Konami Digital Entertainment Inc. has announced today that its popular game eFootball be hosting a major Manchester United-focused competitive campaign. Players around the world will have the chance to compete in order to become the official Manchester United representative in the eFootball Championship 2026.
For interested fans, the online qualifiers for the event are now live for the in-game Club Event “eFootball Championship 2026 Manchester United.” Participating in the event will give players the chance to represent the Red Devils on the global esports stage, which in turn determines the official Manchester United representative for the eFootball Championship 2026.
KONAMI says that in the previous season, 36.3 million players competed in Club Events, with the journey starting all over again this year. All players need to do to have a chance is download eFootball for free and enter the “Match” hub to potentially start your future eFootball legacy.
Two tournaments are slated for fans to compete in: the ’eFootballChampionship 2026 Open’ and the ‘eFootballChampionship 2026 Club Event.’ The former is for all users, and the latter is used to determine each eFootball partnered club’s number one fan. If you manage to succeed in these events, you will be able to compete for the title of ‘World’s Best eFootball player’ at the ‘eFootballChampionship 2026 World Finals’ expected for the summer of 2026.
Surpassing 950 million downloads, the game’s reach has been cemented since its days before its rebranding as PES. In celebration of that fact and to support the current campaign, eFootball has added the Manchester United Club Pack featuring the club’s starting XI, as well as legendary players from the club’s past. Big Time player George Best has been added, along with Epic’s Peter Schmeichel and Bryan Robson.
Spotify Camp Nou in the process of its renovation.
Players can also enjoy a fresh stadium, FC Barcelona’s newly renovated home, Spotify Camp Nou. The stadium is so far only available for mobile players, but PC and console players will soon be able to play a match in the Barcelona icon in a coming update. Using the new stadium, players can experience more of what the game has to offer by participating in the campaign, where daily log-ins and progressing through in-game events can unlock special goal effects and tickets offering the chance to win up to 1,000 in-game coins.
Compete, play, and enjoy yourself in eFootball’s newest campaign, and maybe even try to get that spot representing Manchester United.
43.8 million player votes later, the winners of the 2025 Steam Awards have been announced, with Hollow Knight: Silksong securing top prize, Game of the Year.
It's been another strange, difficult, and yet somehow also brilliant year for video games in 2025. Triple-A releases have been sparse again, compared to the boom times of old, with a great big GTA 6-shaped hole left in the final few months of the year. And yet once again, every gap left by the established order has been filled twice over with something brilliantly new.
2025 has gone by in a flash, hasn't it? Well, apart from the days I've spent tabulating all your Game of the Year votes and presenting the results here - that has felt like an eternity and I think has given me permanent neck pain. But, let's not worry about that. I'm sure you'll agree it was worth the sacrifice.
Last year, after a bit of a wait, Silent Hill was released, and with it came some changes to the series. The combat was a lot more actiony, the format for multiple endings was drastically different, but the most obvious change was its setting. We're not in Silent Hill anymore, Toto! We're in Ebisugaoka, Japan, also a fictional town, though clearly not a fictional country. And that's because Silent Hill, the place, is now also Silent Hill, the "phenomenon."
Silent Hill F is not only the first brand new survival horror game in the franchise in a long time, but also the series' first spin-off, bringing the action to new locales and situations. We leave the horrors of America for a trip to 1960s Japan. While the game presents a fresh take on the series, its gameplay feels like it's being pulled between two horrors.
Cursed All Over
The story follows Hinako, a teenage girl in a rural mountain town. One day, a fog rolls in that seems to cause everyone to disappear, and the town is now full of strange monsters out to get her. She not only needs to navigate the town with the remaining survivors, but a strange man haunts her nightmares.
The story is great, and the game avoids retreading the themes and plot of prior games in the series. Hinako is portrayed as a tomboy and someone who does not like that women are seen as nothing more than a traditional housewife to a man. This upsets her father, who views her as less than her older, married sister. The girls of the village treat her as an outsider and a freak because she doesn't act like the other girls, and because her best childhood friend is a boy. The impact of misogyny and how it can be inflicted by both men and women is on display here.
While the story may be different, you're still going to wander around seemingly normal environments, getting into fights and puzzle-solving. Silent Hill F, however, does things a bit differently with both.
Spooky Soulslike?
The combat system here feels like an attempt to mirror the more personal and methodical fighting of a Soulslike. You'll pick up weapons from the environment in the everyday world, while the nightmare world has stock weapons. The everyday weapons have durability and can break after being overused, but tool kits can be found to enact repairs. Inventory management is a big deal, as you start with limited inventory slots and will want to fill them up with the various recovery items that heal or provide other bonuses. You can find inventory upgrades that are definitely worth seeking.
Combat plays a far larger role here than in previous entries, which does distract from the exploration. Source: Author.
Sanity is a new resource that works with the advanced techniques for fighting. You have a light and heavy attack, which both drain stamina on use. By holding down the focus button, you'll consume sanity to either charge for a strong attack or attempt to counter the enemy when they flash to perform a stunning blow. Sanity can also drain if you are hit by certain attacks, and running out means you take increased damage. You can sell certain items for "faith" at the local shrines/save points that can be used to upgrade your stats and equip Omamoris that provide passive boosts.
The enemy design here is great despite the presence of just a few main types. Each one moves and behaves differently, with a lot of idle animations and weird posturing to make it hard to read them. These are not your basic mannequin monsters from the previous games, and that extends to the newly designed boss fights that are far more lively than previous ones. I'll talk about this further down, but the combat feels less about survival horror and more like a slower take on a Soulslike.
Brain Scratching Scares
For those fearing that a new Silent Hill wouldn't have fiendishly difficult puzzles, I can put those fears to rest. The puzzle design returns to the roots of the series and survival horror, as you must use knowledge both in and outside of the game if you want to solve them.
I played on the highest puzzle difficulty, and it was certainly a challenge. Some of the puzzles require you to understand logic or information without giving you the reference points or material you need, which can lead to frustration. For the very first and last puzzles, I had to look up the solutions, and even knowing it, I had no idea how the clues were supposed to reference the answer. That represents a breakdown in puzzle design – if the clues still don't make sense after you solved it, then the puzzle and/or clues weren't good to begin with.
It's like asking someone to solve a puzzle related to John and Jane's favorite colors, but the game never tells you who John and Jane are and expects you to know who the game developer's friends are as a reference. This feels like a return to the player-unfriendly puzzle design that dominated the adventure genre starting in the 80s.
The one upside is that the puzzles come paired with an excellent journal system, not only keeping track of the characters and monsters, but also providing a collection of all found hints and their relation to each puzzle. This is something I would love to see standardized among adventure games. However, this does come at a cost; there are far fewer puzzles compared to previous entries, and a greater focus on combat, which takes me to my main issues with the game.
While the game purports to be survival horror, there are a lot of action game and Soulslike design features, including unblockable grabs. Source: Author.
All the Action and Survival Horror
Combat has never been the focus of a Silent Hill game, and has functionally been a bit janky at best. This is the first game to have a fully built combat engine; however, "combat engine" and "survival horror" don't really work together.
The aforementioned Soulslike style, on paper, seems like it would work for a survival horror game – Hinako has very long wind-up and recovery animations, so every attack has to be planned out. However, you also have a dodge with I-frames and a punish attack. The game is heavily focused on stunning enemies to deliver more damage, which heavy strikes, focus strikes, and your punish can achieve, and the game is really going to make you use them.
This is by far the most combat-intensive Silent Hill game I've seen yet. The horror of being in a town beset by a curse starts to fade after your umpteenth fight as you rip apart your enemies. What I really didn't like from a horror standpoint is that the game wants you to avoid combat and gives you the option to sneak by enemies in spots...and then it locks you into arenas to fight your way out. At one point, the game practically gives you a devil trigger and asks you to rip and tear until it is done.
Regarding enemy design, I understand the subtext of featuring an enemy that is about the horror of birth in a game about a girl struggling with misogyny. That said, having an enemy that can infinitely respawn other enemies, in a required arena, in a survival horror game, starts to get annoying, not scary.
When you are in those high-action segments, you are still using the very slow, very stilted combat system. While you can upgrade your stamina and sanity, along with the help of the Omamoris, they don't suddenly make the combat faster or provide a new dynamic, such as the auto locks featured in the Callisto Protocol. Sometimes, the enemies just refuse to use any counter-able attack, and you'll need to rely on hopefully getting the stagger off, or you will be attacked easily. There are some Omamori that are really good, but they are tied to the random draw, proving the real psychological horror is gacha. The very fact that there are repeated arena fights in a Silent Hill game makes it tempting for me to give this game an F just on that alone.
Even with different endings, you're still going to be hacking and slashing through the game's combat portions. Source: Author.
Not So Final
Perhaps the biggest disappointment is that all this was designed around playing the game a minimum of 3 times, with a total of 5 endings. This is the only horror game I could think of that actually adds new challenges and puzzles on repeated playthroughs of the main quest, but it's all built on the same annoying puzzle design and repetitive combat. I do like that the world is different, leading to more information and additional content, but you must go through the entire game again to begin seeing this. The best parts of this game are when you get to wander around looking for clues and investigating, and you can do far more of that on your second playthrough and beyond.
Besides having upgraded stats to decrease the difficulty, just having more inventory space to hold and experiment with the additional items also makes things easier. An item I neglected on my first run that would have helped tremendously is the one that gives you infinite stamina for a few minutes.
However, asking the player to repeat the majority of what they just did so that the story makes sense doesn't really work in my opinion. Either the game needs to feel like a different experience, such as Madhouse mode from Resident Evil 7, offer a brand new experience like the Route A/ Route B setup in Resident Evil 2, or just let the player tear through everything they've already done to get to the new stuff.
A Loud Failure
For me, Silent Hill F fails when it comes to puzzle and combat; as a survival or action horror game, it just doesn't work. I wonder if the developers saw the success of Resident Evil 7 and its successors, and felt that the solution to bring back Silent Hill was just to add more combat and action. The story and monster designs are great, but focusing so much on combat, even to the game's difficult final boss, feels like a bit of a betrayal of the series. It's hard to be introspective and learn more about yourself and society when you're busy dodging multi-hit combos from all sides while trying to find the punish tell.
(Note: This review was written with the 1.0 version of Silent Hill F. Following the release, the game has had a balance patch that has reduced the difficulty and the amount of encounters, but I have not had a chance to replay it to see the exact changes).
Be sure to follow me on Bluesky for all my updates on design talks and random game design questions
A new trailer for Christophe Gans’ upcoming Return to Silent Hillhas hit YouTube, offering the most detailed look yet at the upcoming big screen adaptation of Silent Hill 2.
The trailer definitely isn’t short on atmosphere, with the foggy town in all its spine-chilling glory looking just as you would imagine, as protagonist James Sunderland explores its empty streets. Speaking of James, we see him interacting with Maria and encountering a number of iconic creatures from the film’s source material, notably the Lying Figures and Bubblehead Nurses. Pyramid Head is also seen lugging his massive knife along the floor, and the Lakeview Hotel appears in flames, something we didn’t actually see happen in the game.
The synopsis for Return to the Silent Hill is more or less identical to Silent Hill 2 from what we know, with James called to the town by Mary to meet her in their ‘special place.’ However, there appears to be no mention of Mary having died from a mysterious illness three years prior, as it says James was merely ‘separated’ from her. Still, we’ll just have to wait and see how things play out in cinemas.
Check out the trailer below.
This will be the third Silent Hill movie to hit the big screen, following on from the 2006 original starring Sean Bean and Radha Mitchell that was also directed by Gans. That movie loosely adapted the story of the original Silent Hill, although an original character, Rose, replaced Harry’s role from the game as she searched for her missing daughter in Silent Hill. Following this came the M.J. Bassett-directed Silent Hill Revelation in 2012, which used the story of Silent Hill 3 as the basis for its narrative.
Return to Silent Hill is set to launch in cinemas on January 23, 2026.
The developers of Metal Gear Solid Delta are yet to decide what their next project will be, be it another remake or something entirely new. A remake of Metal Gear Solid 4, though, would be "pretty hard".
Remakes, you either love 'em or hate 'em! Or, more probably, you like some of 'em, aren't too keen on others, and are largely ambivalent to the rest. Whatever your perspective, it's obvious remakes - beloved of risk-averse publishers across the industry - aren't going anywhere. They offer the perfect maelstrom of nostalgia bait and brand recognition, meaning they're an easier sell compared to entirely new games, and if players love them, why stop now? But not all remakes are created equally; for every Resident Evil 2 or Silent Hill 2, there's an XIII - a remake so bad its publisher was forced to remake it. Which raises the question - you might call it the Big Question - what makes a remake great?
I realise I'm probably in the minority here, but I don't love Bluepoint's approach to remakes. Sure, they're pretty, they're technically accomplished, and mechanically faithful to the originals, but the studio's artistic liberties too often rankle. I admit I'm a purist and grumpy old man in the making who hates change, but I still think remakes should, fundamentally, play within the boundaries of the original's creative vision. A colour palette shift - swapping the bleached-out ethereal hues of Shadow of the Colossus on PS2 for a more natural lighting, say - might add a bit of beautification, but it can radically alter the intended tone. More egregiously, Bluepoint's decision to redesign chunks of Demon's Souls using a completely different architectural style isn't just an artistic choice, it has significant ramifications for world-building.
Publisher Konami and developer Bloober Team announced their Silent Hill 2 remake is now available for Xbox consoles. The Silent Hill 2 remake is now available for Xbox Series X|S, via the Microsoft Store. A 50% discount is currently being run to celebrate the new release. The Silent Hill 2 remake has been available since October 2024 for Windows PC (via Steam) […]
Konami has released a new Metal Gear Solid Fox Hunt update that includes various tweaks to the publisher’s new multiplayer game while adding a much requested feature.
The most significant change here is how matchmaking works. Previously, players would need to manually select their region which could prolong waiting times depending on your chosen region and the time of day. Now the game will detect if matchmaking is taking too long, widening the search to all regions.
Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater Fox Hunt patch 1.2.3 is available to download across all platforms and will need to be installed in order to access the game. Here’s a rundown of what changes have been made.
Metal Gear Solid Fox Hunt Update 1.2.3 Patch Notes
Added ability to place enemy detection pings while aiming with a knife or gun.
XP can now be earned in custom matches.
Players will now be matched with others from different regions when matchmaking on their current server takes too long.
Extended the duration of invincibility after respawning.
Fixed an issue where invincibility after respawn was canceled by rolling or using Naked Sense.
Minor bug fixes and adjustments.
Fox Hunt launched on October 30th as part of the Snake Eater remake. In our review we scored the multiplayer mode a strong 8/10, saying:
“Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater’s Fox Hunt multiplayer mode rounds off one of the best remakes of 2025. It offers a surprisingly robust spin on existing battle royale and extraction shooter concepts, with smaller maps and match times working in its favour, successfully incorporating those stealth and strategy elements fans have come to expect.”
Despite our praise, we also noted the game’s lack of content at launch with two modes and a handful of maps. In some ways, this minimal offering works in Fox Hunt’s favour though the lack of a future roadmap is somewhat concerning. Hopefully we’ll hear more from Konami very soon.
It's all go in the foggy world of Silent Hill. Following yesterday's surprise Australian launch, last year's stupendous Silent Hill 2 remake is finally available on Xbox Series X/S worldwide - and Christophe Gans' upcoming movie adaptation has received a new trailer too.
We already knew the Xbox Series X/S version of last year's stupendous Silent Hill 2 remake was likely imminent thanks to recent ratings board sightings, but it turns out the wait is already over - for Australian players at least. It's available to download right now via the Australian Xbox Store, suggesting a global launch announcement will feature during tonight's Xbox showcase.
Weeks of rumors and even a rating by the ESRB later, a release date for Bloober Team’s Silent Hill 2 on Xbox Series X/S has leaked via Microsoft’s own storefront. Discovered by True Achievements, which has access to the Xbox Store’s backend (and provided a screenshot of the listing), it’s apparently out on November 21st.
Going by the image, it will support Xbox cloud saves, Achievements, and more. A Deluxe Edition is also seemingly on the way, with a digital art book and soundtrack. It’s worth noting that Xbox Series X/S and PC are listed as platforms, but Xbox Play Anywhere support isn’t specified.
It’s possible that the listing is still a work in progress, so we’ll have to wait for the official announcement. If Silent Hill 2 remake is dropping seemingly out of nowhere in the coming weeks for Xbox, then what about Born from a Wish, the long-rumored additional scenario turned paid DLC?
Actor Salóme Rannveig Gunnarsdóttir, who plays Maria in the base game, said that Bloober Team hadn’t contacted her for the same. However, narrative designer Grzegorz Like seemingly teased its existence, responding to a fan with, “Born from what?” and the “eyes” emoji.
Stealth drop incoming? At the very least, it could be an announcement at The Game Awards on December 11th. In the meantime, check out our review of Silent Hill 2 remake on PS5 here. You can also learn more about the latest entry, Silent Hill f,here.
