June 2025

The video where YouTuber Syrobe kills Elden Ring Nightreign’s final boss solo with a bell is paused right now, but I can still hear the ringing. I just watched them fling orbs at this Night Aspect guy for eight minutes straight with one of the most annoying items I’ve ever seen. It works, but at…

You know what? You gotta give Bethesda credit: the tack it takes with modders is a breath of fresh air compared to, well, pretty much every other big games company out there. Where, say, Nintendo is liable to send in a detachment of mercenaries to damnatio memoriae you and everyone you’ve ever loved if you…

2025 is a busy year for Obsidian. The studio launched the well-received first-person fantasy RPG Avowed in February. Grounded 2, the sequel to its “honey-I-shrunk-the-kids” survival game, arrives in July. And in October, Obsidian’s revisiting its satirical space sci-fi setting with The Outer Wilds 2. You might reasonably expect that its packed release schedule would…

There are a lot of games where you play as a woman with a gigantic sword. Nier: Automata and Stellar Blade were breakouts in the genre, and now here’s another hopeful: Vindictus: Defying Fate, which leans a little harder into soulslike territory than those games. Its big sword hits hard and slamming it down on…

The Pinocchio soulslike Lies of P got an easy mode alongside the release of Overture DLC last week, an entirely uncontroversial move that riled up absolutely no one. But the DLC also apparently introduced a major difficulty spike in the Legendary Stalker mode—previously the game’s default—and it’s bad enough that game director Ji Won Choi…

Team Ninja is busy. On the heels of remaster Ninja Gaiden 2 Black, the studio is working on Nioh 3 for 2026 while also overseeing development of this October’s Ninja Gaiden 4, which is in the works at PlatinumGames. Though they were once rivals for the fiefdom of Japanese character action games—Ninja Gaiden 2 and…