If you’ve been on the hunt for a new game to play, then my friend, your problem is solved—at least for a week. Because this is the week of the Steam Next Fest, the week-long extravaganza of way more game demos than any single person could get through in seven short days.
You probably know the drill by now, but if you’re just dipping your feet into the great, warm ocean that is PC gaming, it’s simple: Every so often, Steam puts the spotlight on upcoming games by giving players seven days to power through about a million game demos (“hundreds,” Steam says, but it always feels like a lot more than that).
Steam Next Fest – February 2026 Edition: Official Trailer – YouTube
But it’s all free, both financially and in terms of commitment, which makes it a great time to dive into titles or genres you might otherwise not be too sure about.
It can also be a little overwhelming, so if you feel like you could use a nudge, here are some demos we’ll be looking at (and talking about) over the week:
Prime Monster– A “card-based political roguelike” that asks, what if our political leaders were literal monsters, rather than the figurative kind?
All Will Rise – a narrative deck-builder about seeking justice for a murdered god in a world that’s all too real.
Vampire Crawlers – A card-based dungeon crawler from the guy who did Vampire Survivors.
The Last Gas Station – Build your business as the owner of one of one of the last gas stations in an electrified world. Also, you’re a red panda.
Windrose – An open-world PvE pirate survival game with “soulslite combat” and challenging bosses, and hopefully plentiful sea shanties.
Tap Tap Loot – Have you ever thought to yourself that Bongo Cat would be cooler if he went out and kicked ass? Try this.
Phonopolis – A new adventure from Amanita Design? Sign me up.
Titanium Court – PC Gamer’s Wes Fenlon called this one the “first must-play demo” of the Next Fest, even though it dropped before the Next Fest started. Clearly he feels very strongly about it, and that makes it worth a look.
There’s a lot more than just that, honestly I just pulled the first handful that the rest of the PC Gamer team are trying out, but if I tried to cite everything we’ve got cooking up—which, as I said, represents only a small slice of the total number of demos in the Next Fest—we’d be here all day.
So tee up what you think looks cool, keep your eyes open for what we think looks cool (we’ll be covering different demos throughout the week) and don’t dawdle—the latest Steam Next Fest runs from now until March 2.
Keep up to date with the most important stories and the best deals, as picked by the PC Gamer team.
Today is a huge deal for our tiny team. We’re over the moon to announce that Revival is launching on PS4 and PS5 on February 26!
The story of Revival began over 20 years ago, way back in 2003. Inspired by the Civilization series and the sci-fi novels of the Strugatsky brothers, especially Roadside Picnic and Noon World, we released our very first game on the Symbian platform.
It was basically a tiny Civilization, just 100 KB in size, yet it delivered a full 4X experience: eXplore, eXpand, eXploit, and eXterminate.
Revival: Recolonization takes place on Earth after an apocalypse caused by an superpower AI uprising. The forward-thinking remnants of humanity, the Emissaries, escaped into cryopods hidden deep underground.
Your mission? Rebuild cities, research tech, explore dangerous lands for rare resources and mysterious anomalies, battle aggressive neighbors, and strike trade deals with friendlier ones. All in the name of restoring human civilization.
On the map, you’ll meet diverse Peoples, survivors of the catastrophe who’ve regressed to a primitive state. Which clan you lead shapes your entire playstyle. It determines your faction’s culture, politics, special weapons, unique buildings, and even exclusive sciences to research.
Each clan in the game belongs to one of five Peoples, each adapted to one of five climate types: Cold, Cool, Temperate, Hot, and Desert.
Units that enter climates they’re not used to can lose health points, block building options, or not yield any resources at all.
But hey, you can change the climate with edicts, an advanced technology from the past. It’s even possible to turn the climate into a weapon by altering the temperature in the enemy’s region.
Oh, and that’s just the start. Edicts let you do all sorts of awesome stuff: raise or destroy mountains, grow forests, drench the land in acid, mind-control your foes, or even starting a zombie apocalypse.
Every battle in Revival plays out on its own map, which reflects the climate and terrain of the global map. Before the fight, you get to scout the battlefield and place your units on the most favorable hexes.
Plus, the Unit Editor lets you mix and match a ton of combinations, creating truly unique units with wildly different traits. As your empire grows, you unlock new sciences and resources, and even more ways to evolve your squads.
Diplomacy evolves too, based on your relationship with other factions. Want to land a sweet deal? You’ll need to raise your standing with them first. And in Revival, you can trade more than just resources — swap techs and edicts too.
You start the game with one clan and one region. The lands next to yours might belong to another faction… or be totally unclaimed. If a neighboring clan is independent, you can make them your vassal — and eventually assimilate them.
How friendly a clan is toward you? That’s Loyalty. It shifts gradually, and you can influence it through your actions.
A massive thank you to every player and fan of the Revival universe.
Because of you, our little team made it this far, and brought our wildest dreams to life. Jump into Revival: Recolonization on PlayStation now!
Helix: Descent N Ascent sounds like it should be a mascot platformer starring a jaunty DNA molecule with floating Rayman hands, whose special power is making stuff go up and down. Up and down the evolutionary ladder, even! A platform game in which you can evolve and devolve your character at will, to solve different puzzles? Good lord, we’ll make one million dollars out of this! Somebody get me the CEO of Midway.
Alas for my career prospects, Midway is no more. And Helix is not a mascot platformer, probably to its benefit. As revealed by the new Steam demo, it’s a slow and atmospheric puzzler in which you investigate a fallen civilisation, while chasing your doppelganger. You being a lanky Area-51-looking lad, who acquires paranormal powers and must weave them into solutions for terrain puzzles of the Pressure Plate N Lever variety.
Beastro is an upcoming cozy/crunchy fantasy restaurant game from Timberline Studio.
Director Lindsey Rostal told us about its thoughtful blend of cozy games with deckbuilding and traditional, trick-taking card games.
It arrives on Xbox Series X|S and Xbox on PC this spring, including day one on Game Pass Ultimate.
Start by sautéing a cozy base of “what if I got to be the cat chefs in Monster Hunter?”
Add diced WarioWare and Slay the Spire for crunch.
Season with Paper Mario and a dash of “Avatar: The Last Airbender.”
Simmer in a broth of traditional trick-taking card games. Cover and cook.
Baby, you’ve got a stew going!
I recently sat down with Timberline Studio Director Lindsey Rostal at a coffee shop in our shared home of Los Angeles to discuss their upcoming fantasy restaurant game, Beastro, after playing the opening hour or so in a PC demo. It’s the studio’s sophomore effort, following their 2020 debut narrative dogsledding game The Red Lantern, which she described as “a sort of narrative Oregon Trail with run-based replayability, where it’s more about the journey than the ending.”
Cozy/Crunchy
Rostal told me that the essence of Timberline Studio’s games is “cozy/crunchy—a vibrant world that offers a cozy space, but something with a little bit more meat, a little bit more crunch for your gameplay.” Like well-prepared food, it’s all about balance: charming and low-stakes enough to be inviting and relaxing, but with enough mechanical crunch to stay engaging where many other cozy games coast on pleasant vibes alone.
In Beastro you play as Panko, an anthropomorphic caracal cat serving as apprentice to the idyllic village of Palo Pori’s chef, whose disappearance is the game’s inciting incident. In taking over the restaurant you have to grow and gather ingredients, learn and prepare recipes, and feed the community, most importantly the Caretakers who go beyond Palo Pori’s walls to defend the community against monsters.
I was immediately taken by Beastro’s vibrant color and interesting visual design. Like the best cozy games, Palo Pori seems like a pleasant place just to hang out.
Cozy classic farming and life sims like Stardew Valley and Animal Crossing inform the various gardening, fishing, and gathering systems that generate ingredients for you to use. As the game unfolds you employ the town’s blacksmith and other merchants to upgrade your kitchen and whatnot. To cook for the villagers every night you chop, boil, and sauté ingredients in WarioWare-inspired minigames that will gradually increase in complexity as the game goes on. All of these interlocking systems are relatively simple unto themselves, stripped down to avoid unnecessary complexity and maintain overall flow and balance.
Everything Changed When the Salty Nation Attacked
As mentioned above, the seed for Beastro came from wanting to play as the Monster Hunter series’ adorable Palicoes that prepare food for the players between hunts in impossibly cute cooking animations. That’s more than just a charming elevator pitch—it’s about what kinds of heroism we choose to valorize. “You don’t have to be swinging the sword and lopping off the heads of your enemies to be a hero,” Rostal says. “They’re made more powerful because they’re being supported by others, and to me that’s just such an important conceit, that strength doesn’t necessarily have to come from the big sword, but it can come from being there, in showing up and supporting other people, in building that foundation for others.”
The animated series “Avatar: The Last Airbender” came up as an influence, both for this collaborative, stronger-together ethos, but also for Beastro’s worldbuilding. Where Avatar uses the four classical elements of earth, fire, wind, and water to structure the peoples and metaphysics of its world, Beastro uses the five core flavors: Salty, Bitter, Sweet, Sour, and Umami. “It’s these different food cultures coming together. It’s them not being as powerful alone.”
Each flavor corresponds to one of the regions of the world, as well as to the peoples that live there, including the game’s Caretakers. “It was really important for us that when we did the flavor factions that they didn’t linearly assign to a culture because those flavors exist across all cultures, Umami is a flavor that’s used in cooking all across the world in various forms, it’s not limited to one place. So for me it was really about trying to anthropomorphize the flavors themselves. For instance, when I think about Bitter, I think about black coffee, right, and I think about kale, and this conceit of like healing, and a little bit of pompousness. Kalan is bitter caretaker and he’s very much focused on the mission, plays by the rules. He’s very principle-defined and acts a bit like he knows better than everybody.”
The Heart of the Chard
The masterstroke that I think really elevates and ties the whole thing together is that the flavors also serve as suits in the card game for Beastro’s other major component. Each night you feed one of the Caretakers, with each ingredient that you use contributing cards to their deck for battles in their adventures outside of town. All ingredient cards have a flavor suit and a numerical value, and some have additional special effects when played.
The card battles are framed as if being told after the fact by the Caretaker in a puppet theater, with a really charming paper cutouts lifted directly out of the Paper Mario RPG series, which Rostal also said informed the light, witty tone of the writing. This papercraft aesthetic led to some unexpectedly delightful moments in my playthrough, such as when a monster breathed fire on me, which actually singed the cards in my hand, but the cards in the sweet suit caramelized, giving them an additional effect. This kind of clever attention to detail defined my time with Beastro.
Rostal loves and pulled liberally from the thriving roguelike deckbuilder genre, but ended up going with a deceptively simple, classic core for the card game, in part out of consideration for not scaring off more casual players. “I love Magic, Pokémon, obviously Slay the Spire, your Monster Trains, etc., but I understand that looking at some of those can feel daunting for a player that’s maybe mostly been playing Animal Crossing who’s drawn to the cozy vibes of Beastro. So we pulled it towards more traditional card games, which a lot of people grew up playing with their families. We got really into playing a lot of trick-taking games like Spades, Hearts, Euchre, Bid Whist, etc. It was very fun to take a deep-dive into global trick-taking games.”
We spoke about how recent indie darling roguelike Balatro made something extremely successful out of the building blocks of poker hands, and how much untapped value is still to be gained from iterating on traditional games. “These foundations have stood the test of time for a reason.” As something of a card game sicko myself, I thought the taste I got of Beastro’s card battles was very promising. The trick-taking core made it easy to just jump in and play hands, but there was clearly a lot more to wrap my head around as I unlock more recipes and Caretakers, and thus more deckbuilding possibilities.
Go Outside and Cook Something
One of Beastro’s biggest influences wasn’t from other games or media at all, but the city we live in. “Los Angeles is a food city. It’s a city that has a lot of cultures where everything is kind of fused together and we have these neighborhoods that are incredibly vibrant and different. I’ve thrown a few item shoutouts into our menu that are definitely from places around the city, as my homage to this place.” Rostal gave me several recommendations of places to check out in the neighborhood where we met and clearly knows her stuff. The inclusion of real, beloved LA dishes in the game’s recipes speaks to a sense of warmth and care that permeates Beastro.
She hopes that this material grounding can extend forward from the game as well. “One thing that I like with games is the ability to also inspire people to maybe look outside or learn something they didn’t know before. We tried to use the flavor pairings as exactly as we could, so if you didn’t know that salty balances sweet, you can take and use that in the real world. Or maybe you didn’t know what aguachile is and want to go try it.”
It’s actually already started—she told me that play testers on their Discord have been excitedly posting pictures of new recipes they’ve cooked, inspired by the game to expand their horizons. I can see why—I was thoroughly charmed by Beastro and its thoughtful blend of ideas and influences into a world all their own, and I am excited to see more of what Rostal and her team at Timberline are cooking.
Beastro arrives on Xbox Series X|S and Xbox on PC this spring, including day one on Game Pass Ultimate.
Beastro
Timberline Studios
☆☆☆☆☆
★★★★★
Palo Pori is a beautiful and peaceful village of artisans and tastemakers. Beyond the village’s protective wall, darkness has begun to stir. Ravenous monsters have claimed the land and threaten to sink their teeth into this final morsel of hope and happiness.
Play as Panko, a young, talented chef, helping to run the local eatery. When Panko’s teacher goes missing, a mysterious visitor arrives with warnings of the dangers beyond the wall. It’s up to Panko to step up and take over the restaurant and tend to the ingredients and patrons. But that’s not all, Panko also finds himself serving the Caretakers, brave adventurers, sent to save the world. In this adventure, preserving peace starts in the kitchen!
FEATURES – WHAT’S ON THE MENU?
FROM TOWN TO TABLE
In Palo Pori, fresh is best! Gather ingredients and resources, care for animals and grow your own fruit and veg to build up your very own cozy town to table restaurant. Forage for wild herbs and unlock new seeds to grow to expand your meals.
SERVING YOUR COMMUNITY
Chop, flip, and sizzle your way through mouthwatering mini-games as you whip up delightful dishes for the townsfolk. Good food is always better with company, so work hard to improve your cooking and experiment with ingredients, to keep your patrons happy.
Tailor your restaurant to the tastes of your community, develop new meals, progress your know how through a skill tree and adjust the decor to increase your restaurant’s appeal.
FEED THE CARETAKERS
You’ll also need to feed the hungry Caretakers; these brave denizens of the land will venture out into the wilds to fight the ravenous monsters threatening the peace of Palo Pori. Each Caretaker hails from their own flavour region, affecting their own tastes and preferences: some like it bitter, some like it sweet and some are just looking to fulfil their craving of the day! Craft thoughtful meals and balance the flavour profiles to boost their spirits, sharpen their skills, and unlock new abilities. Because let’s face it… Who can save the world on an empty stomach?
DELICIOUS DECK BUILDING
Now it’s time to put your meal to the test! This is where taste meets tactics. The dishes you serve will build your Caretaker’s deck – each ingredient unlocking a card. And once they’ve eaten, they’ll venture into the wilds to fight the monsters. Upon their return, they’ll recount their journey and play out their battles through a charming puppet theatre sequence. They might even bring you back some MONSTEROUS ingredients from their ventures. Fight the monsters in turn-based deck building combat, inspired by traditional trick-taking card games. Outplay the monsters, by matching their flavour magic or neutralising it with a balancing card. Add an enhancing card to power up your moves! Your magic can turn the tables!
Utilize the unique effects of your ingredients to put your enemies to sleep, blow away their cards, and more, but watch out, you’re not the only one with special abilities. If you’re not paying attention, you might get burned.
In this food-based fantasy adventure, it’s time to give peas a chance! – Are you ready to get cooking?
Sometimes you get a note through the door, nestled among the bills and flyers for local takeaways. Oi, it says, some priest’s been murdered, and we need you to track down the folks on a list of Nazis he smuggled out of Germany after the war. Ok, you reply, it’s the 1970s and I’ve got nothing better to do.
That’s the setup for Owlskip Games’ The Ratline, the Steam Next Fest demo of which has just put my beleaguered Monday brain to the test.
My Voice Zoo is a unique idle zoo game brought to life with your own voice. Record your sounds through the microphone and turn them into animal calls, creating a one-of-a-kind zoo found nowhere else. Start building your very own zoo, complete only with your voice!
Create animal cries using your microphone,and build a one-of-a-kind zoo found nowhere else. Whenever the animals cry, your voice echoes and income builds up. .hack//G.U. Last Recode
That income can be used to adopt new animals, helping your zoo grow bigger and livelier over time. You can enjoy it naturally without complicated controls, simply by leaving it idle,
free from competition or the pressure to optimize, and experience cozy and gentle healing. Build and enjoy a truly special zoo, completed only with your voice!
Key Features
Create Animal Voices: Roar like a lion, quack like a duck, baa like a sheep, or squawk like a penguin — every animal’s voice can be made with your own.
Idle Income Loop: Each time your animals cry out, income is generated and can be used to adopt even more animals.
Build Your Own Zoo: Your recorded voices become the animals’ cries, creating a zoo that exists nowhere else.
Collect & Grow: Adopt adorable animals, give them names, and expand your collection into a larger and livelier zoo.
Cozy & Relaxing: From moments of laughter to small surprises, enjoy stress-free fun with no competition or pressure.
Only your voice can complete this extraordinary zoo. Start your journey now in My Voice Zoo!
Features and System Requirements:
MyVoiceZoo is a quirky simulation game where your voice directly controls the gameplay.
Speak, shout, or whisper to interact with animals and influence their behavior in real time.
Each creature reacts differently, turning your voice into the main gameplay mechanic.
The game blends humor, experimentation, and light puzzle-solving in a playful setting.
Creative voice-based interactions make every session feel unique and unpredictable.
Screenshots
SystemRequirements
Minimum
OS *: Windows 7 or later
Processor: Intel Core i3
Memory: 2048 MB RAM
Graphics: Intel HD Graphics 4000 or better
DirectX: Version 10
Storage: 300 MB available space
Support the game developers by purchasing the game on Steam
InstallationGuide
TurnOff Your Antivirus Before Installing Any Game
1 :: Download Game 2 :: Extract Game 3 :: Launch The Game 4 :: Have Fun 🙂
.hack//G.U. is back! This collection includes all 3 original .hack//G.U. titles, Rebirth, Reminisce, and Redemption, all fully restored and remastered. As well as an all new 4th Volume: .hack//G.U. Reconnection.
Log back into the .hack//G.U. trilogy and return to “The World,” as Haseo tracks down Tri-Edge in .hack//G.U. Last Recode, now with enhanced graphics, improved gameplay, and brand new modes!
15 years of .hack – Celebrate the 15th anniversary of the beloved global cross media franchise that first released in 2002 Horripilant
Fully restored – Graphically enhanced gameplay and cut scenes now in 1080p and 60fps
Improved system features – Enhanced battle balance and game pacing to provide an optimal experience for new and old fans alike.
Features and System Requirements:
.hack//G.U. Last Recode is a remastered collection that brings the full G.U. trilogy together with visual upgrades.
You play as Haseo, diving into a mysterious online world filled with corrupted enemies and dark secrets.
Fast-paced hack-and-slash combat blends with RPG progression and skill customization.
The story focuses heavily on revenge, friendship, and the dangers of virtual obsession.
Bonus content, smoother gameplay, and enhanced graphics make it the definitive G.U. experience.
Screenshots
SystemRequirements
Minimum
OS *: Windows 7/8/10 (64-bit OS required)
Processor: AMD Phenom II X4 940, 3.0 GHz / Intel Core i3-2100, 3.10 GHz
Memory: 4 GB RAM
Graphics: Radeon HD 6870, 1 GB / GeForce GTX 460, 768 MB
DirectX: Version 11
Storage: 40 GB available space
Support the game developers by purchasing the game on Steam
InstallationGuide
TurnOff Your Antivirus Before Installing Any Game
1 :: Download Game 2 :: Extract Game 3 :: Launch The Game 4 :: Have Fun 🙂
The launch of BioShock’s beleaguered movie adaptation may now be accompanied by other BioShock projects — including the long-awaited next BioShock game.
Talking to Collider, BioShock movie producer Roy Lee confirmed that while the project’s director Francis Lawrence is still tied up in post-production on The Hunger Games prequel Sunrise on the Reaping, the adaptation of 2K’s blockbuster BioShock remains “next on the docket.”
“We would have gotten it made a few years back, but then other movies got in the way, with one being The Long Walk and the other being The Hunger Games prequel, which comes out this December,” Lee explained, before hinting that the film’s eventual release may prove to be part of a wider BioShock push.
“We’re just waiting for [Lawrence] to finish post-production, because he’s going to be working on it through at least September, and then jump back into it,” Lee continued. “I know that Netflix and Take-Two are very anxious to see the movie come out because they want to have the release coincide with some of the potential new incarnations of the game.”
That latter sentence is particularly exciting, as it teases that publisher Take-Two is keen to see the film debut around the same time as a new BioShock game (or two). Exactly what is meant by “incarnations” remains to be seen, though.
When pressed for timescales, Lee cautiously said: “It’s steadily on the path, but you know how it goes. It’s… so many things could get in the way, but I know that the intent is to hopefully get in production next year.”
BioShock: The Collection Screenshots
Netflix announced plans for a BioShock adaptation back in 2022, though the project has stalled due to budget cuts impacting the scope of the movie and its script. Prior to that, Pirates of the Caribbean director Gore Verbinski was working on his own adaptation, though that ultimately came to nothing.
“It’s a tricky adaptation, so there’s lots of things to figure out and to get right,” Lawrence told IGN at the time. “There’s regime changes at Netflix, and so things stall out and get re-energized and stall out and get re-energized, and I think we’re in a pretty good place, honestly.”
As for the long-awaited BioShock 4? After layoffs and a further delay to the project’s release, former Gears of War head and Diablo franchise lead Rod Fergusson will now oversee Cloud Chamber and the project itself, which has been in development for the last decade.
Vikki Blake is a reporter for IGN, as well as a critic, columnist, and consultant with 15+ years experience working with some of the world’s biggest gaming sites and publications. She’s also a Guardian, Spartan, Silent Hillian, Legend, and perpetually High Chaos. Find her at BlueSky.
Star Shards are one of the more important currencies you can get in Abyss, the latest Roblox game to take the platform by storm. While the objective is to upgrade your equipment to explore further and get fish, there are also quests to complete and other activities that reward you with the game’s most elusive resource.
Of course, the easiest way is to redeem one of the available Abyss codes and gain all the bonus Star Shards that way, but you can also earn them as daily login bonuses during events, and buy them from the in-game shop. However, there are several other ways you can get Star Shards without paying a thing.
Daily Rewards are a quick way to grab some Star Shards whenever you start up the game.
How to earn free Abyss Star Shards
From what has been put in the game so far, there are five major ways to get Star Shards in Abyss:
Over on YouTube, publisher Raw Fury has released “90 Minutes of Esoteric Ebb Music | A Lazy Day in Norvik,” a chill arrangement of the upcoming fantasy RPG’s soundtrack. The kicker is that it’s kinda spectacular, and very distinct from Esoteric Ebb’s primary inspiration, Disco Elysium.
With Disco, we got the dreamy indie rock of Sea Power, while Esoteric Ebb has some of what you might expect from a fantasy game—lotta wistful strings and the like up in here—paired with some truly surprising, memorable synths. The closest sound that springs to mind for me is the music of 2022’s superb Tunic—that crazy good Zelda-like where you play an adorable little fox.
90 Minutes of Esoteric Ebb Music | A Lazy Day in Norvik – YouTube
It comes with that classic, long YouTube music video accompaniment of a subject-appropriate character in the lo fi hip hop girl setup. In this case, it’s Esoteric Ebb’s permanently behelmeted cleric main character doing some light reading as the city beyond goes through a full day-night cycle.
The video’s been on my work music rotation for the past few days, and it’s just the thing to get in the mood for Esoteric Ebb’s (presumably) close launch: The RPG is currently slated to release in the first quarter of this year (that just leaves until the end of March).
As for the game itself, Esoteric Ebb has seriously impressed us with its demos. You’ve got the Disco Elysium skills that talk to you and urban exploration, but Esoteric Ebb also does this cool thing where it folds some classic D&D stuff back into the mix (spellcasting, combat), but it’s practically approaching them from first principles to make them work in a Disco-style walk n’ talk RPG.
The lone fight in the demo, for example, is entirely dialogue based, with various ability checks you can make to fight or “charm” a hapless zombie. It’s reminiscent of Disco Elysium’s climactic Tribunal battle, but seems set to be a far more common occurrence throughout the game.
Esoteric Ebb is shaping up to be the best Disco Elysium-style RPG since Disco Elysium itself. In addition to jamming with the OST on YouTube, you can try out Esoteric Ebb’s demo for yourself and wishlist it over on Steam.
Keep up to date with the most important stories and the best deals, as picked by the PC Gamer team.
Video games rule. Sometimes. They can be really cool. It can be tough, though. Finding them. The games are good, but the discoverability? Miserable. Storefronts prioritize what’s already selling in a frenzy despite an intimate record of your playing habits. If your tastes generally lie outside of roguelikes or survival games, you’ve noticed you’re not always being served to your palette. That’s why I love Steam Next Fest. A publicity window, sure, but an easy opportunity to dredge the trenches of the video world.
Steam, for all of its resources and data, never seems to match my freak. In my experience, the moment I buy Capcom’s Pocket Fighter on sale my discovery queue gets force-fed every Monster Hunter under the sun. I think of my poor YouTube algorithm, so confused, so eager to please me, that the moment I watch an old Gordon Ramsay clip the whole feed switches to Kitchen Nightmare reruns and Raj clips. As if to say, “Now this I can work with.”
Three times a year, Steam puts on Next Fest. A digital alternative to the E3 trade-shows of old, the event prioritizes demos for up-and-coming works. It’s a great, zero-investment opportunity to not just check out the biggest and most curious hits on the horizon, but to flesh out a sense of what games excite you, specifically. Because gaming doesn’t have common third spaces like rep theatres or record shops, this is as good as it’ll get for most.
Surprisingly, it’s on that note that Steam runs especially flat. The games that make Next Fest’s front page are just as traffic-oriented as what the store calls attention to every other day of the year. If you’re like me, you keep tabs on interesting curators and creators, squirrelling games away into your wishlist. But even if you are proactive, Steam doesn’t offer a function to see if anything you’ve earmarked has joined in the festivities (you’re welcome, by the way).
No one knows you as well as you do. So unfortunately it’s on you to try to shape an environment by following developers, creators, critics, curators and feeds that seem to gel. Like an esoteric game? Check out its Backlogged page, peek into its lists to see what company it keeps. Hit the wishlist button on Steam as if that rainy day is going to be a biblical flood. You should probably hit up some itch.io feeds, too, where creators you’ve purchased from eagerly share what they find exciting. And if you aren’t in the habit yet, here’s a little tour through some of what I’ve hit up so far, speaking as someone extra invested in the outer orbits than most.
When I first played Corn Kidz 64, it dawned on me that not only can indie devs pursue the games they’ve always wanted to make, they can make the exact game they would have made if they could have made one back when they were a brooding adolescent mall goth. That thread has beautifully blossomed. There’s a slate of games I’ve mentally categorized as “self-medicating interplay,” games in love with the magic-hat nature of what can be rendered on a computer and intense, uncontrollable energies taking the first multimedia shape they can.
One of those is Downsouth, a manic and lurid platformer from Troopsushi about a grinning purple bean descending into an urban underworld, its brisk pace distracted only by the fidelity of detail. Each environment is stuffed with more loaded imagery than a ‘90s MTV bumper. In a similar class is RUBATO, a fun, physics-based, frog-based platformer with visual tonal shifts rapid enough to make you feel like a sleeper cell agent being shown their trigger code.
Reemerging after some time is Blast Cats, an eclectic, explosive 3D platformer reared on all the PlayStation games you saw ads for but never saved up the allowance to play. Another long-awaited bit of goodness is PSI, a first-person adventure about cults, plumbing, and frogs. And if you’re snowed in this week, may as well force the chill deeper with Subjectivation, an off-kilter horror game about a bitter frozen world. Mommy’s Best, who have long made games from a world where the Amiga beat the Super Nintendo, have a demo up for their latest, ChainStaff, a pulpy, Metal Hurlant-flavored run-and-gun. Another retro-inspired game that would make more sense in another dimension is Bad Pixels, a 3D western shooter rendered to resemble something you might find on a floppy disc the size of your outstretched hand. And if you miss light rail shooters and adore names that would make an arcade operator scrunch their nose, you owe it to yourself to check out ᴛᴜᴍᴏʀ ɴᴇᴄʀᴏꜱɪꜱ ꜰᴀᴄᴛᴏʀ:// αᴍᴇɴ.
Again, just a vertical slice of what’s out there for those who have hit a wall. Find the routine that works for you, keep tabs and broaden your video game world. The major industry won’t. If you do it for anything, do it out of spite.
Xbox players and industry observers were surprised last week when Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer announced his retirement, with Xbox president Sarah Bond also announcing plans to leave the company. Now, Bond has shared her reasons for stepping away from the company.
In a lengthy post on her LinkedIn page, Bond wrote that she committed to staying with Xbox and guiding it through “a critical period of change” following the Activision Blizzard buyout in 2022. She went on to share her belief that the moment has been “navigated” and Xbox’s gaming division is ready for “what comes next.”
“With that, I’ve decided this is the right time for me to take my next step, both personally and professionally,” wrote Bond. “We’re living through a transformative technological era that will shape the next generation of our industry, and I’m energized by what’s ahead. This moment also presents a unique opportunity for fresh eyes and new leadership to guide the team into its next chapter.”
30 years ago Toy Story chronicled a generational conflict between an old-timey pull-string doll and a fancy new one with buttons. The two toys learned to get along. This week a trailer for Toy Story 5 arrived showing both toys enacting a Butlerian Jihad against tablets. While I agree on the potential detriments of excessive screen-time, it is telling how the creators and intended audience of Toy Story films now identify less with the kid playing with toys and more with the adult who just spent all of dinner hearing about “looksmaxxing.”
If you’re a child who wants to watch a movie for children, or an adult who wants to watch a movie for adults, you thankfully have options beyond Toy Story. Disrupted as it is, the Hollywood entertainment industry has a built-in ecosystem to provide for demographics across all ages. Gaming still doesn’t.
All of these dramatic pivots occur in the shadow of inconvenient player trends. More players are playing fewer games. The games they do play are years old. Landing a “forever game” is obviously lucrative to the company behind it, and why Sony is wagering they’ll nail at least one for themselves, but it’s a formula that can only shrink the industry.
So why, when the population has never been more immersed in gaming, with evena third of octogenarians hitting Candy Crush, is success so sluggish? Taste and preferences differ across demographics and geographies. Impassioned fans from European rail-sim lovers to Latin fighting game communities make do even when the larger industry doesn’t provide. Those hungry for more deck builders, 4X games and turn-based RPGs will find something to eat. But the biggest gap between cultures is time, not space. There we see devastating stagnation. The youngest players are burning unsupervised hours on Roblox. The oldest are in Odinsleep until a single-player blockbuster catches their eye. The middle of the pack, getting the hang of disposable income, are discovering other ways to spend. The biggest players in the industry are still waiting for this entire bloc to gravitate toward the next Fortnite or Grand Theft Auto, but year after year this just looks more like wishful, harmful thinking.
Through the ‘90s, the video game industry very intentionally tried to narrow its players down to adolescent males, a controlled demographic that made marketing much easier. Movies, music and television did not do this beyond specific programs, because they knew their business relied on having something to sell to everyone. It’s no coincidence that the video game industry found its biggest successes when the facade slipped. The Sims, Pokémon, and the DVD capabilities of the PlayStation 2 were boomtowns, made up of people who did not previously see themselves as the primary audience for games and gaming hardware. The biggest disruptors of the last decade weren’t fantasy RPGs or open-world shooters but Minecraft and Pokémon Go.
Gaming started to broaden its horizons, even if the dude-focused marketing divisions remained entrenched for years. If there is a crash on the horizon, it’s likely Nintendo will be the ones walking away from it the least scathed (again). Games like Mario, Zelda and Mario Kart truly are widely beloved across generations, demographically pliable. The company has long understood the importance of trying to redefine what the experience of playing a game can be.
“If we continue to coalesce around the four or five genres, then we won’t get the new players because those people have already said we’re not interested in your genres,” former Sony Interactive Entertainment Chairman Shawn Layden said back in 2023. “Don’t kid yourself that someone who’s said ‘no’ to Call of Duty for the last 15 years is going to start suddenly saying ‘yes’ to Call of Duty.” It is worth mentioning that sales for Call of Duty, one of gaming’s evergreen cash cows, slipped last year.
The current youth, opting for Roblox and Five Nights at Freddy’s lore, are agnostic to the graphics-pushing that once defined industry progress. The people going to concerts, exhausted of being online but still enjoying posting, are compromising with the cruddiest flashcard digicams the 2000s had to offer. The fans who once reliably showed up for every new salvo in the AAA console war are now busy booking colonoscopies.
As gaming rigs return to the $6,000 range, the island of high-performance players will recede to the peninsula of 30,000 or so people who unironically have “XxX” in their username. The biggest gaming companies are placing unsustainable bets that rely on each one of these kinds of players showing up and subscribing to a singular vision of gaming. These are growing pains maturing at the worst possible time. But it’s the result of intentional decisions, not inevitable fate. If this industry wants a future for itself, it needs an ecosystem that everyone can participate in for the long haul, from first steps to one foot in the grave. That requires an inclusive approach that is very alien to its foundations. Those players will need a way to discover more than the next live-service game, finding the gaming equivalent to Sesame Street, Smiling Friends, and Saturday Night Live all on the same idiot box. Edutainment and courtroom dramas alike. The player base is huge. Bigger than ever. Ever growing. They won’t all fit into the next Fortnite.
This is Terminally Online:PC Gamer’s very own MMO column. Every other week, I’ll be sharing my thoughts on the genre, interviewing fellow MMO-heads like me, taking a deep-dive into mechanics we’ve all taken for granted, and, occasionally, bringing in guest writers to talk about their MMO of choice.
You, reader of Terminally Online, will likely be reading this article during the day. However I think it’s imperative for you to know that when I wrote this very sentence, it was 3 am, unadvisedly out of work hours, because I was too excited to not write something down. In the short five hours I’ve played it, Project: Gorgon has done something magical.
Firstly, it has convinced me, a habitual cynic, that there is a world in which indie MMORPGs can thrive, rather healthily in fact, on concurrent playerbases of less than 3,000 players. Project: Gorgon’s managing it swimmingly. As a matter of fact, it’s done that since 2018, finally ambling out of early access this year.
Secondly, I’d like to point you to an article I wrote lamenting the death of the old-school MMO last year. In it, I wrote the following sentence: “I get wanting to go back, but we simply can’t. Not because we don’t want to, but because everything’s changed—the games, the ways we engage with them, and our own lives.”
This game has proven me completely and utterly wrong. I have, for the first time as a critic, had a full-blown Ratatoullie moment. I’ve been sent back in time to that era of innocence and complete ineptitude, where 11-year old me thought sitting down and simply typing /eat and /drink in World of Warcraft was how you restored health.
How has Project: Gorgon done this to me? By being completely, unrepentantly, and consistently mad—but it’s a controlled sort of madness, carefully maintained by a recursively-collapsing house of dopamine-sparking systems that have kept me up to this obscene hour of the night.
Wonderfully wild
Project: Gorgon, as an MMO, is not interested in a lot of things. It’s not interested in fairness, justice, mercy, or simplicity. It’s not interested in having much of a proper tutorial, beyond telling you how to hit stuff and equip items. It’s not interested in a smooth progression system, quest loop, or race to endgame.
(Image credit: Elder Game)
Nothing better shows this off by the “tutorial” island: If you wander into a dungeon you’re not supposed to go into, a big, blaring alarm warns you that you are at risk of being cursed. I asked what this curse did, and it apparently causes zone bosses to spawn out of nowhere and gank the hell out of you. Awesome.
Keep up to date with the most important stories and the best deals, as picked by the PC Gamer team.
There’s also a helpful wizard who is interested in getting your amnesiac hiney off the island, but you need to find a series of coordinates for him to teleport you with—what happens if you enter a random string of digits? You can just get teleported goddamn anywhere. Project: Gorgon lets you make bad decisions and live with the consequences.
Get this number wrong, and you’ll potentially be sent to the shadow realm. (Image credit: Elder Game)
Even doing things the “intended” way like some sort of curse-allergic coward, there have been multiple times where I’ve died entirely unavoidable deaths in my last five hours. I have been mercilessly ganked by suddenly-spawning squads of walking brains. I have run straight into a level 30 skeleton in a dungeon I thought I was being directed to in an early-game zone. I have been violently hunted down by a slime I did not have the right damage type to fight.
There will be more deaths like this, but I’m not that mad, since beyond being told by a debuff that I should roleplay out a phobia of trees, it’s all part of the process. As a matter of fact, dying is a skill you can get better at, and I mean that entirely literally.
The beating heart at the center of Project: Gorgon lies in its skills and abilities system—as you play, you gather skills to train in from NPCs. Some of these are normal, like Swords, Fire Magic, and Unarmed.
(Image credit: Elder Game)
(Image credit: Elder Game)
Some of these are not normal, like Psychology, which lets me ask a Pig about its relationship with its mother so hard it dies. Speaking of which, Pig is also a skill. I know this not because I have Pig as a skill, but because Mycology gives me Pig points. Dying is also a skill (I was not joking), which gives you points in Necromancy, but also, at level 35, also gives you a point in Holistic Wellness. What does that skill do? I’ve got no idea, I’m still trying to figure out where to get Civic Pride.
Unlocking these skills isn’t straightforward, either. To unlock Fire Magic, I had to speak to a shirtless dancing man in a town square, then purchase a book of spells from him, then go burn a special material in a fireplace three times to unlock some spells. This, as I understand it, is one of the more straightforward skill unlocks.
Is Project: Gorgon balanced at its endgame? Are there cool builds you can theorycraft? The answer, I am rapidly discovering, is “probably, but you aren’t going to be caring about that for potentially hundreds of hours”, and even then I’m not convinced that’s the point.
Simply the quest
Project: Gorgon’s skills are an excuse to get you out there doing strange, baffling nonsense. Here’s an example of some of the things I have done in the past five hours:
I have solved a math equation from a golem and got a lollypop.
I have built a spore bomb and hurled it at a training dummy to get a secret key.
I have tried, and failed, to get two hat-wearing psychic mantises to fall in love.
I accidentally drank a bottle of ink. Nothing happened, it was just sort of embarrassing.
I have had to find a bath because I was too stinky for the elf I was talking to.
I have run a terrifying gauntlet through a dark, rainy forest to complete a cheese delivery.
I have received directions from two dogs.
On that last bit—it has been years since I have independently asked for directions from a random stranger in an MMO, but while I was struggling to find the aforementioned town for that cheese delivery, I saw two player characters who were dogs. It is unclear if they were shapeshifted into dogs or cursed to become them, I did not pry.
(Image credit: Elder Game)
However, I asked if they knew the direction to the nearest town. North, they told me. Thanks, I said, you’re good doggos. Awooo, one of them said.
Another time, I was accosted by a stranger who was looking for a pair of hat-wearing mantises (there are several, they were made by a wizard, it’s a whole thing). I had already killed them, and was able to point out that they were located halfway across the map from where they were standing, tucked in an abandoned warehouse.
Could both me and this person have consulted a wiki? Sure! But Project: Gorgon’s complete lack of insistence on linearity, fairness, or good sensibility engenders a shocking result: You want to talk to people about the nonsense that’s happening to you. Why go online when there’s a living, breathing person right there you can figure it out with? Why indeed, asks Project: Gorgon.
If you want to learn or train a skill, chances are high you’ll get roped into five other tasks along the way.”
The result is an act of sorcery: Old-school magic reinvented for the modern era. Project: Gorgon tells you it’s all about discovery, and it bloody well means it. It is a chaotic, messy, irreverent, incoherent setting. It is a game filled with hidden portals and secrets and ways, I hear, to get yourself permanently cursed to be a deer unless you find help to defeat a boss. Or drink a “potion of un-deer” I found on a vendor.
It’s a grindy game, sure—but those grinds are designed to collapse into each other. If you want to learn or train a skill, chances are high you’ll get roped into five other tasks along the way. And, in a pleasingly Star Wars Online-y fashion, the investment you need to get these skills up means you’ll get players specialised in all sorts of different things.
It is absolutely wonderful so far. If you’ve ever yearned for the good old days of MMOs again, I advise you to go download the demo, give yourself over to the chaos, and see where Project: Gorgon takes you. It is well worth it.
Hello reader who is also a reader! It’s time for another instalment of our winningly impromptu article series in which game developers discuss and marvel over books. Let us make the customary ritual sacrifice to Saint Nic Reuben, baron of words and founder of this column. Excelsior! And now, I turn the lectern over to Mariia Grygorovych, executive producer at GSC Game World, developers of S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chornobyl and S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chornobyl. Cheers, Mariia! Mind if we have a nose at your bookshelf?
What are you currently reading?
Right now I’m reading The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk. It’s a book about how trauma doesn’t end when the event is over. It keeps living inside a person – in the nervous system, in automatic reactions, in the way we build intimacy, in the very feeling of safety or its complete absence. Trauma isn’t just a memory. It’s a present state.
What did you last read?
I recently re-read Isaac Asimov’s Foundation. There, too, it’s about memory – but this time civilizational, not bodily. Can you predict the collapse of an empire? Can knowledge (even a fragment of it) save a culture? Every empire dies sooner or later. Ideas don’t. I’ve always been drawn to that scale: the individual and the system, freedom and predetermination, chaos and the desperate attempt to order it.
What are you eyeing up next?
Classic of Mountains and Seas (Shanhai Jing). I’m pulled toward ancient texts not out of nostalgia, but out of respect for humanity’s original imagination. Back when the world hadn’t yet been dissected into rational pieces. When a monster was simply a way to name and explain a mountain. When the sea wasn’t geography – it was myth, living threat, and mystery. I’m curious how people constructed reality before science. Because we’re still doing exactly the same thing – just with different tools.
What quote or scene from a book sticks with you the most?
From The Little Prince: “All grown-ups were once children… but only a few of them remember it.” It’s about the loss of the ability to see the essence behind the surface.
From Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning: “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms – to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances.” Probably one of the most powerful thoughts about inner sovereignty. When the outer world collapses, one last thing remains – your stance.
What book do you find yourself bothering friends to read?
Evgeny Schwartz’s The Dragon. Because it’s about the inner tyrant. About the collective habit of oppression. About how you can kill the dragon, but its shadow keeps living in people – sometimes even growing stronger. The ultimate takeaway: when you kill the dragon, the hardest part is not becoming the dragon yourself.
What book would you like to see someone adapt to a game?
The Thousand and One Nights – in the original form. Scheherazade doesn’t just tell stories. She changes reality with words. A story becomes a weapon. A story becomes a shield. A story becomes a way to postpone death – night after night. And if you weave together everything I’m reading right now – the body that remembers trauma, dying civilizations, ancient myths, the freedom to choose one’s attitude, the inner dragon – it all comes down to the same thing. To the human being as such. It’s about memory, about the power of narrative, about how the world is always built from stories. And the only question is: who tells them, and how.
This feels like a good opportunity to boost Unicef’s fund-raising campaign for Ukrainian children in wartime. I appreciate the connections Mariia makes here across psychiatry, fantasy and fable. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how trauma “lives” in the body, and the accompanying desire for a clean purge that can be quite self-destructive if you insist on it for too long. I’m not sure I’ve read anything recently that helps, but I do find walking guidebooks cathartically “bodiless” for the mild dissociation of attempting to visualise movements through unseen terrain. How about you – any books to share?
Sundays are for finally biting the bullet and spending some of your Christmas money on a boxset of 2000s British Touring Car Championship season reviews. You stick the first DVD in, a three hour trip back through the 2000 season of car touring around the finest tarmac-filled fields Britain has to offer. You think of the American readers, and make a mental note to explain to them that the action you’re watching is a bit like NASCAR, except with no oval tracks, smaller engines, and a lot more exchanges between drivers you can accurately describe as ‘politely grumpy tantrum throwing’.
Nyooommmm. A Ford Mondeo flies by, Swiss ace Alain Menu at the wheel. Smash. James Thompson and Jason Plato have attempted to meld a Honda Accord and a Vauxhall Vectra together to form the world’s first Honhall Veccord. Screech. Another Mondeo slides around a bend. You can’t make out the number on the door. Is it Rickard Rydell or Anthony Reid at the controls? Oh smeg. It’s neither. Adrian Edmondson somehow flashes a cheeky grin through a full face helmet as he dips the machine down through Paddock Hill bend.
SealChain is a roguelike game where items can link together to form chain reactions. Items can also be arranged into specific formations to create seals, granting special effects.
The world is collapsing. Chaotic evil shrouds the land like thick purple mist. In this catastrophe, countless innocent beings have become cursed monsters. There is no savior here. Ancient incantations are awakening, bestowing power upon the ‘Spirit Mediums’. Menherarium
Use the power of seals to cleanse the evils of the apocalypse.
Game Features
Items can link together to form chain reactions
Items can enchant each other to enhance attributes
Items can resonate with each other for additional effects
Items can be arranged into specific formations to create seals, granting special effects
Multiple playable characters, each with unique builds, skills, armor, and weapons
Event system: obtain various items through randomly triggered events
Rich variety of items, rewards, builds, monsters, and events
Receive different rewards from a variety of NPCs
Items can be stacked infinitely
Unlimited combat power, exponential thrill
Talent tree system
Endless mode
Easy modding: create mods without programming — edit simple .txt files to customize items, monsters, characters, and events
Features and System Requirements:
SealChain: Call of Blood delivers a dark fantasy action experience built around brutal combat and relentless enemies.
Master blood-fueled abilities that grow stronger as you defeat foes and harvest their essence.
Explore a haunting world filled with corrupted creatures, hidden lore, and dangerous secrets.
Strategic timing, skill combos, and precise movement are key to surviving intense battles.
A grim atmosphere and challenging progression make every victory feel earned and impactful.
Screenshots
SystemRequirements
Minimum
OS *: Windows 7
Processor: 2 GHz
Graphics: 512 MB
Support the game developers by purchasing the game on Steam
InstallationGuide
TurnOff Your Antivirus Before Installing Any Game
1 :: Download Game 2 :: Extract Game 3 :: Launch The Game 4 :: Have Fun 🙂
On Thursday, February 19, Roblox was sued by Los Angeles County for allegedly failing to guard the children that play it from predators. A press release from the county argues that “while Roblox markets itself as a safe digital space for creativity, it is in reality an unsafe online environment that has become a breeding ground for predators.”
The release continues with a statement attributed directly to county counsel Dawyn R. Harrison, who filed the suit. “This is not about a minor lapse in safety,” said Harrison. “It is about a company that gives pedophiles powerful tools to prey on innocent and unsuspecting children. The trauma that results is horrific, from grooming, to exploitation, to actual assault. This needs to stop.” The complaint can be read in full here.
This is not the first time Roblox has caught this sort of heat. A class action suit back in 2023 sought to combat a “misperception that Roblox is safe” for children, saying widespread sexual content and grooming are serious issues in the game.
In one harrowing case, a pedophile abducted and sexually assaulted a 15-year-old girl after grooming her via Roblox. Numerous states have sued Roblox over child safety concerns, including Kentucky, Louisiana, Tennessee, and Texas.
While the Roblox Corporation has consistently pushed back on the notion that it runs, as one research firm called it, a “pedophile hellscape,” and improved its safety features over time, it’s also done plenty to reverse any gains. Last year, Roblox CEO David Baszucki proposed the game make room for a dating hub despite its overwhelmingly young playerbase.
As far as this specific suit is concerned, Roblox responded with a statement issued to L.A.’s Fox11. “We strongly dispute the claims in this lawsuit and will defend against it vigorously. Roblox is built with safety at its core, and we continue to evolve and strengthen our protections every day,” the statement reads. “There is no finish line when it comes to protecting kids, and while no system can be perfect, our commitment to safety never ends.”
Keep up to date with the most important stories and the best deals, as picked by the PC Gamer team.
The scale of this issue is hard to fathom. Players spent well over 10 billion hours in the game last year alone, accounting for two thirds of the gaming industry’s growth outside of China in 2025. Roblox’s engagement stats rival Steam and dwarf the likes of Epic and Battle.net. At least one industry analyst reckons that huge swathes of Gen Alpha gamers may not ever “grow out of” Roblox.
Today marks the 40th anniversary of The Legend of Zelda. Originally released for the Famicom Disk System in 1986, Nintendo’s ambitious adventure kicked off the most beloved high-fantasy video game series of them all. Through decades, the tunic-wearing hero has slain stalfos, obliterated octoroks, and harassed cuccos. But behind all the sword and sorcery lies another campaign in waiting, an adventure Link has never braved but come very close to undertaking: some outer space shit.
In 2017, Breath of the Wild director Hidemaro Fujibayashi, art director Satoru Takizawa and technical director Takuhiro Dohta gave a keynote at GDC. It offered a rare and candid glimpse at the production behind the latest (and to some, greatest) Legend of Zelda, released only a few days prior. Getting a peak behind the curtain at how the toybox of physics and elemental effects came to be was a treat, but one of the more bizarre parts of the talk regarded an earlier pitch.
In a segment called “Trial and Error,” Takizawa reviews concepts for a version of the game called The Legend of Zelda: INVASION. “This is where things got a bit dodgy,” Takizawa said. “And here’s an invasion from outer space.”
As chuckling swells in the crowd, bizarre slides of this would-be Zelda cycle. It features a UFO descending on to Hyrule, a storyboard for an alien autopsy, spacesuits and Ganondorf in what appears to be a Metallica t-shirt. Most offensive of all were slides of the most fuckboy Link ever developed. Dressed like a frosh week volunteer, Link dons baggy denim pants, a striped winter hat, a Triforce guitar and a motorcycle. To think we came this close to a Link with a Superbad poster in his room still gives me chills.
The Legend of Zelda is 40 today 🤯 *check notes on space*
The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (2017): UFO concept, artist unknown Art director Satoru Takizawa: “Some of our younger designers came up with very unique suggestions, like the idea that UFOs could invade from space and abduct cattle.”
Thankfully we got the incredible game we got instead, but it’s probably no coincidence that Takizawa brought up INVASION when discussing the design for Breath of the Wild’s ancient ruins and Guardians. Sheikah technology has a strong, otherworldly and out-of-place appearance to it. Mechanical octopus arms. Ominous glowing spotlights. Metallurgy so distant to the masonry everywhere else. Hell, Link’s main weapon is a damn smartphone. It always felt like some of the sci-fi elements remained deep in Hyrule’s soil, built by ancient visitors.
This Stargate-aside wasn’t The Legend of Zelda’s only near miss with a different genre. Fact is, since day one Shigeru Miyamoto considered giving The Legend of Zelda a harder sci-fi bent. In an interview with the French publication Gamekult, Miyamoto confirmed that the series’ original idea revolved around time travel.
Obviously time travel is a frequent occurrence, but this initial concept is less Ocarina and more Back to the Future Part II. This plot seemingly concerns a bygone era of steel and shield rubbing up against strange future devices, and the source of the Triforce’s incredible magic being microchips and computer parts. In that same conversation, Miyamoto even muses that Breath of the Wild producer Eiji Aonuma might have added the Sheikah Slate as a kind of callback to this original idea. 1992’s A Link to the Past got so close to Link facing off against flying cars that concept art was drafted for a tubular, ‘90s, cyberpunk Princess Zelda, resurfacing in 2013’s Hyrule Historia. Come to think of it, the title A Link to the Past would make a lot more sense for a game about time travel than one in which you merely hop between a good dimension and a scary dimension.
After 40 years, it feels unlikely that Nintendo will send Link, Zelda, Tingle, all our Hyrule friends spiraling into wormholes and far off nebulas now. When Hylians land on the moon, it usually means the moon came to the Hyrule. Nintendo has reigned in their style guide before. As they venture into movies, Netflix shows and theme parks I expect them to only become more conservative on what their IPs do and do not do. Still, as much as INVASION’s Link… disturbs me, I am that steadfast Jackie Brown and Ed Wood are their best movies kind of hack who finds that great artists often do their greatest work beyond the comfort zone. Throughout the ages, people who work on Zelda seem to dream of one day lobbing Link into the cold void of space. Perhaps, one day, they will get their wish.
The weekend is finally here, and new deals have popped up as a result! There are quite a few solid discounts across the board, including savings on Donkey Kong Bananza, Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater, and even a Zojirushi rice cooker. Check out our top picks for Saturday, February 21, below.
Save $10 on Donkey Kong Bananza for Switch 2
Donkey Kong Bananza – Nintendo Switch 2
0
Donkey Kong Bananza was, without a doubt, one of the best games of 2025. It had been decades since DK had received a 3D entry, and Nintendo did not hold anything back with Bananza. This inventive platformer brought the act of destruction, allowing DK to punch and smash his way through any surface on his quest to the center of the planet. You can save $10 off a Switch 2 copy today at Woot!
Ghost of Yotei for $49.99
Ghost of Yotei
2
Ghost of Yotei has hit its first major sale at PS Direct, with copies available for $49.99. This second entry in the Ghost franchise brings a new protagonist, Atsu, plus a new region of Hokkaido. In our 8/10 review, we wrote, “A predictable but well-executed story takes you through Ghost of Yotei’s gorgeous landscapes and satisfying, fluid action – it may not be revolutionizing open world games, but it’s a great distillation of the samurai fantasy.”
Save 28% Off This Zojirushi Rice Cooker
Zojirushi NP-HCC18XH Induction Heating System Rice Cooker and Warmer
1
Zojirushi rice cookers are often known as the best brand around, and Amazon has a sweet deal on this model for a limited time. You can save over $100 off this rice cooker, which can hold 1.8 L / 10 cups uncooked rice. This is the perfect appliance for perfect rice every time, or a quick all-in-one meal during the busy week.
Xenoblade Chronicles X: Definitive Edition – Nintendo Switch 2 Edition Out Now
Nintendo shadow dropped Xenoblade Chronicles X: Definitive Edition – Nintendo Switch 2 Edition this week, bringing support for 4K60FPS to the 2025 release. The upgrade pack is available now for $4.99 on the Nintendo eShop, with a physical copy due out in April. Unfortunately, there are some visual smoothing and shimmering issues thanks to heavy MSAA use, but Nintendo and Monolith Soft will likely bring a patch forward in the near future to address this.
Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater for $29.99
METAL GEAR SOLID Δ: SNAKE EATER TACTICAL ED – PS5
4
Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater was one of the most faithful remakes of 2025. You can save $40 MSRP this weekend at Amazon, as PS5 copies have dropped to $29.99. With Metal Gear Solid: Master Collection Vol. 2’s release set for August, now is the time to check out the Snake Eater remake.
Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze for $39.88
Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze – Nintendo Switch
0
Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze is one of the best games on the Nintendo Switch, and you can pick up a copy today for $39.88 at Walmart. If you played Donkey Kong Bananza on Switch 2 and are searching for another adventure with DK and friends, Tropical Freeze is an amazing choice.
The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening for $39.88
The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening – Nintendo Switch
0
The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening is one of the best Zelda games on Nintendo Switch. This Presidents Day weekend, you can score a copy of the game at Walmart for $39.88. If you’re playing on Nintendo Switch 2, you can play the game at 60FPS with a higher frame rate in both docked and handheld modes.
