Chris Stair, one of the creators of action platformer Bō: Path of the Teal Lotus, was in Kyoto celebrating the game’s launch at indie festival BitSummit when he got the news: The publisher he’d trusted with all of the launch logistics was effectively gone. All 36 employees had been laid off. “We had a Slack…
There comes a point in every cool new and/or retro revival indie genre where there are just way too many to play all of them, even if you love the style: Metroidvanias, boomer shooters, and Vampire Survivors-alikes (bullet heavens?) all spring to mind for me. As a big fan of the genre, I can confidently…
After years of being accepted as just how things are done, crunch—working horrifically long hours for weeks or months at a stretch in order to meet an arbitrary deadline set by an executive who’s probably still going home on time every night—is now widely frowned upon in the videogame industry. But it also seems to…
As it did to many in my generation, Pokémon Snap left an indelible imprint on my childhood psyche. Even at a young, tender age, I admired the rarity of a game that celebrated the simple act of observing creatures in their natural habitat instead of attacking them on sight. I’m all for fighting fake creatures,…
XIt’s been a bad few days for Larian Studios and CEO Swen Vincke. Instead of basking in the glory of its first post-Baldur’s Gate 3 project, revealed at The Game Awards as Divinity, the studio has been dealing with the ugly aftermath of Vincke’s comments about the use of generative AI at Larian. In a…
The Forge is part Roblox RPG, part mining sim, and what’s an RPG without a little off-the-beaten-path questing? One of your first side gigs begins in Stonewake’s Cross, sending you on the hunt for a fellow explorer’s missing pet in the Tomo’s Lost Cat quest. Despite his weirdly perky demeanor, Tomo is pretty down about…
This year’s Steam Winter Sale has arrived, but don’t let the biggest game sale of the year stress you out when you’re already frazzled enough by the rest of your holiday shopping. We’ve picked through the mountains of games on Steam to find the deals you should actually care about. Below, we’ve highlighted Winter Sale…
Just one week after a new trailer for the upcoming Mass Effect-alike Exodus was unveiled at The Game Awards, a Bloomberg report says James Ohlen, the head of developer Archetype Entertainment, has stepped down. The change comes as part of what appears to be a shakeup of gaming efforts at Hasbro, which has brought in…
Well, that didn’t take long: Diablo 4 players have cooked up a completely automated build for the new paladin class that involves walking your dogs around while surrounded by a ring of fire. Never again will you need to burden yourself with pressing buttons once you get this build going as it’s powerful enough to…
After spending my life with a vague fear of fightsticks and button combos, I now have more reason than ever to finally learn how to play a fighting game: so I can someday be even a tenth as cool as Hisako Sakai, the 92-year-old Japanese woman who won the title of Tekken 8 champion during…