Indiana Jones and the Great Circle is set in 1937, in the space between Raiders of the Lost Ark and The Last Crusade, and it’s being developed by MachineGames, the studio behind the most recent Wolfenstein installments. So, of course the game’s main enemies are Nazis, and obviously it has a robust range of Nazi-punching mechanics. What makes The Great Circle intriguing, even after just a 30-minute hands-off preview, is its lighthearted interpretation of classic Indiana Jones tropes, leaning into the series’ humorous tone and adding twists like open-handed Nazi slapping to Indy’s repertoire.

When it comes to combat, Indiana has a whip, a revolver and his fists (or palms). His whip appears to be the most useful tool on his belt, allowing him to swing across gaps, activate levers, and pull in enemies nice and close for a one-two punch. Hitting a Nazi with the whip briefly incapacitates them while they’re reeled in, setting up an advantageous close-quarters melee situation. Hand-to-hand combat requires precise timing in order to land knockout combos or finishing moves, and on top of throwing punches and slaps, Indy is able to block and defensively parry. In fistfights, the game’s first-person perspective crops in extra tight, filling the screen with punchable Nazi surfaces and enhancing the tension behind each blow and dodge. He can also pick up objects and hit enemies with them, and in pre-recorded gameplay footage, it all looks supremely satisfying.

MachineGames

Indiana Jones and the Great Circle isn’t just an action game, though. Many of its encounters can be approached with stealth mechanics, where players sneak past guards and perform silent takedowns without fisticuffs or gunfire at all. The revolver is really a last-ditch option in each scenario, game director Jerk Gustafsson and creative director Axel Torvenius said. Otherwise, puzzles are a pivotal component of gameplay.

Indiana is joined on his adventures by Gina, an Italian journalist who’s searching for her sister, and together they encounter a variety of logic and spatial puzzles. Some are quick, like finding an alternative entrance to a sealed room, and others are more involved, requiring a few minutes of focus to fully understand.

The preview focused on Giza, Egypt, showcasing bustling outdoor marketplaces, a depressing Nazi meeting room and a vibrant temple hidden beneath the sands of the Great Sphinx. Here, Indy and Gina had to catch the sunlight with a series of ancient mirrors, lining them up one by one until the beam bounced to the proper place. This particular puzzle room seemed straightforward and slightly clever (though maybe that’s just because The Mummy is one of my favorite childhood movies), but there are apparently more challenging riddles in the game, too. The most complex puzzles are hidden, requiring some light exploration in various regions, and they’re not necessary in order to complete the main storyline. These bonus riddles are just some of the many secrets to find around the game’s world.

MachineGames

“I don’t really like too difficult puzzles myself,” Gustafsson said. “I like to just enjoy the experience and not be so challenged by them. That said, we do have a mix [of puzzle difficulties] because I like a lot of variation. It’s not like we have some unique puzzle mechanic that goes across the entire game. We tried to create every puzzle in a different, unique way.”

There are also difficulty options for the puzzles overall, allowing players to choose how complex they’ll be throughout the entire game.

Indiana has a notebook that fills up with evidence, objectives and photos that he takes while investigating various relics around the globe. The camera is an essential tool in The Great Circle, and each snapped pic can unlock new clues and trails to follow. Indy also carries a lighter, which functions as a flashlight and can set stationary torches ablaze. His play style is customizable, with dozens of upgrades available as the game progresses. One potential upgrade is True Grit, an ability that allows him to recover from a fatal blow by crawling toward and grabbing his fedora within a certain amount of time. You know, classic Indiana Jones stuff.

MachineGames

I’ve seen some angry chatter online from people who don’t like the first-person perspective in The Great Circle, citing a desire to actually see Indiana as he does all this cool stuff, just like in the movies. I don’t think these people have much to worry about — not only are there plenty of cutscenes featuring Troy Baker’s utterly impressive 1980s Harrison Ford impression, but parts of the game are in third-person after all.

“When it comes to a character like Indiana Jones, I want to play the character and I want to be the character, I want to look through and explore the world through his eyes,” Gustafsson said. “To me that’s a very important part of what we do here. For me, it was a very easy choice. But also, we do mix in some third-person elements here. We have very much come back to our own history with games like Riddick and The Darkness where we also did this mix between first-person and third-person perspective. We do that for this game, too. Everything is not first-person, even though the core experience is in first-person.”

Torvenius added, “There’s a great opportunity here as well for us because we do have a large section of the game that is mystery, it’s solving puzzles, being up front and close to ancient relics and ruins and scriptures. So it adds an intimacy to the adventure to some aspect, that you can get really up and close and can really inspect things, which is actually pretty nice how it plays out in the game.”

MachineGames

Even in first-person scenes, Indiana Jones and the Great Circle looks, sounds and feels right so far. Baker’s Indiana Jones is nearly indistinguishable from the early film versions, his voice drawling and gravelly with a sarcastic bite. There’s a dry humor built into his interactions, as is fitting. In one scene, he’s introducing himself to a woman who has an intricately designed eye patch; she seems to be indigenous to the jungle they’re sitting in.

“I’m an archaeologist,” Indiana says.

“Another one,” she replies, clearly unimpressed.

It’s a quick moment from a short preview, but it sets a solid tone for the game as a whole: dry, lighthearted, and a little punch-drunk in between all the actual punching. Or you could say, a bit slap-happy amid all the slapping. Either way, these Nazis won't know what hit them.

Indiana Jones and the Great Circle is coming to Xbox Series X/S and PC on December 9. It'll be available on Game Pass Ultimate, and it's also coming to PlayStation 5 in spring 2025.

Indiana Jones and the Great Circle is coming to Xbox Series X/S and PC on December 9. It'll be available on Game Pass Ultimate day-one. Indiana Jones and the Great Circle is also coming to PlayStation 5, but it's taking the scenic route to Sony's console: It'll hit PS5 in spring 2025.

It's been rumored for a while that The Great Circle — a game developed by Xbox subsidiary MachineGames and published by Xbox — would also come to PS5. Just in February, Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer said The Great Circle was not heading to PS5 or Switch, though a handful of other Xbox properties were making the cross-console leap. That hasn't stopped the rumor mill from spinning, of course.

MachineGames was swept up in Microsoft's acquisition of ZeniMax in 2021, alongside id Software, Arkane and Bethesda Game Studios. In June 2023, Bethesda VP Pete Hines testified in court proceedings that Disney and ZeniMax originally planned to release The Great Circle on multiple platforms, and it only became exclusive to Xbox after Microsoft's purchase of ZeniMax was approved.

Xbox is not required to release The Great Circle on PS5 or any other platform. This whole situation is separate from Microsoft's controversial acquisition of Activision Blizzard, wherein Xbox is legally mandated to release new games like this fall's Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 on competing consoles.

We recently saw a 30-minute hands-off preview of Indiana Jones and the Great Circle and found it to be charming as hell. It's filled with plenty of Nazi punching — and slapping, which is a nice surprise. Read the full preview for more insight.

Summer Game Fest 2024 officially wrapped up on June 10, after a long weekend of game previews, developer interviews and unlimited cold brew — but we just published our final stories from the show this week (held under embargo, of course). Those were Mat Smith's impressions of Black Myth: Wukong and Tales of the Shire, and they capped off a month of juicy video game news out of the summer's biggest show.

No, Silksong did not make an appearance.

There were, however, plenty of bright and shiny games at the show, and many of them were available to play for the first time ever. Our hands-on and first-look stories include Assassin’s Creed Shadows, Astro Bot, Dragon Age: The Veilguard, Kunitsu-Gami: Path of the Goddess, Lego Horizon Adventures, Marvel Rivals, Metaphor: ReFantazio, Neva and Skate Story.

On top of the playable previews, Day of the Devs, Devolver, Xbox and Ubisoft held their own showcases brimming with new information and game reveals, and the big Summer Game Fest kickoff event was similarly stacked. Just to name a few of the hits: There's a new Doom with a medieval flair (and flail), Civilization VII is coming out in 2025, Slitterhead will land on November 8, Heart Machine is building a gorgeous-looking platformer called Possessor(s), and the Fable reboot is due out in 2025. There are also new Xbox Series consoles coming out this fall — and as it turns out, Microsoft's mid-cycle refresh says a lot about the Xbox hardware business as a whole, especially when compared to the company's internal roadmap that leaked in October 2022.

After E3 collapsed on itself like a sad soufflé, Summer Game Fest has emerged as the home of mid-year video game goodness, offering a little more room for smaller studios and plenty of space to grow. It's been four years of digital and physical Summer Game Fest events at this point, and the show just keeps getting better.

Catch up on all of the news from Summer Game Fest 2024 right here!

Mixtape is a coming-of-age story about the reality-bending adventures of three teenage friends on their final night of high school, featuring a soundtrack of classic punk and alternative hits. It's due to hit Xbox Series X/S, PlayStation 5 and PC in 2025, and it'll be available day-one on Xbox Game Pass.

Mixtape follows three friends on their way to their final high school party, as they relive their glory days to the tunes of a perfectly curated playlist. Their memories appear in dreamlike sequences, featuring songs by Iggy Pop, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Joy Division, DEVO, The Smashing Pumpkins and other old-school hit makers.

The main trio in Mixtape provide plenty of teenage sass in the game's reveal trailer, and its art style feels like something between stop-motion and cel-shaded cinematics. It's a welcoming, stylish world. The Mixtape microsite includes the mantra, "Skate. Party. Avoid the law. Make out. Sneak out. Hang out." Sounds like high school to me.

Mixtape comes from Beethoven & Dinosaur, the studio behind the musical adventure The Artful Escape and fronted by Australian rockstar Johnny Galvatron. It's published by Annapurna Interactive.

Catch up on all of the news from Summer Game Fest 2024 right here!

South of Midnight, first revealed at last year’s Summer Game Fest, will launch on Xbox and PC sometime next year. During today's Xbox showcase, we got a first look at how the third-person action-adventure will play. 

Right off the bat, it reminds me of Square Enix’s fun-but-flawed Forspoken. In South of Midnight, protagonist Hazel is apparently pulled into a “Southern Gothic world” where reality and fantasy are blurred. Hazel is able to move around the environment fluidly, with the new trailer showing off gliding skills, double jumps, and some sort of magical grapple hook to speed up level navigation. 

We also got even more cutscenes to help flesh out this world, and they still have that Into The Spider-verse jumpy frame-rate trick to separate cutscenes from in-game actionYou’ll be able to fight monsters with close-up magical blade attacks and other midrange weaponry. Oh and you seem to befriend – and ride – a giant catfish around the magical bayou.

Catch up on all of the news from Summer Game Fest 2024 right here!

There's a new Doom in town. Doom: The Dark Ages is heading to PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S and PC, day one on Game Pass, in 2025. The game's first trailer showcases a world of hulking monsters in blood-soaked environments, badass new weapons and what looks to be a player-controlled dragon. At one point, the Doom Slayer steps inside a giant mech suit in order to battle a huge demon, buildings crumbling beneath their feet. 

The weapons and creatures in Doom: The Dark Ages have a distinct medieval flare, as is expected, with lots of sharpened blades, at least one flail and heavy armor all around. One new weapon that stands out in the game's reveal trailer is an automatic shotgun with a skull in the center of it, menacing and slightly silly at the same time. As is custom in Doom games, the level of gory, gruesome detail on display in The Dark Ages is exceptional, and it looks like the game is leaning into everything that makes this franchise so deliciously disgusting.

Doom: The Dark Ages is a prequel to 2016's Doom and Doom Eternal, developed by series shepherd id Software. Its story will illuminate the origin of the Doom Slayer. Spoiler: He will slaughter a lot of demons.

It's possible this is the rumored Doom: Year Zero that was mentioned in leaked documents related to Microsoft's acquisition of Activision Blizzard. The leak happened in September 2023 and it outlined Bethesda's roadmap over the coming years as part of the Xbox Game Studios brand.

Catch up on all of the news from Summer Game Fest 2024 right here!

Break out your blankets and settle in, everyone. It’s time for the cozy games.

The latest Wholesome Direct showcase offers an hour-long celebration of innovation and coziness in indie development, featuring more than 30 meditative, calming and absolutely adorable experiences. Some of the titles are brand new, some are getting updates, many of them have demos, and others simply deserve time in the spotlight. One thing they all have in common is an inherent ability to warm your heart.

The entire Wholesome Direct 2024 showcase is worth watching. It’s packed with brilliant indie gems and brand-new trailers, and many of the featured titles already have demos available to download. Here, we’ve collected four games that came out today as surprise drops tied to the showcase: Kamaeru: A Frog Refuge, POOOOL, The Palace on the Hill and Tracks of Thought. I spent some time playing the first three games on this list and each one is lovely in its own way; I’ve left my thoughts with the game descriptions below.

Watch, read about and then play a bunch of cozy, wholesome games — that’s not a bad way to spend a Saturday. Or a summer.

Kamaeru: A Frog Refuge

This one’s for the players who can’t get enough of games like Neko Atsume and Usagi Shima, or for folks who just really love adorable amphibians. Kamaeru: A Frog Refuge is a farming sim about building and maintaining a protected space in the wetlands where wild frogs can thrive, and it gets much deeper than simply buying new poufs for the animals to sleep on. In Kamaeru, players have to dig out the wetlands, harvest ingredients to make jam and other treats for selling at the market, monitor their environmental impact, and purchase items to create an inviting space for all of their frog friends. Players are able to take photos of the frogs, feed them, name them and even breed them, mixing their colorways in a tic-tac-toe Punnett square.

Kamaeru is a relaxed, methodical and surprisingly deep experience that happens to be filled with cute and colorful frogs. It’s much more than a passive animal-observation game, and it takes a fair amount of grinding — but like, in a really cozy, froggy way — for the on-screen rewards to start rolling in. After about an hour of play, I feel like I’ve only scratched the surface of this game. 

Kamaeru is available now on Steam, itchi.io and Nintendo Switch, and it’s verified on Steam Deck. It's developed by Humble Reeds and published by Armor Games Studios.

POOOOL

Count 'em, that’s four Os. POOOOL is a sweet and simple game with infinite replayability, much like the stick-and-ball sport that inspired it. In POOOOL, players fling bouncy balls of various sizes around a contained rectangle, one at a time, in an attempt to make spheres of the same color touch. When two matching balls collide, they instantly combine into a bigger ball, which can then be combined with another of the same size, and so on. It’s kind of like Threes! but with colorful balls instead of numbers. Eventually, the globes reach their limit and they disappear with a pop, leaving plenty of room for new balls to spawn. The round ends and the score is tallied when there’s no more room for the spheres to be flung.

POOOOL is a lovely little physics simulator with a friendly art style and soothing, repeatable mechanics. This is a game that rewards strategy, but it’s also incredibly forgiving of mindless clicking and dragging, and both play styles result in a satisfyingly bouncy experience. Put it in your pile of games to play while killing time or pretending to get work done, and you’ll get plenty of use out of it. POOOOL comes from developer Noah King and publisher digimoss, and it’s available right now on Steam.

The Palace on the Hill

This is a special one. The Palace on the Hill is a thoughtful and robust slice-of-life game set in a fictional town in rural India in the 1990s, starring a young man who’s helping his family earn money over the summer. Players plant, tend to and sell their crops, they work shifts at the local tea shop, and they pick up odd jobs in town, getting to know the residents along the way. The young man is an aspiring artist, and he finds inspiration for new paintings around the village, sharing stories about the area’s past in beautiful watercolor vignettes. There’s a rich history here and plenty of things to do in each moment.

The Palace on the Hill is a sweet surprise of an adventure game, riveting, methodical and illuminating. The rural town where it takes place feels alive and its boundaries expand delicately as the game progresses. Each NPC has a distinct personality and a unique relationship with the protagonist, and their world quickly feels familiar, even as it remains filled with secrets. I heartily recommend this game.

The Palace on the Hill is available today on Steam, Xbox Series X/S, Xbox One, iOS and Android, and it’s verified on Steam Deck. It comes from indie studio Niku Games.

Tracks of Thought

Tracks of Thought is a game about chatting, managing cards and solving mysteries, and it all takes place on a long-haul locomotive heading to an unknown destination. After passing through a strange tunnel, every passenger on the train forgets where they’re going, and it’s up to the protagonist, an amiable purple ladybug, to figure out what’s going on. The ladybug’s personality is shaped by the player’s interactions with other passengers, and conversations play out as card battles where the goal is to resolve conflict and help everyone get on the same page.

Tracks of Thought has a cartoony art style and a cast of cool, bug-like characters, and it seems to offer a clever blend of conversation and card battles. With today's showing, this game has been featured in a total of four Wholesome Directs (yes, that's nearly all of them), so it's especially great to see it out now on Steam and the Epic Games Store. Tracks of Thought comes from developer Tidbits Play and publisher Freedom Games.

Catch up on all of the news from Summer Game Fest 2024 right here!

Bloober Team's remake of Silent Hill 2 is due to hit PlayStation 5 and PC on October 8, and it's looking nice and spooky. It's available to pre-order on the PlayStation Store and Steam.

It's been less than two years since Konami and Bloober Team announced the Silent Hill 2 remake, though news of its existence leaked a few months beforehand, giving fans plenty of time to catastrophize the situation. Today we got the first gameplay trailer for the remake, showcasing familiar hallways lined with bloody nurses, low-light environments crawling with bugs, and other nasty surprises that have always been lurking in the sleepy town of Silent Hill. With modern visuals, lighting and sensibilities, it all looks eerily beautiful.

The release date trailer dropped during today's PlayStation State of Play showcase. Right after that, Konami held a separate event just for its numerous Silent Hill projects, including an extended look at the Silent Hill 2 remake.

Bloober Team is the studio behind the Layers of Fear franchise, Observer, Blair Witch and The Medium — all perfectly serviceable psychological horror experiences. Still, there's a lot to live up to here: Silent Hill 2 is a beloved, classic horror game. It hit the PlayStation 2 in 2001 and, more than 20 years on, plenty of fans are anxious to see how the remake will hold up. Bloober Team has completely rebuilt the game, including full performance capture and swapping a semi-fixed camera for a modern third-person perspective.

Bloober Team co-founder Piotr Babieno told Engadget in June 2023 that the studio shifted its entire game-making ethos for the Silent Hill 2 remake. Instead of leading with mood and set dressing, they made mechanics the foundation of the on-screen terror, using player input to generate disquiet. The Layers of Fear collection that came out last summer marked the end of Bloober Team's psychological-horror era. As Babieno said last June:

“This year is like closing the era of making psychological horror games. Right now we are going into Bloober Team 3.0, making mass-market horror.... We decided that our next titles should be much more mass-market oriented. We’d like to talk with more people. We’d like to deliver our ideas, with our DNA, not by environment or storytelling, but by action. So all of our future titles will have a lot of gameplay mechanics. They will be much bigger.”

This one's a bummer. Mega-publisher Take-Two Interactive is shuttering Rollerdrome studio Roll7 and Kerbal Space Program 2 team Intercept Games, according to paperwork seen by Bloomberg.

Roll7 is based in London, and was founded in 2008 by lifelong friends Tom Hegarty and Simon Bennett. Roll7 is the studio behind OlliOlli, OlliOlli World and Rollerdrome, all fantastic games with wheel-based mechanics. OlliOlli was a Vita hit in 2014 and World landed in early 2022 — they're both great, and the latter in particular is a flow-state-inducing skateboarding platformer with an adorable art style. Rollerdrome was one of our favorite games of 2022; it's a luscious third-person rollerskating-and-gunplay title that looks like a slice of 1970s dystopian sci-fi. 

Roll7 has picked up multiple prestigious awards over the years, including recent wins at BAFTA and DICE. As the studio name implies, Roll7 developers know how to make incredibly smooth action games.

Take-Two purchased Roll7 in November 2021 and made it a subsidiary of Private Division, the company's label for small- and mid-size publishing deals. According to Bloomberg, Take-Two plans to close Roll7 and will offer severance packages to staff.

Intercept Games is based in Seattle and is responsible for Kerbal Space Program 2, a popular flight-simulation title that's still technically in early access on Steam. Take-Two founded Intercept in 2020 specifically to manage Kerbal Space Program 2, and the game has been receiving updates since going live in February 2023.

Take-Two has yet to confirm that it's closing Intercept Games — but it hasn't said it isn't, either. The company filed a notice in Washington on Monday outlining plans to lay off 70 people in the state and permanently close their place of business, and some Kerbal developers have confirmed their recent departures. Private Division will continue to update Kerbal Space Program 2, Take-Two said in a statement.

Take-Two is one of the largest video game companies around, reporting $5.3 billion in revenue last year. It's the owner of Grand Theft Auto and the parent company of Rockstar Games, 2K, Private Division, Zynga and — very recently — Gearbox Software. Take-Two purchased Borderlands studio Gearbox in March for $460 million. Grand Theft Auto VI, arguably the most anticipated game of the decade, is due to add billions to Take-Two's bottom line in 2025.

In April, Take-Two announced plans to lay off 5 percent of its employees, or roughly 600 people, by the end of 2024. It also canceled some in-development projects. When news of the planned firings broke last month, Take-Two didn't identify which studios would take the hit, but now we know it includes Roll7 and Intercept. The company laid off some Private Division workers in 2023 as well.

An estimated 9,400 people have been laid off in the video game industry so far in 2024, and a total of 10,500 workers were let go in 2023. Sony, Microsoft and Riot Games have fired a combined 3,300 employees this year alone, and the fallout from Embracer Group's funding implosion keeps spreading, with numerous shuttered studios and more than 1,400 displaced workers.

Starfield, the excellent Digipick puzzle game surrounded by 80 hours of sci-fi mediocrity, is getting a performance update on Xbox Series X that unlocks frame rates above 30 fps. Starfield's May update adds the option to target 30 fps, 40 fps, 60 fps or an uncapped frame rate — for displays that support VRR running at 120hz. Displays without VRR will have the choice of 30 fps or 60 fps. 

The May update also includes the ability to prioritize visuals or performance at each frame rate target. Visuals mode means the game will do its best to maintain a high resolution and full detail in lighting, special effects and NPCs, while performance lowers the resolution and clarity of those same details. Of course, both modes adjust the game's base resolution alongside heavy on-screen action. 

Bethesda recommends performance mode when playing at 60 fps and above. For Xbox Series X players with 120hz VRR displays, Starfield's settings now default to 40 fps, prioritizing visuals.

The May 1 display updates bring the Xbox Series X version of Starfield closer to its PC counterpart in terms of customization options. The Xbox Series S edition remains capped at 30 fps. This is the version I played when I reviewed Starfield last year, and while a frame rate upgrade won't make the game less bland, its combat scenes would definitely benefit from a boost to 40 fps, at least. It's a shame that the most popular Xbox Series console isn't seeing any frame rate love in today's update.

Additionally in the May update, Starfield's surface maps have been overhauled in order to increase legibility on all platforms. The new design shows top-down 3D images of terrain, buildings, and objects like trees and rocks, which makes a lot of sense for, you know, a map. The original surface map tries to make landscapes out of white dots on a bright blue background, so this is a welcome improvement. The update also allows players to customize their difficulty options on the ground and in ship battles, and it adds navigation markers to the environment when walking around a planet.

This is Bethesda's fourth and largest Starfield update since the game came out in September 2023. It's all scheduled to go live by May 15.

Children of the Sun burst onto the indie scene like a muzzle flash on a dark night. Publisher Devolver Digital dropped the game’s first trailer on February 1, showcasing frenzied sniper shots and a radioactive art style. A Steam demo highlighting its initial seven stages went live that same day and became a breakout hit during February’s Steam Next Fest. Two months later it landed in full and to broad acclaim. This explosive reveal and rapid release timeline mirrors the game itself — chaotic but contained, swift and direct, sharp and bright.

Though it feels like Children of the Sun popped into existence over the span of two months, it took solo developer René Rother more than 20 years to get here.

René Rother

As a kid in Berlin in the early 2000s, Rother was fascinated by the booming mod community. He spent his time messing around with free Counter-Strike mapping tools and Quake III mods from the demo discs tucked into his PC magazines. Rother daydreamed about having a job in game development, but it never felt like an attainable goal.

“It just didn't seem possible to make games,” he told Engadget. “It's like it was this huge black box.”

Rother couldn’t see an easy entry point until the 2010s, when mesh libraries and tools like GameMaker and Unity became more accessible. He discovered a fondness for creating 3D interactive art. But aside from some free online Javascript courses, he didn’t know how to program anything, so his output was limited.

“I dabbled into it a little bit, but then got kicked out. Again,” Rother said. “It was just like the whole entrance barrier was so big.”

René Rother

Rother pursued graphic design at university and he found the first two years fulfilling, with a focus on classical art training. By the end of his schooling, though, the lessons covered practical applications like working with clients, and Rother’s vision of a graphic design career smashed into reality.

“There was an eye-opening moment where I felt like, this is not for me,” Rother said.

In between classes, Rother was still making games for himself and for jams like Ludum Dare, steadily building up his skillset and cementing his reputation in these spaces as a master of mood.

“Atmospheric kind of pieces, walking simulators,” Rother said, recalling his early projects. “Atmosphere was very interesting to me to explore. But I never thought that it was actually something that could turn into a game. I never thought that it would become something that can be sold in a way that it's actually a product.”

René Rother

By the late 2010s Rother decided he was officially over graphic design and ready to try a job in game development. He applied to a bunch of studios and, in the meantime, picked up odd jobs at a supermarket and as a stagehand, setting up electronics. He eventually secured a gig as a 3D artist at a small studio in Berlin. Meanwhile, his pile of game jam projects and unfinished prototypes continued to grow.

“In that timeframe, Children of the Sun happened,” Rother said.

In Children of the Sun, players are The Girl, a woman who escaped the cult that raised her and is now enacting sniper-based revenge on all of its cells, one bullet at a time. In each round, players line up their shot and then control a single bullet as it ricochets through individual cult members. The challenge lies in finding the most speedy, efficient and stylish path of death, earning a spot at the top of the leaderboards.

“It was just a random prototype I started working on,” Rother said. “And one Saturday morning I was thinking, ‘I don't know what I'm doing with my life.'” With an atmospheric prototype and a head full of ennui, Rother emailed Devolver Digital that same day about potentially publishing Children of the Sun.

“The response was basically, ‘The pitch was shit but the game looks cool,’” Rother said. “And then it became a thing.”

René Rother

Visually, Children of the Sun is dazzling. It has a sketchy 3D art style that’s covered in bruise tones, with dark treelines, glowing yellow enemies and layers of texture. Every scene looks like The Girl just took a hit of adrenaline and her senses are on high alert, lending a hectic sense of hyper-vigilance to the entire experience. It’s a game built on instinct.

“I didn't make any mood boards,” Rother said. “I didn't prepare [for] it. It was just like, oh, let's make it this color. Ah, let's make it this color…. This is something to very easily get lost in. I spent a lot of time just adjusting the color of grass so it works well with the otherwise purplish tones and these kinds of things. I spent way too much time on the colors.”

Children of the Sun went through multiple visual iterations where Rother played with contrast, depth, fog density and traditional FPS color palettes, before landing on the game’s dreamlike and neon-drenched final form. The residue of this trial and error is still visible beneath Children of the Sun’s frames, and that’s exactly how Rother likes it.

“I see it as a big compliment, actually,” he said. “In paintings, when we talk about visual art, I really like when you can see the brushstrokes. I like when you can still see the lines of the pencil before the painting got made. I like the roughness. I wanted everything to be rough. I didn't want it to be polished.”

Rother picked up the game’s soundtrack collaborator, experimental ambient composer Aidan Baker, the same way he hooked up with Devolver. Rother was a fan of Baker and his band Nadja, and he wanted a similar droning, slowcore vibe as a backdrop for Children of the Sun. On a whim, Rother sent Baker a casual message asking if he’d like to make music for a video game.

“He was like, ‘Well I've never done it, so I don't know,’” Rother remembered. “So we met one evening and then afterwards he was like, ‘Yeah, let's just do it.’ Instead of just emulating something that I like in the game, I somehow managed to get straight to the source of it. And that was a really nice experience.”

For Rother, Children of the Sun has been a lesson in trusting his gut. He hasn’t found the proper word in English or German to describe the atmosphere he created in the game, but it’s something close to melancholy, spiked with an intense coiled energy and bright, psychedelic clarity. He just knows that it feels right — visuals, music, mechanics and all.

“That's kind of how I live my life,” Rother said. “Not that I'm, like, super spontaneous or just flip-flopping around with opinions or these kinds of things. It's more about doing things that feel right to me without necessarily knowing why.”

When he booted up that Quake III demo disc and started making 3D vignettes for game jams, Rother didn’t realize he was building the path that would eventually lead him to a major publishing deal, a collaboration with a musician he admires, a big Steam release and a game about cult sniping called Children of the Sun. When Rother takes a moment to survey his current lot in life, he feels lucky, he said.

René Rother

“I feel like in the last three years, somehow, lots of things fell into my lap,” Rother said. “Although I still had to do something for it. I needed to be prepared for this moment, that required work.… But in the time where I prepared myself, I was not aware that I was preparing myself. So that's how the feeling of luck gets amplified a bit more.”

“Luck” is one way to describe it, but “artistic instinct” might be just as fitting. Children of the Sun is available now on Steam for $15.

Children of the Sun burst onto the indie scene like a muzzle flash on a dark night. Publisher Devolver Digital dropped the game’s first trailer on February 1, showcasing frenzied sniper shots and a radioactive art style. A Steam demo highlighting its initial seven stages went live that same day and became a breakout hit during February’s Steam Next Fest. Two months later it landed in full and to broad acclaim. This explosive reveal and rapid release timeline mirrors the game itself — chaotic but contained, swift and direct, sharp and bright.

Though it feels like Children of the Sun popped into existence over the span of two months, it took solo developer René Rother more than 20 years to get here.

René Rother

As a kid in Berlin in the early 2000s, Rother was fascinated by the booming mod community. He spent his time messing around with free Counter-Strike mapping tools and Quake III mods from the demo discs tucked into his PC magazines. Rother daydreamed about having a job in game development, but it never felt like an attainable goal.

“It just didn't seem possible to make games,” he told Engadget. “It's like it was this huge black box.”

Rother couldn’t see an easy entry point until the 2010s, when mesh libraries and tools like GameMaker and Unity became more accessible. He discovered a fondness for creating 3D interactive art. But aside from some free online Javascript courses, he didn’t know how to program anything, so his output was limited.

“I dabbled into it a little bit, but then got kicked out. Again,” Rother said. “It was just like the whole entrance barrier was so big.”

René Rother

Rother pursued graphic design at university and he found the first two years fulfilling, with a focus on classical art training. By the end of his schooling, though, the lessons covered practical applications like working with clients, and Rother’s vision of a graphic design career smashed into reality.

“There was an eye-opening moment where I felt like, this is not for me,” Rother said.

In between classes, Rother was still making games for himself and for jams like Ludum Dare, steadily building up his skillset and cementing his reputation in these spaces as a master of mood.

“Atmospheric kind of pieces, walking simulators,” Rother said, recalling his early projects. “Atmosphere was very interesting to me to explore. But I never thought that it was actually something that could turn into a game. I never thought that it would become something that can be sold in a way that it's actually a product.”

René Rother

By the late 2010s Rother decided he was officially over graphic design and ready to try a job in game development. He applied to a bunch of studios and, in the meantime, picked up odd jobs at a supermarket and as a stagehand, setting up electronics. He eventually secured a gig as a 3D artist at a small studio in Berlin. Meanwhile, his pile of game jam projects and unfinished prototypes continued to grow.

“In that timeframe, Children of the Sun happened,” Rother said.

In Children of the Sun, players are The Girl, a woman who escaped the cult that raised her and is now enacting sniper-based revenge on all of its cells, one bullet at a time. In each round, players line up their shot and then control a single bullet as it ricochets through individual cult members. The challenge lies in finding the most speedy, efficient and stylish path of death, earning a spot at the top of the leaderboards.

“It was just a random prototype I started working on,” Rother said. “And one Saturday morning I was thinking, ‘I don't know what I'm doing with my life.'” With an atmospheric prototype and a head full of ennui, Rother emailed Devolver Digital that same day about potentially publishing Children of the Sun.

“The response was basically, ‘The pitch was shit but the game looks cool,’” Rother said. “And then it became a thing.”

René Rother

Visually, Children of the Sun is dazzling. It has a sketchy 3D art style that’s covered in bruise tones, with dark treelines, glowing yellow enemies and layers of texture. Every scene looks like The Girl just took a hit of adrenaline and her senses are on high alert, lending a hectic sense of hyper-vigilance to the entire experience. It’s a game built on instinct.

“I didn't make any mood boards,” Rother said. “I didn't prepare [for] it. It was just like, oh, let's make it this color. Ah, let's make it this color…. This is something to very easily get lost in. I spent a lot of time just adjusting the color of grass so it works well with the otherwise purplish tones and these kinds of things. I spent way too much time on the colors.”

Children of the Sun went through multiple visual iterations where Rother played with contrast, depth, fog density and traditional FPS color palettes, before landing on the game’s dreamlike and neon-drenched final form. The residue of this trial and error is still visible beneath Children of the Sun’s frames, and that’s exactly how Rother likes it.

“I see it as a big compliment, actually,” he said. “In paintings, when we talk about visual art, I really like when you can see the brushstrokes. I like when you can still see the lines of the pencil before the painting got made. I like the roughness. I wanted everything to be rough. I didn't want it to be polished.”

Rother picked up the game’s soundtrack collaborator, experimental ambient composer Aidan Baker, the same way he hooked up with Devolver. Rother was a fan of Baker and his band Nadja, and he wanted a similar droning, slowcore vibe as a backdrop for Children of the Sun. On a whim, Rother sent Baker a casual message asking if he’d like to make music for a video game.

“He was like, ‘Well I've never done it, so I don't know,’” Rother remembered. “So we met one evening and then afterwards he was like, ‘Yeah, let's just do it.’ Instead of just emulating something that I like in the game, I somehow managed to get straight to the source of it. And that was a really nice experience.”

For Rother, Children of the Sun has been a lesson in trusting his gut. He hasn’t found the proper word in English or German to describe the atmosphere he created in the game, but it’s something close to melancholy, spiked with an intense coiled energy and bright, psychedelic clarity. He just knows that it feels right — visuals, music, mechanics and all.

“That's kind of how I live my life,” Rother said. “Not that I'm, like, super spontaneous or just flip-flopping around with opinions or these kinds of things. It's more about doing things that feel right to me without necessarily knowing why.”

When he booted up that Quake III demo disc and started making 3D vignettes for game jams, Rother didn’t realize he was building the path that would eventually lead him to a major publishing deal, a collaboration with a musician he admires, a big Steam release and a game about cult sniping called Children of the Sun. When Rother takes a moment to survey his current lot in life, he feels lucky, he said.

René Rother

“I feel like in the last three years, somehow, lots of things fell into my lap,” Rother said. “Although I still had to do something for it. I needed to be prepared for this moment, that required work.… But in the time where I prepared myself, I was not aware that I was preparing myself. So that's how the feeling of luck gets amplified a bit more.”

“Luck” is one way to describe it, but “artistic instinct” might be just as fitting. Children of the Sun is available now on Steam for $15.

Panic is celebrating Playdate's second birthday this month, and the party favors include some piping-hot statistics about Catalog game sales.

Playdate hit the market in April 2022 with 24 free games. Its Catalog store went live in March 2023, offering 16 curated games for purchase directly on the device. Panic has added more titles to Catalog on a bi-weekly basis for the past year, and the marketplace today has 181 games and apps. More than 150,000 games have been sold on Catalog, giving developers $544,290 in gross revenue — that's after taxes, processing fees and Panic’s 25 percent cut. 

Panic

The average price of a Playdate Catalog game is $5.36. The average install size is 5.03MB, while the smallest Catalog game is 30.1KB and the largest is 107MB. Playdate ships with 4GB of flash storage. It also has 16GB of RAM, an accelerometer, a 400 x 240 1-bit display, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth capabilities, a mono speaker, and a condenser mic and stereo headphone jack. Oh, and it has a delightful little crank.

The figures Panic shared today cover Catalog purchases, which means they only tell part of the story. While Catalog has just under 200 titles, there are more than 800 Playdate games and apps available on itch.io alone, and the community there is active and vibrant. As I described in our Playdate retrospective published last week, browsing the device's itch.io page feels like "hanging out in a friendly underground clubhouse populated by crank-obsessed video game freaks." But, like, in a great way.

Playdate supports games from new and veteran developers, and some of its most notable titles include Mars After Midnight by Lucas Pope, Crankin’s Time Travel Adventure from Keita Takahashi’s studio uvula and Zipper by Bennett Foddy. Some of my personal favorites include Root Bear, Spellcorked, Word Trip, Chopter Copter and Pocket Pets.

This is the first time Panic has publicly shared data about Playdate game sales or its revenue-share model. The 25 percent cut that Panic takes is less than the standard set by Steam, which gets 30 percent of most game sales, but it's more than split on the Epic Games Store, which reserves 12 percent for Epic.

Playdate costs $199 and there's an optional teal cover available for $30. Panic has also been teasing the Stereo Dock — an adorable Playdate charging station, Bluetooth speaker and pen holder — for more than two years, but the accessory is still "coming soon." There's no word on a price or release window for the Stereo Dock, but Playdate Project Lead Greg Maletic recently told Engadget to expect an update in the coming months.

"We apologize to everyone with a Playdate who has been waiting patiently for the Stereo Dock; it’s been a trickier project than we anticipated and we had a few false starts," Maletic said. "We thought we'd save some time on that project by having our factory do the software for the Stereo Dock, but we've learned that you don't always necessarily want that in some cases. The Stereo Dock is very much alive, we have the physical prototypes to prove it! We expect to have a formal update on when you can buy one later this year."

Panic

More than 70,000 Playdates have been sold in the past two years and a little more than half of all owners have purchased a Catalog game, according to Panic.

Game design is a daring and dangerous endeavor for Niklas Åkerblad, who creates under the name El Huervo. When he describes the artistic process behind ULTROS, a neon-speckled platformer set in a demonic cosmic uterus, he talks about pushing against the sharp edges of introspection and sanity, drawing from wells of creativity buried deep in his psyche. It sounds like he could’ve slipped and fallen down any of those wells at any second, never to be seen again.

“I had a pretty rigorous discipline when it came to creating the world of ULTROS,” Åkerblad told Engadget. “It involves deep meditation while working and maintaining 100 percent focus to be able to know when harmony is achieved when working with such a dense flow of shapes and colors. It is almost impossible to cerebrally analyze this process, but it is rather something you have to feel, thus any external disturbance can greatly impact the process. It is perhaps not something I recommend others do without proper experience in creating visual art.”

Niklas Åkerblad

At the same time, Åkerblad is extremely practical about the business of making games. He’s been in the independent scene for years, and he’s enjoyed incredible success as the collaborator who provided the cover art and other assets for Hotline Miami and its sequel. You know the vibe — grizzled but radiant, with the threat of violence in every other pixel. He also composed a handful of songs for those games, including “Daisuke” and “Rust,” and he went on to develop else Heart.Break(), a 3D adventure set in a digital city of hackers, artists and activists that implemented programming as a core mechanic. Else Heart.Break() came out in 2015 and was a finalist at the Independent Games Festival that year.

His latest project, ULTROS, is a 2D exploration of The Sarcophagus, a looping world in a black hole that cycles players through environments overrun by alien plant life and vicious demons. Every scene in ULTROS is packed with detail and brilliant color; the backgrounds are alive with monsters and organic machines. Streaks of black delineate the boundaries of walking paths, ceilings and platforms, contrasted against shifting rainbows of luminosity.

Hadoque

There’s a lot going on in ULTROS at any given moment, but the protagonist stands out with a glowing green helmet, vermilion cloak and an evolving arsenal of platforming gadgets. One lesson from else heartbreak() that Åkerblad fed into ULTROS was the idea that games can have way more fun with color palettes. ULTROS is purposefully packed with visual interest.

“I felt video games tend to not push the boundaries of colors so much beyond ‘green is good’ and ‘red is bad,’ and whatever metrics are used for loot tiers,” he said. “I feel that there is this misunderstanding in design that less is more, and my gut tells me it's the opposite and I worked very hard on ULTROS to prove my theory. Undoubtedly there will be those who do not agree with me, but I feel it has more to do with taste and personal or physical preferences than academic truth — if there is such a thing.”

As a cyclical Metroidvania title, ULTROS is completely different from Åkerblad’s previous projects, but it’s also undeniably El Huervo. Actually, in this case, it’s Hadoque — around 2017, Åkerblad and game director Mårten Bruggemann started building the prototype that would become ULTROS, eventually bringing in composer Oscar “Ratvader” Rydelius and Fe designer Hugo Bille. Other artists joined over the years, and they ended up calling themselves Hadoque, a loose organization of creators who could float in and out as a project called to them.

Hadoque

“We wanted our group to be associated with its own thing, so we decided on Hadoque,” Åkerblad said. “It's a cool name that looks a bit weird and it suits our vibe. Also, it allowed everyone to still have their own thing on the side and not be legally tied to anything if they wished to pursue other venues.”

El Huervo AB remains Åkerblad’s own corporate entity, useful for dealing with the bureaucratic aspects of making video games. Through El Huervo AB, Hadoque received backing in 2019 from the gaming fund Kowloon Nights, which has also supported titles like Sifu, Rollerdrome, We Are OFK, Sea of Stars, Spiritfarer and Tchia.

“El Huervo AB merely functions as a sort of bureaucratic condom, and Hadoque as a name to be used when a group of developers come together to make art as games,” Åkerblad said. “Sort of like a band name. People come and go, but the vision remains.”

ULTROS is a game about life, rebirth, aliens, monsters and peace, and it all plays out in a technicolor dreamscape of vicious creatures and gorgeous foliage. This is the palette of surreal sci-fi, to Åkerblad.

Hadoque

“The themes explored in ULTROS are of an existential and spiritual nature, and I find that surreal sci-fi is a good genre to explore these themes in, as it has a long tradition of doing so,” he said. “In this regard, Ursula K. Le Guin has been a huge inspiration. Hopefully, what we manage to evoke in players is a sense of introspection and comfort.”

Despite the amount of deep thought that he’s done about the nature of art, sci-fi and play, there’s no singular message that Åkerblad is trying to convey with ULTROS. Instead, he and the rest of the developers at Hadoque encourage players to identify their own journey as they cycle through The Sarcophagus. As Åkerblad put it:

“Please enjoy ULTROS any way you want and don't try to look for a ‘true’ interpretation, but rather find your own meaning. This goes for any art, I think, in general. Interpretation is purely subjective and I want to keep telling stories that invoke and allow this subjectivity to exist.”

ULTROS is available now on PlayStation 4, PS5, Steam and the Epic Games Store, published by Kepler Interactive.

For Engadget’s 20th anniversary, we put together a package of stories about the most pivotal pieces of technology from the past two decades, and mine was on Steam. It’s difficult to overstate how influential Steam is to PC gaming, or how rich the storefront has made Valve. As a private company with infinite piles of Steam cash, Valve has the freedom to ignore market pressure from consumers, creators and competitors. It famously has a flat hierarchy with no strict management structure, and developers are encouraged to follow their hearts.

This has all resulted in an incredibly rich studio that doesn’t produce much. It may be a tired joke that Valve can’t count to three in its games, but we’re not talking about Half-Life today. We’re talking about Valve’s history of buying exciting franchises and talented developers, playing with them for a while, and then forgetting they exist. Real fuckboi behavior — but it’s just how Valve does business.

Let’s take a look at Valve’s history of talent acquisition. One of its oldest franchises, Team Fortress, started as a Quake mod built by a small team in Australia, and Valve bought its developers and the rights to the game in 1998. Team Fortress 2 came out in 2007 and it received a few good years of updates and support. Today, the game has a devoted player base, but it’s riddled with bots and it’s unclear whether anyone at Valve is consistently working on TF2.

Portal began life as a student project called Narbacular Drop, and Valve hired its developers after seeing their demo in 2005. Portal officially came out in 2007, Portal 2 landed in 2011, and both were instant classics. There hasn’t been a whiff of another Portal game since, even though one of the series writers, Erik Wolpaw, really, really wants Valve to make Portal 3.

Of all the Valve franchises that have been left to wither and die, I miss Left 4 Dead the most. Turtle Rock started building Left 4 Dead in 2005, and by the time that came out in 2008, Valve had purchased the studio and its IP outright. Citing slow progress and poor communication, Turtle Rock left Valve before helping the company make Left 4 Dead 2 in 2009. Turtle Rock went on to release Evolve in 2015 and Black 4 Blood in 2021, and is now owned by Tencent. Meanwhile, I’m here, dreaming of that third Left 4 Dead game.

In 2010, Valve secured the rights to the Warcraft III mod Defense of the Ancients, and hired its lead developer. Dota 2 came out in 2013 and became an incredibly successful esports title. Now, eleven years later, Dota 2 players are complaining about a lack of support and communication from Valve, especially in comparison with games like League of Legends.

Counter-Strike has received the most attention from Valve in recent memory, with the rollout of Counter-Strike 2 late last year. The original Counter-Strike was a Half-Life mod, and Valve acquired it and its developers in 2000. Counter-Strike 2 is the fifth installment in the series, released 11 years after its predecessor, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive. After this recent attention, it’s about time for Valve to start ignoring the Counter-Strike community again.

Valve has quietly continued to make acquisitions. In 2018, Valve hired all 12 developers at Firewatch studio Campo Santo, who were at the time working on a very-rad-looking new game, In the Valley of Gods. This could turn out to be another spectacular, genre-defining franchise for Valve’s resume of acquired IP, but there have been no updates from that team in nearly six years. In April 2018, Campo Santo said they were still building In the Valley of Gods at Valve, and promised regular blog posts and quarterly reviews. And then, nothing.

Matt Wood worked at Valve for 17 years, where he helped build Left 4 Dead, Left 4 Dead 2, Portal 2, CS:GO and both episodes of Half-Life 2. He left in 2019 and is now preparing to release his first independent game, Little Kitty, Big City. Wood told me in 2023 that Valve was “sitting on their laurels a little bit, and it’s like they weren’t really challenging themselves, taking risks or doing anything. Steam’s making a lot of money so they don’t really have to.”

Of course, Little Kitty, Big City is coming to Steam.

Steam’s unwavering success has helped turn Valve into a senior resort community for computer science nerds, where game developers go to live out their final years surrounded by fantastic amenities, tinkering and unsupervised. It’s a lovely scenario. At least developers there aren’t getting laid off — and I mean that sincerely. Steam is a great service, and Valve seems at least temporarily committed to the Steam Deck hardware, which is very cool. Still, I miss the games that Valve devoured. I have to wonder if the developers there do, too.

Valve’s treatment of legendary franchises and developers raises questions about its commitment to… anything, including Steam. What happens if Valve decides to pivot, or sell, or Gabe Newell retires and blows everything up? What would happen if Steam shut down? As a service with native DRM, all of our games would instantly disappear. Just like all those game devs.

This week's news

Playdate update

Playdate is one of my favorite gaming gadgets of the past decade, not only because it has an incredibly cute crank, but also because its low-res screen belies a buffet of strange and beautiful experiences pushing the boundaries of traditional play. Panic held a showcase for new Playdate games last week and the headliner was Lucas Pope’s Mars After Midnight, which is coming out on March 12. Pope is the developer of Papers, Please and Return of the Obra Dinn, two incredible games, and Mars After Midnight is set in the doorway of a crowded alien colony. Pope’s games were made for Playdate, this time literally.

Yuzu and Citra are gone

A week after Nintendo threatened to sue the creators of Yuzu into oblivion, the popular Switch emulator has been pulled off the market as part of a $2.4 million settlement. To make matters worse for the emulation community, the lead developer of Yuzu announced that they are also killing the 3DS emulator Citra. Both emulators were open-source, so it’s likely we’ll see Citra at least maintained by the broader community. It’s not clear whether anyone is willing to take on a fork of Yuzu and risk a lawsuit.

Bonus Content

• Ghost of Tsushima will hit PC on May 16. It comes with all of its DLCs, and Sony says it’ll run on anything from high-end PCs to portable PC gaming devices.

• Capcom's Kunitsu-Gami: Path of the Goddess is apparently coming out this year on PC, PlayStation and Xbox. It debuted at Summer Game Fest and looks pretty unique.

• Hades hits iOS as a Netflix mobile exclusive on March 19. There are currently no plans for an Android version, which sucks for me.

Now Playing

I found This Bed We Made while doing research for the GLAAD Gaming report I covered a few weeks ago, and I’m incredibly pleased about it. This Bed We Made is an exploration and narrative-driven game set in a 1950s hotel, and it’s absolutely oozing drama and mystery. The writing is fantastic, the characters are complex, and there’s a thrilling storyline running through the whole thing. It’s available on PC and consoles now.

Let's all take a breath. Layoffs are still churning in the video game industry, even as the frigid winter air is beginning to thaw. Amid the turmoil of these past few months, there are still things to be excited about: new games and hardware, the evolution of established franchises, and plenty of small teams building surprises to shake up the status quo. Look at all of the rad things happening over at Playdate for just one example of positive momentum in video games (we'll talk more about this next week).

Breathe in, breathe out.

Now, let's dive back into the news cycle:

This week's stories

PlayStation layoffs

The layoffs crisis in video games isn’t slowing down, and the latest company to announce drastic staffing cuts is PlayStation. Sony on Tuesday fired roughly 900 people from its PlayStation division and fully shut down its London Studio, which had been building a co-op multiplayer game for PS5. Insomniac, Naughty Dog and Guerrilla all lost employees, despite being behind some of the platform’s most successful games in recent memory. First-party studio Firesprite was also hit by the layoffs, and it reportedly had to cancel a live-service Twisted Metal project. It’s barely March, but already more than 7,000 video game workers have been laid off in 2024; last year, more than 9,000 people in the industry lost their jobs to layoffs.

Happy Pokémon Day!

February 27 was Pokémon Day, and in celebration, Nintendo revealed two new games: Pokémon Legends Z-A and Pokémon Trading Card Game Pocket. Pokémon Legends Z-A is set in Lumiose City, which you might remember from Pokémon X and Y on the 3DS, and it looks like it features Mega Evolutions. Pokémon Legends Z-A is due to hit Switch in 2025. The other title, Pokémon Trading Card Game Pocket, is a mobile game that should land on Android and iOS devices by the end of the year. It’s exactly what it sounds like — Nintendo is putting the physical card-opening mechanic inside your phone, complete with flashy animations and addictive sound effects when you rip off the digital packaging. You’ll also be able to engage in quick battles. Nintendo has clarified that Pocket will not have NFTs, but it is described as “free to start,” so expect microtransactions.

Random PR roundup

It’s been a strange and slow week here in Engadget video game land, so I thought we’d have some fun this episode. As tech reporters, we receive ridiculous emails from startups and PR agencies literally every day, and even though we don’t end up covering many of the proposed products, some of the messages themselves deserve a moment in the spotlight. Many of the pitches we get are just silly or tone deaf, but some of them are outright dystopian. And honestly, I thought you all might enjoy seeing some of the weirdness that hits our inboxes.

This is all meant in good fun — I appreciate the communications teams who are just trying to sell their stuff in creative ways. The real enemy here, as always, is capitalism.

So, here are some emails that recently found their way into my inbox and made me go wut:

GameScent - New Groundbreaking Device Enhances Player Immersion by Releasing Gameplay Corresponding Scents

“As players dive into a game, GameScent’s patent-pending adaptor captures audio in real-time. These real-time audio cues are processed by GameScent's innovative AI to release scents that correspond with the on-screen action. Inhale the smoky aroma of battle, the exhilarating scent of speeding race cars, the calming fragrance of a forest, or the fresh smell of rain after a storm.”

Unsurprisingly, this little doodad comes with replaceable scent cartridges, though it's unclear how to actually buy those at the moment. Scents include gunfire, explosion, racing cars, blood, sports arena and other brotastic flavors.

Is this... cool? There's definitely a fun idea here about the future of immersion, right? Or I've completely lost the plot. Either could be true.

Seeking Products for Pickleball Stories? (Samples Available)

Ma'am, this is Engadget.

Deconstructeam Delivers a Valentine's Day Surprise of Cosmic Proportions

This was for the game The Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood, and the surprise was a huge dildo. I thought the whole email was cute, actually — it was tasteful and coyly advertised a giveaway in partnership with a well-known adult toy company. The Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood is a sexy game and it stars a muscular behemoth the size of a planet, so it all made sense. It just didn’t fit in our general news feed, ya know?

(Story Idea:) Here’s Doom Running On A Robotic Lawn Mower: Yes, A Robotic Lawn Mower! (You Have To See It To Believe It!) (Video Included)

"I am reaching out with a great story that is sure to go viral… This spring, Husqvarna will make the iconic 1993 video game DOOM, available to play on the company’s robotic lawn mowers."

I find this email charming because it’s just a traditional, infomercial-style email with lots of unnecessary exclamation points and parenthesis. I respect it. But seriously, are we still doing this Doom thing? Next you’ll be asking me if this lawn mower can run Crysis and making jokes about Leeroy Jenkins, and I’m just here in 2024, begging for some new references.

The best part of this one is the fact that, after I added it to my list of silly emails, we actually hit this as news on Engadget dot com. Who's the joke now? (It's me).

Meet My Regina | PC Preview – Dickhead-Destroying Extravaganza Cookie Cutter

“I’ve got something to show you, Jessica.

She’s one of the most incredible things I’ve ever held between my legs.

She’s small but tough and can take a beating.

And everyone knows she’s smart because she has a British accent.

She’ll giggle if you tickle her just right.

And she even glows in the dark!

Are you ready to meet her?

Well, are you?

Don’t be shy now.

Good. Well, here she is!”

I asked to be removed from this list.

Bonus Content

• In more layoffs news, Until Dawn studio Supermassive Games fired about a third of its workforce, or roughly 90 employees, and the team is reorganizing. Also, indie studio Die Gut Fabrik, which created Sportsfriends, Johann Sebastian Joust and Saltsea Chronicles, has halted production amid funding issues and developers there are looking for other jobs.

• Nintendo is suing Yuzu, a popular and long-running emulator that allows players to put their Switch games on other platforms. Nintendo argues that the app is "facilitating piracy at a colossal scale,” and says it illegally circumvents DMCA protections. Nintendo wants Yuzu shut down and the company is seeking damages.

• Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth finally comes out on February 29 and our review from Mat Smith is live now. He’s a really big Final Fantasy nerd, and he really liked Rebirth.

Now Playing

Home Safety Hotline is the perfect game to play at your desk, on the PC, so you can let the mid-90s computer interface fully engulf your senses. In this game, you take calls from people complaining about pests and paranormal creatures invading their homes, and using a detailed reference guide, you identify what’s going on and help them sort it out. Or, you get it wrong and get fired while a family of three screams for their lives on the other end of the line. There’s also a broader meta-horror unfurling in the background, and I’m having a lovely, spooky time sorting through all of it. Home Safety Hotline is out now on Steam.