Tag: Double Fine

Xbox Developer_Direct 2026 Recap: Everything Revealed, Including a Surprise New Double Fine Game – Xbox Wire

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Developer_Direct kicked off 2026 with new gameplay and developer insights for four games coming to Xbox, all of which players can enjoy this year.

The development teams at Playground Games (who brought two games to the show), Game Freak and Double Fine showed off Fable, Forza Horizon 6, Beast of Reincarnation, and surprise announcement, Kiln. Each brought extended new footage, looks behind the development curtain and, of course, information on when you’ll be able to play the games yourselves.

All the games in our show are Xbox Play Anywhere titles, meaning when you buy them through the Xbox or Windows store, they’re yours to play on PC, Xbox console, or supported gaming handhelds at no additional cost – and you can pick up where you left off with all your saves, game add‑ons, and achievements.

Here’s a summary of everything we brought to Developer_Direct today:

Beast of Reincarnation – Launching Summer 2026

Xbox Series X|S, Xbox on PC, Xbox Cloud, Xbox Play Anywhere, Handheld Optimized, or play it day one with Xbox Game Pass Ultimate (see developer website for other platforms)

Launching this summer and available day one with Xbox Game Pass Ultimate, Beast of Reincarnation promises an unforgettable blend of action, strategy, and mystery. Game Freak gave us more details on Emma and her companion Koo’s adventure in a haunting, post-apocalyptic Japan.

We learned that Emma has been afflicted by “blight” – which has removed her memories and emotions, but given her the ability to manipulate plants – and led her to meet Koo, a dog that’s become a “malefact.” Emma’s role is to hunt down malefacts, but she forms an unusual bond with Koo, setting her off on a journey through Japan circa 4026 AD.

Game Freak call Beast of Reincarnation a “one-person, one-dog action RPG”, and have created a unique combat system to match – Emma provides classic, fast-paced action game attacks in real-time, but Koo offers added skills that can be used from a menu that slows time, more like a turn-based RPG. It makes for a game that offers a very different feeling to other action titles, adding tactical complexity to high-speed combat – which can be tweaked to your liking with three difficulty settings.

You can learn much more about the characters, combat, world, story and the game’s dynamic tempo in our Xbox Wire article, and wishlist the game now ahead of its launch this summer.

Fable – Launching Autumn 2026

Xbox Series X/S, Xbox on PC, Xbox Cloud, Xbox Play Anywhere, and launching day one with Game Pass Ultimate – also available on PlayStation 5 and Steam

The Fable team at Playground Games took us to the fairytale world of Albion, for the first in-depth look at the studio’s brand new open world action-RPG – and revealed that the game will be coming to players in Autumn 2026. Developed by a dedicated team at the UK-based studio, Fable is set to deliver everything players love about the original trilogy – choice and consequence, dry British wit and playful moral chaos – all reimagined for a new generation of players in an unmistakably Playground way.

During the show, we learned how your story in Albion begins, how character customization will work, learned more about the game’s new take on Fable’s morality system and saw brand-new gameplay that showcased combat – with enemies old and new – as well as the game’s unique living population of NPCs. Fable will be a fresh new beginning for this much-loved franchise and will be coming Autumn 2026 to Xbox Series X/S, Xbox on PC, Xbox Cloud, Steam, PlayStation 5 and Game Pass Ultimate.

Check out our in-depth interview with Fable GM & Game Director, Ralph Fulton here.

Forza Horizon 6 – Launching May 19, 2026

Xbox Series X/S, Xbox on PC, Xbox Cloud, Steam, Xbox Play Anywhere, Handheld Optimized, or play it day one with Xbox Game Pass Ultimate at launch – coming to PS5 later in 2026

Forza Horizon 6 is speeding towards players in 2026, with the announcement that the much-anticipated next instalment of the Horizon series will be landing on May 19 this year. As part of the Developer_Direct show, the Forza team at Playground Games revealed first-ever gameplay showcasing the breathtaking landscapes of Japan in all their glory, and lifted the curtain on the spectacular cars that will be gracing the cover of the game – the 2025 GR GT Prototype, which is making its video game debut in Forza Horizon 6, and the 2025 Toyota Land Cruiser.

Forza Horizon 6 will feature the largest and densest map of any Horizon game to date, full of verticality, diverse biomes, seasonality and breathtaking driving experiences – all elevated by Japan’s unique car culture. And just when you thought things couldn’t get better, the team provided an overview of the new features players will enjoy as part of Forza Horizon 6 – including Customizable Garages and The Estate, an overhauled car roster (with 550 cars to collect and customize at launch) as well as new shared experiences, Drag Meets and Horizon Time Attack Circuits.

For an in-depth look at what’s new in Forza Horizon 6, check out our interview with Design Director, Torben Ellert here.

Kiln – Launching Spring 2026

Xbox Series X|S, Xbox on PC, Xbox Cloud, Xbox Play Anywhere, Handheld Optimized, or play it day one with Xbox Game Pass Ultimate – also available on PlayStation 5 and Steam

We joined Double Fine in their game-turned-ceramics studio in San Francisco, California to learn more about Kiln, an Online Multiplayer Pottery-Party Brawler (say that ten times fast!), arriving this spring.

Double Fine’s new foray into fun asks the question: what would it look like for a game to combine the beautiful expression of creation with all of the chaotic fun of destruction? Turns out it’s a team-based arena battle game which asks you to craft ceramic battle armor on a realistic pottery wheel, and where your abilities are determined by the kind of pot you make.

We took a turn on the clay-splatted wheel to learn all about the 4v4 action of Kiln, the wide variety of crafting tools at your disposal, and what each size and shape of crafted pot means for your combat abilities.

You can catch more of the action in their smashing Announce trailer now and get fired up for the ultimate throwdown by wishlisting Kiln today. Help the team sculpt the game before it launches this Spring by signing up for their upcoming closed beta test, and joining the Double Fine Action Insiders. Find out about the game’s story, mechanics, and more in our hands-on preview on Xbox Wire.

Looking Ahead

As with every Developer_Direct, today’s show marks just a selection of the games coming to Xbox this year. 2026 marks the 25^th anniversary of Xbox, and offers a moment to honor the games, creators, teams, and players that have inspired play for decades – and we’ll be celebrating that all year long. With the likes of Gears of War: E-Day and Halo: Campaign Evolved still to come, we’ll be returning to some of our most beloved franchises, not to mention introducing new worlds of our own, and those from our incredible third-party partners. It’s going to be an incredible year – make sure to stay tuned to Xbox Wire and Xbox social channels to keep up to date with everything we have to show you.

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Joe Skrebels, Xbox Wire Editor-in-Chief

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January 22, 2026
Keeper: A Note from Its Creator on Launch Day – Xbox Wire
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Summary

Keeper, the otherworldly new adventure from Double Fine, arrives today.

Launching on Xbox Series X|S, Xbox on PC, Xbox Cloud, and Steam. It’s an Xbox Play Anywhere title, and available day one with Game Pass.

Read a note from Creative Lead, Lee Petty, as his beautiful passion project arrives.
Hi there, my name is Lee Petty, and I’m a Creative Lead here at Double Fine Productions. I’ve been at Double Fine for almost 20 years! I was the Art Director for Brütal Legend and Broken Age, but was also the Creative Lead for Stacking, Headlander, Autonomous, and RAD.

My new game, Keeper, was inspired by the events of the last few years. Like most, I thought a lot about isolation and connection with others. I’ve always been into hiking, backpacking, and spending time outdoors with my family. During the pandemic, it became even more important to me. I wondered if the wildlife around me would be all that is left in the future. Would it continue to develop, to evolve? I thought of the mycelium, the vast underground networks that connect fungi, and how they are also used by trees to share nutrients and communicate with each other.

I imagined an isolated island in a far-flung future without humans. What sorts of life would evolve there? Would this life still be possessed with a need to connect with others and to have a purpose?

When thinking about what this world could look like, I was inspired by Surrealist painters, like Max Ernst and Salvador Dali, who created vibrant, dream-like worlds that are both familiar and unlike anything else. Some of my favorite movies, like ‘The Dark Crystal’ and ‘Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind’, are about strange, otherworldly places and unusual forms of life, and both present as family-friendly films but have weirder, darker undercurrents. This comes through in Keeper too, giving it a gameplay style that I like to call “Weird, but Chill”.

A story told entirely without words, Keeper is the tale of a long-forgotten Lighthouse on a post-human island, which awakens after eons of lying dormant. The Lighthouse’s ancient masonry crumbles and it falls to the ground, but then it grows legs, stands up, and sets off on a journey toward the mountain peak at the center of the island, joined by a spirited seabird companion, named Twig.

It’s a psychedelic tale of companionship and an adventure of mystifying metamorphosis, all set in a beautiful and surreal otherworldly realm beyond understanding.

It’s a game which is very much about the unexpected, and we have gone to great lengths to preserve the mysteries and surprises the game holds. I’m really excited for you all to discover them for yourselves as you play – and I’d like to ask you to please consider how you talk about these surprising elements, ideally preserving some of the mystery for others wherever possible. Thank you for playing!

Lee & The Team at Double Fine Productions

Keeper

Xbox Game Studios

☆☆☆☆☆
200

★★★★★

$29.99

PC Game Pass

Xbox Game Pass

From Lee Petty and Double Fine Productions, Keeper is a beautiful and surreal otherworldly adventure, and a story told without words.

On an island in a long-lost sea, a forgotten lighthouse stands dormant in the shadow of a distant mountain peak. As withering tendrils spread and coalesce, it awakens. Taken with a mysterious sense of purpose and joined by a spirited seabird, it embarks upon a heartening tale of unlikely companionship, an odyssey of mystifying metamorphosis, and an unexpected journey towards the center of the island, into realms beyond understanding.
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Joe Skrebels, Xbox Wire Editor-in-Chief

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October 17, 2025
Keeper’s First Extended Gameplay Shows Us an Ever-Changing Adventure – Xbox Wire

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There’s a primal human pleasure in simply finding out what something does. It’s the reason you’d still want to push a button that says “do not touch”, or wonder what’s behind a locked door. Keeper thrives on that idea, building out a game of discoveries and experiments around it.

Seeing extended gameplay for the first time at gamescom, Keeper’s key trick – of telling its story in a never-before-seen world, all without words – means that almost everything you do is less about completing an objective you’re told to follow, and more about finding out what the objective is.

Shine Your Light

First revealed at Xbox Games Showcase earlier this year, Keeper is a dreamy, otherworldly adventure that puts you in the misshapen body of a suddenly sentient walking lighthouse – but there’s no narrator, nor talking sidekick to explain where you are, what’s going on, and what you should be doing. Working these things out is the game.

“A key tenet of this game is the unexpected,” Creative Director Lee Petty tells me. “We wanted players to be able to relax a bit, chill out a bit, and embrace the unexpected. So to that end, there’s some experimentation, but there’s nothing the player can do to die in this game. They can’t mess up the experience. We sort of get the player on board early so that, when something unexpected is thrown at them, it’s not a moment of panic that they don’t know how to get through.”

In three portions taken from early sections, I see how Keeper slowly introduces new ideas in subtle ways. With only the ability to walk, shine a beacon, and the help of a bird companion called Twig, the player needs to work out what they should be doing through context clues.

“The lighthouse beam has two main modes,” explains Petty. “It has an unfocused and a focused mode. The unfocused mode is for exploring – as you shine it around, you might see little subtle shimmers or reactions in the world. Bigger transformations occur when the player focuses that bigger, brighter beam on things, and that’s often used to solve puzzles as well.

“Twig rides along on the lighthouse and can do things that the lighthouse can’t. The lighthouse doesn’t have arms, only legs. Twig however, can directly manipulate things in the world. So what the player can do, for example, to solve a puzzle is use a combination of that light ability and Twig’s ability to pick up and collect things.”

I see this early on, as the lighthouse comes across a lumpen… thing blocking its path. Under the unfocused beam, the creature bristles slightly, enough to show you that it’s reacting – and, focusing the beam, it puts a claw in front of its eyes. This produces a shimmer, which attracts Twig, who flies to grab the claw, and an option to “tug” appears on the screen. Twig pulls at the creature, who flops to one side, revealing a seed that Twig stows away for a future puzzle.

It’s a sequence of purely organic discovery – the game doesn’t tell you what you need to be doing, and the weirdness of it all means you don’t come in with a preconceived idea of what you should be doing, other than trying things out. And this is repeated throughout. I see the lighthouse effectively organising a dance of creatures attracted to its light to smash through a sheet of ice, a gorgeous discovery that touching a certain spore-like plant will allow the lighthouse to subvert gravity itself, and even a wild sequence in which it becomes apparent that the beam can control the flow of time on objects it touches in a certain area.

The real ace in the hole here is that Keeper’s world is unlike any other – its bucolic landscapes inhabited by scuttling, alien-like creatures, trees with faces, and flora with unusual effects. It means that, even once you do work out where to go, or what to look at, the effects of your interaction remain a surprise. Crucially, Double Fine never want that feeling to go away:

“We wanted the entire game to have this sort of organic, almost handmade, bespoke feel,” Petty adds. “It’s not a game of repeating actions as much as a game of wandering among unique areas and set pieces that change.”

In just 15 minutes of gameplay, I see – by my count – 11 different puzzles (not to mention smaller interactions as you prod and poke at the world around you). It’s clear that the aim here is to keep surprising the player with what they realize they’re being asked to do. Not all of this is ‘mission-critical’, either – the more you explore, the more you’ll find:

“There’s a lot of stuff for the player to discover along the experience,” adds Petty. “Some of those come in the form of environmental storytelling, some of those things are in the form of hidden interactions with the various creatures, and a lot of it is also just about the players’ interpretation of the games events, and finding meaning in the experience.”

Crucially, though, this is all done with the same small pool of button presses. It might have been complex for the developers to find so many ways to play with these toys, but they didn’t want the player to be bogged down by an unwieldy control scheme:

“We wanted Keeper to be an experience that wasn’t especially difficult to play,” says Petty. “It’s not a game about control, mastery or incredibly hard challenges, because we wanted this sort of unique, weird-but-chill experience for players to go on. We don’t have a need for all those buttons on the controller.

“And we also just have a really big set of accessibility features where people can map the controls to what they want. If they prefer to play with keyboard and mouse, or they play on a controller, we support both of them.”

For a game this overtly strange, it’s a way of easing you in – in all ways, Keeper has been designed as a welcoming experience, not an alienating one. You’re discovering this world, not being repelled by it – and it seems there’s a great deal to discover. What I’ve seen is from its earliest stages, and a literal cliffhanger at the end of the demo – in which the lighthouse tumbles into an abyss caused by a bridge, well, ceasing to exist under its feet – promises that there are far more surprises to come.

Keeper arrives for Xbox Series X|S, Xbox on PC, Xbox Cloud, and Steam on October 17, priced at $29.99 USD. It will be an Xbox Play Anywhere title, and available day one with Game Pass.

Keeper

Xbox Game Studios

☆☆☆☆☆

★★★★★

From Lee Petty and Double Fine Productions, Keeper is a beautiful and surreal otherworldly adventure, and a story told without words.

On an island in a long-lost sea, a forgotten lighthouse stands dormant in the shadow of a distant mountain peak. As withering tendrils spread and coalesce, it awakens. Taken with a mysterious sense of purpose and joined by a spirited seabird, it embarks upon a heartening tale of unlikely companionship, an odyssey of mystifying metamorphosis, and an unexpected journey towards the center of the island, into realms beyond understanding.

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Joe Skrebels, Xbox Wire Editor-in-Chief

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August 20, 2025