Marvel Games and NetEase Games have announced the official launch of the newly established Marvel Rivals Professional League. The award-winning PvP hero shooter Marvel Rivals has gained significant traction across the gaming industry since its release in December 2024.
With an all-time Steam player peak of 642,333, Marvel Rivals has shattered its own records multiple times and has significantly surpassed player counts for other hero shooters such as Overwatch 2 and Apex Legends. In its first month alone, Marvel Rivals peaked at more than 400,000 concurrent players, a level of success that quickly sparked interest from the esports community.
In the past, NetEase organized the Marvel Rivals Championship, which launched in 2024, the game’s release year, and featured a prize pool of approximately $450,000. The newly announced professional league offers increased support for participating teams and an uncapped prize pool of up to $3 million.
The league will include teams from the Americas, Europe, the Middle East and Africa, the Pacific region and China. This year’s season will be played in three stages. The opening stage runs from May to June, followed by the mid-season finals in August.
Stage two will run from September through October, culminating in the grand finals in late November. Beginning this year, nearly all Ignite Series tournaments, along with the mid-season finals, will serve as qualifiers for the grand finals.
League points will be awarded based on final placements in stage one, the mid-season finals and stage two. Teams can secure a spot at the global finals either by winning the stage two playoffs or by finishing near the top of the overall league standings.
To enhance the competitive experience and support a sustainable development pipeline, the Marvel Rivals Esports team has introduced a promotion and relegation system. Under the new structure, teams can earn points throughout the Marvel Rivals Championship 2026. At both the mid-season finals and the conclusion of the season, top Championship teams will have the opportunity to compete against league teams for an official league position.
This year, NetEase has also collaborated with organizations across regions to launch the Marvel Rivals Esports Partner Teams Program. Selected teams will share revenue from in-game team-themed content and receive comprehensive support. Submission date ends January 15th.
StarRupture has a ton of places to explore, from underground living caves to abandoned outposts. Each of these will house something you'll probably end up needing at some point, so you may want to check them out when you get a chance.
If you like the anxiety of holding the line as hordes creep up on you, then today is your lucky day. For the second game giveaway of 2026, the Epic Games Store has picked one of its most popular tower defense games, but you have to act quickly if you want to keep it.
There may not be a more influential, yet highly scrutinized video game, than Final Fantasy 7. Square's landmark JRPG release changed the entire industry, and the hype cycle is still one that has not been seen since. It may never be seen again.
The Life as a Poem (2.1) season update in Infinity Nikki continues to add to the already behemoth-sized amount of content for players in Itzaland. Along with ambitious endeavors like the Behemoth Guardian Project, there's also plenty of charming little challenges you can take on to earn various rewards.
Ah, the sweet moment of roping your friend circle into a game on Steam that you'll only play a couple of hours and shelve. It's a reflective scenario that almost everyone has experienced at least once in their lives.
For multiple decades, LEGO has not only entertained people through their physical brick sets but also through the digital world with dozens of LEGO video games.
A key part of survival games like StarRupture is being able to build numerous buildings around your base that aid in your survival. In this instance, these buildings allow you to take basic materials like Calcium, Titanium, and Helium, and turn them into complex materials used for crafting high-end items to appease your corporate overlords.
Since StarRupture is a survival game, you will want to get your hands on every resource in the game. This includes things like Calcium, Helium, Titanium, and Wolfram Ore. Unfortunately, these resources won't help you defend yourself.
A couple years ago, the Persona 3 Reload soundtrack was uploaded to Spotify. The issue? Developer Atlus hadn't released the album digitally. That album, and Shin Megami Tensei: Strange Journey's soundtrack, were uploaded by a random guy and quickly removed—likely from a DMCA request—in 2024. Now, Sega is suing over it.
In a lawsuit filed Thursday in Florida, Sega said it discovered in March 2024 that a person with the username Ziodyne (a reference to a skill in Shin Megami Tensei) uploaded the two soundtracks to different music platforms, like Apple Music, Spotify, and Amazon. That person used a music distribution service called DistroKid to get the soundtracks on the platforms, offering them for sale and streaming. Sega says the person "received significant revenue and profits from the unauthorized sales," and that the person used the Persona 3 Reload logo to "deceive or mislead consumers concerning the source of the sound recordings."
DistroKid is a distribution service that advertises itself as an easy way to get music on all different platforms—Instagram, Spotify, Amazon, Tidal, and more. It charges a yearly fee, collects payments from streaming and sales, then pays out the artist. The company has been sued at least nine times for how it handles DMCA takedown requests, failing to pay out artists, and other reasons. Many of these cases are pendings, but a few have been dismissed.
Sega wasn't offering these soundtracks digitally yet, but people were looking for them. People immediately noticed them, according to several different Reddit posts, which showed the Persona 3 Reload soundtrack as having more than 26,000 monthly listens on Spotify. On Reddit, another screenshot of Ziodyne's page showed more than 134,000 monthly listens, including the popular Burning Men's Soul from the Persona Trinity Soul anime. Sega says in its lawsuit that it subpoenaed Apple, Spotify, and DistroKid to determine Ziodyne’s identity.
"Defendant has taken advantage of a set of circumstances, including the anonymity and mass reach afforded by the Internet and social media, coupled with the cover afforded by international borders, to violate Sega’s intellectual property rights with impunity," Sega's lawyers wrote in the complaint.
Sega is looking for "at least $60,000" in monetary damages, according to the complaint. The counts listed in the complaint include copyright infringement, trademark infringement, false designation of origin, and unfair competition.
Since the unauthorized version was removed, Sega and Atlus have uploaded their own digital version of the Persona 3 Reload soundtrack to music platforms. Strange Journey's soundtrack doesn't appear to be available digitally.
Aftermath has reached out to Sega of America and Ziodyne for comment.
Ubisoft announced Wednesday it will close its Ubisoft Halifax studio and lay off 71 people. Ubisoft's closure of the Assassin's Creed: Rebellion and Rainbow Six Mobile studio comes just weeks after a group of 60 employees voted to unionize with Communications Workers of America's Canadian affiliate, CWA Canada. Seventy-four percent of the staff voted yes to unionize and create a wall-to-wall union including producers, designers, artists, testers, and researchers.
CWA Canada Local 30111, the chapter the Ubisoft Halifax workers joined, also includes more than a hundred workers at Bethesda Game Studios.
"Over the past 24 months, Ubisoft has undertaken company-wide actions to streamline operations, improve efficiency, and reduce costs," a Ubisoft spokesperson said in a statement to Aftermath. "As part of this, Ubisoft has made the difficult decision to close its Halifax studio. 71 positions will be affected. We are committed to supporting all impacted team members during this transition with resources, including comprehensive severance packages and additional career assistance."
The Ubisoft spokesperson did not specifically address the closure's relation—or not—to the recent union vote.
CWA Canada president Carmel Smyth said in a statement to Aftermath the union will "pursue every legal recourse to ensure that the rights of these workers are respected and not infringed in any way." The union said in a news release that it's illegal in Canada for companies to close businesses because of unionization. That’s not necessarily what happened here, according to the news release, but the union is "demanding information from Ubisoft about the reason for the sudden decision to close."
"We will be looking for Ubisoft to show us that this had nothing to do with the employees joining a union," former Ubisoft Halifax programmer and bargaining committee member Jon Huffman said in a statement. "The workers, their families, the people of Nova Scotia, and all of us who love video games made in Canada, deserve nothing less."
Ubisoft has been cutting costs over the past several years: laying off staff, canceling games, and shutting down studios. In November, Ubisoft shared in its earnings report that it intends to continue to reduce its fixed costs—to reduce costs by an additional €100 million by the 2027 fiscal year—on top of the €200 million reduction it had already enacted. Part of that reduction was a decrease of roughly 1,500 employees in the 12 months prior to the November earnings report. Not all of those departures were layoffs, however.
Ubisoft required a $1.25 billion investment from Tencent last year, too, to spin off the company's most successful franchises: Rainbow Six Siege, Far Cry, and Assassin's Creed. That initiative is called Vantage Studios, led by Charlie Guillemot and Christophe Derennes. "Vantage Studios represents a first step in Ubisoft's ongoing transformation," Ubisoft said in a news release from October.
We had these report cards in elementary school that, in addition to grading us on school subjects, also evaluated how we were doing on general life skills. I did pretty well in classes besides math, but the two skills I repeatedly failed were “penmanship” and “following directions.” I am simply not very good at reading and understanding explanations before I begin a task, and it’s this tendency that’s making the game Uncle Chop’s Rocket Shop a bit of a nightmare for me, but also really fun.
Uncle Chop’s Rocket Shop came out in 2024, and it’s been sitting in my Epic store library for a while before I finally decided to check it out this week. You play as Wilbur, a fox-headed dude who inherits an intergalactic mechanic’s shop and has to fix enough spaceships to make growing rent payments. There’s more plot than this– I’m only a few in-game days in, and I’ve already encountered mystical beings, thieves, meteor showers, and other hints that this isn’t just a job simulator. It’s possible to die, but the game is also a roguelike, with upgrades to your mechanic’s shop persisting between runs. But the bulk of your day is taken up by choosing from a number of repair jobs and getting them done to the customer’s satisfaction.
There are two modes to choose from: one with time pressure, where customers will get angry if you don’t fix their ships fast enough, and one that does away with the clock but makes the repairs harder and more exacting. I hate time pressure in games so opted for this more chill mode. This seems like a good way to learn the game, and especially how to come to grips with its giant, weird manual.
When you go to refill a customer’s fuel pump, for instance, you’ll see a symbol that will tell you which tab in the manual to go to, which you do by physically pulling the book out of your inventory and clicking through its pages. There, you’ll get a variety of images, brisk instructions, and references to other parts of the manual that will help you troubleshoot and solve the problem. My fuel jobs have been pretty basic–remove the fuel cell, refill it at my fuel station without filling it too far and exploding it, putting it back in. Oil is a little more complicated–in addition to the oil levels, there’s the oil quality to consider, as well as a pump, heat gauge, and other gadgets that could be busted. A recent job included both of these tasks and two new complications. There was an alarm that wouldn’t stop timing out and locking me out of the other ship modules, which had to be disarmed with a series of puzzles, and a “tomfoolery” module that required buying a new repair station to fix and then playing a whole other video game to calibrate.
Beard Envy
The actual fixing is wonderfully tactile, with lots of buttons to press and levers to pull and bolts to unscrew. Just like in real life, you have to make sure you do all these things–I’ve lost money for forgetting to close a panel back up, or gotten stuck because I was flipping switches in the wrong order. The manual tells you all this, but it’s written like a real professional manual that assumes a certain familiarity with the objects at hand. Everything you need to know is in there, but it can be a little baffling to get your head around, especially if you’re not a great visual learner or are me, who cannot help himself from skimming the instructions before diving into a ship’s guts. In the game’s time-pressure mode, I imagine learning a new task for the first time requires an overwhelming amount of speedreading and making good choices, but in my chill mode I have no justification for not taking the time to look everything over first besides being a dumbass. I find it hard to understand the manual without experiencing the thing it’s describing, but going step-by-step often gets me stumped if a problem is deeper in the book. I’ll plunge ahead with unearned confidence, run into problems, give the manual the most cursory glance, dive back in, and get stumped again, in an absurd loop I have no one to blame for but myself.
Beard Envy
I hate reading directions, but I do like research, so I enjoy looking stuff up in the manual even if I’m not fully digesting it. It’s hard not to get impatient to fiddle with all the strange machines, which give me some great Spaceteamvibes. The computer I’m playing Uncle Chop’s on sits next to an Ikea bookshelf I put together myself also without reading the instructions in full, and which is now listing to one side because I didn’t pay enough attention to the importance of rigorously attaching its shitty plywood back. Looking up from a game that reminds me I apparently haven’t grown at all as a person since third grade to real-world proof of the fact that I haven’t grown at all as a person since third grade is a lot, and the in-game consequences for my bad habit feel like a reminder that there will also be real-world consequences when my bookshelf inevitably collapses. At least in the game I’ll get a chance to start again, unlike my bookshelf, which will destroy everything around it when it forces me to pay for my hubris.
Uncle Chop’s Rocket Shop is available on PC and consoles.
Compared to the PAXes or even MAGFests of the world, Awesome Games Done Quick is itsy bitsy. Around 2,000 speedrunners and fans mill about in Pittsburgh’s Wyndham Grand hotel, with a theater where speedruns take place serving as the obvious centerpiece. Other attractions – like an arcade, a game room with consoles and PCs, and a small artist alley – exist, but they feel more like brief breaks from the 24/7 speedrun deluge than fully fledged alternatives. The entire event spans just a handful of rooms across two floors. Some might view this as a downside, but I find it refreshing.
There’s an intimacy to AGDQ that makes it feel uniquely cozy. If you make a friend, you will run into them again. Runners and hosts are accessible and friendly. Vocal audience participation during runs is common. The vibe is slumber party, with some audience members going so far as to wear pajamas to late-night runs.
In my few days attending, I’ve also come to appreciate the event’s focus: There’s one main thing pretty much everyone is here for, so we all have a shared destination and set of hyper-specific discussion topics. The standard model of a video game convention (or comic convention, or anime convention) lends itself to sprawl and bloat. They can even be actively unpleasant to attend – squirming seas of people shuffling between halls, attempting to extract amusement from vast selections of activities that rarely rise above the level of Fine.
AGDQ, in its current state, lacks unnecessary flab. This makes sense, considering that it began as a group of 20 friends in founder Mike Uyama’s mother’s basement. It was not born as a convention, even as it has since bolted on some of the format’s more common trappings. But that was 2010 and this is now; AGDQ attracts tens of thousands of concurrent viewers across Twitch and YouTube, and the organization behind it now employs over 100 people.
GDQ, meanwhile, is now far more than just one event, with AGDQ joined by Summer Games Done Quick, as well as a series of smaller charity marathons hosted by satellite organizations like Frame Fatales and Black In A Flash. Every non-event week, meanwhile, GDQ hosts regularly scheduled “Hotfix” programming, with two themed shows each weekday as well as weekend specials. There’s more to speedrunning than GDQ, but it has, in many ways, evolved into a one-stop shop for the average person’s speedrunning needs.
What does this growth mean for the event that started it all, though? GDQ director of operations Matt Merkle doesn’t plan to shy away from further expansion and experimentation.
"We've already actually expanded,” he told Aftermath. “The artist alley is a new addition. We just started that last summer. We have amazing artists supporting the event – the stuff they do for us to advertise the event. We wanted to bring them into the event and let people purchase their works. ... I think it's been fantastic. The community really loves that artist alley, and we'll continue to grow that as we get into bigger hotels that can support it."
But Merkle is cognizant of the fact that he’s in possession of bottled lightning.
“Obviously speedrunning is gonna be the primary focus of the event for the foreseeable future,” he said. “But we'll always continue to experiment with different things. Over the summer, we had a live concert, which was really cool to do for the first time. ... We definitely continue to experiment so that when people come back to the event year after year, they have something new to experience on top of the stuff that they know and love."
The show’s format, Merkle added, helps it nimbly avoid some of more traditional conventions’ biggest pitfalls.
“The event lasts for seven days rather than three or four, so you have plenty of time to experience the entire event – to go around and enjoy yourself,” he said. “We don't focus on panels as much as other conventions, so people aren't focused on just getting in lines and waiting for the panel they want to see most or something. Because we control the growth and ensure that there's always plenty of space and time to do everything, it makes it so you don't feel rushed, you don't feel cramped. You feel that you have space to do what you want and hang out with your friends."
Even as AGDQ continues to grow and attract more attendees, Merkle wants to preserve the show’s unique vibe.
“Intimacy is a core part of it,” he said.
That intimacy – and a rigorous set of rules – means people feel safe at AGDQ. This comes through whether you’re in attendance or watching along from home. What other video game event, after all, boasts “trans rights” as its rallying cry? Merkle recognizes the importance of maintaining that core component of the event as well.
“If you’re harassing anybody in our community or making people feel uncomfortable, we don’t want you here,” he said. “I think the community has come to expect that type of vibe at this event, and that’s why we have so many people that feel safe to come to these events. … We take it seriously.”
Sometimes, on my better days, I think I know the answer to what keeps me up at night. Or that I have it in me to figure it out. I like those days because even though they start with a problem, I know where to go, what to do, or who to ask to solve it. That's a pretty good day. Not too many of those lately.
Perhaps this is why, when considering the year that was, mysteries – particularly video game mysteries – come to mind. Of all the entertainment released in 2025, I was drawn to these the most: I know the dirty secret of the Roottree family. I know why Evelyn Deane disappeared from Blake Manor. I know the truth about Mt. Holly Estate. Some questions wormed into my head, and I answered them. I had problems, and I solved them.
When executed well, sleuthing suits video games even more naturally than violence, a contest between the programming logic of video games and the human ability to think laterally. One of the first things you learn about coding is that computers are literal to a degree that is, frankly, madness-inducing. The genius of any particular application, including video games, lies in how elegantly it hides the fact that it is reducing your every input into a cascade of simple binary decisions. However, even with a program designed to do all of the heavy lifting for you, even with all the cumulative experience of the internet at your disposal, sometimes the thing that lies between you and your goal is the wildly frustrating task of figuring out how to ask the right question.
This also happens to be the engine that drives a good mystery.
On a basic level, a video game mystery narrativizes one of the most fundamental computational functions: Querying a database. (The narrative designer Bruno Dias has called games expressly built around that function "database thrillers" for this reason, going so far as to jam out his own – quite good! – text parser version of one, Kinophobia.) Defining the right parameters that will separate the endless sea of useless data from the precious and narrow set of information you can actually use, perhaps to form another query in turn, rendering previously useless data into something vital. Once again: Asking the right questions.
The Roottrees Are Dead (Evil Trout)
The Roottrees Are Dead, Jeremy Johnston and Robin Ward's 2025 remake of Johnston's browser game of the same name, operates on this fundamental level. It casts the player as an amateur genealogist, asked by a mysterious client to trace the family tree of the Roottree sisters. Recently deceased in a private plane crash just before the start of the game, the sisters are heirs to a massive family fortune, and their untimely demise means a significant windfall for the extended family.
The pleasures of The Roottrees Are Dead lie in doing the task it sets out for you in its simulated tactility. The game is set in 1998, and in researching the Roottree family, the player bounces between a table with relevant documents and photographs to examine, a corkboard where they lay out the family tree, and a desktop computer with a blistering 56k modem for surfing the information superhighway. A notebook, available at the push of a button, allows you to type notes or collect highlighted passages from your research materials. Using all these tools, a family's history becomes a giant jigsaw puzzle, a deductive riddle that feels impossible until you just buckle down and do the work. One good lead yields another, and then another, and finally you have names and faces and the puzzle begins to take shape.
But these aren't just puzzle pieces: They're people. The connections and if/then questions that determine where they fit in the Roottree pedigree are just part of the story. What makes The Roottrees Are Dead such an exceptional game is in the way it tells you from the start that one branch of the family tree is off-limits until the end, an optional question where the answer isn't so much there to be found as it is inferred. In laying out the endgame this way, Johnston and Ward provoke the player: Were you merely solving the puzzle? Or were you paying attention to the story it told? You know the what – how about why? Can you see the people hidden between the data points?
The Seance Of Blake Manor (Spooky Doorway)
In the twilight of the 19th century, the massive disruption of the industrial revolution left European high society in a state of unease, as the edges of a carefully-constructed social order began to crumble. Literacy spread among the middle class, the world shrank as steamships sent people all over the globe, new customs and experiences shook the once–strong foundations of Christian institutions. For many people of means and those who aspired to such status, the church was insufficient at addressing their moment of malcontent. The occult took root.
Set in the final three days of October 1897, The Seance of Blake Manor follows Declan Ward, a detective from Dublin, after he receives a mysterious commission to investigate the disappearance of Evelyn Deane. Deane was one of a number of mystics and magic-curious from all over the world invited to Blake Manor, a hotel in Western Ireland, for a Grand Seance to take place on Samhain, the day when the veil between the mortal world and the spirit realm is thinnest. Assuming the role of Ward, the player wanders the eponymous manor, snooping through rooms and asking guests questions, each exchange or observation deepening the mystery of Ms. Deane's disappearance.
The Seance of Blake Manor is a work of folk horror, which means that history has something to say here, whether the story's characters are able to hear it or not. (They will pay if they don't.) While a far more traditional narrative than The Roottrees Are Dead, Blake Manor is similarly powerful in its subtext. Every character is haunted by some private thing that has brought them to the seance; each is fleeing something or in denial or mourning or desperation. It causes them to be cruel, selfish, reckless. You can piece these backstories together for as many characters as you wish – the game encourages you to solve them all – but what lingers for me is the weight of all that history.
In the search for Evelyn Deane, Declan Ward must repeatedly contend with the beliefs of others. He learns much about Irish folklore, of the fae and the Other World and the Tuatha Dé Danann, the pagan deities worshipped in Gaelic Ireland before Christianity arrived in the country. He sees evidence of the ways both Catholics and Protestants have incorporated those pagan traditions, turning them into saints or holy days. He meets people from around the world who have their own version of those same saints and gods.
Blake Manor requires you to note all this, and think about it some. Learning the faith of each character you meet is integral to solving its mystery. But in this story, Christ and Allah are both just characters in books. The pagan deities, however, are very much real.
I don't believe this is the game choosing a side, asserting that the pagans had it right and everything else is just a fairytale. Rather, I think The Seance of Blake Manor's choice to slowly, deliberately communicate that, in its fiction, the folkloric deities are real is meant to underline the ways in which the indigenous beliefs and cultures of a place are never really gone, even after waves of colonization, industry, and plunder. The spirits are real in Blake Manor because we have fooled ourselves into thinking that wealthy men who build monuments to their fortunes and family name are the only ones who get to write their stories upon the land, forgetting that the land might have stories of its own. Will you seek them out, even if you don't have to? Will you carry that history within you, and keep it alive just a little while longer?
Blue Prince (Dogubomb)
Like many others this year, I have lost countless nights in search of the secret 46th room in the Mt. Holly Estate, and for the bewildering number of mysteries Room 46 is but a mere prelude to. I have many of the answers I set out to find, but I still have further questions beyond them. I also know that the point here may very well be learning to quit.
It's remarkable that Tonda Ros' Blue Prince is structured as a roguelike, a genre defined by its endlessness and infinite possibility. This brings the game in conflict with its narrative setup, which casts the player as Simon P. Jones, a young boy who has learned his wealthy uncle has willed his entire estate to him – provided he can find the hidden 46th room in the logic-defying 45-room mansion that changes its layout every day. Such an explicit goal implies an ending, and upon achieving it, credits do roll. But as anyone who has played Blue Prince knows, that ending is merely an ending. It is also not a solution. Simon's strange quest, the magical nature of the house – which, after enough excursions, is clearly diegetic and not just an allowance for gameplay – are the first of many whys that are left unsaid by that initial ending.
Thus the real mystery of Blue Prince begins, but what that mystery is largely depends on the player. What about this house and the family who built it did you notice, or care about? What in its many possible configurations, its hidden foundations, its many scrawled notes that double back and recontextualize previous findings, bedevils you? Is the game truly endless, like its genre structure implies? Can you be at peace with that? Or do you refuse to accept it?
Consider again how well-suited games are for mystery, how they can present players with impossible enigmas but also guide and nudge them towards asking the right questions. Games can assure players that the world is knowable. We talk about power fantasies, and perhaps this is the most seductive one, even more so than those that give us guns or impossible abilities or great destinies. The fantasy of a world that fits together.
I find that fantasy alluring. Justice has been lacking in my lifetime, and it may not be my lot to see it win the day. I like the idea that asking the right question is the first step to making sense of the world. And if I ask the right question and then answer it skillfully, I can find some kind of peace. Or at least, know what it is that will give me a direction to walk until I find it.
This is a delusion, but a useful one. Answers aren't what make questions worth asking, but go long enough without finding your way to one and, well. That's a lot of sleepless nights. Sometimes you need a ballast.
If there is a reason these games are the mysteries that have resonated with me most strongly this year, this is why: because while they provide all the pleasures of a solvable problem, of crimes answered for, they also present me with so much I cannot know. Of how much escapes the record of material evidence in the gaps of a family tree or a nigh-forgotten folkloric tradition or the inscrutable patterns of an ever-shifting mansion. There is tragedy in this, but also grace, and humility. In grappling with them, solving a mystery takes on another, more durable purpose: making peace with what I don't know, so I can be brave with what I do know. Every day I'm able to do that would make for a good day. Every year I strive for that goal would be a good year.
To steal a line from Unbeatable, I could feel the game's last chapter in the space between my eyes. It's the place where tension builds before you're about to cry—a unique feeling of feelings that manifests through pain. Played in episodes, the sixth of which is the culmination of it all, Unbeatable is set in a world where music is illegal. So illegal, in fact, that the world's become a fascist police state; musicians and music lovers still exist, but they’re pushed to the margins of society. Music is the key theme here both narratively and mechanically; the story is centered around it, tied to traditional rhythm-based gameplay where you push buttons to a beat.
Storywise, where Unbeatable lands is the idea that music and art are not only "amplifiers" of feelings, as Unbeatable's characters put it, but are feelings. The last chapter is where all of this becomes clear, and the game's rhythm gameplay, stylish animation, incredible music, and high-stakes story work together to reinforce that.
The problem is that it takes five episodes to get there. When Unbeatable is good, it's really good, but there's just too much time where it's not. Up until the last episode, I couldn't tell you why music is illegal, how the main character Beat was dropped into this world, or even who she really is. After the last episode, I still can't answer some of those questions, but it doesn't really matter. Unbeatable feels like the sort of game that's supposed to be a bit messy. This ending section of Unbeatable, though, is where the game gets to the heart of its characters, what drives it all—not the overly complicated story and slow pacing. For most of Unbeatable, the game gets in its own way.
Image: D-Cell Games/Playstack
Unbeatable is about music, but it's also about grief. It's about making mistakes, creating good and bad art, about feeling things. There's one scene, at the end, where the main character, Beat, is talking to her much younger companion, Quaver, about loss. The circumstances of their losses are different—from each others' and my own–but the feeling is universal. Just last night, I was talking about this: It's too painful to remember what I've lost. If I don't think about it, I don't feel it—that tension between my eyes. But in refusing to remember, I lose the overwhelming love that makes the loss much too painful. Beat and Quaver don't necessarily have the answers, and I don't either.
From this conversation, the screen cuts to white. Quaver starts to sing. The instruments come in, and I can start hitting stuff on beat—the perfect emotional release after the game's most poignant moment.
But the rest of the game, aside from several other moments here and there, move too slowly, with too many extraneous details, and way too much walking around. There's one section, early on, where the crew is trying to escape from prison. There's some rhythm elements, and it works as a sort of tutorial. There's a part where you get a prison job. A baseball minigame. A lot of walking around with bad camera work. It's so painfully slow, while also somehow moving way too fast—narratively, I have so many questions. Later, there's a random platforming part to restore power to an arcade that never comes back up in the story. The problem with these sections and several of the others is that the material within doesn't necessarily point towards the core of the story, what's at the center of the last chapter. Unbeatable is shrouded in a mystery that makes this feel intentional. I haven't mentioned this yet, but there's also a supernatural element: Cops are arrested musicians and music lovers, but there's also a big black hole that's threatening to engulf the whole world. You're kind of fighting both at the same time, but it's not until the last few chapters where Unbeatable reveals why. (I still don't entirely get it.)
There were a lot of times during Unbeatable when I wanted to quit the game's story mode. And right when I was thinking that, I hit one of the moments where the visuals, music, and writing really work. Those moments do a lot of work in forgiving the bad parts. It's easy to see the vision of developer D-Cell; the game drips both heart and an undeniable cool. But you can also see where the focus was—rightfully on these big, key moments—and where everything went off the rails.
Yet, by the end, I found myself shrugging off its failures. That's kind of the takeaway of Unbeatable, no? It's messy. Sometimes bad. And yet it still made me feel.
In 2020 workers at Naughty Dog, developers of the Uncharted and Last Of Us series,came forward with reports of brutal, 12-hour work days and sustained periods of what's known ascrunch:
Many who have worked at Naughty Dog over the years describe it as a duality—as a place that can be simultaneously the best and the worst workplace in the world. Working at Naughty Dog means designing beloved, critically acclaimed games alongside artists and engineers who are considered some of the greatest in their fields. But for many of those same people, it also means working 12-hour days (or longer) and even weekends when the studio is in crunch mode, sacrificing their health, relationships, and personal lives at the altar of the game.
In 2021, in response to those reports, Naughty Dog bosses Evan Wells and Neil Druckmannsaid they were 'assessing ways the studio can improve', with Druckmann insisting there wasn't one single solution to the problem:
...in the past where we’ve said, “Okay, no working past this hour,” or, “It’s mandatory that no one can work on Sunday,” and they’re always a lot of corner cases of someone saying, “Well, I couldn’t work on Friday because I had to be with my kids. It’s actually more convenient for me to come in on Sunday.” When you try to have a silver bullet, like one solution, you’re always leaving someone behind. That’s why we feel like we need multiple solutions. We have to approach this from multiple angles.
In 2024,in a documentary detailing the production of The Last Of Us 2, Druckmann said, "We now have the goal for Naughty Dog to eliminate crunch", before quality assurance lead Patrick Goss added, "When we onboard people, we tell them that we have a reputation as a studio for crunching, and it's something that we don’t want. And it's something we're not going to do anymore".
In December 2025 (as in, today), Jason Schreier at Bloomberg has reported:
For the past seven weeks, the Santa Monica-based studio behind The Last of Us has been pushing its staff to work long hours to get ready for an upcoming review of the [Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet] demo by its parent company, according to people familiar with the situation. Starting in late October, staff were asked to begin working a minimum of eight extra hours a week and logging their overtime in an internal spreadsheet, said the people, who asked not to be identified because they weren’t authorized to speak publicly. This overtime period was an attempt to get the production back on track after several missed deadlines.
Workers were also told to get back into the office five days a week (they had only been required for three). What's notable here is that this cycle of crunch--which lasted for just under two months--wasn't even to finish the game, which isn't due until 2027, but just to finish a demo.
Also of note, from the end of Jason's story:
Earlier this year, members of the production team were each given customized metal coins that seemed to capture, purposefully or not, the current state of the studio’s workplace attitude. On one side was the company’s paw-print logo. On the other, a quote from the trailer for Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet: “The suffering of generations must be endured to achieve our divine end.”
A survival city-builder in broadly the same vein as stuff like Frostpunk and Ixion, Flotsam is a game set at the end of the world that, thanks to its vibrant art style and optimistic outlooks, actually feels more like the start of the world instead.
You play as a tug boat that poots around a flooded world, ala Waterworld, and as you go--on a kind of strategic overworld map--you need to scrounge for resources and pick up survivors. Zoom in, though, and the game becomes a city-builder, where you can attach buildings to your boat and use those resources to craft stuff, build more buildings and keep everyone happy by giving them nicer houses and places to hang out.
The cheery, hand-crafted visuals are a joy to be around. For an apocalyptic game, Flotsam's glass is very much half-full, its flooded wastes featuring crystal-blue oceans, storybook islands and fantastic character art, while the survivor's chatter is mostly interested in everyone working together to build something new and communal from the wreckage. To give you an idea of just how cheery things are, here's the game's website:
The world of Flotsam is a colorful and cheerful place. It’s about going on adventures, seeing the world and cleaning it up as you go. The sun is shining, the sky is clear and the ocean is calm… mostly at least.
Does this change the way the game plays? Not really. Does it dictate the way I feel while playing it? Absolutely. As I've explainedin my impressions of Town To City, I like these games because they let me build stuff, and I hate the stresses so many of them bring along for the ride. Flotsam has those stresses--you need to keep everyone fed and supplied with fresh water--but meeting those needs is so straightforward, and everyone looks and works so happily while they're in danger, that it never feels like a crisis.
I should note that this isn't really a city-builder in the traditional sense. While you are definitely building a settlement around your boat, and it needs walkways and power and all that stuff, the overworld navigation is a place you spend a lot of time exploring, finding resources and picking up survivors. What's cool is that the two are linked; you cruise around a map screen where everything is abstract, but when you find something to explore, the view zooms into the boat-scaled view, and the objects that appeared as points on the map are now islands represented off the stern of your town, on which you can see your survivors clambering over and harvesting supplies.
Flotsam has a more involved supply chain and production management slant than many of its peers, which I really enjoyed; the loop of harvesting raw resources from the overworld, then using your city to refine them and turn them first into processed resources, then things, is always satisfying. There are a ton of different materials and items, some you can only get by scrounging, others that can be grown and others that you have to craft, and it's an interesting challenge having to prioritise your survivors and various buildings to churn out exactly the things you need at any given time.
I said earlier in the yearthat I'm tired of apocalyptic futures where humanity is resigned to living off scraps, where the overriding themes are those of defeat and despair. Flotsam's optimism and resolve to build something new from the ashes are exactly what I was talking about; the fact it's a game where you're directly responsible for the building only makes it better.
I don't want to be the Game Announcement Police here, ACAB, but over the last month there have been two big, new video games revealed that were notable not for what they showed off, but for what they didn't.
First up was Total War: Medieval III, which was announced via a live-action trailer (below) andblog post:
Amazing news! There hasn't been a proper historical Total War release since Three Kingdoms (I'm not counting Pharaoh's mea culpa), and Medieval is a long-time fan favourite, so this should have got people excited. Only problem is that there wasn't any gameplay shown. There weren't any screenshots. There wasn't even much art for the game, aside froma single piece shown at the top of a follow-up blog.
Only days later, Creative Assembly announced a second upcoming Total War game coming out much sooner, this time set in the Warhammer 40K universe, and its debut trailer was packed with gameplay footage, right down to giving us a look at the menus and interface.
I'm not drawing a very long bow here to speculate that the Medieval announcement was made a few days prior in an attempt to head off any uproar over the 40K announcement. For those unfamiliar with the franchise, there's a kind of uneasy divide among some in the community, with Total War's longest-serving fans (going back to 1999's Shogun) preferring the series' historical focus over the wilder, more fictional stuff that has featured in the Warhammer (and now 40K) entries. They look at how much money and effort has been poured into the Creative Assembly collab, then look at the relative neglect shown to the historical games (from endingThree Kingdoms support early to whatever the hell happened with Pharaoh), and get pretty mad.
While getting Medieval III out in front like that probably made diplomatic sense to publishers Sega and developers Creative Assembly, I dunno, I think I'd rather a game be announced on its own merits and with something genuine to show off and talk about, rather than shoot a clip and write a blog just so you make some of your own fans less angry. Medieval III is clearly years away (they didn't even hint at a broad window for it to come out), and you went and announced a whole other game a few days later– you didn't have to Elder Scolls VI-ify your next big game!
The second game I wanted to talk about is even funnier. Earlier today Netflixannouncedthat Delphi, a company you've likely never heard of (they're relatively new, and their only public credit is as support on IO's upcoming 007 game) will be both developing and publishing a new FIFA game. You might remember thatback in 2022 EA Sports (developers of the long-running series) and FIFA (the world governing body for football) split, and ever since EA's series has been called EA Sports FC, or EAFC for short.
Netflix's announcement contains zero images or video of the game. And there's probably a good reason for that: the press release says stuff like "All you need is Netflix and your phone", and "We want to bring football back to its roots with something everyone can play with just the touch of a button", suggesting that whatever Delphi is cooking up, it'll be a lot closer to a casual mobile experience than the blockbuster simulation football fans have long come to expect from series like FIFA (now EAFC) and Pro Evo (now called eFootball).
That obfuscation has paid off handsomely, though, with a ton of mainstream coverage of the announcement hitting today with headlines like:
There's a small mention of what I've just said above at the bottom of that BBC article, but as a mainstream article intended for a mainstream audience, I guarantee Delphi and FIFA will be thrilled at the number of water cooler and group chat conversations this week that will revolve around the talking point "Boys, did you hear FIFA is coming back?"
