless endeavor – unless you ask the man himself. During a chat to discuss Omega 6, I asked who his dream collaboration would be for whatever comes next - and in typical fashion, his hypothetical project didn't disappoint.

"To tell the truth, I really really like The Witcher 3," shared Imamura. "I don't know whether we'd get on, but I'd love to work with CD Projekt Red on something. I'd love to do a Star Wars game with them."

At first glance, that reads like a wild game of pop culture bingo. But the more you think about it, the clearer you can see that dreamy space where Star Wars, The Witcher, and Imamura's Venn diagrams overlap – and now, I'm ready to bat for a future where his dream is realized.

A terrible fate

If you ask me to name some of the darkest fantasy games around, The Witcher 3 and The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask would both rank very highly. Geralt's quest to save Ciri is steeped in tragedy. Even the most straightforward side quest forces you into making morally gray decisions – the needs of the many outweighing the needs of the few is a particularly common theme, but that cold logic rarely absolves your guilt when it comes to the fate of the few.

Even the "right" decisions leave you feeling like you've sucked down cold mud – In The Heart of the Woods twists the knife whether you choose to help a village destroy or bond with the monstrous leshen stalking its surrounding forest, while The Bloody Baron's familial drama is tearful at best and soul-crushing at worst.

Majora's Mask isn't as gory as The Witcher, but when it comes to exploring the human condition, it's just as bleak. For those who haven't played one of the best Zelda games, Majora's Mask is set in an eerie alternate realm to Hyrule called Termina, where a leering moon is just three days away from falling from the sky. Link has just three days to save Termina from its lunar fate, and if you run out of time, it's shown in no uncertain terms that the land and everyone in it is violently destroyed.

On the first day, local carpenters refuse to merit the fact the moon will even fall, and insist on holding the annual Carnival of Time regardless. Some characters are already convinced it's plummeting, but true realization doesn't sink in until it's essentially too late to do anything about it. A postman can't bring himself to abandon the people on his route, despite his terror, while separated fiances Anju and Kafei choose to reunite and spend their last moments together. It's an examination of how we respond to imminent death – an unflinching look at the scream before a crash – and to this day, remains one of Nintendo's darkest games.

As the art director for Majora's Mask, Imamura was largely responsible for some of the game's most darker imagery. Think of the moon with a human face, which grins and cries over you as it looms, or the intensity of the eponymous purple mask that drives the antagonistic Skull Kid – who is himself a victim in many ways – from childish pranks to abuse and would-be mass murder. It's a tone that Imamura picked up and ran with.

"The direction of dark fantasy itself came from the director, [Yoshiaki] Koizumi-san," says Imamura. "But when I got assigned to it, I started sketching the moon, the mask – that was my design – so that was one of the reasons it went in that direction. One of the other [reasons] is just that when I start working, I get into it – I'm really fast. So before we knew it, we already had the basis of this world."

With that in mind, I can already see a world where the bleaker tone of Disney's Andor is given life through the Imamura-CDPR collaboration I'm desperately trying to manifest. CD Projekt Red's Cyberpunk 2077 is one of the best sci-fi games going – and with the amount of characters in it that want to escape Night City for a life on the moon, I'm starting to suspect the studio is projecting something. Even less needs to be said of Imamura, whose vast vast body of work is almost always set amongst the stars.

So, yeah: this may well be Imamura's pipe dream, but now it's my pipe dream too. Hit me with side quests that force you to choose between entire planets, and let me soak my eyeballs in Imamura's take on a galaxy far, far away. Squeeze a few hands of Gwent into that world, and I won't even ask for a matchmaker's fee.

Zelda and Star Fox veteran says the Nintendo Switch has been a global success, but thinks the House of Mario still has "something" up its sleeve for the Switch 2

If you're someone who likes to let your Sims live out a natural life, dying due to old age or an unfortunate accident, congratulations, you're a monster and we can't be friends. I get far too attached to my creations and turn their aging off entirely, but for those of you who prefer to let nature take its course, there is some life after death in Inzoi.

As spotted by PCGamer, director Hyungjun "Kjun" Kim took to the game's Discord server to explain some of its upcoming early-access features: "We want to keep the playability of ghosts fairly limited so it doesn’t overshadow the main gameplay, but we also want to make sure the experience is engaging enough when it does happen."

InZOI has a karma system, and if your Zoi has enough, it'll make its way to a peaceful afterlife when it dies. If it doesn't, it'll hang around after death as a ghost that you can "encounter at set times under certain conditions." They won't be playable right now, but that is planned for later on. "Any further development for ghosts will have to come after the release," Kjun says.

Although the ghosts won't be playable yet, InZOI is implementing Nvidia Ace, the company's generative AI that features text-to-speech capabilities meant to make NPCs more life-like. It calls these NPCs "Smart Zoi," and in the video shared by publisher Krafton they sort of just seem like regular NPCs that react to the world around them. I saw the tech used at an Nvidia demo last year (not for InZOI), and wasn't very impressed, but maybe it'll be implemented in a creative way for InZOI.

To get a better idea of what this Sims competitor will look like, check out our InZOI preview. You should also check out other games like The Sims if you're a fan of the genre.

I say "slightly" because Arrowhead hasn't actually altered the power of the GP-31 Ultimatum at all. The explosive-launching delete button was only just added to the game in Helldivers 2's Servants of Freedom Warbond last week, and the devs have made it clear that "it's not our intent to release Warbond items that need immediate balancing, and we understand that any changes we make can evoke strong feelings." However, with the single-shot Ultimatum able to gain "extra ammo from the previously-a-bug-but-now-a-feature Siege Ready armor passive," Arrowhead thought "this specific combination is too strong."

In the latest patch notes, Arrowhead's release manager Max Carlberg (AKA Release Captain Carlberg) explains: "We're huge fans of big booms booming big (to quote our fabulous design director) so we didn't want to make the weapon less satisfying to use – we still want it to bring democratic tears to your eyes every time you use it, like it does for us. However, we will be addressing how easy it is to access extra ammunition for it, ensuring it requires a bit more effort to use it to the full effect."

It's not just the Siege Ready passive that won't work on the Ultimatum anymore – the Hellpod Optimization Booster is now ineffective, too. So, it'll no longer be so easy to fire out loads of shots, but it does seem like a solid approach to a nerf that still allows the weapon to keep its "core identity as a powerhouse" while dealing with "mixed" feedback about its strength.

Elsewhere, the patch irons out some crashes and an issue "where the scope aim-center was misaligned with the projectile's fire trajectory," and rebalances the LAS-17 Double-Edge Sickle – another new Servants of Freedom addition. "The goal is to ensure it feels like a truly powerful weapon while properly balancing the self-damage mechanics to reflect its high-risk nature," Carlberg writes. "In the current live version, we felt it lacked both the punch and the level of risk we wanted and we didn't feel it really lived up to our intent."

Now, the Double-Edge Sickle's armor penetration only builds up to the medium level (AP3) once the weapon has surpassed 25% heat, and after you pass 50%, you'll deal 70 damage rather than 55. However, you'll also be more vulnerable yourself, at 20 damage per second rather than 10 between 51% and 90% heat. From 91% heat onwards, the damage to enemies is still 70, but you'll go all the way to armor penetration level four. That is, of course, if you're willing to stand the 50 damage per second to yourself, which remains unchanged (along with the fire status effect).

For fellow fans of big booms booming big, you'll be pleased to know that the new Portable Hellbomb stratagem remains unchanged – other than the fact that you'll no longer be able to accidentally arm it when entering the Fast Recon Vehicle (FRV).

To celebrate Helldivers 2's first birthday, GM Joel recalls his favorite community moments that are now "canon" and "part of Helldiver lore."

McKay plays the role of protagonist Henry, and in an interview with the BBC he says working on the Kingdom Come games was "one of the most amazing and unusual acting challenges."

Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 is a sprawling RPG with many choices available to you. It's believed to have the biggest video game script ever, meaning McKay was in the sound booth for "over 500 hours."

"You would kind of go down one channel of a decision and then come halfway back up and go down another one and then maybe all the way back up to the beginning and back down," he says. "And that's not an acting challenge that you ever would have in TV or film."

You can play as a good person, an unlucky thief, or just murder anyone unlucky enough to cross paths with you. So, Henry needs to be able to deliver his lines in many different ways.

Dale, who plays Hans Capon, adds: "So you do the scene and you've got three four different people coming over to you, 'Can you do that? Can you just be aware of this?' Me and Tom are like: 'OK, can we distill this down?'"

Spending so much time together, the co-stars all became quite friendly with each other. "It is like putting on a really comfortable pair of clothes. Which is ironic because in the motion capture studio you're literally wearing head-to-toe lycra."

But while the actors can make friends on set, they had to keep the work they were doing for the better part of nine years incredibly secret. "It was almost like working for GCHQ or something," says McKay. "You couldn't talk to anyone about it and people in the studio couldn't even talk to their partners in some cases about what they were doing."

Movies and TV shows often share behind-the-scenes pictures and have actors, showrunners, and directors letting fans know what to expect for months or even years in advance, but video games are often far more secretive. When fans of the original game spotted McKay in Warhorse Studios' native Prague, he had to think fast to throw them off the scent of a sequel. "I'd be like: 'I just love Prague. And I come here very often for lots of holidays,'" he says.

Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 has been a huge success, selling over one million copies in just 24 hours and already shattering its predecessor's peak concurrent player record and making it into Steam's top 50 most-played games.

If you're a fan of Kingdom Come, check out some of the other best RPGs you can play.

Yesterday, NetEase Games broke the news to Marvel Rivals players that come the second half of Season 1 on February 21, everyone's ranks would drop by four divisions. "For example, if you ended the first half of Season 1 at Diamond 1, you'll start the second half at Platinum 2," a dev diary explained at the time. This didn't go down well at all – ranking up takes sweet time, which isn't a luxury everyone has in spades. It's a lot of progress lost when you consider that Marvel Rivals ranks will be reduced by a further six divisions at the start of a new season, too.

Thankfully, it's taken less than 14 hours for significant changes to be announced. In yet another new dev diary, NetEase Games acknowledges the "wealth of feedback" it's received, noting that "a common concern was the pressure associated with having a rank reset every half-season, which has made participating in competitive mode less enjoyable."

While the season will still be sort of split in half – granting those at or above Gold, Grandmaster, and One Above All ranks certain rewards on February 21 – there'll no longer be a rank reset. "Players will retain their ranks and scores from the end of the first half," the post explains. "To earn new rewards, players simply need to complete 10 matches in Competitive mode and meet the relevant conditions by the end of the season. Rewards will include a new Gold rank costume and a variety of Crests of Honor, featuring distinct designs for Grandmaster, Celestial, Eternity, and One Above All."

Wrapping things up, NetEase Games says: "We strive to make Marvel Rivals the best game it can be, and the community is the driving force behind this mission!" You've really got to hand it to the devs for quickly responding to what fans actually want from their third-person shooter – it's no wonder that it continues to be so popular.

Be sure to check out our Marvel Rivals characters tier list to see who the strongest heroes in the game are right now.

In an interview with ScreenRant, Assassin's Creed Shadows director Jonathan Dumont explained how he personally chooses to spend his time between the two protagonists. They both have their own unique strengths and weaknesses, with Yasuke is big, powerful, and brutish, while Naoe is light, nimble, and quick, and Dumont wisely takes advantage of that.

"I play quite a bit balanced out and what happens is, I play with one for three, four, five hours, and then I switch, and then I just play two, three hours," said Dumont. "Usually I play stealth and then I play, all right, let me destroy some camps and stuff all right for a while. And then I just change like that."

Content-wise, Dumont said each hero has their own unique intro scenes and questlines, but he recommends simply playing the characters you're having more fun with.

"So I don't think you're missing out on things too much," he said. "I think it's more on your preference to [say], 'okay, I'll see how the game will adapt a little bit to the character if you choose one over the other.' They get individual introductions and then they get their own questline also. So that one is, let's say Naoe, a personal questline cannot be played by Yasuke and those are two distinct things. But the core of the game can be pick your character and the game adapts."

It's still not entirely clear how many unique scenarios can be missed, but Dumont said several times you won't be "missing out on things too much," adding, "we're not imposing players try to split the time. So if you prefer one character for any reason, you can play maybe - I don't know, I'm not going to put a percentage - but quite a bit of the game using one of them. But if you want to balance it out."

Assassin's Creed Shadows launches on PS5, Xbox Series X, and PC on March 20.

Be sure to check out our Assassin's Creed Shadows big preview hub for more details about the game from our hands-on preview.

For the uninitiated, Tibia is an MMO from German developer and publisher CipSoft released in 1997, years before genre titans Everquest and RuneScape were more than twinkles in their publishers' eyes. It even beats out Ultima Online, if only by a few months. Point is, it's not quite the oldest MMO ever made, but it's one of the oldest and certainly longest running ever.

To really contextualize just how old Tibia is, it wasn't until 2022 that the game added sound... yes, sound. Now, it's getting arguably an even more significant update that adds the game's first new class ever. That's right, for 28 years there have been four classes; the Knight, Paladin, Druid, and Sorcerer; but that's about to change with the addition of the Monk class later this year.

We don't have any footage or even clips of the Monk in action, but CipSoft says in a press release that gameplay is focused on melee combat and "mystical powers."

The Tibia project manager known only as Niadus says the idea of adding a new class after so long was long deemed "too complex and too risky," but ultimately CipSoft decided "it felt actually possible as well as a natural step for the game."

"All in all, we see the addition of a new vocation as an opportunity to rekindle the sense of discovery that was always part of Tibia. A chance to learn the intricacies of a new vocation, experiment with new strategies, and adapt to new team compositions."

There's no release date for the Monk just yet, but the first playtest will be on February 25 and the full release is slated for the second quarter of 2025.

In the meantime, here are the best MMOs you can play today.

That's why "there has been a slight delay in the release of major news," CEO Akihiro Hino says on Twitter, as translated by Japanese gaming site Gematsu. Hino doesn't expand on what new hardware he's been busy brawling with, though his announcement has a peculiar smell to it… it almost sounds like Fantasy Life i could maybe, possibly be an upcoming Switch 2 game.

But we have wiggle room for speculation. Game screenshots Hino attaches to his Twitter post indicate that he's using an Xbox controller, and Gematsu also reports that PlayStation leaks show Fantasy Life i could be coming to Sony's console, too.

While the game hasn't yet been announced on any console other than the Switch, Hino says in another loaded tweet translated by Gematsu that some additional screenshots he posts are "still from the Switch version" – implying other versions.

In any case, Hino more plainly shares a crucial milestone for the life-sim RPG: "The game content has become significantly more enjoyable."

The last and only other Fantasy Life game released in 2012 for the 3DS, so while, truthfully, any cute call back to that time in Nintendo's history would be enough to satisfy me, I'm glad to hear that Level-5's sequel will also have "enjoyable" content on offer.

Hino also boasts that Fantasy Life i's twee, rainbow cereal "visuals have evolved," and that, overall, the game is "shaping up to be an outstanding RPG."

"New information will be released soon," Hino shares, "so please look forward to it!"

Fantasy Life i: The Girl Who Steals Time looks like the RPG take on Animal Crossing: New Horizons that I've been waiting for.

In its latest earnings report for the nine-month fiscal period that ended on December 31, Square Enix says its "HD game sub-segment," which refers to its big tentpole releases like Final Fantasy 16 and Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth, saw a decline in sales compare to the previous fiscal year. That's because "new titles generated lower sales than releases such as 'FINAL FANTASY XVI,' 'FINAL FANTASY PIXEL REMASTER,' and 'Dragon Quest Monsters: The Dark Prince' had the previous year."

Thankfully, Dragon Quest 3 HD-2D Remake, along with "lower development cost amortization and advertising expenses compared with the same period of the previous year," saved the day. Square Enix reports that the Dragon Quest 3 remake raked in "stronger sales" than "initially assumed."

That's fairly encouraging news amid news of so many big and well-received RPGs, including Dragon Age: The Veilguard, Final Fantasy 16, and Final Fantasy 7: Rebirth failing to satisfy sales expectations. Back in September, Square Enix admitted it might've been cannibalizing its own games and slapped several of its most anticipated RPGs with the classic "below expectations" line we hear far too often in these financial reports. It's refreshing to hear some good news about an RPG for a change, and a relatively niche one at that.

In our Dragon Quest 3 HD writeup, we praised the beautifully modernized graphics but warned that the 36-year-old JRPG might not be the most approachable thing for newcomers to the genre.

Why not pick something from our list of the best JRPGs to play right now?

No offense, The Thing and Human Torch – you Fantastic Four members look very strong and intimidating in your promotional images. Personally, I would hate to be a torch or boulder person, so good for you.

That said, these superheroes are getting overshadowed like it's a lunar eclipse by Marvel Rivals' mid-season rank reset, which will make players fall four divisions when it also launches on February 21.

"For example, if you ended the first half of Season 1 at Diamond I," says a Marvel Rivals dev diary, "you'll start the second half at Platinum II."

Players don't like the sound of that. Marvel Rivals already has a seasonal rank reset, which drops players down six divisions – two unsparing rank resets might make gameplay feel like a depressing chore. Developer NetEase's decision here, by the way, comes only months after League of Legends developer Riot announced walked back its infamously back-breaking rank resets for one, massive yearly reset.

"This has to be the dumbest decision I've ever read," says one popular reply to Marvel Rivals' announcement on Twitter.

"Why on God's green earth do we need a mid-season rank reset?" wonders another player on Steam.

On Reddit, Marvel Rivals players are ready to revolt, feeling crushed by the "truly devastating news," as one hugely upvoted thread says.

"I can promise you NOBODY wants to have their rank reset halfway through every season," the Reddit post continues. "People have JOBS. I don’t have the time to re-rank up every few weeks.

Out of everything great about this game, this WILL make me and my friends stop playing."

Marvel Rivals is killing it right now, but there's one more thing it needs to borrow from Overwatch to truly thrive.

Last week, Zelnick again affirmed that Rockstar's long-awaited open-world sequel is still on track to launch on PS5 and Xbox Series X this fall, noting that "there's always a risk of slippage." An eventual PC release has always seemed fairly likely because of established Rockstar precedent as well as the unrivaled demand for a game like GTA 6, and in an interview with IGN, Zelnick seemed to raise that likelihood significantly.

"So with Civ 7 it's available on console and PC and Switch right away," Zelnick said, referring to Firaxis' recent multiplatform release, Civilization 7. "With regard to others in our lineup, we don't always go across all platforms simultaneously. Historically, Rockstar has started with some platforms and then historically moved to other platforms."

In the same interview, Zelnick said the PC version of a multiplatform release can account for 40% of overall sales and that the PC market has "become a much more and more important part of what used to be a console business." And though he shrugged off concerns over struggling console sales thanks to a promising 2025 release lineup, he also said "the trend that you'd want to focus on is this increasing share of the market that is reflected in PC."

Basically, it would be really weird for Zelnick to say all of this and then not have GTA 6 come to PC at some point, but it's hard to say how long it'll take for that to happen. The most recent Rockstar game of comparative scale would be Red Dead Redemption 2, and that launched on PC in November 2019, a little more than a year after its PS4 and Xbox One release date. There's no telling whether it'll be the same for GTA 6, but it's a sound enough general indicator.

"Rockstar Games seeks perfection in everything they do": Take-Two boss is confident in GTA 6, but "our competitors are not asleep."

"One 'Hunter's Grooming Ticket' and one '[Palico]'s Grooming Ticket' will be available free of charge from each store from the date of release for editing the series' familiar gestures and characters that have already been created," developer Capcom shares on Twitter, according to a DeepL translation.

Monster Hunter World notoriously offers players the same limited ability to alter their protagonist's and kitty companion Palico's appearances. After initially finalizing these characters' sweet looks, players have only one free Character Edit Voucher to meaningfully modify them – after using the Voucher up, players need to purchase additional $2.99 Vouchers if they want to continue overhauling their character customizations.

It's not a very popular system, as fans' responses to Capcom's Monster Hunter Wilds news proves.

"Still wish it was just free to edit in general," popular Monster Hunter fan account Kogath says on Twitter.

"I think it's always kind of dumb to monetize the ability to change your character in a video game," agrees another popular Twitter reply. "I much prefer the route of having certain bonus choices be monetized, but free to swap."

Other fashion-conscious Hunters are already worrying about paywalled haircuts, or wondering why Wilds doesn't just copy Wild Hearts' totally liberating, and literally free character customization. Slaying monsters shouldn't preclude you from slaying, you know?

I spent 5 hours with a new build of Monster Hunter Wilds and it solved basically every problem I had after playing the beta – now this really feels like Monster Hunter World 2.

A new Resident Evil 5 ESRB rating was noted by Wario64 on Bluesky earlier today, and curiously, this rating is only for Xbox Series consoles. The content description is quite similar to that of previous versions of the game, though the text is slightly different, just as it subtly changed between the original PS3/Xbox 360 release, the later Gold Edition, and the PS4/Xbox One port.

What's odd here is that this Resident Evil 5 rating is, again, only for Xbox Series consoles, just like the Resident Evil 6 rating that popped up back in January. In a world where publishers like Square Enix are embracing multiplatform releases - and heck, even Xbox itself is doing the same - what sort of Resident Evil rerelease might only come to Xbox Series consoles?

It's certainly possible that the PS5 and/or other versions of these games just haven't been rated yet, but we're still left to wonder just what these implied new versions actually are. If Capcom continues its trend of remaking numbered entries in the Resident Evil series, 5 would be next in line, but it seems exceedingly unlikely that they'd let a full-on remake be outed by an ESRB rating.

The smart money is on remasters or current-gen patches for RE5 and 6, but exactly which platforms these games come to remains to be seen.

The Resident Evil deathmatch game that flopped is going offline as Capcom says it's "served its original, celebratory purpose admirably."

1. Begin on Scribe difficulty

Civilization 7 dramatically changes up the 4X gameplay formula, to the point that even returning players may not be used to the new systems introduced. As such, we recommend turning the difficulty down to Scribe, the lowest of Civ 7’s six difficulty levels.

This will allow you to learn the game from the ground up at a leisurely pace. With the Scribe difficulty active, other leaders are less likely to stomp all over you, and you’ll be able to learn each of these new and returning systems without the fear of that looming over your head.

Once you’ve got to grips with how the game works and the best ways to progress through a standard game, you’ll be better off moving up to higher difficulties for added challenge.

2. Start by building scouts

As early as the first 10 turns, you should prioritize training a few scout units to explore the surrounding terrain. Building a scout will allow them to get the lay of the land and help you find good resource tiles along with other factions while you’re still setting up your main city.

Scouts can move two tiles per turn, and have a higher field of view when compared to other units you can create at this point. Therefore, they’re incredibly useful for exploring the world map and finding areas you’ll want to expand into.

The main thing to beware of is that scouts aren’t fighters, so if a hostile enemy decides to attack your scout unit, you’ll risk losing them altogether.

3. Be aware of surrounding terrain

When using your scouts to explore the terrain around your city, now’s a good time to take note of what resource tiles are available to you and plan accordingly. When it comes to expanding your starting city (or building new towns), it’s important to pick up technologies that take advantage of the resources available to you.

For example, if your first city is located near a lot of food tiles, research technologies that will improve your yield from food. This will help your city grow massively in the early game, allowing you to expand quickly.

The same goes for other types of resources. So, if you’re settled near a lot of production tiles, prioritize technologies that will take advantage of that.

4. Expand early and quickly

Being aware of nearby resources is important, but you know what else is important? Being aware of what isn’t near your city. If there’s a specific resource you need which isn’t as readily available, you’ll have to expand by creating towns.

The best thing about having towns is that they’re a major boon to resource stockpiles. Ideally, you’ll want to settle at least two additional towns by the time you reach around Turn 50. We recommend placing them on the same continent as your city, but on opposing coasts. This comes in handy during the Exploration Age later on, when you need to venture further outside of the starting area.

There’s no downside to settling more towns, as long as you make sure you stay under the settlement limit. If you go over by settling too many towns, you’ll receive a penalty.

5. Choose a Legacy Path early

Civ 7’s Legacy Paths are the conditions you need to follow in order to achieve victory. There are four routes to victory: Economy, Military, Culture, and Science. However, this is not just a case of following one route from the first turn to the final turn, as each age has its own conditions to achieve.

There are three distinct ages a Civ 7 game will play through: Antiquity, Exploration, and Modern. Legacy Paths will give you a set of objectives to achieve in each age, and accomplishing them will influence your play in the following age.

Sometimes it’s best to stick to one Legacy Path throughout all three ages, but depending on your leader and civilization, it may also be beneficial to switch them up mid-game. We recommend experimenting with the best leader and civilization combinations and how they influence the Legacy Paths.

6. Use your influence points

As you meet other leaders, you’ll gain influence points which allow you to strengthen or weaken how favorably other civilizations think of you. If you’re aiming for a more diplomatic victory, it’s wise to use your influence points to keep these leaders happy. We’ve found that using influence for diplomacy that’s mutually beneficial for both civs is the best route to avoiding conflict.

Similarly, you’ll also encounter independent factions as your scouts move around the map. Spending influence points will allow you to befriend them and become part of your civilization. This brings new bonuses and will help you grow your empire.

7. Military is important, even for peaceful players

Generally speaking, the AI in Civilization 7 is quite aggressive in our experience. Even if you’re pursuing a peaceful playthrough, it’s wise to amass a large army if only for self-defence. Particularly in the Antiquity Age, you’ll certainly run into some hostile independent cities that can become a problem for you if you don’t have a strong military presence.

Commanders, a new addition to Civ 7, are also great to have. You can use them to stack multiple units on one tile, allowing them to move as a group. It’ll also make them much stronger when it comes to fighting with a hostile enemy.

8. Be prepared for disasters

It helps to be prepared when faced with a crisis. This could mean an ally potentially turning on you, or a natural disaster destroying a portion of your settlements and units. At any time, your city could be upturned by a blizzard, a volcanic eruption, a flood, or something else entirely. Should this happen, you’ll need to use your resources to rebuild any tiles affected by the disaster.

On the other hand, once the Age progresses to around 60%, every leader will be hit with a crisis to deal with. This will appear in the Government screen, where you’ll be required to pick up a social policy which brings some kind of debuff to your progress. As the age continues to edge towards completion, this crisis will worsen, so make sure you’re prepared to deal with it.

And those are the best Civilization 7 tips we can offer to help you start out.

© GamesRadar+. Not to be reproduced without permission.

In Civilization 7, a new system has replaced the previous Eras of the game. In Civilization 6, there was both a World Era and an Individual Era, with the former being the median of all civilizations in play.

Now, instead of everyone progressing at their own pace by researching technology and civics, when one Age is completed, all players and opponents level up to the next one at the same time. Currently, you can play through three Ages: Antiquity, Exploration, and Modern, and then the game ends just before the Cold War properly kicks off. The game currently has mixed reviews on Steam, and the devs have said they'll keep working to improve it.

As spotted by IGN, a redditor supposedly discovered that a fourth age is on the way: Atomic. The devs themselves have also teased more Ages, so this could be legitimate. In an interview with IGN, Civilization 7 executive producer Dennis Shirk says: "You can imagine the possibilities with this, honestly. The way that the design team set it up so that each age is chockfull of systems, visuals, units, Civs, all specific to that age, and what you could do with that and where you could take it… we can't talk about the specifics. We can just talk about it in generalities. We're excited for where this is going to go."

An Atomic age would likely go from the Cold War all the way to the current day, but it could go even further and throw in some sci-fi such as space travel or strange new nuclear weapons. The possibilities are endless, and it opens the game up for future Ages that speculate on what the years to come could hold.

While you wait, check out all the other best strategy games you can try right now.

As it stands, GTA 6 is only set to release on PS5 and Xbox Series X|S. Rockstar has remained vague about a potential PC release, although many believe it'll get a port eventually, just like GTA 5 and Red Dead Redemption 2 did a good while after their initial launches (it took over a year and a half for the former). Speaking to IGN, Zelnick makes it clear that he knows how important PC launches are, explaining that PC versions of multiplatform games can generate 40% or more of total sales.

In fact, Zelnick says the industry has "seen PC become a much more and more important part of what used to be a console business," but he's clearly not concerned about GTA 6's console launch, even if there's been a dip in sales for current-gen hardware. Rather, he's convinced that it'll actually help convince some players to splash their cash on a current-gen console for the first time. "When you have a big title in the market and we have many of them coming, historically that has sold consoles," Zelnick explains.

"And I think that will happen this year," he continues. "I don't think tariffs are going to be our friend, but I think there will be a meaningful uptick in console sales in calendar [year] 25 because of the release schedule, not just coming from us, but coming from others. So I'm not concerned about [console sales falling]. I think the trend that you'd want to focus on is this increasing share of the market that is reflected in PC."

Zelnick isn't just being humble about there being big games "not just coming from us," because 2025 is looking ridiculously busy. Beyond GTA 6 and Borderlands 4, we can also look forward to Elden Ring Nightreign, Death Stranding 2: On the Beach, Doom: The Dark Ages, and many more. Get those backlogs cleared now, because they're about to get even more chaotic.

GTA 6 still coming this fall, Take-Two boss says "there's always a risk of slippage" but "we feel really good" about a 2025 launch.

The temptation to commit crimes is rampant, but I'm committed to upholding my RPG tradition. So, I made a promise to myself early on: I will live honestly and do right by as many people as I can. I'm now 13 hours in, and it's certainly not the easiest path to tread – in fact, it at times feels like I'm doing everything the hard way – but you better believe it's rewarding. I will not allow any crime to tarnish my good name. Henry will be a good lad, groschen be damned.

Honorable Henry

The beginning of my adventures start off very slowly. After asking around about any honest work, I spent a lot of time walking down dirt roads in search of new opportunities. Outfitted in what isn't far off from rags, I don't give off the best impression, but even so, I reply politely to every passing guard who throws suspicion my way. Deciding to not only let my actions speak to my good nature, I even try to greet everyone who wants to chat with a friendly hello. On one occasion, I even try to compliment someone's strong arms, which quickly backfires. The bloke is convinced I'm taking the piss and before I know it, he's threatening to throw hands. I quickly quell the situation by refusing to engage in fisticuffs, but it's certainly a lesson in how fast things can take a turn if you don't choose your responses wisely.

Once I reach a nearby village, two fellows ask for my assistance, and what is a good boy to do but hear them out? Once I get wind that this pair wants me to pinch a lute for them, I know I'm not in great company right off, but I'm always willing to hear just about anyone out.

After all, one of the great joys of Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 is the fact that there are often different approaches you can take in any given quest. Just because you're asked to do something bad at a surface level doesn't mean you can't try to find another solution.

So, despite my personal code of honor, I decide to reluctantly agree, believing that perhaps there's some way I can convince the instrument's owner to part with it fairly. As it is, I've yet to find a good solution to this particular quest, so it'll sit in my log forever more if need be. I'm certainly not going to risk stealing it and compromise my principles for some groschen – you just have to read about my editor Andy Brown's shenanigans to see how bad that can go .

Since a lot of early quests give you some morally questionable tasks – see the aforementioned maypole thievery or bull paint sullying – I spend a good deal of time plucking up various plants and practicing the art of alchemy to sell off decocations for food. Once I at long last make my way to the blacksmith, I make as many horseshoes as possible to sell off, with the axe becoming my mainstay weapon against wolves and bandits. I've yet to use any lockpicks, nor have I robbed anyone or stolen loot. Everything in my possession in my first 10 hours has come purely from some good exploration out in the fields, or through groschen I've earned honestly.

Good groschen

The only time I slightly bent the rules was an occasion that called for me to break into someone's home. Yes, on the surface this sounds like a pretty bad crime, but it was in the name of a very good cause. See, the good old lady Bozhena asked for my help, and since she saved my skin, not to mention Hans, of course I'm going to do everything I can to find her missing daughter. The house in question happens to belong to a missing person related to the case, and all I did was climb in through a side window – no lockpicking required – and look for clues. Sure, it was a little tempting to swipe some things in boxes, but I left with no stolen goods lining my pockets.

So much of the early stages of the game really do push you to do less than reputable things in the name of survival. Sometimes you can justify it, sure, but it's not easy being completely good in the middle ages. Nothing speaks to this more than when I encounter a miller in one of the optional main questlines. After he tasks me with what I think is some good honest labor, it turns out he's fixing to do a spot of thieving and wants me to get involved. When I call him out and turn him down, proclaiming that I want to live honestly, his reply says it all: "Honest living, eh? You're doing your own pocket a disservice, lad".

Maybe I am doing my pockets a disservice early on, and maybe it takes me some time before I'm lining them with grochen after my spell in the stocks. But over 10 hours later, I have sturdy armor, plenty of helpful perks to boost my charisma, and I'm affluent enough to get by comfortably. So, I'm proof that it is absolutely possible to get by without doing crime - even if you do have to avoid certain quests altogether. Better yet, I have a good reputation. Everywhere I go, people are happy to see me, and when I hear remarks like "you have a kind master" when I travel through a village with my loyal hound Mutt, I don't regret the path I've taken for a second. Who knows if temptation or possibly even necessity will lead me astray in the future, but I'll do everything I can to help those in need and earn money honestly.

"Instant gratification in gaming has become a problem" – Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 dev says the RPG is meant to feel like a spiritual successor to Oblivion and Morrowind.

Deltarune is an upcoming game with some familiar faces from Undertale, although it has a different setting. It's been in development for over six years and we've only got two chapters so far, with two more due out this year. Described as a "parallel story" to Undertale's, it contains "non-violent RPG battles" that function like bullet hells and have "funky, funky music."

Over on Bluesky, Fox shares something that's almost like a progress update: "I showed my family and friends a minigame I've been working on for DR and they all described it as 'a cry for help because your game is not out.'"

He follows up: "My family clarified that was a good thing. My other friend didn't clarify but they did laugh for about 10 minutes straight hearing me play it. Same friend who played Chapter 3 like over a year ago also told me 'I miss Tenna' and I was like 'man that's something no one in the world has ever said huh.'"

Tenna is a chapter three antagonist who hasn't actually featured in the first two chapters, so that's why that line is something no one has said before. It hurts to see others living the dream and playing this game before us, but hopefully, Fox can keep on schedule, and we get those next two chapters soon. You can play the first two chapters for free on Steam.

In the meantime, there are plenty of great games like Undertale that you can play right now to tide you over.

Speaking to Anime News Network, Sakaguchi charts the road back to Square Enix that recently led to his lovely wee JRPG Fantasian springing free from Apple Arcade jail to PC and consoles. Replaying Final Fantasy 6 influenced him to make Fantasian in the first place, though it was how Final Fantasy 14 honored its series' legacy that helped set things in motion for a post-release port.

“I've been playing Final Fantasy 14 for a little over three years now, and I log in almost every single day. It might be the game that I've played the most in my life," he says. "Because of that, I can't pinpoint the specific factors that influenced me. I believe I have been significantly influenced by it in ways that aren't overt.

“My experience revisiting Final Fantasy 6 influenced Fantasian's production. But witnessing how Final Fantasy 14 honors the legacy of earlier Final Fantasy games while also enhancing them impressed me and allowed me to approach the direction I had for Fantasian without wavering.”

Sakaguchi goes on to say that playing Final Fantasy 14 also brought him into contact with the MMO's producer and director Naoki Yoshida, who played a large role in making Fantasian's Neo Dimension glow-up a reality.

“I felt that Yoshida-san was a diligent and sincere person through my experience with Final Fantasy 14, and that impression was reinforced through working with him on Fantasian Neo Dimension,” Sakaguchi says. “Needless to say, if the opportunity arises, I strongly wish to work together with him again and create something new."

Fantasian: New Dimension is out now.

Final Fantasy creator says his Final Fantasy 14 habit got so bad "on rare occasion" that some of his employees would hop on the MMO to DM him about missed meetings.

Whether you choose to pay $90 to access Avowed on February 14 or hold out until its wide release on PC, Xbox Series X, and Game Pass on February 18, it's destined to be a monumental few days for Microsoft Gaming. The launching point for what is undoubtedly the most important year for Xbox in a generation. And let's be honest here, it kind of has to be.

There were times over the past 12 months where you could almost hear it, the death knell ringing. The tolling bell echoing amongst news of mass layoffs and studio closures, game delays and Game Pass price hikes. Another tumultuous period for a company who can't surely manage many more of them, with Xbox under increasing scrutiny as it struggles to sell the potential of its burgeoning multiplatform release strategy, appropriately scale membership to its subscription service, and quell concerns around the Series S' impact on developer ambitions.

For a while there, it really did feel as if Microsoft Gaming was genuinely at risk of collapsing under all of the weight it is shouldering. Perhaps that's why Xbox is going all in on 2025. The upcoming Xbox games in the spring release window alone is electrifying, a reminder of why so many of us migrated to the platform to begin with. What we're looking at here is Xbox reinvesting in the core – the Xbox Game Studios group delivering expressive RPG, FPS, and action-adventure titles, the lineup bolstered by ambitious experiments from talented third-party publishers.

Xbox's 2025 in brief

The release of Obsidian's Avowed in February is followed by Compulsion Games' South of Midnight on April 8 and Doom: The Dark Ages on May 15 from id Software. Three ambitious, beautiful, and decadently-crafted experiences that are shouldering the burden of building momentum for Xbox in a challenging landscape. Sprinkled throughout the spring are other excellent additions to the Game Pass library; Rebellion's Atomfall on March 27 and Sandfall Interactive's Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 on April 24 undoubtedly the standouts.

Looking beyond the summer, Playground Games' Fable and Obsidian's The Outer Worlds 2 have tentative 2025 windows, while The Coalition's Gears of War: E-Day and The Initiative's Perfect Dark reboot are also rumored to launch within the financial year. It really does feel like this is the moment every Xbox owner has been waiting years for – the true result of Microsoft's big studio acquisition spree, which started in earnest all the way back in 2018. I don't know about you, but this massive investment in key genres (across both new IP and legacy franchise revivals) is starting to rekindle fond memories of the original Xbox and Xbox 360 eras.

Now, with that all said, I am trying to temper my own expectations. We need only look at the quality gulf between Redfall and Senua's Saga: Hellblade 2, Starfield and Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, to be reminded that Xbox Game Studios has a tendency to be wildly inconsistent in a way that output from the PlayStation Studios group isn't (Concord notwithstanding). There's even less room for error in that respect now, with so many of Xbox's first-party releases primed for release on PlayStation – Series X/S sales are reportedly less than half of the PS5, so key would-be exclusives are about to get unprecedented exposure.

Doom: The Dark Ages is confirmed to be a simultaneous release across both platforms, and it's expected that a great many of these other Xbox games will eventually land on PS5 before the year is up. I'd suspect that any success for Indiana Jones and the Great Circle and Forza Horizon 5 (two crown jewels in the Series X lineup) within the PlayStation ecosystem later this year will only expedite Xbox's drive for platform ubiquity. Could Halo or Gears really make the jump to PS5? It's not out of the realms of possibility.

Whether Xbox's drive onto rival platforms is ultimately judged as a success or failure is a story that will unfold gradually all throughout 2025. For now the focus should be on Avowed. As the first major release from Xbox Game Studios this year, it's bound to set the tone for the year to come. If Obsidian has a winner on its hands (and we've certainly been left impressed by what we've played of it so far), then momentum will only begin to build. If it lands with a thud, pressure will begin to build around South of Midnight and Doom: The Dark Ages to demonstrate that Xbox is able to rise to meet the moment.

Speaking to PC Gamer in magazine issue 405, director Junya Ishizaki shares that the map sometimes sees "large-scale changes to terrain in the form of procedurally appearing volcanos or swamps or forests."

"We wanted the map itself to be a giant dungeon, so players have the chance to traverse and explore a different way every time they play," he says. "You have to choose the boss you want to face at the end of the third day.

"Once you've made that choice, maybe you have an idea of how you want to strategize against that boss, and this might change how you approach the map. We wanted to offer players that agency, to decide 'I need to go after a poison weapon this time to face this boss.'"

So there you have it, while Elden Ring Nightreign does throw in some roguelike and co-op elements to freshen things up, it doesn't dare go without offering a horrible ol' swamp that'll likely leave you greatly poison debuffed. You don't really see a FromSoftware game without a poison swamp, so why start now, I suppose?

Elsewhere in his chat with PC Gamer, Ishizaki says that tossing some roguelike elements into the pot was a way of "condensing" the RPG experience down rather than "chasing a trend" – not that there's anything wrong with that.

Elden Ring Nightreign is due to release this year.

Elden Ring Nightreign beta invites are apparently so in demand, scalpers are already trying to resell them for hundreds of dollars.

It's not easy to get away with crime in Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2, and protagonist Henry can be faced with a number of consequences depending on just how troublesome his actions were, from being put in the stocks and damaging his reputation, to being branded as a criminal. However, the very worst-case scenario is being hanged, which results in a genuinely heartbreaking cutscene where Henry looks just as upset as you'd imagine.

Highlighted by Twitter account @NikTekOfficial, you can watch the scene below. It opens with Henry looking forlorn in a cell, before being led through the audience, who are all cheering for his punishment. He looks positively terrified as the hangman prepares him for the execution, and takes one last look at the sky above as birds fly by before the stool he's stood on is kicked from beneath him. Poor guy, he didn't choose to commit those crimes the player made him do. As the screen goes black, you're given a game over screen, which reads: "You have been executed for your crimes."

Most players will probably seek to avoid this scene – GamesRadar+'s Andrew Brown found Henry's life tough enough after being hit with a massive fine for stealing a lute, and comparatively, he got let off easily. You've got to hand it to the devs for the attention to detail of including it at all though, even if you're not about leading Henry through a life of crime.

If you're just getting started on Warhorse Studios' new RPG, be sure to check out our top Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 tips and Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 best weapons guide.

Going hands-on, we join Michi as he links up with Pinky, the titular agency's main mascot and leader. A severed giant little finger, Pinky is a disturbing nod towards yubitsume, the ritual practice of cutting off part of your own finger for atonement, usually associated with yakuza crime fiction. Having fallen on hard times, the agency itself was converted into a love hotel, giving the now-deserted interior a kind of tacky, grimy feel. Our first mission has us driving Michi's prized, battered pickup truck to the corrupt Mayor's office to beg for the restoration of the mascot agency's license to do business. There's a constant, seedy undercurrent in Kaso-Machi.

Making a promise

It's not Kaizen Game Works' first time thrusting players into an oddball community. "Modern indie classic" Paradise Killer was a murder mystery that had you running and jumping through a strange vaporwave house of divinity. In Promise Mascot Agency, Kaso-Machi is bigger, meaning most of the time we're blazing through rural roads watching Pinky wobble in the back of the pickup truck. But it's no less an aesthetic, the visuals trading Paradise Killer's high contrast colors for a film-grain Showa-era style Japanese cinema vibe – just like the yakuza movie classics.

Less like those classic flicks are the bizarre mascots. Like everyone else in Kaso-Machi, they're struggling, down on their luck, and out of work – meaning they're more than willing to hear Michi out with an offer to get back into the game. But, like Pinky, they're more than a little bit off-kilter and unsettling.

To-Fu is an ever-wet piece of the food stuff, thanks to constantly crying, with a little crumbled off corner; Trororo is a yam cat, always upsettingly covered in the sticky stuff, and obsessed with the adult film industry; Kofun is a living tombstone and goth who's obsessed with death and history. The whole town is filled with these strange creatures to meet and strike up a deal with.

And strike up a deal I do. Recruitment involves actually offering contract perks like the percentage they make from mascot jobs, how often their salary is negotiated, and how much time they get off. This affects not just how much money you can make from their mascot laboring, but also how their stats will grow and change as they take on work, and how likely they are to get into trouble while on a job.

What trouble could a mascot get into, you might ask? The answer, from my own experience, is lots. And that's where Michi shines. While jobs can be completed over time by simply waiting, when something goes wrong he'll get a phone call, rushing you to the scene. These incidents play out as slapstick skits that have your mascot getting, for instance, stuck in a "normal sized door" while entering the event they're promoting, a playful dog getting too excitable, or perhaps a gas stove getting supercharged and the mascot having to deal with the fiery fallout.

These mundane hazards are given the RPG battle treatment, with Michi's staff being dealt to him as cards which you can play to have them jump in to assist. Most of them have specialities for dealing with specific situations. José, for example, is the local mechanic, so will deal greater "damage" to engineering issues. Others might be better equipped to deal with social problems, like rowdy crowds. So far, only a couple of hours in, these have all been quite simplistic, but have been fun and quick ways to throw me into the hazards of mascot life.

Expanding the staff that can assist, like everything else in Promise Mascot Agency, mostly revolves around driving across Kaso-Machi and scooping up collectibles. At this point, this is more straightforward than Paradise Killer's exploration – which may be a relief to some that found its tricky parkour a bit overwhelming. Still, poking around Kaso-Machi has been compelling, especially as I come across new locations and learn a bit more about the history of the town – praying at shrines and recycling trash as I go.

But what's stuck with me the most so far is meeting the people. Each new character, be they human or mascot, has a hook that makes me want to get to know them more. And, importantly, as seedy as Kaso-Machi is, everyone stuck here doesn't just feel like a real person, but a genuine piece of a community. Mr. Mori and his cat Tori, a train guard who stands ever vigilant at the now disused train station; Miss Wambui, an anime fan who came to Japan to teach, and cares for her troubled students deeply; or even Captain Sign, a Power Rangers-like hero with road safety signs strapped to his body.

There's so many people who truly want to make things better, as hard as it is to get by in Kaso-Machi. Michi might have a tough exterior, but his heart's in the right place – and if he can overcome the yakuza-killing curse, he might just be able to bring them all together to build something better, one creepy mascot at a time.

This might only include the captial "Y" series, but here's the best Yakuza games, ranked, if you're looking for some more quirky crime drama.

Speaking to author Marijam Did in a recent stream, Kurvitz explains how significant Fallout is to Eastern European gamers and developers in particular before Did plays its opening – an opening Kurvitz dubs "the perfect beginning." He describes the old RPG as an "incredibly important game in Eastern Europe" where it was "tremendously and totally adored," detailing how Fallout "showed them that video games can be a total work of art."

As the two move into Fallout's character creator, one Kurvitz calls "the best thing on Earth," the Disco Elysium lead admits he was "mystified" by the menu when he first played. It's one of many features that make the game so unique for its time – but its worldbuilding is where Fallout truly shines. The dark, post-apocalyptic setting comes up while answering viewers' questions, when Kurvitz is asked what Karl Marx's favorite Fallout entry would be.

He says it would be the "second Fallout, definitely" – but that's because the first leans more into establishing a convincing environment marked by destruction whereas the sequel focuses on "trade and social economics and about all of these settlements influencing each other." The original Fallout is a "mood piece," as Kurvitz puts it. "The first Fallout is like a perfect mood capsule that's almost Biblical in its annihilation," he explains.

"Humanity is truly on its knees. It makes other post-apocalyptic worldbuilding seem like an amusement park – except maybe Threads or some of the really darker TV series." It sounds like high praise from the Disco Elysium director, and it speaks to Fallout's influence decades on. While the 1997 smash hit likely isn't for everyone, especially those more accustomed to Bethesda's more recent shooters, it arguably still stands as one of the best Fallout games yet.

After forming a new studio at an "apocalyptic" time for game devs, Disco Elysium writer says "this industry is finished" but "video games are not"

The next new Dragon Quest instalment was first revealed during the series' 35th Anniversary livestream back in 2021 alongside Dragon Quest 3 HD-2D Remake, and while the latter was finally released last year, we're still yet to see anything of The Flames of Fate other than its logo. However, speaking in a recent livestream alongside his KosoKoso Hōsō Kyoku radio show group (translated by Automaton), Horii shuts down concerns that the JRPG could be canceled, and says he hopes the team will be able to gradually share more about it.

Of course, Dragon Quest 12: The Flames of Fate isn't the only Dragon Quest game in the works at Square Enix, as HD-2D remakes of Dragon Quest 1 and 2 are set to release at some point this year, completing the HD-2D collection of the original trilogy. The upcoming remakes don't have an exact release date just yet, but they should be coming to PS5, Xbox Series X|S, Switch, and PC before the end of 2025.

Back in 2021, it was hinted that Dragon Quest 12 will shake up the series as we know it, at least somewhat, as the then president of Square Enix, Yosuke Matsuda, said it'll take "into account the next 10 to 20 years" of the series, noting that while some parts will fit into the traditional Dragon Quest image, "new elements are also necessary." What that'll look like in the full release is yet to be seen – after all, we've not even had a proper trailer yet, but with Square Enix's track record of creating some of the best JRPGs out there, it's definitely worth staying excited about.

You can find even more fantastic games to play on our roundup of the best RPGs.

Sequels are a tricky business. On the one hand, they allow developers to reuse assets and get a game out of the door faster, and if the original game was a success, it's comforting for investors to know there's already a fan base. On the other hand, if a sequel relies on you having played its predecessor, it can alienate some and lead to fewer sales. Well, it seems you're all much more interested in dense RPGs now than you were in 2018.

Kingdom Come: Deliverance had a peak concurrent player count of 96,069 when it was released in February 2018 - a very respectable number. But the sequel got a staggering 256,206 over the weekend. As noted by one redditor, this means the game is in Steam's top 50 chart for all-time peak concurrents. There's already a roadmap and post-launch plans, so all of you enjoying it now have more to look forward to.

Our Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 review noted that while the game has a lot of friction, "its realization of medieval life remains utterly absorbing." System-heavy RPGs seem to be making a comeback in the wake of games like Baldur's Gate 3.

The Kingdom Come: Deliverance series is notable for not giving you a super-powered hero right off the bat. You play as Henry, the son of a blacksmith thrust into a war who needs to learn all the skills a medieval worker would. Want to read a book? Better learn how. Want to fight a knight in shining armor? Do you even know how to swing a sword properly?

This means "progression can be a more pedestrian affair," but "having the patience to meet the game on its terms makes for a more genuine form of role-playing." Our Features Editor is a very bad thief and now has to pay a hefty fine or live life as a criminal. You can't just do what you want, this world reacts.

In recent years, I realize my taste in video games has shifted to these slower, more deliberate ones, where I have to invest in my character to navigate a hostile or indifferent world. I love Dragon's Dogma 2 and Stalker 2, games where I have to plan before I set forth on a journey.

If you want to play more games like Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2, check out our list of the best RPGs.

Chris Kaleiki is perhaps best known for designing WoW classes for 13 years, but he's trying to change that at his new company Notorious Studios with a new game, the PvPvE RPG Legacy: Steel & Sorcery, which is headed to early access on February 12.

Of course, launching any game these days can be a gamble because, well, there are way too many games to keep track of and gamers only have so much bandwidth to play with them all. Even so, Kaleiki told GamesRadar he feels "super excited" about launch and "in some ways, I was more nervous or had more anxiety when we did the first alpha friends and family play test, because again, I didn't quite know how the game would go." Now that he knows "the game is good based on player feedback," some of that trepidation is gone. "There are some players who play the game literally, gosh, 60 hours during a week play test. So I think there's a market for it. There's a player who is interested in it. I think it's fun."

His personal feelings aside, there's also the commercial side of releasing a game - "the marketing, getting it out there, getting players to see it" is a whole different story. "And this is the bane to every game developer's existence these days because marketing is completely shifting on how to market a game."

Despite all the external challenges, Kaleiki still feels "there's not much we can do there with the budget" and "the most important thing is the game has to be good." That's because, according to him, "Valve does a very good job of surfacing games that players like or that players are enjoying" and "the algorithm is almost impenetrable."

"If you watch some indie dev videos, they'll often say we tried hacking the algorithm, we tried doing all these goofy things, and there's not much you can do," he said. "All you can really do is make a good game, which, in a lot of ways, is good news for us, but also this is really hard because there's no little hacks you can do to surface your game like you could 20 years ago. "

We'll see how Legacy: Steel & Sorcery does when it hits Steam early access in just a few days.

In the meantime, keep an eye on the upcoming indie games of 2025 and beyond.

The former long-time Dragon Age executive producer revealed the interesting tidbit in a new YouTube video, calling 2008's Sonic Chronicles: The Dark Brotherhood his "favorite" project to work on because there was something "magical about leading a team as small as this game was - it never got much above 20 people."

Sonic Chronicles: The Dark Brotherhood "actually uses Dragon Age: Origins' dialogue system," Darrah said. "Heavily streamlined to fit on the Nintendo DS, but it's still at its base the same code stack. I guess if you really wanted to try, you could make the argument that, because Sonic Chronicles shipped in 2008 and Dragon Age: Origins didn't ship until 2009, that Dragon Age: Origins actually shipped using the Sonic Chronicles dialogue system."

The Sonic RPG team eventually moved on to the cancelled Mass Effect DS game that was planned to have you pirating across the fringes of the galaxy in first person. The spin-off was scrapped due to the economics of shipping games on the Nintendo DS, though.

BioWare now doesn't have the bandwidth for any quirky projects like Sonic Chronicles, though. The entire studio now reportedly employs around 100 people after EA cut even more roles from the team. The publisher blamed the layoffs on Dragon Age: The Veilguard's performance, but one wonders how much more "agile" a team can get.

Baldur’s Gate 3 developer slams EA’s BioWare layoffs as “a short-term cost-cutting measure” that “doesn’t solve a long-term” problem.

The trend was seemingly kicked off by developer quicktequila, who showed off their wildly stylish psychedelic shooter Tamashika and quickly garnered over 150k likes. It looks like you're rampaging through a twisty-turvy corridor that unfolds as you walk, murdering cartoony frogs, equipped with only a pistol for shooting and a knife for parrying and/or stabbing. It's gorgeous, trippy, and unlike anything else I've seen. You can wishlist it on Steam.

Next up is Mightreya, a spectacle fighter in the same vein as Hi-Fi Rush or Bayonetta where you're chaining sick combos and juggling foes in the pursuit of the validation of an S-rank. The twist here is that you're playing as an anime schoolgirl superhero who doubles as a content creator, so I'm guessing those S-ranks also lead to likes and follows and subscriptions. More validation, basically! See it's aerial combat below and check it out on Steam if you like.

Changing gears to something a little less frantic, we have Detective Dotson, a pixel art slice-of-life mystery game set in modern day India. I love how vibrant everything is. I love a good detective board. And, as a Yakuza sicko, I love the glimpses we get at all the mini-games in just 15 seconds. (What a cool trend!) This one's coming to Steam on April 3 - there's also a free demo.

This next one is slightly less wholesome. Car Park Capital looks like a chill, old school SimCity-like that has you connecting roads, building infrastructure, and helping your big-nose residents get around easier. It's actually a "satirical simulator" where the car industry has tasked you to "convert walkable cities into parking lots and use propaganda to convince everyone it's what they want." Truly evil! Sick, really. (It's also on my Steam wishlist, shh.)

Finally, we have Truckful, which seems like an initially chill sim about driving a truck through some of the most serene woods you've seen in-game. You'll soon be trying not to drift off a cliffside while unravelling a "small town mystery." It's also, of course, on Steam.

For more, keep an eye on the upcoming indie games of 2025 and beyond.

Due to kick off at 7pm PT on February 13 (3am GMT on February 14 if you're in the UK), you've now got more Monster Hunter goodness for an extra day across PS5, Xbox Series X|S, and Steam.

Original story: Capcom is thinking about extending the second Monster Hunter Wilds open beta because of the recent PSN outages.

The publisher acknowledged that the outages caused "inconvenience as you were unable to participate in the test" in a recent social media post. "Considering that a significant portion of the test period was cut short, we are currently examining the possibility of conducting an additional approximately 24-hour session next weekend or later."

The PlayStation Network was down for basically the entirety of yesterday, February 8, meaning it was impossible for most people to play online games, digitally-owned games, and connect to services like the PlayStation Store. The PSN outage also came at a particularly bad time for fans of slaying big beasts, though.

Monster Hunter Wilds' second open beta was set to take place across two weekends with the first running from February 6 to February 9. Of course, the outages meant that PS5 players couldn't access the beta or its online features for a essentially third of its runtime, but it seems like Capcom might be making up for it in the future.

Sony itself hasn't fully detailed what caused the issues, although it did state that "network services have fully recovered from an operational issue." To make up for blunder, it's automatically giving "all PlayStation Plus members" an "additional 5 days of service."

Elsewhere in the game, Monster Hunter Wilds fans were delighted to see the return of the nightmarish bug that turns everyone into a PS1-style blob. It didn't come as too much of a surprise since Capcom warned folks ahead of time that improvements made since the first beta wouldn't surface until the game's full release on February 28. However, even the developers were happy to see fans embracing the cursed bug.

Check out the best Monster Hunter Wilds weapons and tier list for the beta.