It’s time to see which PS5, PS4, PS VR2, and free-to-play games topped last month’s download charts. In May, Mr. Bond does it again as 007 First Light topped the Asia charts for PS5,  while NTE: Neverness to Everness topped Asia’s Free to Play charts. 

Check out the full listings below. What titles are you playing this month?

PS5 Games

*Naming of products may differ between regions
*Upgrades not included

PS4 Games

*Naming of products may differ between regions

PS VR2 Games*

*PlayStation Store purchases only. Game upgrades or games bundled with hardware not included

Free to Play (PS5 + PS4)

The wait is over! We have an all-new gameplay video for Marvel’s Wolverine, along with details about our gameplay, characters, and story from the recent State of Play. We’re also excited to announce you can pre-order Marvel’s Wolverine starting today. 

But first, dive into our new trailer. 

Play Video

Setting the stage: our gameplay trailer 

Let’s not mince words: Marvel’s Wolverine is a brutal, violent, and action-packed single-player adventure from our team at Insomniac Games, in collaboration with Marvel Games. It cuts deeper than claw combat alone, with an emotionally charged original story centered on a comic book icon: James “Logan” Howlett, aka Wolverine.

To set up our Extended Gameplay Trailer, Logan is tailing a group of mutants that have been hunted and captured by the Reavers, a guns-for-hire cybernetic militia. The Reavers have plans to deliver the mutants to their client, Bolivar Trask – a billionaire industrialist driven by a fanatical belief in human superiority. We also introduce another major player in Logan’s journey: Jean Grey, a powerful telekinetic and emergent leader of the captured mutants.

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The situation is dire and help is limited. Mutants live in the shadows fearful of those hunting them, while the rest of society lives unaware of their existence. The only ones potentially capable of protecting their own is Team X, a last-stand mutant task force facing its darkest hour, which Logan rejoins after leaving three years prior. For the mutants, the fight for survival is theirs alone.

View and download image "Wolverine angrily slashes his right arm, fist, and claws upward; he’s splitting a Trask grunt’s gun in half. Meanwhile, Jean fights a Reaver on top of a truck just off in the background using her telekinetic powers."

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A slice of the action 

In his search for the mutants, Logan crosses paths with unsuspecting Reavers. They’re armed to the teeth with advanced technology, equipped with lethal weapons and cybernetic implants. They’re ready for a fight… but so is Wolverine. He can stalk enemies, ambush from above, or shred through them with fast, fluid, and brutal claw attacks. 

Drawn in by a frantic plea for help, Logan and Jean are compelled to team up against Trask’s hired guns, and they prove to be more than capable. Logan can carve into foes with special combat moves called “Techniques” such as the Tornado Spin and Bull Rush. Meanwhile, Jean obliterates enemies with her powerful telekinetic abilities, which presents a few opportunities for Critical Strikes. These are devastating finishing moves that Wolverine can execute solo or with other characters; they’re takedown opportunities worth looking out for during a frenzied fight.

Every successful attack, parry, and kill will build up Logan’s Rage. This allows for stronger attacks or activating his Healing Factor to survive grievous body damage. If Logan’s Rage is pushed too far, he can unleash Rage Tier 3: a stylized monochromatic explosion of savagery inspired by Marvel Comics’ Black, White, and Blood series. 

The overwhelmed Reavers retreat. But Logan can take this fight to go. In one of many set pieces, Wolverine tears through the highway on a motorcycle where he can take out trucks, slash tires, and hurl enemies off the road. He also leaps to different vehicles fighting anything the Reavers throw at him, including powerful Brutes. Bloodied, battered, and on the brink of defeat? Wolverine can channel his rage and kick into Last Stand to activate his Healing Factor; he can live to fight another day and show everyone why he’s the best there is.

View and download image "Wolverine lunges forward, claws at the ready, at a Reaver. Both are fighting on top of a truck. The rest of the Reaver convoy surrounds them in the background."

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Our accessibility 

Additionally, we’re delighted to confirm that Marvel’s Wolverine will feature a comprehensive list of accessibility options at launch. It’s a longstanding part of our development process at Insomniac Games to create features that provide assistance for players with cognitive, visual, auditory, and motor disabilities.

You can cut over to our Support website for a detailed list of features coming to Marvel’s Wolverine at launch here.

September 15, 2026 is our date. Pre-order today* 

Save the date. Marvel’s Wolverine arrives September 15, 2026, on PlayStation 5. You can pre-order now to secure access to these early unlock bonuses and PS Avatars via the PlayStation Store or at participating retailers**.

In Thailand, pre-order for disc version will begin on June 4, 2026.

Marvel’s Wolverine – Pre-order Bonuses

• Early Access Suit: Classic Brown
• Early Access Claws: Reflective Claws
• 1 Additional Technique Point
• 4 PS Avatars

Unleash your full potential with the Digital Deluxe Edition (SGD 99.90 / MYR 399 / IDR 1,349,000 / THB 2,690 MSRP). This version includes exclusive suits, claws, and more technique points to get you started faster! To note, the suits and claws are purely cosmetic. 

Marvel’s Wolverine – Digital Deluxe Edition 

• Marvel’s Wolverine Digital Game
• All Pre-Order Bonuses
• 5 Exclusive Suits
  • Incredible
  • Savage
  • Age of Apocalypse
  • Night Hunt
  • New Leather
• 5 Exclusive Claws
  • Smooth-Edged Claws
  • Hollow Blade Claws
  • Thick Claws
  • Serrated Spine Claws
  • Tapered Claws
• 3 Additional Technique Points

Not only will you have a variety of looks to choose from, but you’ll also have an assortment of claws to unlock in Marvel’s Wolverine. You can gain access to them in the base game through standard progression, with exclusive items offered only through the Digital Deluxe Edition. But we’ll share more about our suits and claws at a later date. Speaking of which…

View and download image "Sabretooth angrily snarls, showing his teeth. He has long blonde hair dangling off the side of his head; fire is behind him as embers fall in the foreground."

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** Pre-order is also available for Standard Disc Edition (SGD 89.90 / MYR 299 / IDR 1,169,000 / THB 2,290 / PHP 4,099 / VND 1,799,000).

Expect more soon

We have several teases closing our trailer too, including more intense battles, suits, enemy factions, and characters…. was that Sabretooth!? There’s plenty left to share about Marvel’s Wolverine on our road to launch, so pre-order today and keep up with @InsomniacGames on social media for future updates. Fortunately, the wait won’t be long… Stay tuned!

On behalf of Insomniac Games and our collaborators at PlayStation and Marvel Games… thanks for reading!

Back in 2015, Until Dawn arrived on PlayStation 4, and we all fell (and screamed) in love with this instant classic. Now, we’re beyond excited to finally announce an all-new sequel for PS5… and if that’s not enough, we’ve got the world’s first trailer, right here, just for you.

Play Video

Until Dawn 2 is a standalone experience, featuring a brand new cast, a whole new world to explore, and true to form, a modern horror experience packed with intrigue, emotion, twists, and the kind of choices that will keep you up at night. Your decisions still shape the story: who falls victim, and who survives Until Dawn…

Brand new story

Our cast this time is a crew of ghost hunters, the faces behind the wildly popular paranormal channel, Dead True.. Only, well… they’ve never actually seen anything supernatural. The scares they are known for are, let’s say, a little staged. But all that changes when for the very first time, they come face-to-face with real horrors and must start living up to their reputation to survive until dawn.

Having just signed a deal with a big TV network, the crew gets shipped off to an abandoned tropical island for their first fully funded episode.  At first, it’s all sun, sand, secrets… plus some very not-safe-for-the-workplace drama as their complicated relationships bubble to the surface. 

Of course, there’s more to this beautiful island than meets the eye.  Beneath this blissful exterior, hide dreadful and heartbreaking secrets – centuries old and hungry for vengeance… and our crew have landed right in the middle of it.

Chasing likes might have brought them here, but survival quickly becomes the only metric that counts. Will you help them escape to tell the world their story, or will they become just another haunted legend, claimed by the island?

Choice and consequence

Would it even be an Until Dawn game without gut-wrenching decisions? Will you risk injury to save a cute baby boar from a gnarly bear trap? Keep a scandalous affair going, even if it could blow up the group? Push someone to their breaking point, all for the sake of content that your intimidating boss says you need to get?

This time, how you manage relationships within the crew matters more than ever, with some branches based on where things stand between characters. It’s not just the huge moments, even small character moments can set off a Butterfly Effect, sending your story spinning off towards unforeseen consequences… 

Stay tuned for more

Here at Firesprite, we took the reins on Until Dawn 2 as our first release since Horizon: Call of the Mountain, where we collaborated with our friends at Guerrilla Games. Like many of you, a bunch of us on the team are massive fans of the original Until Dawn, so getting to build the sequel has been a dream come true.  Part of our mission from day one has been honoring that core DNA: character drama, tough choices, and those unforgettable horror moments that made the first game so special.

In the coming months, we’ll be rolling out more story details, diving into Until Dawn 2’s gameplay, and of course, introducing our new cast. Amongst the characters in today’s reveal you’ll have spotted the return of the enigmatic Dr Hill, played once again by the fantastic Peter Stormare. We’ve still got plenty more to share leading up to the launch of Until Dawn 2 in 2027.

Thanks for reading! 

Exclusivity is a thorny subject in the world of video games. On the one hand, gaming platforms and console creators benefit from having games that they offer exclusively or provide early access to before the game is released for broader consumption. This creates an appeal to the system and encourages gamers to buy systems that offer the best exclusives.

For gamers, of course, this is a net negative, aside from the small subset who prefer to “win” the console wars rather than have access to as many great games as possible. Speaking at a Bloomberg Tech event, Xbox’s new CEO, Asha Sharma, discussed exclusive games and offered both encouragement and concerns for gamers opposed to the practice.

“I think it’s a tough topic,” Sharma said when asked about exclusivity and plans for the Game Pass subscription service. “Look, we’re the number two publisher in the world. And in order to be a great publisher, you must have your games reach large audiences to play.”

While this would seemingly point to fewer games receiving exclusive distribution from the company, with developers benefiting from their games being available to as many gamers as possible, she also noted the conflicting goals that the platform side of the company carries.

“At the same time,” she followed up, “we’re increasingly becoming a platform. To be a platform, you must offer exclusive content and services. And so we’re looking at that very closely. I think that we have to be very thoughtful about each title on how we want to think about it and learn from similar cases in the industry, and that’s what we’re doing.”

With the talk coming on the back of Sharma’s first 100 days as CEO, there’s still much to be seen about what her vision is and how it will play out on video game exclusives.

You can catch the full Bloomberg Tech event, which includes a discussion of a range of topics relevant to gamers, including AI use and its impact on console costs by driving up chip prices, on Bloomberg Live YouTube.

Telltale Games has released a teaser trailer for The Wolf Among Us 2, confirming the long-awaited sequel will be releasing in 2027.

Check out the trailer below.

In addition to the trailer above, Telltale Games also announced that The Wolf Among Us Remastered is launching in Fall 2026. More details as we get them.

The post The Wolf Among Us 2 Re-emerges At Summer Game Fest With 2027 Release Window appeared first on PlayStation Universe.

Cooldown Games and Frozenbyte just unveiled the latest entry in the Trine series, Trine 6: Together in Time. The game is heading to both Nintendo Switch 2 and Switch on September 25, 2026. Trine 6: Together in Time will feature five playable heroes with unique abilities and a Time-Slow mechanic to temporarily slow down the action. Co-op is fully supported,...

The post Trine 6: Together in Time announced for Nintendo Switch 2, Switch appeared first on Nintendo Everything.

Clutch is the debut title from Maverick Games. The studio comprises former Forza Horizon developers. The game was officially announced earlier in the week, but at Summer Games Fest 2026, the First full trailer was shown off.

The post Clutch’s First Full Trailer Shown At Summer Games Fest appeared first on Insider Gaming.

Telltale Games has unveiled The Wolf Among Us Remastered and it's release window at Summer Game Fest. Here are more details.

The post The Wolf Among Us Remastered Release Window Revealed appeared first on Insider Gaming.

Today during Summer Game Fest’s main showcase, Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio announced that legendary rapper and activist Tupac Shakur—who died in 1996—will be in its jazzy new historical Yakuza-like, Stranger Than Heaven. Nobody asked for this, and an only slightly larger number like it.

Snoop Dogg, who will also appear in the game, was brought out to explain the puzzling inclusion.

"The Tupac estate and my son and myself, we work very closely together, so it just made sense to put him in this game,” Snoop told Geoff Keighley. “His likeness and his spirit still lives on, and I just feel like it was so connected to what we're doing."

But it’s still an act of digital necromancy involving a man who, crucially, cannot object. The dead deserve to rest, but instead, the modern era turns their ghosts into IP. This isn’t even the first dead person RGG has shamelessly boasted will appear in Stranger Than Heaven. That not-honor goes to Japanese actor Bunta Sugawara, who passed away in 2014. At least in his case, it’s confirmed he’s not getting the Val Kilmer treatment, with actor Takashi Ukaji providing his voice instead of AI. 

Still, the whole thing feels gross, which caused “Tupac” to trend on both X and Bluesky for the wrong reasons.

They're putting Tupac in a Yakuza game with "Snoop Dogg's blessing." Snoop Dogg shills for anything. He would dig up Tupac's bones and shoot them out of a cannon into the sea if it meant a paycheck.

— Mallorie Malcontent ✨ (@sweetbeanscomix.bsky.social) June 5, 2026 at 2:42 PM

First it was the scumbag in Yakuza 3, and now they’re digitally animating Tupac’s corpse? Yeah, I think I might be done with anything RGG does for the foreseeable future. Incredibly tone deaf and disrespectful.

— Coop (@riderstrike.bsky.social) June 5, 2026 at 2:26 PM

"why is tupac trending" *click* "noooooo"

— foaming pipe snake (@guntoucher.bsky.social) June 5, 2026 at 2:53 PM

I'm glad I'm not watching this show live, I feel like I would've instinctively dropped my phone and the double over from psychic damage once Tupac showed up

— Brian M (@legendofnerd.bsky.social) June 5, 2026 at 2:42 PM

I love RGG and I love hiphop and I absolutely hate everything they're doing with this angle.

— Janet Garcia (@gameonysus.bsky.social) June 5, 2026 at 2:25 PM

btw this is who runs Tupac's estate

[image or embed]

— Chris Person (@papapishu.bsky.social) June 5, 2026 at 8:07 PM

All this after RGG already found itself in hot water earlier this year for refusing to dismiss a voice actor who admitted to sexual assault and generally dropping the ball on the Yakuza series’ latest remake, Kiwami 3. For some, it’s starting to look like Stranger Than Heaven might end up being the last straw.

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For reasons that will never fully be understood, Geoff Keighley’s annual beach-flavored ode to video games is called Summer Game Fest, singular, not Summer Games Fest, plural, even though it includes far more than one game. Because of this, many mistakenly call it Summer Games Fest—and also search for it incorrectly online. 

As we at Aftermath sleuthed out last year, one man, Epic Games senior trust and safety investigations manager Bruce Knapik, has been sitting on the summergamesfest.com URL for six years, having it redirect to a variety of causes. At times, that’s meant in-jokes like a picture of a taco shell with a sausage in it, while at others the URL has sent visitors to pages intended to support Black Lives Matter, Palestine, and laid-off games journalists. 

This year, Knapik has changed things up again; while the URL was at various points this year marshalled in service of friend of the site Stella Sacco and laid-off game developers more broadly, it now redirects to the Transgender Law Center. For Knapik, this one’s personal.

“Trans rights have been important to me my entire adult life,” Knapik wrote on Bluesky. “My first job after leaving the Army (which no one who knows me will admit happened) was for my mother at the Hippo in Baltimore. The Hippo was, to my knowledge, the largest queer nightclub in Baltimore, maybe the state. … It wasn't my first time among LGBTQ+ communities—my mother is a lesbian, my friends were sometimes queer, and people I had known throughout my time in the Army transitioned immediately afterwards—but my time there did more to shape me into an upstanding person than service ever did.”

Knapik believes that homophobes and transphobes are a dying breed in the grand scheme of things, but they’re not going out quietly. 

“I (perhaps naïvely) believe there are fewer of those people these days, but they are inarguably louder and more powerful than ever. They hold office, they own websites,” he wrote. “UFC fucking champions posting AI videos depicting hate crimes. Shit we didn't accept from YouTubers a decade ago has become passé behavior for major public figures. So yeah, the silly typo website redirects to a place that fights as well as anyone can for trans people in this environment. I'm just garden-variety bi, but I've been within the echo radius of trans hate—and trans joy—for decades, and seen how gleefully the former shreds the path to the latter.”

It wouldn’t be Summer Games Fest, plural, (as opposed to Summer Game Fest, singular) without some fraction of tongue planted in cheek, however. Currently, if you post the URL on a site like Bluesky, it auto-populates with “Gamergate Was A Jeff Epstein Joint.”  

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When I wasn't digging around the game's kitchens, one of the most striking things about playing through 007 First Light was just how reflective the game is. There are mirrors everywhere, and in 2026 that was such a jarring experience in a AAA video game that I wanted to learn more.

If you're wondering why I got so excited about mirrors of all things, allow me to explain. For the longest time, video games didn't have working mirrors–that was absurd, how would an 8-bit console even do that? But by the mid-90s, games like Duke Nukem 3D had pioneered actual, functioning video game mirrors. You could walk in front of one and it would reflect the world back at you. It was sorcery, one of the most "next-gen" moments in the history of the medium, and for a while there it felt like something you could just get used to seeing in big, AAA video games forever.

Or not. It turns out that, even back in 1996, developers knew that if you wanted a proper mirror in your game the performance cost would be immense, and usually not worth the effort. So by the time the 2010s rolled around we started to see fewer and fewer player characters staring back at us through bathroom mirrors.

This decline culminated in the reception to Cyberpunk 2077, a game that featured a mirror as its central viewpoint for character customisation, but which--despite having other reflections present in the game if you crank the settings up, like in puddles--didn't actually let the player look at themselves outside a specific scripted editor, a frankly astounding decision considering customisation seemed such an important part of the story. People got so worked up about it that they built mods to get mirrors working and tried to explain it away using MS Paint.

One series that has maintained working mirrors throughout recent years, though, is Hitman, so it shouldn't have been such a surprise to see them feature in 007 as well. But there aren't just mirrors in First Light; there are enough of them to compel me to write a blog this long about them. There's an abundance of them, and just some absolutely over-the-top placement, from club bathrooms featuring enormous triple-pane vistas to expensive apartments featuring floor-to-ceiling mirrors to cracked mirrors that reflect multiple, cracked versions of Bond back at you. Other people have noticed this, and they are excited.

To learn more about this game--which really could have been called 007 Mirrorverse--I spoke with Dag Bjärum Bengtsson, Senior Technical Artist at developers IO Interactive. If one person could answer my deeply specific questions about the workings and placement of a bunch of mirrors in a single video game, it'd be Bjärum.

My first question was a historical one: why don't we see mirrors anymore in big video games? "Supporting functioning, good-looking mirror reflections in more modern games has become increasingly difficult with the ever-growing number of advanced rendering techniques/features which generally don’t scale or work well with having extra cameras rendering the whole world multiple times in a convincing manner", he tells me.

"If a game wants mirrors it has to be prepared to make quite a big technical commitment, and there is a performance cost to them that has to be accounted for and balanced all the way from the technology side to the art implementation side."

Bjärum says “many modern games”--I name-dropped Cyberpunk specifically when chatting with him--have not wanted to pay this cost, saying they'd rather prioritise other features, or that mirrors are rarely accounted for when scheduling for the development time needed to implement them.

The reason First Light is able to throw so many of them at the player is a fairly simple one: like I've already mentioned above, the Glacier engine--which powers First Light but also the last few Hitman games--has simply never stopped doing it, so IO has never had to worry about changing their processes or adjust their resource allocation.

Which led me to my next question: just how do those mirrors work, exactly? "For mostly flat surfaces we have the possibility to configure a plane which describes the desired reflective object’s surface", Bjärum says. "Using the position, size and angle of this plane together with the position of the player camera, we have a secondary camera which renders the world using these parameters. The rendered image is then sampled by the material of any surface which we want the reflection to appear on."

"On the technical side, a lot of the heavy optimisation work done for Hitman carried over to 007 First Light, and in First Light we further enhanced them, with motion vector support so antialiasing techniques can better resolve the image, global illumination support, and more", Bjärum adds. "We also have many scalability settings to maintain stable performance across platforms.”

Which answers how they work, but what I really wanted to know is why there are so many big mirrors in this game. By the time I was one or two hours into First Light I was appreciating the working mirrors, but by the time I was five to six hours in I was thinking "man, there sure are a lot of mirrors in this game". By the time there's a cutscene that directly involves Bond trying on a pair of sunglasses in a bedroom mirror, I was convinced the developers knew what they'd accomplished and were taking the piss. So I asked Bjärum: were there so many mirrors because the concept artists just imagined the world that way, or was this an enormous flex from the technical artists because the mirrors worked so well?

"It came from both sides", he says. "The technical team’s confidence in the mirrors gave the artists the freedom to go big, and the artists going big pushed the technical team to keep optimising. Our artists really love the visuals of mirrors and embrace them to a very large extent, and we also have some special moments in 007 First Light (without spoiling anything) that could not really be achieved in alignment with the vision set out by our directors without them".

Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick is now a playable character in WWE 2K26. I have some questions. 

Principally, of course, I’d like to know why 2K added one of gaming’s most AI-confused, money-hungry executives at all. I mean, it’s not like he has some enormous cult of personality beyond his position at Take-Two and the odd vaguely spicy interview quote. He did release a fitness book and go around promoting it by showing off shirtless pictures of himself with eight percent body fat, but that was back in 2018. Plus, he’s not even shirtless in the game. 

Beyond that, I’m also curious as to why he was added to WWE 2K26 with essentially no fanfare. 2K just published a blog about the game’s new season spotlighting four other new wrestlers—complete with a splashy trailer—but Zelnick, added at the same time, received no such red carpet. He’s not even mentioned in the patch notes! (He’s also not listed on the game’s official roster page, but neither are the other new additions.) Did 2K want this to function as an easter egg? Because easter eggs are supposed to feel almost intimate, like a secret shared between friends. A multimillionaire CEO is… not that.

And why are Zelnick’s stats high enough that he’s above some well-respected real-life wrestlers? I mean, I guess you can’t portray the boss as a hapless, bumbling clown—and it’s better than the time UFC president Dana White got added to EA UFC with inexplicably god-tier stats—but still.   

Most of all, why is “My Way” by Frank Sinatra Zelnick’s entrance theme? Does it hold some special significance to him personally? Or did the developers just pick it because of his whole vibe? And why does it appear to be confined only to Zelnick, meaning that it can’t be applied to other characters? 

WWE 2K26’s player base is as confused as I am. Oh well, at least Zelnick—the character, not the man—isn’t costing anyone any money.

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As A Principled Video Game Executive, I Believe AI Is ‘Metadata’ Mixed With A ‘Parlor Trick,’ And We Should Be Skeptical Of It. Then Again, Counterpoint: Never Mind

Life comes at you fast

AftermathNathan Grayson

Shortly after the release of a new trailer for the upcoming Tomb Raider remake, Legacy of Atlantis, some folks spotted on the game's Steam page that there was a disclaimer outlining the team's use of AI in its development.

It reads:

AI-assisted tools were used during development to support some early exploration and temporary development content. Any AI-assisted assets were either replaced or refined by humans in order to maintain the creative and artistic vision of the development team.

No thanks! I feel like we've been through this, a bunch of times now, but it bears repeating: I don't want AI-generated content anywhere in my video games, but I especially don't want it anywhere near things that can be described as "creative and artistic".

One of the great delusions with the AI bubble is that the executive class feel compelled to argue that its implementation is about eliminating waste, cutting corners, streamlining processes, no matter where and no matter the cost. And one of the great battlegrounds in the fight against the adoption of AI tech is that, when it comes to art– even the most mundane aspects of it--there are no corners to cut. The iterating is the point.

One of the real joys of this medium is that, as chaotic and broken as the development process can be, video games are works of art. Every line of dialogue, every wooden crate, every colour palette you see in a game is the result of decisions made by a person, drawing on their own ideas and values and collaborations with their colleagues.

And those things you're seeing in a game didn't just magically appear there. They were workshopped, improved on, drawn up then thrown out then drawn up again. That's the artistic process; it's how everything we've ever made as humans has been made. That's how it works! You can't cut corners on ideas! It'd be like me asking ChatGPT to provide an outline of this blog, then me saying I'd gone over it and made some edits, added an extra paragraph or two; I could put my byline on it and add a disclaimer, but...this wouldn't be my blog anymore.

I realise we don't know the degree to which the team have made use of this tech; it could have been extensive, it could have been used on a single lamppost. But in many ways that makes it even worse; like I said with The Alters, the suspicion and uncertainty over AI's presence in a game is exhausting in its own right.

In response to swift backlash online, co-developers Crystal Dynamics provided a statement to Eurogamer that basically repeated the disclaimer:

At Crystal Dynamics, we leverage AI tools to help our teams iterate on ideas faster and more efficiently, while ensuring that all finished content in the final product is human-crafted. Our goal is to empower the creativity and flexibility of our developers to deliver the highest-quality experiences for players everywhere.

Come on, your goal is to cut corners and save some cash, maybe lay off some artists down the line. You could at least be honest about it.

After a few of the many, many trailers shown during yesterday’s PlayStation State Of Play, a theme began to emerge: September. It seems that everyone in the games industry suddenly remembered the 21st night of September and all the others besides, with a whopping ten major releases set for the humble month and another six on the way during its annual sequel, October. Obviously, publishers are terrified of Grand Theft Auto VI, the sleeping behemoth that wakes in November. But surely somebody’s gonna blink before it’s all said and done, right?

Here’s the full list of major games now scheduled to come out during September:

• The Blood Of The Dawnwalker – September 3
• Halloween: The Game – September 8
• Phantom Blade Zero – September 9
• Marvel’s Wolverine – September 15
• Trails In The Sky 2nd Chapter – September 17
• Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War IV – September 17
• Dune Awakening (console) – September 22
• Control Resonant – September 24
• Silent Hill: Townfall – September 24
• Onimusha: Way of the Sword – September 25

And just for fun, here’s a selection from October, too:

• Rayman Legends Retold – October 1
• Dynasty Warriors 3 Remastered – October 1
• Ace Combat 8: Wings of Theve – October 2  
• Star Wars: Galactic Racer – October 6
• Planet Zoo 2 – October 13
• Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 – October 23

Now, many of these games cater to different audiences, and you don’t have to buy every game—even ones you’re looking forward to—on the day they come out. In fact, it often makes more sense to wait for a sale, especially when you’re dealing with triple-A price tags. 

Still, this is the kind of pileup we haven’t seen in years, and I would have to imagine that at least a few of these games wind up getting delayed into the following months—or to early 2027, to once again avoid a potentially disastrous clash with GTA VI. Further, I cannot help but consider the current industry climate; if any one of these games falls short of—or, in some cases, even meets—sales expectations, layoffs and other grim knock-on effects are likely. However, given the shortsightedness with which companies are incentivized to operate, delays could produce similar outcomes. Not ideal no matter how you slice it!

Perhaps one especially bold publisher will move their game into November, a wintry dead zone outside of GTA VI. I’m not counting on it, but you know what they say about desperate times. 

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AftermathJoshua Rivera

Because I am no longer capable of playing video games like a normal human being, when I fired up 007 First Light earlier this week to ostensibly play as a globe-trotting secret agent, I instead quickly found myself poking around its kitchens and break rooms looking at how everyone in the game was making their coffee.

And I'm pleased to report that, for the most part, everyone in this game is doing just fine! Maybe better than fine. Cast your eyes on these excellent espresso machines:

That's a good espresso machine! It's got fictional in-game branding, and with buttons along the top in logical places, and a big lever for the steam wand. It looks very functional as well. The portafilter looks great, having cups on top being warmed by the boiler is also a nice touch and, with a hot water dispenser present and a pressure gauge on the front, I get the impression that whoever worked on this actually knew how an espresso machine worked, unlike those found in some other video games.

Coffee expert Jesse Raub helpfully tells me that the machine appears to be very closely based on La Speziale's Mini Vivaldi II, which might explain why it works so well. One of the biggest issues with so many other games’ coffee machines is that they're often nonsensical, collections of random buttons and visual cues that might present something that looks like an espresso machine at a glance, but which up close reveals itself to be something that simply wouldn't be able to make coffee. In this case, by just seeming to base First Light's machine on a real one, that problem is easily avoided!

My only criticism, then, is down to either the art team or, more likely, the game's inhabitants themselves. What's the big bag of coffee doing there if there's no grinder? If those are beans, you're not going to be able to use them, and if it's pre-ground coffee, purchased with the intent of using it in an expensive espresso machine, you have fucked up. THAT SAID: I have seen too many workplaces and homes where people have splashed out on an espresso machine and then had no intent on learning how to use it properly, so while having a 1kg bag of ground coffee is a very bad idea (not only will it not extract properly in the machine, but it'll go stale REAL fast), it's also something I can absolutely see being included in the various homes and offices you see this setup in throughout the game regardless.

Those who prefer their coffee dripping all morning and tasting like an ashtray are also being looked out for, as the game also includes good old-fashioned drip coffee machines. Presumably the above is for use by the same character who has the blender and protein shakes everywhere, because for them, the joys of taste and flavour are secondary to crunching numbers and maximising gains (in this case, caffeine intake).

Below is an example of another one of these 'cup of Joe' stations in action; not only does it feature a different colour scheme on the machines, which is a nice touch, but we can see the pots themselves as well, along with some sugar. This looks exactly like you'd expect a workplace coffee setup to look!

Actually, while we're here looking at screenshots from kitchens, can I quickly mention how nice the kitchen is in this safehouse? Architecture in video games is nearly always prioritising space and level design, and so rarely comes across as being something "real" or even liveable, but this kitchen looks exactly like the kind of kitchen you'd expect from an expensive London apartment. The scale of it, the amount of storage, the bench space, the appliances; this absolutely looks like something you'd see in an aspirational architecture or interior design video, so good job!

Wonderfully, the game doesn't just make a couple of machines and call it a day. There are more! Not too far into the campaign Bond finds himself in a smuggler's marketplace in the Mauritania desert where the locals, short on amenities in the rusting hulks of old cargo ships, are brewing themselves cups of coffee (and tea, more on that soon) on stovetops:

Later in the game, situated in the dystopian corporate offices of a military arms manufacturer, we have an example of an automatic coffee machine (which grinds, stores milk and produces loads of different types of coffee at the press of a button), the ideal coffee solution for a company that values aesthetics and perceived cost over the actual quality of the coffee being produced. Again, this looks real and workable, a sign that the art team knows their coffee, or at least cared enough to do some research on how coffee machines worked before making some for the game.

Note that these cold, glistening halls aren’t just home to expensively terrible coffee machines that are pretending to make passable coffee, they’re also home to even more terrible coffee machines that don’t even bother. There aren’t many of these to be found in the game, but when you find one of these 7-Eleven-ass units, you just know the security guards and cleaners on this floor are having a very bad time.

All of which is leading me to my favourite device in the game, and the one that shows IO's artists really knew what they were doing when it came to making First Light's coffee: Q's manual espresso machine (below). Every other unit in the game (outside the desert stovetop kettles) makes coffee electrically; it's either got computer programming or, at the very least, needs power, circuits and/or motors to work. This lovingly-maintained antique relies solely on physics and that big lever, which is used to push pressurised water through the coffee. To have it in the game at all is neat. To have it belong to Q, a man whose job is literally building the latest gadgets, while trapped in a game whose story centres around the dangers of adopting and trusting in modern technology, is a very nice touch.

I love all of this! The reason I like peering into this one particular subject of set dressing over and over is not just that I've become an insufferable coffee weirdo in middle age; it's that checking out how closely the art team pays attention to coffee can serve as a window into how they feel about decorating the rest of the game. If, like me, you find yourself spending hours poking your nose into a game's quieter corners, admiring the craft and the work that's gone into them, it can be so rewarding to find that world to appear real and lived-in, full of secrets and flourishes, especially when it concerns something you're interested in! For me that's coffee, but I can also tell that 007 is full of detailed stuff for all kinds of sickos, from audio visual nerds to book collectors.

I'd be remiss to let this blog end without an acknowledgement that, while there's plenty of coffee to go around, the game is largely set in the UK, and so there are still lots of options for tea-drinkers as well. A particular favourite of mine is this office setup at MI6, which aside from the 'Your Nan's House' decorations on the teapot and cups is again very fully realised. There's multiple varieties of tea, there are spoons, there's some sugar, a kettle (not sure where it's plugged into, but whatever) and, most importantly of all, some bikkies.

All in all, a great job! And testament to a level of detail that you see throughout First Light. As you'd maybe expect from the folks who made Hitman, the entire game is full of quiet spaces that are begging to be explored, and I've been having as much fun checking out newspaper headlines and listening in on fake radio broadcasts of the Manchester Derby as I have knocking dudes unconscious.

Paralives, an indie life sim, came out in early access last week. It’s pretty much exactly like The Sims, except a little bit worse.

I will say it’s incredibly impressive that such a small team—according to the Paralives website, the team is just fifteen people, and the game was primarily funded through Patreon—was able to create a legible life simulator. It’s a task that all but defeated Paradox, which canceled Life By You in 2024. InZoi, developed by Korean video game publisher Krafton and also in early access, honestly isn’t very fun to play. The actual life simulation felt clunky and without much texture, and the build mode was so frustrating that I ended up not using it—not to mention that Krafton used generative AI during the development process.

In comparison, Paralives is an obvious success, despite being a little buggy given that it’s early access. I can happily build a house, create a character (or Para, in the parlance of the game), get a job, make friends, get married and explore a small town. The only problem is that it feels almost like a direct copy of The Sims, but without the depth of gameplay. I hope that this early access release can help the Paralives team free themselves from their obvious inspiration, because in its current state the things that are unique and interesting get buried by the stuff that clearly comes from The Sims.

When you start a game, you’re asked to pick a storyteller that will guide the narrative in your gameplay. What this amounts to is that, every night when your Para goes to sleep, the storyteller offers you a series of cards that add buffs, bonuses or events for the next day. This does give the player daily goals, but these cards aren’t all that impactful to gameplay, and the system feels shallow. Sure, getting four random wants for my Para does give me a concrete series of activities to pursue. But the range of those wants is limited to things like “flirt” or “get a snack” or “get a bonus at work,” and worst of all, they’re fairly repetitive. Also, “wants,” a series of randomly rolled things your character wants to do that day, are another system from The Sims, this one from The Sims 2.

The game is kind of an open world, like The Sims 3, except when you want to enter a lot. Then the entire game grinds to a halt to load that location, which feels like a bad compromise between the discrete neighborhoods of The Sims 4 and the truly chuggy and badly optimized open world of 3. The build mode is a direct rip from The Sims 4, complete with walls you draw and then push and pull. The Paramaker is uncannily like Create-A-Sim in its presentation, though the game has sliders instead of allowing the player to directly grab parts of a Sim’s body and mold them. Paras also have meters for their needs which must be fulfilled and speak a gibberish language not unlike Simlish. The art style is different enough, pleasantly evoking illustrations from a storybook, but in practice it makes the game just feel like The Sims wearing a different skin.

The conversation system is where the game diverges the most, and it’s the system I like the most. Instead of selecting conversation topics from a radial wheel, Paras enter a conversation and when a meter fills up, the player can select a conversation topic from three or four random cards. It’s here that I finally feel like the Paras come alive a little. You’re not always going to get the conversation topics you want to raise the friendship or romantic relationships between Paras, and each card will contribute towards each Para’s current mood. It’s hard to make things flirty if you keep getting cards related to friendship—but that’s the kind of texture that makes a life sim interesting to play. The key to a good life sim isn’t just giving players everything they want, but introducing a little bit of chaos into their well-made plans.

My Para, Cherry Palmer, has a Gloomy disposition, meaning she’s sad a lot of the time, but is also predisposed towards romantic interactions. When Paras flirt, players are shown the percentage chance of the action being successful, and my god does Cherry ever eat shit when she wants to flirt. After embarrassing herself dozens of times, she finally managed to flirt successfully with a townie named Vincent, and even asked him to move in. It was a truly engaging saga, for a moment. Then I went into build mode to make my house bigger, and I felt like I was playing an off brand The Sims again.

What a non-Sims life sim would look like is, right now, an unanswered question, so it's hard to fault Paralives for hewing closely to the most successful game in the genre. How else would you visualize the cleanliness of a Para other than a meter that fills up and then drains? It’s just that by cribbing so many features from The Sims, I cannot help but think of that game when I play Paralives, and lament the things Paralives does not yet have. (Just like The Sims 4 on launch, this early access version of Paralives doesn’t have pools or swimming, though the team says these features will come further along in early access.) I hope as they continue to add features, they lean into the things that are unique to Paralives and develop a language of life simulation that feels uniquely their own.

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AftermathLuke Plunkett

Today Sony revealed a new God Of War, which stars Laufey, Kratos’ wife who died at the start of the 2018 game. It looks like another modern God Of War, which is to say gorgeous and dour. But the series has never been entirely bereft of humor, and this one seems to be leaning into that element in a big, boxy way: There is a talking gelatinous cube. It rams into things in a way that mostly seems to annoy them. I think it’s great.

The cube’s name is Phranque, an objectively stupid name that I nonetheless enjoy in this specific context. He’s voiced (and mocapped!) by The Boys star and reasonably likable nepo baby Jack Quaid. Laufey meets him while imprisoned in a giant bone cage, alongside what appears to be a talking sword, but which is actually a talking ribbon sticking out of said sword, named Rue (played by Perlina Lau).

Already, there’s been discourse online about how a) God Of War stars a woman now, woe are the many babies who actually hate both women and video games, but more importantly b) the cube. Some contend that it looks out of place in this otherwise muddy, bloody afterlife setting and that Jack Quaid’s line reads, so far, sound a little Marvel-y. I cannot deny these prospective criticisms of a game that—let’s not forget—doesn’t even have a release date yet. 

But watching the trailer, I was absolutely entranced not by the brutal balletics of a boss battle against a red demon, but instead by the cube wobbling along beside and behind it. Then, as if to add insult to the injury of Laufey’s sword strikes, the cube would crash into the back of the boss with the ferocity of an untouched, slightly spoiled Jell-O mold.

Nobody really acknowledges this as Laufey and the boss trade ill-intentioned blows and words, which in my opinion makes it better. Laufey nearly hews the dude in half, and then—for good measure—gelatinous cube comes in with a follow up boop. It is the gentle rhythm of slapstick, a dying art resurrected. Fitting for a game about someone who’s supposed to be dead.

Put simply, I love da cube. If you don’t, too bad. There is joy to be found in this world, but only if you’re willing to seek out its goopiest corners.  

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