Mina the Hollower was announced in 2022 and originally slated to launch the following year. It’s a top-down adventure in the style of older Zelda games, and as far as I can tell there’s no grand twist: it’s a very orthodox take on the genre, just as Shovel Knight was for the NES-era platformer. The…

Every so often, I am hit with the intense urge to bulldoze everything in my Sims 4 neighborhood and start over from scratch. I don’t know why I do it, but I love wasting at least one week of my annual vacation razing the earth like some sort of unappeasable Sims 4 deity and rebuilding…

RGG Studios is finally ready to talk about Stranger Than Heaven, the next major action game from the Yakuza studio that appears to be a Yakuza prequel after all. In the 30-minute video, executive director Masayoshi Yokoyama introduces the sprawling brawler from the comfort of a swanky jazz club. Beginning in 1915 and spanning 50…

I’m bleeding to death. I’ve got six minutes before I’ll be too exhausted to do anything but lie down and die. I wish it was the worst of my problems. But it’s not. The real problem is that… gamers are bastards. Lost. In the middle of a dense forest, crowded with ravenous mountain lions. I’m…

This week, Valve released a $99 Steam Controller the general public was so excited to have that it sold out in 30 minutes, temporarily tanking its service in the process. It was the best selling product on Steam despite zero active players (dead device?). Not to brag about spending too much money on a controller…

You’d think it would be fairly easy to make a BioShock game: After all, “there’s always a lighthouse,” as the man once said. Yet it’s proven remarkably challenging: After three acclaimed games in relatively quick succession—BioShock in 2007, BioShock 2 in 2010, and BioShock Infinite in 2013—there’s been nothing. Efforts have been made: Hangar 13…

Firaxis was brave with Civilization 7, altering the basic structure of the decades-old grand strategy series in ways that were bound to be controversial. I liked some things about Civ 7’s new “Ages” system, which requires players to swap to a new civilization twice over the course of a campaign, but it hasn’t been especially…