Valve has just checked off a long-requested wishlist item for the Steam Deck: Downloading games even when the screen is turned off. The feature, available now in the Steam Deck’s beta client, is enabled by default when the Steam Deck is plugged in. The handheld will automatically complete all downloads in the queue with the…
When Telltale Games came to a messy end, it seemed like the end of the line for that particular style of episodic modern choice-and-consequence adventure game. In retrospect, Life is Strange looked like a blip, a one-hit wonder whose success wasn’t repeated by any of its spin-offs or follow-ups. No amount of editorials about why…
The Grand Theft Auto games are famed for their sprawling recreations of famous US cities: Liberty City is New York City, Vice City is Miami, Los Santos is Los Angeles. And despite being around for nearly 30 years now, the series has—with one exception, noted further below—never ventured outside of American borders. In a recent…
Princess Azula is introduced in a flashback in which she’s watching her brother receive his disfiguring scar while pumping her first in the air with glee. But even more tellingly, when her brother and uncle are torn between turning for help to the Earth people who might kill them, or the Fire people who might…
Amazon didn’t spin up its game development studios a decade ago just to be a regular game publisher: It wanted to take on Steam, but missed its shot by such a wide margin that we didn’t even realize that’s what it was trying to do. Now it seems to have at least partially moved on…
Arc Raiders is not a game that immediately reveals all to its players. Much of the experience in its early hours is cautiously sussing out where to find good loot and how and when to fight or avoid the Arc robots that patrol the surface. The tentative peaceful relationships formed with other raiders are just…
Earlier today, Maiden of the Dark launched its Kickstarter campaign. The action platformer for the Game Boy is the first indie project from TigerChainsaw Studios, which is headquartered in Milwaukee. Led by TigerChainsaw, the four-person team also includes RetroRoo, PixelChunga, and OGM. Maiden of the Dark is an action platformer in the style of…
Against all odds it’s nearly 2026, so it’s time to start planning for another year of our grim future, and I think we can all agree that there’s no better place to capture all your important events, holidays, new year’s resolutions, and eviction dates than on a wall calendar decorated with pictures of a deranged…
I hold the dubious honour of holding what is probably the most positive opinion of the Monster Hunter movie on planet Earth. I thought it was great! Spiders exploding out of a guy’s chest and then eating him: what’s not to like? Plenty, according to everyone else, with the film sitting at around a 40%…
One of America’s greatest poets once said, “Everything dies, baby, that’s a fact. But maybe everything that does someday comes back.” I don’t know if that’s true for everything, but it is true for T-Minus Zero, the game studio founded in 2023 that just two years later fell victim to NetEase’s brutal cutbacks. “Earlier this…