Lost Records: Bloom & Rage, the long-awaited next game from the team behind the original Life is Strange, will arrive in two parts.

The first installment launches for PC, PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S on 18th February 2025, with its concluding slice then a month later on 18th March.

Tonight also brings an initial look at gameplay from Don't Nod's latest teen adventure, which has a dual timeline split between 1995 and 2022, when its young protagonists are now adults - and dealing with the consequences of their/your actions.

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Just when Geoff Keighley had started to fade from your memory, he comes rubber-banding back with a vengeance - snap! It's Gamescom week and it kicks off with Opening Night Live this evening from 7pm UK time (other Opening Night Live timings here). A pre-show with additional announcements will begin at 6.30pm UK. We'll be watching and reporting on it live, as always, right here, so you can either keep abreast of announcements while you do something else, or you can join in with your thoughtful and amusing comments. Please keep us company. Please.

What do we expect to see today? Well, probably Geoff Keighley, but also the new Indiana Jones game, Monster Hunter Wilds, and Dune Awakening. We're also expecting Little Nightmares creator Tarsier to unveil its new project, which could be exciting. On top of that: Diablo 4 expansion Vessel of Hatred, Civilization 7, hero shooter Marvel Rivals, Lost Records (the project made by the creators of Life is Strange), Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 (which was recently delayed), and Black Ops 6. Keighley's best pal Hideo Kojima has also been tweeting enigmatic silhouetted pictures of actors who are presumably playing roles in Death Stranding 2.

And before you ask, "Yes, there will be new game announcements," Keighley said on X.

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It was Digital Foundry's John Linneman who first made me see the truth. The truth, in this case, being that Crackdown, the deliriously great open-world blaster, is not a platform game so much as it's a climbing game. Crackdown casts you as a supercop in a city in which you can race up skyscrapers as easily as if you're tooling down the street in a sportscar. Crackdown is all about the window-ledge grip, followed by the boost, followed by the grip and so on until you hit the troposphere. When you scan the side of a building in Crackdown's Pacific City, you're not really looking for platforms, but handholds.

Funny it should take me so long to realise this. I've always been a fan of climbing - not doing it, although I have dabbled, skill-lessly, in my youth, but following it, reading about it, dreaming about it. I have friends who are climbers and I am always full of questions. I've read the complete works of people like Alex Honnold and Chris Bonington. Bonington was my mum's childhood - and adulthood - hero, incidentally. I'm named after him, and on my desk at home I have a postcard of him as a young man, wearing a dark, surprisingly formal jacket, up somewhere high, and with a thick cord of ropes over his shoulder. It's a picture of pure adventure. What a disappointment to him I must be.

At that desk, though, I do quite a bit of climbing. I climbed through Crackdown, without realising it, and recently I climbed through Jusant. With the release of a new climbing game this week, I've been thinking about how it all fits together. Climbing feels, of all activities, uniquely physical to me, because it's about rock and about hands and about clasping. It's about connections, points of contact, cleaving to a part of the natural world and holding on tight. How do games do that?

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It was Digital Foundry's John Linneman who first made me see the truth. The truth, in this case, being that Crackdown, the deliriously great open-world blaster, is not a platform game so much as it's a climbing game. Crackdown casts you as a supercop in a city in which you can race up skyscrapers as easily as if you're tooling down the street in a sportscar. Crackdown is all about the window-ledge grip, followed by the boost, followed by the grip and so on until you hit the troposphere. When you scan the side of a building in Crackdown's Pacific City, you're not really looking for platforms, but handholds.

Funny it should take me so long to realise this. I've always been a fan of climbing - not doing it, although I have dabbled, skill-lessly, in my youth, but following it, reading about it, dreaming about it. I have friends who are climbers and I am always full of questions. I've read the complete works of people like Alex Honnold and Chris Bonington. Bonington was my mum's childhood - and adulthood - hero, incidentally. I'm named after him, and on my desk at home I have a postcard of him as a young man, wearing a dark, surprisingly formal jacket, up somewhere high, and with a thick cord of ropes over his shoulder. It's a picture of pure adventure. What a disappointment to him I must be.

At that desk, though, I do quite a bit of climbing. I climbed through Crackdown, without realising it, and recently I climbed through Jusant. With the release of a new climbing game this week, I've been thinking about how it all fits together. Climbing feels, of all activities, uniquely physical to me, because it's about rock and about hands and about clasping. It's about connections, points of contact, cleaving to a part of the natural world and holding on tight. How do games do that?

Read more

It was Digital Foundry's John Linneman who first made me see the truth. The truth, in this case, being that Crackdown, the deliriously great open-world blaster, is not a platform game so much as it's a climbing game. Crackdown casts you as a supercop in a city in which you can race up skyscrapers as easily as if you're tooling down the street in a sportscar. Crackdown is all about the window-ledge grip, followed by the boost, followed by the grip and so on until you hit the troposphere. When you scan the side of a building in Crackdown's Pacific City, you're not really looking for platforms, but handholds.

Funny it should take me so long to realise this. I've always been a fan of climbing - not doing it, although I have dabbled, skill-lessly, in my youth, but following it, reading about it, dreaming about it. I have friends who are climbers and I am always full of questions. I've read the complete works of people like Alex Honnold and Chris Bonington. Bonington was my mum's childhood - and adulthood - hero, incidentally. I'm named after him, and on my desk at home I have a postcard of him as a young man, wearing a dark, surprisingly formal jacket, up somewhere high, and with a thick cord of ropes over his shoulder. It's a picture of pure adventure. What a disappointment to him I must be.

At that desk, though, I do quite a bit of climbing. I climbed through Crackdown, without realising it, and recently I climbed through Jusant. With the release of a new climbing game this week, I've been thinking about how it all fits together. Climbing feels, of all activities, uniquely physical to me, because it's about rock and about hands and about clasping. It's about connections, points of contact, cleaving to a part of the natural world and holding on tight. How do games do that?

Read more

It's been a good while since we first laid eyes on Lost Records: Bloom & Rage, the new narrative adventure from developer Don't Nod's Life is Strange 1 & 2 team, but the studio has now given us another tantilising peek at its slightly mysterious hazy summer action in a new trailer.

Bloom & Rage - described as the first game in Don't Nod's new "Lost Recordsuniverse" - is intriguingly split across two timelines, with part of its story unfolding in 1995, as high school friends Swann, Nora, Autumn, and Kat embark on a "magical summer" of self-discovery.

But Lost Records is also set some 27 years later, when, after decades without contact, the group is reunited "to confront the long-buried secret that made them promise to never speak again."

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The developers behind the Life is Strange remaster, spin-offs Before the Storm and True Colors, and The Expanse: A Telltale Series, Deck Nine, have laid off 20% of the studio’s staff due to “the game industry’s worsening market conditions”. The latest job losses are the second wave of layoffs at the company in the last 12 months.

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A report by the French video game workers union has raised concerns from staff at Life is Strange and Vampyr developer Don't Nod.

Headquarted in Paris, the company released action role-player Banishers: Ghosts of Eden this week, following last year's well-received Jusant and Harmony: The Fall of Reverie.

Now, a report by French union Le Syndicat des Travailleurs et Travailleuses du Jeu Vidéo (STJV) has alleged that staff at Don't Nod are subject to mismanagement by the company due to the need to balance multiple projects with "frequently" changing deadlines, "contradictory" directions and "no long-term vision" for staff welfare.

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Commitment can be scarier than any ghost story. When I got married, I spent a lot of time leading up to the wedding borrowing grief from my future self. The prospect of 'til death do we part' brought forward the stark idea that one day one of us would have to say goodbye to the other. I was suddenly and unexpectedly wracked with anxiety about the mortality of my loved ones, and playing Banishers: Ghosts of New Eden reminded me of this uncomfortable feeling. Antea and Red have each other, to hold and confide in and joke with – but Antea is a ghost, and they have to get ready to say goodbye. That's the commitment they make to each other.

Banishers: Ghosts of New Eden sees Red and Antea, ghost hunters and life partners, called to settle a curse that's fallen on the early Massachusetts settler colony of New Eden. The tight-knit, suspicious puritan community aren't all convinced that the pair can help, seeing their arrival as too little too late – or insufficiently godly – after the loss of their community pillar to the ghost at the centre of the curse.

New Eden Town introduces you to life as a banisher: fighting violent spectres that have forgotten who they were, convincing benevolent ghosts to leave people to grieve in peace, and snooping in people's belongings to get better answers to your questions. When the pair inadvertently walk into a trap, the townspeople's suspicions are proved correct – Antea is killed, and the survivors scatter. To help her peacefully pass on, it will be a long journey to loosen the curse's hold on the area to retrieve her body – and there's the unthinkable option of taking that same journey to instead resurrect her, going against everything they believe as banishers. Death to the dead, and life to the living.

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"Banishers took a while to kick in," I wrote in the RPS group chat last week, "but I fought a monster made of angry witch-hunting jam last night." It was a pivotal boss fight about half way through Don't Nod's ghost hunting action-adventure RPG Banishers: Ghosts Of New Eden, and typical of the over-the-top, slightly ridiculous, but entirely earnest drama of the game that joyfully pulls you along. Don't Nod - who I am starting to suspect make their magic teen angsthologies to fund their real passion for "grimdark grown-up fantasy that you sort of suspect should be a book series" - have followed up 2018's third-person action effort Vampyr with this new semi-epic.

Banishers has a lot in common with the interwar bloodsucker, including methodical investigations and stacking moral choices, but is a much more accomplished effort. Banishers combines a sweeping, tragic love story with some very decent swashbuckling, shooting possessed skeletons in the face, and being disappointed at Puritans. A perfect game, some may say. I'd elevator-pitch it to you as a sort of goth Uncharted where you find-and-replace "treasure" with "ghosts".

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