In mid-September, YouTube announced a collection of new artificial intelligence tools coming to the platform. The tools touch basically every part of the content creation process, from generating topics to editing and even generating video footage itself through the Dream Screen feature. But even as AI features have caused an uproar in so many other creative industries, the response to YouTube’s new suite of tools has been muted. Instead, YouTubers are sharing other concerns about the ways generative AI is already affecting the platform.
It’s been a watershed year as generative AI tools have made it easier to create images and text, all generated from internet scrapes of others’ art and writing. Artists and writers have typically pushed back, citing issues like copyright and their own work being undermined — in September, high-profile authors including George R.R. Martin and Jodi Picoult filed to sue OpenAI for scraping their books. And then there’s generative AI’s issues with hallucination and inaccuracies.
On the other side of the coin, these tools have been used by many people, either experimentally or professionally. Prizes have been won by AI art, while some news sites cut their staff and put out AI-generated articles. AI has also become a cornerstone of TikTok, particularly AI-powered filters. Creators use the Bold Glamour filter to apply makeup, a Ghibli filter to look like characters from the studio’s films, and even pay a fee for filters that generate themed avatars — like the hugely popular ’90s high school photo filter.
Maybe it’s the fact that YouTube’s tools aren’t available to the general public yet. But the quiet reception still seems to buck the trend. On the YouTube Creators account on X (formerly known as Twitter), the announcement only picked up a few hundred likes, doing similarly to engagement-bait tweets like “how do you make your audience feel seen and heard?” On the main YouTube account, it performed worse than a tweet reading “stars are kinda just sky rocks.”
On the platform itself, it’s difficult to find videos discussing the tools at all, despite a thriving community of YouTubers who explain how to use AI tools in making videos — just not the ones announced by YouTube. Instead, these videos focus on explaining existing tools to generate scripts and voice-overs, and to create and edit together images for the video visuals. YouTube’s new tools basically give creators an in-house option for much of this: Creators will be able to generate video prompts and script outlines, automatically edit clips together, and create AI-voiced dubs into other languages.
The main potential draw is that these AI tools would generate content based off of creators’ own historical output. For example, YouTube says the “insights” tool will be personalized so that new video ideas will take into account what a creator’s audience is already watching, something that other text generators can’t do without access to YouTube’s data. It also aims to recommend music for videos, including royalty-free music that hypothetically should help creators know what won’t get them troublesome copyright strikes.
But existing creators don’t seem particularly interested one way or the other. “No one’s heard of it yet,” says Jimmy McGee, a YouTuber who recently made a video titled “The AI Revolution is Rotten to the Core.” As the title might suggest, he’s not a huge fan of YouTube’s proposed tools, but he says it’s “strange” how they’ve been received.
He thinks it may be that these tools are mainly geared toward creators, and viewers may not notice if, for example, a video is edited with the help of AI. He doesn’t think the more obvious tools, like the melty generated visuals of Dream Screen, will take off in the long run. “People will get sick of those quick enough that it’s not really a problem,” he says. But the other tools might lead to longer-term issues in the creator space.
Viewers might not immediately notice if AI software is used to edit videos, but McGee worries that it will undermine those who actually use it. “It’s going to de-skill newer people on YouTube,” he says. Although he finds it unlikely that it will replace professional editors in its current form, it will prevent newer creators from growing their skills. YouTube is billing the feature as an easier way in for people who might not be as confident in their skills yet. It’s also aimed toward Shorts, YouTube’s vertical-video spinoff, so it might make things easier for those who only have their phones to edit on. But McGee thinks that relying on it may end up discouraging video creators in the long run as they struggle to grow creatively.
“I think the more decisions you can make in your video, the better the video can be,” says McGee. “Maybe it won’t be [at first], but the ceiling is higher. That’s what worries me. If someone goes in earnestly trying to use these tools, it’d be very sad to see them give up.”
That potential pitfall depends on whether YouTube’s tools stick around. Parent company Google has a habit of shuttering things — including features it has hyped up a lot more than this one. And generative AI is currently running at a loss for most companies. “We’re probably going to see a decline in its popularity pretty soon,” says media and fandom critic Sarah Z. “[In the meantime] I hope these tools are helpful to creators and serve as a way of empowering them to better execute videos that serve their visions rather than a way to undercut creators.”
But some creators already feel undercut by AI on the platform. Just before YouTube’s tool announcement, creator Abyssoft released a video about a potential case of plagiarism. In it, he detailed the similarities between a previous video he had put out and a video uploaded by a different channel and speculated on how AI could have been used to perform the theft, including using speech-to-text programs and AI voice-over software.
Contacted for comment, Abyssoft pointed out that this is already a widespread issue on the platform. In May, science communicator Kyle Hill spoke out against YouTube channels using AI to create unverified but attention-grabbing content on the site. These videos are often misleading and in some cases appear to copy topics that Hill himself had made videos on.
In his video, Abyssoft says that he isn’t sure what the solution to these issues is. But one thing he suggests is that YouTube should disclose when AI is being used in video creation. He’d also like to see “a punishment or strike system for people that fail to disclose and are proven to be using AI.”
This would be easier if it were YouTube’s own AI tools that were being used; the platform would already be aware. In response to a request for comment on whether Google was considering implementing this feature or any additional measures to avoid plagiarism and misinformation on the platform, Google policy communications manager Jack Malon stated that all content is subject to the existing community guidelines, and that these are “enforced consistently for all creators on our platform, regardless of whether their content is generated using artificial intelligence.”
Although Abyssoft considered some of the other generative AI tools as potentially useful, like the music tool helping creators avoid copyright issues, he continues to fear what easy access to AI tools might do to YouTube creators. “AI facilitates plagiarism in a way we haven’t seen before, and with a bit of effort it will soon become undetectable,” he says. “Competing in a sea of faceless AI channels will be a tough challenge for creators who make a living this way, as their upload cadence will be greatly outpaced by the AI.”
However, he doesn’t think that AI will necessarily produce interesting videos. “I’m assuming the tool that suggests video topics is only going to suggest ideas that it thinks will do well in the algorithm,” he says. “Things will get incredibly formulaic if [it’s] relied on too much.”
He does acknowledge that channels with technical content, such as his own speedrunning history videos, have the advantage of research and understanding that can’t be carried out by AI. McGee similarly feels somewhat protected by his own style. “My videos are messy and I like them that way,” he says. “I can make all the melty, weird visuals myself and make something I’m actually proud of.”
But other channels might not be able to survive. “Someone that covers current news will see AI upload videos before their editing is finished, since it can just scrape whatever articles have been published for the day and render out a video and voice-over in less than an hour,” says Abyssoft.
YouTube’s tools haven’t yet launched beyond a few test countries, so it’ll be some time until we see the impact they’ll have on the platform. But while creators have concerns that they might add new issues for both existing and upcoming video makers, they also have prior concerns about the use of AI that they feel aren’t being addressed by the platform. It seems to be these that are holding creators’ attention, not any new announcements.
Demián Rugna’s terrifying possession movie When Evil Lurks — now available for streaming on Shudder — breaks the rules of the subgenre in all sorts of startling ways. For one thing, it isn’t a religious movie at all, even though most exorcism movies are. For another, the victims facing down a demon in his film aren’t struggling with faith, or with something they don’t understand. They all know the rules for dealing with the hideous, bloated creatures that result from demon possession — the encarnado, or as the English subtitles put it, “the rotten.” There’s even a little teaching song about the rotten, presented in the film as something akin to a children’s lullaby.
So if everyone knows how to safely deal with demons, why is the movie so frightening? Because the rules — including “stay away from electricity and electrical appliances, demons can travel through them” and “only kill the possessed in certain specific ways” — take effort and self-control, and people are often greedy, lazy, or impulsive. “It’s too hard,” Rugna told Polygon at the 2023 Fantastic Fest in Austin, Texas. “You need to comply with the rules because the demon wants to be with you, but it’s too hard for us to run away from cities, trying to avoid electricity, to avoid even thinking about the devil.”
When Evil Lurks is a tremendously frightening movie, in part because it’s as much about the power we give our personal demons as it is about any sort of supernatural force. Unlike in films like The Exorcist and its many sequels and reboots, Rugna’s characters can’t expect any help from organized religion or from God. “I have no religion,” the director said. “And I hate religion as a business. I love religion as faith, or for helping people. But not as a business.” Instead, the characters in When Evil Lurks have to rely on each other, and on their own courage and discipline. That goes poorly, to put it mildly.
They’re also meant to rely on institutions put in place to help them. At the beginning of the film, it becomes clear that the government has systems in place to handle the encarnado, and those systems have failed entirely because of bureaucratic indifference and laziness. Rugna’s inspiration for the movie explains a lot about where that theme came from: As he told the Fantastic Fest audience in a Q&A after the movie’s premiere, he got the idea for When Evil Lurks from a series of news stories about farm pesticides in his native Argentina causing widespread health issues.
“The owners of those lands contaminate those fields with glyphosate to kill bugs — pesticide,” he said at the Q&A. “There’s a lot of people who work in those fields, and they get cancer. You’d probably see a little kid with cancer, because they are workers. They didn’t say anything — or if they say something, nobody knows.” He suggests that corporate apathy about the workers’ health, and the way the issue occured “out in the middle of nothing,” where it’s easy for profiteers and city-dwellers to ignore the impact of their choices, started him thinking about the idea of lurking evils given free rein to spread.
“The pesticide infected them,” Rugna told Polygon. “Kids were born with cancer. Sometimes you see something in the news, but then there’s nothing more to say, and you forget the image. They’re in the middle of nothing, the middle of poverty. They must do work for less than a couple dollars, and they’re all ill. After you turn off the television, you forget, but they are still there, they are still probably gonna die.”
He said it happens too often, that “people who work the land” get “abandoned” by the system. “When I decided to make a movie with some kind of exorcism, I thought, OK, but what happens if the people cannot reach a priest? All the Exorcist movies happen in the city, in a big house. But what if we’re in the middle of nothing, in a poor house, with poor people who nobody cares for? Even the owner of the land wants to get rid of them, to burn their houses. It happens in my own country all the time — not the demons, [but the rest].”
All that said, while Rugna emphasizes how important realism in the acting, relationships, and setting was to him in making the movie, he laughs off the idea that realism in terms of reflecting the real world is important in horror. “You can see a movie just for fun,” he said. “Being entertaining is most important for me. If you have the chance to have reflection, that’s a double goal. But for me, it’s not fully necessary.”
He said the social inspirations just worked their way naturally into the writing because they’re part of his background. He didn’t set out to make a message movie, just one that would scare audiences. “I’ve noticed for myself in my movies, for a greater horror story, I want to make you suffer,” he said. “And the social element just comes along with my culture.”
Photo: Shudder/IFC Films
Ironically for a movie inspired by bureaucratic indifference to the suffering of children, though, one of the biggest limits on his film was bureaucratic regulations about how he could handle his child cast. When Evil Lurks is unusually brutal to its kid characters, with graphic scenes of child distress, mutilation, and death. In response to an audience question at the Q&A about how he protected the child actors, Rugna grinned and explained how his production walked the actors’ parents through their safety plans.
“I’d need two hours to tell about the process of working with the parents,” he said. “It’s too funny, because we did take care with the parents — we thought, OK, we want to share the entire script. We were scared about the reaction of the parents. […] The parents were too excited to put their kids in our movie. You can’t imagine. […] When the parents read the script, and we’re like, The kid’s gonna be bit by a dog and crushed with a car — ‘Oh, I love the script! Got it!’”
But the government was much more limiting, Rugna said. Among other things, in spite of the violence of the scenes involving children, they weren’t allowed to have artificial blood on the kids’ skin at any time. In another scene, a teenager wasn’t allowed to hold a gun during an emotional monologue. “All the time, it was horrible to work with the kids,” he said, laughing. “Not for the kids, for the rules.”
Movies inspired by H.P. Lovecraft’s writing are often so oppressive that they can be exhausting. Lovecraft’s most central theme (apart from the virulent racism and all) was the idea that we live in a howling, empty void — a cosmos that’s indifferent to humanity at absolute best, and so inimical at worst that even a glimpse at the true horrors of the universe would drive most people insane.
And yet a handful of filmmakers have found the wry humor in Lovecraft’s stories — sometimes for satiricalpurposes, but sometimes without losing the sense of cosmic horror at the heart of his work. Chief among the Lovecraft horror-comedy directors is Stuart Gordon, whose Re-Animator, From Beyond, and Dagon all lend a certain amount of goofiness to Lovecraftian horror. With the gleefully gory new movie Suitable Flesh, Mayhem and Knights of Badassdom director Joe Lynch is openly operating in Stuart Gordon mode. He has the best assistance possible: screenwriter Dennis Paoli, who wrote all three of those Gordon films, and is in his element here, loosely adapting Lovecraft’s 1937 short story “The Thing on the Doorstep.”
It’d be easy for impatient streamers who’ve never seen From Beyond in particular to miss the tone Lynch and Paoli are going for with Suitable Flesh. They might turn it off early, thinking it looks too cheap, flat, and glossy to feel convincing, that the acting is too broad, or that the emotions on display feel too fervent. Those are all no-nos in an era of oppressively realistic horror settings. But early quitters will miss out; by the time Suitable Flesh hits its peak and fully reveals its creators’ intentions, it’s a wild bacchanalia of violence, over-the-top humor, and authentic cosmic terror.
Photo: RLJE Films/Shudder
Heather Graham stars as Elizabeth Derby, a psychiatrist navigating the usual ailment of psychiatrists in horror movies. Faced with events the average horror movie character would quickly accept as supernatural, if only to move the story forward, Elizabeth keeps looking for rational psychological explanations. And even when she starts to accept that she can’t rationally explain the things she’s experiencing, her colleagues keep trying to pathologize her, slapping reductive scientific labels on every earth-shattering event she experiences. (See also: Rose Cotter in Smile, a much less funny, much less Lovecraftian horror movie that’d still make for a perfect double bill with Suitable Flesh.)
Elizabeth’s latest patient, Asa (Judah Lewis), is an emotionally ragged young man who’s frantic to get someone to listen to him, even if most of what he’s saying doesn’t make sense. His attempts to explain his anxieties are woefully unclear: When he talks about his father, Ephraim (Bruce Davison), trying to take his body, he could be talking about anything from sexual molestation to paranoid schizophrenic delusion. Elizabeth initially assumes the latter, especially after seeing Asa undergo a surprisingly violent process that winds up with him adopting a completely different personality. She immediately decides he’s suffering from dissociative identity disorder — which in no way limits her completely inappropriate attraction to him.
What follows between them starts out as half body-snatcher horror, half ludicrous erotic thriller, complete with a panting Cinemax-era softcore sex scene that’s a little too ridiculous even for something openly meant as satire. But the balance shifts sharply toward the body-snatcher end when Ephraim decides he wouldn’t mind claiming Elizabeth’s body in multiple ways. When Elizabeth finds out that Asa’s father really can use occult powers to force body swaps — the first few of them temporary, leading up to a permanent one — she only has a few chances to stop him before she ends up trapped in someone else’s far-less-suitable flesh.
Suitable Flesh is an intensely messy movie. It moves breathlessly from solidly plotted psychological thriller to almost Army of Darkness levels of slapstick violence — including a scene involving a van’s backup camera that’s a must-see for every true fan of grisly horror movie effects. Its broadest structure is classic horror, as Elizabeth tries to overcome her own doubts about what she’s experiencing, then tries to convince other people that she isn’t just having a psychotic break. And the entire time, she’s facing a confident, competent foe who knows far more than she does, and is almost always three steps ahead of her. (Purely in terms of plotting, this film would also make a solid double feature with the original Nightmare on Elm Street.) But on a scene-for-scene basis, it’s all over the place tonally, as Lynch and Paoli keep shifting their intentions.
Photo: RLJE Films/Everett Collection
Suitable Flesh is a “yes, and” movie that just keeps taking on new baggage. It’s a cosmic horror movie that respects the intentions and anxieties in Lovecraft’s “Thing on the Doorstep.” It’s a satire of that classic age of steamy potboiler erotic dramas, at least for a few scenes. It’s a cat-and-mouse thriller between two unmatched adversaries. It’s a giddy chase movie that pushes its physical confrontations far enough that even dedicated gorehounds may feel like they’re watching the horror-movie equivalent of Sideshow Bob stepping on the rakes in The Simpsons. And it’s an occult mystery with a little ’80s throwback style and a little for-the-fandom nodding to Lovecraft references. (“Filmed in Cthuluscope,” a label on the film proudly declares.)
It’s a lot to take in, and it doesn’t always work together, the way a more tonally consistent and coherent movie would. The shifts don’t always serve Graham well, either — it’s sometimes hard to buy her as the same character from scene to scene, because those scenes put her in such different mental and emotional places, some of which she’s better equipped for as an actor than others.
All of that stops mattering by the final climax, which locks in on that “serious situation, slightly silly execution” that serves Re-Animator and From Beyond so well. For a movie with such a cluttered, kitchen-sink ramp-up, Suitable Flesh charges to a memorable conclusion that’s perfect for celebratory group viewing, whether at the local multiplex with other die-hard horror fans seeking a seasonal thrill, or at home with a group of friends and a stack of Stuart Gordon DVDs as follow-up.
Lynch and Paoli are openly aiming this one at audiences who love Lovecraft-derived work, but don’t take him so seriously that they need to come away from every Lovecraft movie feeling depressed and oppressed. And they’re purposefully pouring this one out for every Stuart Gordon fan who worried no one else would ever make movies quite like he did. His legacy is in good hands.
Suitable Flesh is in theaters and is available for rental or purchase on Amazon, Vudu, and other digital platforms.
Marvel comics, TV shows, and especially movies seem to have a requirement to emphasize the “what’s next” of it all, where the end of everything is also a tease for something else. Well, folks, Insomniac Games took that assignment, ran with it, and took a few extra laps just for good measure.
Spider-Man 2, the triumphant sequel of one of the best games of 2018, is packed with teases and Easter eggs, all of which could be spun off into new games, half-sequels, or the ultimate finale of Spider-Man 3. We’ve got evil brothers hidden in plain sight, a mysterious bartender rendered in PlayStation 1-style graphics, and more symbiote threats than we initially thought. Let’s tuck into it.
[Ed. note: This post contains major spoilers for Marvel’s Spider-Man 2. If you haven’t beaten the campaign of the PlayStation 5 game and cleared every side mission, you will probably be spoiled by something in here.]
Spider-Man 2 sequel teases
Image: Insomniac Games/Sony Interactive Entertainment via Polygon
There are a lot of teases for the future of Insomniac’s Marvel games, and several of them come at the very end of side missions or are a bit obscure if you’re not a comics reader.
Otto’s plan for the final chapter
Image: Insomniac Games/Sony Interactive Entertainment via ScereBro PSNU/YouTube
In one of the post-credits scenes for Spider-Man 2, Norman Osborn visits his old frenemy Otto Octavius. Otto is, of course, imprisoned in the Raft penitentiary because of all those crimes he committed as Doctor Octopus back in the first game.
Norman wants Otto to tell him the identity of the Spider-Mans so that he can seek revenge against them for putting Harry in a coma. Otto, who used to be lab partners with Norman but now hates his guts, revels in Osborn’s suffering and refuses to help, and he just keeps working on his manifesto. When Norman asks what Octavius is writing, he simply responds, “The final chapter,” as he limps toward the camera.
The tease here is really just that Otto is clearly going to be back in some capacity in a potential Spider-Man 3. Although with his physical condition worsening (it’s established in Marvel’s Spider-Man that Otto has some kind of degenerative brain disorder that’s causing him to lose his fine motor skills), it’s unclear whether he’ll be fighting on the front lines or playing the role of master tactician.
Miles, meet Cindy and Albert Moon
Image: Insomniac Games/Sony Interactive Entertainment via Dan Allen Gaming/YouTube
After Miles’ mom, Rio, spends the entire game asking him to meet her new boyfriend, Miles finally opens the door to meet Albert in one of the post-credits scenes. But Albert isn’t really the tease here, as it’s quickly revealed that Albert has brought his daughter Cindy with him to the family dinner.
Cindy Moon is better known as Silk, yet another Spider-person who fights baddies and protects New York. In some versions she has a rather traumatic upbringing and isn’t particularly close with her father. Insomniac is clearly looking to twist this origin, although we’re not quite sure how just yet.
Norman wants the ‘G-Serum’
Image: Insomniac Games/Sony Interactive Entertainment via Dan Allen Gaming/YouTube
After the Spider-Mans and MJ defeat him, Venom reverts back to Harry, who, as we said earlier, is in a coma. In a fit of rage over his son’s condition, Norman calls someone to ask for the G-Serum.
Now, it’s never explicitly stated, but this is about as on the nose as you can get for a Green Goblin tease. In the moment, it seems like Norman wants the G-Serum for Harry, but we have no doubt it’ll end up in the disgraced former mayor eventually.
Wait, isn’t that Knull’s symbol?
Image: Insomniac Games/Sony Interactive Entertainment via Zanar Aesthetics/YouTube
During the campaign, it’s revealed that the symbiote came to Earth via a meteor, and that meteor has a big, red spiral on the front of it, which is most often associated with Knull, aka the King in Black, the tyrant god of symbiotes.
Interestingly, the game never mentions Knull by name, or even really alludes to an additional cosmic presence outside of the meteor itself, which Miles, Pete, and MJ destroy at the end of the story. This could be just a nod to comics fans, but it could also be a seed that might blossom into a full symbiote invasion led by the king himself.
Cletus Kasady is in possession of a symbiote
Image: Insomniac Games/Sony Interactive Entertainment via HD Playground/YouTube
Peter works to take down a cult called The Flame over the course of Spider-Man 2, And in the final quest, Insomniac reveals the cult’s leader to be none other than Cletus Kasady, everyone’s favorite serial murderer.
Cletus is the symbiote host for Carnage, the red-tinged symbiote villain who has given both Venom and Peter a lot of trouble over the years. With Kasady uncaptured at the end of Spider-Man 2 and in possession of a healthy symbiote, the rise of Carnage is all but assured.
The Chameleon is thriving in NYC
Image: Insomniac Games/Sony Interactive Entertainment via GameClips/YouTube
After chasing down all of Kraven’s drones, the two Spider-Mans eventually stumble upon a beautiful penthouse apartment with a secret basement. Turns out this place belongs to Chameleon, a master of disguise. (Fun fact: He was the first villain Spider-Man ever faced in the original comics.) Oh, and the Chameleon is also Kraven’s brother.
As the Spider-Mans swing away from the apartment, we see a man in disguise looking toward the rooftops, indicating that the Chameleon was watching as the heroes ransacked his apartment. Chameleon has clearly been set up in the city for a while, and this tease seems to indicate that he’ll appear in a Spider-Man sequel.
Miguel O’Hara and the Bar with No Name
Image: Insomniac Games/Sony Interactive Entertainment via PerfectParadox/YouTube
Once you’ve collected all the Spider-Bots in the game, you’ll get a signal that leads you to an alleyway. When you get there, a portal opens, and you see a bartender named Delilah standing behind a bar. Delilah is the operator of the Bar With No Name, a secret bar for villains in the Marvel universe. After a cryptic chat, she opens a box and steals all the Spider-Bots you spent so long collecting. She then name-drops Miguel (O’Hara) before shutting the portal.
This is a weird little Easter egg that doesn’t exactly have a clear tease. But with the nature of the Spider-Bots all being based on Spider-Man characters and villains from other universes, and Delilah’s style being that of a PlayStation 1 game, this seems to be teasing a multiversal story or some kind of crossover. It’s very unclear what this could be leading to or what it has to do with Miguel O’Hara, aka Spider-Man 2099.
Spider-Man no more?
Image: Insomniac Games/Sony Interactive Entertainment via DVESF/YouTube
Pete hangs up his tights at the end of Spider-Man 2, letting Miles handle the city while the original Spider-Man gets a well-earned break. But this seems more like a Spidey-hiatus than full-on Spidey-retirement. We’d wager we’ll see a decent time skip between Spider-Man 2 and Spider-Man 3, and that Pete will be married and potentially a father before he dons the suit again.
Are we getting another half-sequel?
Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales (2020)Image: Insomniac Games/Sony Interactive Entertainment
Spider-Man: Miles Morales was a big hit with fans, and took the massive, sprawling Marvel’s Spider-Man and condensed it down to just a handful of hours. It told a great little tale, introduced us more completely to Miles as a hero, and, crucially, did a lot of legwork to set up Spider-Man 2.
Based on the reception of Miles Morales, it seems extremely unlikely that we won’t see another half-sequel that bridges the gap between Spider-Man 2 and Spider-Man 3. The real question, then, is whothat half-sequel will be about. We have a handful of ideas on that.
Venom
Venom is the clear candidate for a spinoff game. Not only is he briefly playable in Spider-Man 2 already (we’re not game designers, but we have to imagine at least some of that hard dev work will transfer over to a new game), but it seems like Insomniac’s developers have at least thought about it.
In a recent interview, Spider-Man 2’s narrative director, Jon Paquette, told Insider that the team is waiting to see how fans react and what they want before committing to any spinoffs. This was in direct response to a question about a Venom game, so most people (ourselves included) are taking this as at least soft confirmation that Insomniac is toying with a Venom spinoff, and that the answer basically amounts to “we’re not not making a Venom game (*wink*).”
But you may be asking yourself, “Wait, isn’t Harry in a coma, and wasn’t the Venom symbiote destroyed?” The answer to both of those questions is technically yes, but there’s a Venom-sized “but” that follows. Spider-Man 2 very clearly establishes that symbiotes remain inactive inside the host even after they’ve separated themselves from the original parasite.
Just like how Mister Negative was able to harness Pete’s latent symbiote to turn him into Anti-Venom, it seems very easy to explain how someone with a very powerful connection to their symbiote (like Harry) could have their alter ego reawaken despite the host symbiote being “dead.” This could be especially fun with Harry’s current predicament, as it means we could spend the first bit of a Venom game piloting around a comatose Harry, wreaking havoc and getting into scrapes with Miles.
Silk
Silk is another strong possibility for a spinoff, as it’s essentially the same setup that led from Spider-Man into Miles Morales. However, Miles plays a major role in the first Spider-Man before getting any powers. All we see of Cindy is the back of her head, and we learn nothing about her character in Spider-Man 2.
With Silk just being a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it tease, it seems much more likely that she’ll feature heavily in whatever half-sequel we end up getting before being playable in Spider-Man 3.
Miles Morales 2
Our final guess for a half-sequel is just a straight-up sequel to Miles Morales. This makes some sense, but is also just boring in comparison to the other two options — no offense to Miles, but we already have two full games where we can play as him whenever we want!
Still, a Miles sequel would allow Insomniac to explore a New York where Miles is the only Spider-Man, and even bring Cindy in as his trainee. This would be a poetic handoff after the tutelage Miles received from Peter in Miles Morales and Spider-Man 2, and a great setup for a third game. I mean, who doesn’t want to hear Pete refer to himself as Silk’s “Spider-Grandpa”?
But a Miles Morales sequel in that fashion is still retread ground, and Insomniac seems hell-bent on delivering new experiences each time it puts out a Spidey product.
So where does that leave Spider-Man 3?
Image: Insomniac Games/Sony Interactive Entertainment via Polygon
Insomniac Games has clearly left itself a lot of wiggle room when it comes to the future of its Spider-Man. Will Carnage show up in Spider-Man 3, or will he take center stage in a Venom game? Is that Miguel teaser an offhand tease of another spinoff we don’t know about, or just another side activity in a sequel that’s probably five years off? We don’t know the answers to either of those questions, and it’s entirely possible that Insomniac doesn’t have them 100% pinned down yet, either.
So what do we know for sure about the next game? Well, Norman’s Green Goblin will be a pretty big deal. That’s a very safe bet — the free space on all your Spider-Man 3 bingo cards at home. We also know that Otto will play some kind of role as well, likely as a third party warring against both Green Goblin and Spider-Man.
And we know we’ll have no shortage of heroes for us to embody, with Miles, Cindy, Peter, and (probably) Harry all on the bench and ready to take on whatever Insomniac has in store for New York.
We’re still at least two or three years (and a whole-ass Wolverine game) away from learning what’s next for Insomniac’s New York. But the studio has certainly given us plenty to ponder in our time away from the web-head and his crew of friends and enemies.
The Deck of Many Things is coming to wreak havoc on your next Dungeons & Dragons campaign. This classic magical D&D item, sometimes known as The Deck of Hazards, has been granted physical form by Wizards of the Coast and features a collection of 66 unique, tarot-inspired cards capable of sowing magic and mayhem in your next tabletop session.
The $99.99 bundle currently available to pre-order from Amazon and Wizards of the Coast includes the fabled deck in addition to The Book of Many Things, which features content for players and DMs that’s thematically tied to the deck, and an 80-page hardcover guidebook that explains the effects of each card.
Reserving a copy ahead of the launch date from either Amazon or Wizards of the Coast saves you $10 on the launch price. Additionally, pre-ordering from Wizards of the Coast will get you early access to The Book of Many Things on D&D Beyond starting Oct. 31, as well as a collection of other digital bonuses. Just note that pre-orders from Amazon cost the same as a direct purchase from Wizards of the Coast, but that doesn’t include a digital copy, or any of the featured pre-order bonuses.
While The Deck of Many Things was initially slated to launch on Nov. 14, a series of unfortunate manufacturing defects has suspended the launch until further notice. However, early access to the digital pre-order bonuses available through Wizards of the Coast won’t be impacted. A revised launch date for the physical release hasn’t been announced yet, but we’ll update our pre-order post with new information once it becomes available.
The cards found in The Deck of Many Things use a non-standard size compared to those found in games like the Pokémon TCG or Magic: The Gathering. Thankfully, Ultra Pro makes card sleeves specifically measured for tarot decks, and the company confirmed to Polygon that they’re compatible with the cards found in The Deck of Many Things.
Update (Oct. 27): Following a series of manufacturing defects, the launch date for The Deck of Many Things has been postponed until further notice (originally Nov. 14). The post has been updated to reflect this information.
As a child in Finland, Sam Lake spent his summers in water as much as on dry land, by virtue of his family’s annual trips to a lakeside cabin outside his hometown, Helsinki. He would often stand poised on a wooden pier that extended over a body of pristine water, his back arched into his shoulders, arms pointed forward, ready to dive. But the tranquility of these aquatic sojourns was tinged with dread, even for an accomplished athlete like Lake, who represented his local swim team. Finnish water is not bright, crystalline blue but deep and impenetrably dark, a surface that’s practically impossible to see beneath. Lake often felt a compulsion to puncture this water, or “black mirror,” as he calls it, and immerse himself in its inky, fathomless depths.
The video games that Lake has either written or directed at Remedy Entertainment over the past 27 years conjure a similar foreboding through spaces that threaten to swallow the player whole. In 2016’s Quantum Break, you navigate a university town that fractures like glass as the very fabric of time is disrupted; in 2019’s Control, a towering brutalist building traps a young woman in a shifting, supernatural panopticon (one that seems to be constructed from a strange liquid substance as much as from actual bricks and mortar). Alan Wake, published in 2010, and its newly arrived, long-awaited sequel, Alan Wake 2, meanwhile, hem the player into confined forests where pines sway with an unrelenting, paranormal menace. Players explore these vividly realized worlds while engaging in altogether baser pleasures: namely, letting loose a hail of bullets and leaving a plume of atomized debris in some of the medium’s most refined gunplay. Remedy’s games have long sought to bridge the gap between genre craftsmanship and high art, and Lake’s writing embodies this daring, high-wire approach: pulpy, allegorical, poetic, and infused with a streak of absurdist humor that, at times, threatens to derail the entire experience.
Lake, who was born Sami Järvi in 1970 (järvi means “lake” in Finnish), describes Alan Wake 2 (published by Fortnite maker Epic Games)as a “dream project,” one he has agitated to make ever since the original was released for the Xbox 360 13 years ago. Microsoft initially passed on a sequel to the cult favorite in favor of something new (this became Quantum Break), and then a second pitch eventually turned into Control. “It’s been such a long time coming that I felt a kind of fever throwing myself into it,” he says via a video call from Remedy’s office in Espoo, a picturesque city that sits next to Helsinki on the southern coast of Finland. Lake says that everything he was “burning” to do with the game he has done: “It’s been quite an effort,” he stresses. “But I honestly feel, sitting here, that I can say: I have given it my everything.”
When we spoke in late September, Lake was deep in the final production push, playing Alan Wake 2 at every opportunity, making last-minute tweaks, and ensuring that the finishing touches being put on the game, like custom music, were up to scratch. He describes his work on the game as a kind of “creative chaos,” primarily because of the many hats he’s worn: writer, codirector, even actor (Lake is a recurring presence in Remedy’s games, this time playing FBI agent Alex Casey). Still, he hoped to take a breather the weekend after our conversation and venture into the countryside to do some foraging. “It’s a very good year for mushrooms,” he says.
Alan Wake 2 has taken four years to complete, and it’s notable for being neither an open-world behemoth nor an always-online, live-service game. Like its predecessor, it’s a committedly linear single-player experience set in an oppressively hostile yet oftentimes strikingly beautiful version of the Pacific Northwest whose cold yellow sun evokes the perpetual twilight of the Northern Hemisphere’s far reaches. You play as two characters: Alan Wake, a writer of Stephen King–esque thrillers and the protagonist of the first game, and Saga Anderson, an FBI agent who has been sent to this usually bucolic pocket of the United States to investigate a spate of ritualistic murders.
As in every other Remedy title (barring the studio’s 1996 debut, the vehicular-combat game Death Rally), the camera is slung behind the back of a character clasping a gun (or flashlight, in the cases of Alan Wake and its sequel). But Alan Wake 2 isn’t an action-thriller like the studio’s prior releases (which hewed closely to the formula laid out by Remedy’s second game, Max Payne,in 2001). Alan Wake 2 is survival horror, the studio’s inaugural effort in the genre. Rather than riffing on the time-bending high jinks of The Matrix, à la Max Payne, Lake and his codirector, Kyle Rowley, have looked to Resident Evil games, seeking to inspire terror through newly claustrophobic encounters, a deeper sense of vulnerability, and violent acts rendered with stomach-churning photorealism.
The game’s structure mimics the glassy body of water in Lake’s memories of his childhood. Above, Anderson and the events playing out in a world similar to our own. Below, Wake, who has been trapped in a surreal, metaphysical location called the Dark Place for more than a decade. You’re able to freely switch between these two characters at the game’s equivalent of Resident Evil’s safe rooms, exploring one or the other’s story to whatever extent you wish (perhaps even leaving Anderson or Wake to languish in their respective realities). Together, they embody a duality—one of the game’s big themes, says Lake. The solid, stable world of Anderson’s adventure, the submerged dream logic of Wake’s: light accompanied by dark.
Lake’s mother harbored artistic ambitions while working as a secretary at the University of Helsinki; his father was a computer programmer. As a child, he was an avid reader (his “fondest form of entertainment”), drawn especially to the fantasy worlds of J. R. R. Tolkien, which in turn led him to the Icelandic sagas. As a teen, he read the English-language version of Terry Brooks’s Sword of Shannara with a dictionary nearby to help him translate unfamiliar words, but this proved to be a laborious process. He gave up the dictionary, and so “if there were some words I didn’t understand, I just let my imagination fill that in.” By the time Lake was studying English language and literature at the University of Helsinki in the mid-1990s, he was writing fiction for his friends’ Dungeons & Dragons campaigns. “That’s a wonderful way to start as a writer,” he says. “You have a captive audience.”
In college, Lake studied postmodern literature, falling in love with Thomas Pynchon’s 1966 novella, The Crying of Lot 49, which centers on a conspiracy involving a centuries-old feud between two mail distribution companies. He recalls one seminar discussing the work: “There were a number of students in the class who absolutely hated it because they couldn’t quite figure it out,” he says. “They felt that it was rubbish, pointless because of that, protesting rather loudly: ‘This doesn’t make any sense.’” He enjoyed the moment not because he got the story and was able to lord his intellect over his classmates. Rather, he reveled in the sense of the unknown that Pynchon inspired in him. “The whole book is a kind of reverse detective story where the main character comes to [the events] naively and then starts to chase down its mystery,” he says. “When we come to the end, there are no clear answers. If anything, we know less because we understand more.” The feeling The Crying of Lot 49 left Lake with was a “haunting”—he couldn’t “let it go.”
The games that Lake has written and overseen as creative director have increasingly left their own trail of metatextual breadcrumbs, which have led players not out of the woods but deeper into them. Alan Wake features a handful of stray manuscript pages read not by Wake’s voice actor, Mathew Porretta, but by Payne’s James McCaffrey, the hard-boiled words appearing to reference the studio’s earlier noir shooter. A live-action trailer for a fictional film called Return appears at the start of Quantum Break, showing two FBI agents (one played by Lake) searching for an unnamed writer who bears a striking, bearded resemblance to Wake’s performance actor, Ilkka Villi. During Control, it becomes increasingly clear that it and Alan Wake share a universe, with the writer appearing in the hallucinations of Control’sprotagonist Jesse Faden before making a more concrete arrival in Control’s expansion, AWE (“altered world event,” according to Remedy’s idiosyncratic lore). Lake admits that such winking postmodern flourishes started as little more than a “joke,” though they have steadily grown into something “much more.” It’s all starting to resemble the “super-allusion”-filled shared universe that Stephen King—whose words open the original Alan Wake and whom Lake is an avowed fan of—has been crafting for decades.
As it stands, Alan Wake and Control are the only Remedy franchises confirmed to be part of what the studio is calling the Remedy Connected Universe—think less the broad popcorn appeal of the Marvel Cinematic Universe and more an eerie, Easter egg–filled matryoshka doll of virtual worlds within worlds as dreamed up by A24. If there is a defining trait of this universe, it’s a sense of creepy unease: “doubles, doppelgängers, twisted mirror images,” says Lake. This feeling is reinforced by Remedy’s increasingly avant-garde approach to environment design, in which in-game locales twist and reconfigure themselves like a series of endlessly ramifying labyrinths. In Alan Wake 2, the labyrinth manifests most intensely in the Overlap, where realities bleed into and are layered atop one another. As she’s trekking about the Pacific Northwest wilderness, it’s as if Anderson is having the worst mushroom trip of her life.
Lake has a knack for posing questions in a tantalizing manner and leaving just enough space within his fiction for them to stoke the imagination. It’s this aspect of Lake’s work that Ville Sorsa, principal audio designer at Remedy, has long admired: “elaborate, seemingly complex stories” filled with details to “discover and speculate on.”
That said, it’s easy to feel cynical about the Remedy Connected Universe in light of Marvel’s creatively and commercially exhaustive approach to shared fiction. On one level, the Finnish studio’s efforts can be construed as a ploy to keep players hooked on its games via an IV drip of insular references. Lake himself has the exuberant and enthusiastic air of a fan, and so he perhaps knows as well as anyone what such an audience craves. His TikTok account almost exclusively shows him drinking coffee, both a reference to Alan Wake 2 (see its opening credits sequence) and an extended ode to Twin Peaks, one of his favorite TV shows (the levels of homage also run many layers deep).
On another level, it’s practically a miracle that the Remedy Connected Universe exists at all in light of the past decade’s upheaval for independent studios of the Finnish outfit’s size (some 360 people). Remedy has had to contend with the declining stock of “one-and-done” single-player titles (its bread and butter), the resultant industry-wide pivot to live-service titles, and the increasingly rapacious acquisitional moves of major platform holders and publishers looking to bolster their own fortunes. Amid it all, the studio had to regain the publishing rights for Alan Wake from its initial publisher, Microsoft.
“Six years ago, if we were talking about the Remedy universe, we’d be like, ‘Who fucking cares? There’s not going to be a Remedy Universe because the studio’s going to be closed,’” Rob Zacny, former senior editor at Vice Media’s gaming vertical, Waypoint, and cofounder of Remap, tells me over a video call. But Zacny remembers playing Control and seeing the Alan Wake references for the first time: “I was like, ‘Oh my God, they’re still doing stuff with that universe. It’s still something they want to explore.’” Yes, Zacny admits, it can feel “indulgent,” but its very being is cause for celebration. “I think, when you have your entire universe put on ice for a decade, and you’re wandering the deserts of what the independent studio landscape became in the 2010s, you get to send yourself some flowers,” he says.
The original Alan Wake was the product of a torturous six-year production. It started life in 2004 as an open-world adventure inspired by Grand Theft Auto before eventually transforming into a linear, level-based third-person shooter in the vein of Max Payne. This tension is palpable in a game that’s frequently panoramic in scope before zooming in to lead the player down an altogether more confined garden path. The pacing is unsatisfying, at least in the first half, but the game’s unrealized open-world ambitions also yielded its central mechanic: light as a weapon and a place of safety, stemming from the day-night cycle the team developed. Rather than burying the agonizing development process in his mind and the vaults of Remedy’s Espoo headquarters, Lake incorporated it into the game’s narrative. Alan Wake’s back half plays out as an extended, warts-and-all analogy for its real-life creation.
In one standout sequence, Wake finds himself in an asylum, essentially being gaslit into thinking he’s experiencing hallucinations. He meets two geriatric rock stars and a painter who are being treated for work-related problems and encouraged to create as part of their therapy. At one point, the leader of the institution, Dr. Emil Hartman, suggests that what these patients really need is a producer. It’s a freaky, meta, and utterly disconcerting set piece and, Zacny opines, an example of the way Remedy’s “self-referentialism” can lead to “transcendent moments.”
Alan Wake 2’sdevelopment has been fraught and intense, but Control’s director, Mikael Kasurinen, says Lake “always had his eyes on the prize.” According to Kasurinen, “a new sense of creative confidence was born” at Remedy because of Control’scritical and commercial success, which naturally fed into Alan Wake 2. Indeed, Lake himself says the game arrives with its original concept remarkably intact. “There hasn’t been a Remedy game before that has actually retained its original vision as closely as this one. I felt confident that this is how the game should be,” he continues. It’s also notable for being the studio’s first sequel in 20 years, albeit with a “creative ambition” that exceeds that of its other titles, says Lake.
From what I’ve played of the game, there’s a strong case that it’s the weirdest triple-A blockbuster ever made, stranger even than Hideo Kojima’s most perplexing (and arguably best) works, Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty and Death Stranding. The sections in which you play as Wake in the nightmarish Dark Place are delightfully confounding, presenting an extraordinarily rendered New York as a grimy fantasia of fiction, memory, and reality. The third-person action is tense and challenging, while the game’s horror shocks are paired with cerebral, surprisingly robust detective gameplay. The game’s investigations evoke not only Lake’s university days hunting down clues in postmodern literature (House of Leaves is another favorite) but also, more concretely, 2011’s L.A. Noire (and, at times, a sillier, more fantastical take on David Fincher’s police procedurals). The live-action elements (screens within screens, fictions within fictions) that have become Lake’s artistic calling card and leitmotif have never been more seamlessly integrated; the awkward game-television hybrid of the intermittently compelling QuantumBreak feels like a distant memory.
Yet a nagging suspicion persists that Remedy’s games remain a case of flashy stylistic tics over substance—that beyond the undeniably thrilling moment-to-moment experience of playing them and interrogating the reams of metatextual questions they pose, these games lack a little weight. This is perhaps the fundamental critique leveled at postmodernism: that the movement’s works exude a kind of flatness and depthlessness—a superficiality. To quote Lake’s own self-reflexive fiction: “What lies beneath the surface?”
I mention the fact that in many Remedy games, protagonists find themselves trapped by abstract forces: time itself in Quantum Break, fiction in Alan Wake, the invisible hand of bureaucracy in Control. Does this speak to any of Lake’s own latent anxieties? “Maybe it’s more a fascination with the mystery of the unknown,” he muses while stressing, on the contrary, that his own “stable, normal life” contains little of the trauma his protagonists have experienced. The unifying element that Lake chooses to focus on in his work is the idea of truth—more specifically, the idea of a “single truth.” He refers to the conversation we’re having, which each of us will remember differently (although only one account is being published). “Still we want to say, ‘This is the truth, and this is what I believe in,’” Lake says. “Part of the struggle of our hero characters is this comfort being ripped apart and taken away. They find themselves in this reality that they didn’t think was possible, and they have to deal with it, piece it back together, find a new identity, beliefs—a new reality, in a way.”
Alan Wake 2 has two protagonists and thus two different perspectives. Wake looks up toward the “black mirror”; Anderson peers down into it. Regardless of their respective viewpoints and their takes on precisely what is real or not, both are forced to adapt to new circumstances, be they straightforwardly material or bizarrely metaphysical. When you first encounter Wake, he is bewildered by his new surroundings, as if awoken from a trance—a man at sea.
Lake has also felt the ground shift beneath his feet at various points in his life. Plunging back into his childhood, he recalls his father reading bedtime stories to him at home in suburban Helsinki. “I can still think back and see the jungle and the great apes,” he says of Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Tarzan stories. Another selection was Arabian Nights, the collection of Middle Eastern folk tales that deal with challenging, decidedly grown-up themes. “Those times when something is too much, too strong, or slightly too scary, it does something to your imagination,” he says. “It kind of pushes it forward in an interesting way—makes you think and feel differently.” At their core, Lake’s video games inspire a similar uncanny emotion: the strange, not wholly unpleasant sensation of feeling “overwhelmed” by forces, and stories, far beyond our means of comprehension.
Victor Timely’s fingerprints are all over Loki season 2, even when he isn’t. As one of the many versions of Kang the Conqueror, Timely immediately feels important to the second season, even before we know it’s his designs that inspired (nay, created?) the Time Loom. Sure, that was by He Who Remains’ design, but still! As we see from his workshop of inventions and the way Miss Minutes tries to come on to him: Timely’s got the juice!
[Ed. note: This post will now spoil the end of episode 4 in some detail, with some speculation of what’s to come. Ye be warned.]
So it’s kind of surprising when, after all the teamwork and effort and Marvel CGI that got him to the TVA with O.B. to build the magic machine that saved the day, he just… spaghetti’d. In just an instant, Timely turns into noodles, and Loki is left dumbstruck, just wondering what the hell they’re going to do without him, while the audience wonders what the heck Loki will do without him.
Still, this season folding in on itself so much has taught us one thing: This moment might have major implications for the space-time continuum. Timely getting the time-space pasta treatment might mean his existence, life, consciousness, or matter has simply been wibbly-wobblied somewhere else. As such, spaghettified Victor Timely might not be gone — or at least, the narrative might not be done with him. So what exactly could have happened to him? Here are our theories.
Theory 1: Victor Timely’s episode 4 fate creates Kang the Conqueror
Image: Marvel Studios
We know that there are seemingly endless Kangs spread across endless realities, but how did they become… you know, Kang? He comes from the future, so his advanced technology (and his supersuit) can account for many of his powers. And we know he has a genius-level intellect, as shown through Victor Timely’s less-than-timely inventions. But his ability to manipulate time and reality? It’s sometimes attributed to his suit, but I think it’s also a little left open to interpretation.
What if we just saw its origin in Loki? The man was, as many have put it before me, completely and totally spaghetti’d as he approached the Loom and the many different branches of the multiverse. Could his essence have been spread out into the multiverse through the Loom, gaining unexpected powers in the process? Or, even more directly, did this event somehow change the brain chemistry of all other variants across the timelines, due to sheer proximity to those timelines? Could this have been the event that transformed Victor Timely/Nathaniel Richards into Kang the Conqueror? It seems like the kind of thing the MCU would do — they love a grand reveal, after all, and Loki has been asked to be surprisingly load-bearing when it comes to the universe’s next Big Bad. So showing his “origin” of sorts in the series wouldn’t be that much of a stretch. —Pete Volk
Theory 2: Victor Timely is going to go somewhere else in the Marvel Cinematic Universe
Image: Marvel Studios
What little we know about the technobabble of the Time Loom is it’s pulling all the various timelines of the multiverse and getting clogged. But unlike an actual sewing machine, the Loom is just sitting in massive space, pulling in whatever strands get near it. So maybe when Victor turns into strands in the vast vacuum outside the TVA, his remnants just also get sucked up into the Loom, like one giant machine-like wormhole.
From there, Timely could plop out… anywhere! My guess is it doesn’t even have to be anywhere big (or certainly shouldn’t be), like the Battle of New York or the fight against Thanos. It’ll just be a quick little end-credits gag, like the original Guardians of the Galaxy tag with Howard the Duck. Hopefully he lands somewhere he can keep making his little inventions; if not, well, there’s always the next Kang. —Zosha Millman
Theory 3: Victor Timely died!
Image: Marvel Studios
I think he’s dead. Which would seemingly present a problem to the timeline: If Victor Timely is really the Kang who invented the TVA, then he’d need to have not died before he invented the TVA. Perhaps we’re about to see the fallout of that — two climactic episodes in which all TVA employees wake up in their normal lives on the timeline, because there was never a TVA to pull them out of it. Maybe Mobius would finally get to ride a Jet Ski. Maybe he’d have to choose between Jet Skis and putting the TVA back into existence somehow.
But honestly, causality only seems to exist when Loki wants it to, so who knows! If Timely is dead, there are plenty more Kangs to go around. —Susana Polo
Theory 4: Victor Timely is spaghetti now, period.
Photo: Luis Robayo/AFP via Getty Images
My theory is short, uncomplicated, and best summarized through the words of Polygon executive editor Matthew Patches when he’s in dad mode: pasghetti.
That’s right, Victor Timely is not He Who Remains, necessarily, but he is an equally if not even more important variant of Kang: the one who started spaghetti. Inside the walls of the TVA, far outside the bounds of regular time, all spaghetti, and possibly all European noodle shapes in general, were discovered chiefly through the disintegration of Victor Timely. Through his sacrifice, the bright divinity of his newly noodly form will slip into the loom and be dispersed throughout the multiverse, sliding right into the perfect place in each universe’s history to help someone discover the holiest form of pasta sauce delivery: the spaghetti noodle.
Of course, it’s important to remember that Victor is but one man, and his corporeal form is limited by its size, even when stretched by the unstable Loom. This means, tragically, that not every timeline will get to experience the magic of spaghetti. Some lost out on its pasta perfection, because their universe was never delivered a horrifying Cronenberg-esque noodle-shaped piece of a man. But thank God we exist in one that did. —Austen Goslin
Battlefield 2042 is enjoying a small resurgence as it nears its two-year anniversary, thanks to a recent free weekend, a sale, and multiple updates from the developer. The game’s new season will hopefully maintain players’ renewed interest in DICE’s futuristic military shooter — particularly the new mode that lets you deploy and fight against hordes of 3D-printed synthetic soldiers who run around naked and smash enemies’ heads in with hammers.
Season 6’s of Battlefield 2042 will introduce a new limited time mode called Killswitch, a 12v12 game type that lets players print out waves of Geists — the aforementioned buck-naked ’bots — that can be deployed in combat. They’re effectively (fast) zombies who sprint at the opposing team and try to bludgeon them to death, as seen in the trailer above.
Geists are printed at Forges in Killswitch’s maps (Redacted, Manifest, Hourglass and Spearhead), and teams will battle for control of those Forges while they simultaneously attempt to capture locations called AOS nodes.
How did these synthetic soldiers, who are not canonically zombies, find their way into Battlefield fiction? According to DICE and publisher Electronic Arts, a secret R&D lab off the coast of Scotland is the victim of an AI run amok. That artificial intelligence has taken over and created the Geist, glowing-eyed bad guys who are programmed to kill. Sure, I buy that.
Killswitch is playable as part of Battlefield 2042’s Dark Protocol event, which runs Oct. 31 to Nov. 14. Players who take part in Killswitch matches can earn Ribbons that can be cashed in for free cosmetic rewards, like weapon and vehicle skins.
60 Songs That Explain the ’90s is back for its final stretch run. (And a brand-new book!) Join TheRinger’s Rob Harvilla as he treks through the soundtrack of his youth, one song (and embarrassing anecdote) at a time. Follow and listen for free on Spotify. In Episode 107 of 60 Songs That Explain the ’90s—yep, you read that right—we’re covering the Cardigans’ “Lovefool.” Read an excerpt below. And if you’re in Los Angeles on November 16, check out the 60 Songs and Bandsplaincrossover event celebrating Rob’s new book.
The Cardigans form in Jönköping, Sweden, in 1992. The Cardigans consist of guitarist Peter Svensson, bassist Magnus Sveningsson, drummer Bengt Lagerberg, keyboardist Lars-Olof Johansson, and lead singer Nina Persson. Nina had never sung before, but Peter and Magnus were like, Trust us on this. Peter and Magnus both started out as metal dudes. They played in heavy metal bands—as did Max Martin, come to think of it—but they got sick of metal, and now they’d like to play in the poppiest pop band ever born. And the Cardigans will devote their lives to proving that pop and metal are quite tonally similar, at least the way they do it. They do that in a song called “Rise and Shine,” and this one’s called “Black Letter Day.”
And here’s the whole ball game, really, with Nina Persson, lead singer of the Cardigans: She sings beautifully and exquisitely and elegantly and delicately even when she’s singing what could totally be Metallica lyrics. James Hetfield totally would’ve written and barked out a song called “Black Letter Day” if he’d thought of that title first. James Hetfield got so mad when he heard this song. The first Cardigans album, called Emmerdale, comes out in 1994; the album cover is a blurry photo of a dog. It’s an extremely 1994 album cover, I have to say. A blurry photo of a dog perfectly sums up the dominant vibe of alternative rock in 1994. Time for a piano ballad.
This song is called “After All,” and it sounds like Nina is singing directly into your ear, which means that the t in the word insanity is really going to pop when she sings the word insanity. Is she singing, “I’m scaring close to insanity”? Because if she is, James Hetfield is so pissed he didn’t think of that first. James Hetfield is pissed regardless, obviously. You want the chorus? Do you think you can handle the chorus? Well, let’s find out!
And this, too, is an extremely 1994-type vibe, yes? Tremendous darkness in a tremendously bright package. This bait-and-switch approach is not exclusive to the Cardigans, or exclusive to Sweden for that matter, but it feels exclusive, it feels fresh and freshly unsettling when the Cardigans do it. Talking in early 2023 with a newspaper called The New European, Nina says, “Isn’t it a universal thing, really? If you made stats, there are few pop or rock songs that are only bright—that’s very rare. The rest of them are dark! I’ve always had a hard time talking about the Scandinavian mentality, but I think it’s art in general. I think what we are drawn to—which might be a Scandinavian thing—is to sort of ‘Trojan Horse’ your product; put it in a costume of something that’s light and upbeat.” All right, so time for something light and upbeat. Name that tune!
And then the Trojan horse opens up and oh, shit, it’s the Cardigans’ cover of “Sabbath Bloody Sabbath” by Black Sabbath. Told ya pop and metal were quite tonally similar! Take it, Ozzy!
I feel as though Ozzy and Nina would really get along. I don’t think Nina Persson would bite the head off a bat or snort a line of ants or befoul the Alamo, but she sings as though she’s considering doing all of those things. All right, we got ourselves an intriguing and sweetly confrontational Swedish alt-rock band with sophisticated pop overtones; time for the second Cardigans album. You know the greatest feeling in the world? You wanna know my favorite thing? I’ve said this before, but I’m saying it again: It’s when you love a song, but you totally forget about that song, and then you hear that song again years and years later, and you fall in love with it for the first time but also simultaneously realize that you’d already fallen in love with it.
The second Cardigans album is called Life, it comes out in 1995, and we have leveled up in terms of brightness, cheeriness, catchiness, and also, possibly, subversion. There’s an exclamation point in this song title.
That song’s called “Hey! Get Out of My Way.” There’s Nina, on the cover of the Life album, smiling extra brightly, lying on her stomach in a powder-blue dress with furry sleeves, propped up on her elbows with a little sunflower pinkie ring, her feet crossed and dangling in the air, and she’s wearing ice skates, and it occurs to you, pretty immediately, that ice skates are just blades for your feet. Hey! Hey! Get out of her way. This song’s called “Tomorrow,” and it’s as close as Jönköping, Sweden, has ever gotten to Motown.
Is morning a sugar kiss, though, really? The Cardigans are not setting the world or the pop charts on fire at this point. But they are building toward something, and this precise three-year span, 1994 to 1996—post-grunge, pre–nü metal, post–alternative explosion, pre-Napster—this is a great time to be building toward something, pop subversion–wise. The third Cardigans record, released in 1996, is called First Band on the Moon. Nina, in a 2014 interview, says, “Every record we have made with the Cardigans has been a counter-reaction to the previous one. And by then we were really tired of everybody calling us cute, after having done sort of cute and ethereal—we felt like we weren’t easy listening. We weren’t taken serious. So we wanted to be taken seriously. We wanted to be sort of more gritty and rocking.”
As an added bonus, this song has the most Black Sabbath–esque guitar riff on this whole record. Get a load of how rad this guitar riff is:
Y’know how Black Sabbath–esque that guitar riff is? It’s the most Black Sabbath–esque guitar riff on an album where, just for emphasis, the Cardigans cover Black Sabbath again.
Yes, the Cardigans do “Iron Man,” and I used to play the Cardigans cover of “Iron Man” all the time on college radio, and I’d be just tremendously pleased with myself. As an added bonus, this record, First Band on the Moon,has another track that went semi-arbitrarily viral on TikTok in the spring of 2023, and I love it when semi-arbitrary ’90s songs go viral on TikTok; that doesn’t make me feel weird or old at all. It’s called “Step on Me,” and Nina means it literally.
That’s the sped-up TikTok version of “Step on Me.” I feel great. This phenomenon of speeding up songs for TikTok, I understand that perfectly. I don’t feel like my bones are grinding themselves to dust and blowing away in the wind at all. That quote of Nina’s, about wanting to be taken seriously and be more respected and gritty and rocking on this record, there’s one last part to that quote, actually. She says, “So we wanted to be taken seriously. We wanted to be sort of more gritty and rocking. But then we made ‘Lovefool’ on that record, so we like totally dug our grave.”
And maybe there is nothing that I could do. The mass appeal of “Lovefool” was immediately, painfully obvious to everyone, and that includes the band—this song’s mass appeal was painfully obvious while they were still writing it, before they sped it up. Talking to Billboard in 2016, Nina says, “We definitely were aware that it was a single and a catchy song when we wrote it, but the direction it took is not something we could have predicted. It wasn’t necessarily our character; it felt like a bit of a freak on the record—which, objectively, it still is. Before we recorded it, it was slower and more of a bossa nova. It’s quite a sad love song; the meaning of it is quite pathetic, really. But then when we were recording, by chance, our drummer started to play that kind of disco beat, and there was no way to get away from it after that.”
To hear the full episode, click here. Subscribe here and check back every Wednesday for new episodes. And to preorder Rob’s new book, Songs That Explain the ’90s, visit the Hachette Book Group website.
Kingdom opens ominously, with two attendants walking across a Joseon-era Korean palace’s courtyard to bring the king his meal. Once inside, the older attendant warns his young companion not to look into the king’s bedchambers while passing the food underneath the curtain. The young attendant can’t resist, and when he opens his eyes he’s dragged under the curtain by a snarling beast. It’s a dread-filled scene that grabs your attention, but Kingdom also uses that moment to set itself apart. Most zombie shows are centered around characters thrust into survival mode without knowing what caused the outbreak in the first place. In Kingdom, the original zombie is not just a known entity, he’s also being tended to by a royal staff.
The rest of the intro reveals a lot of information in a short amount of time. A group of scholars has been posting flyers that the king is dead and it’s time for Crown Prince Lee Chang to ascend to the throne. But there’s an issue: Prince Chang’s mother was a concubine, and his current stepmother, Queen Consort Cho, is very pregnant. Her family has seized power with their new royal status, and they’ve rounded up and tortured these scholars to find out who’s behind their support of the prince. Meanwhile, Prince Chang has grown suspicious, and decides to find out the truth about his father’s mysterious recovery from smallpox.
If that sounds more like a Game of Thrones plot than a zombie show, well, you’re right. Kingdom is really, at its core, a political thriller set in medieval times. The zombie stuff, well, that’s just part of the politics — until, you know, it isn’t.
Photo: Juhan Noh/Netflix
The brilliance of Kingdom is that it doesn’t rely on twists and aggressive plot machinations to drive the show forward. The core conflict is laid out in 15 minutes flat: The king is a zombie, the queen is pregnant with his baby, and the queen’s family has seized power that would be threatened if the crown prince were anointed as the new king.
It doesn’t take much to realize who’s behind the zombification of the region’s ruler — but knowing the truth isn’t the same as proving it. Kingdom follows Prince Chang as he tries to collect evidence that he’s the rightful heir while avoiding the Cho clan’s guards, who are actively pursuing him. That alone would make for an exciting show. And then, of course, there are the zombies. As Prince Chang leaves the palace to find the doctor who treated his father, he discovers something even more terrifying: The king bit one of the doctor’s young assistants. We all know how that goes.
With a tight two-season story written and directed by Kim Eun-hee, Kingdom plays out its political games in conjunction with a growing zombie threat. It’s gripping, smart, and subtle, pacing its story in snippets of dialogue for viewers to stitch together. It’s also full of incredible action, painful suspense (characters in the daytime walking over dormant nocturnal zombies under floorboards, etc.), and truly terrifying horror: Victim by victim falls to brutal isolated zombie attacks, until a proper horde grows big enough to assault the entire royal city. Kingdom is truly an equal mashup of two different genres, and the fact that it’s done so well feels like a miracle. Just be prepared for things to get gnarly — two guards are beheaded in the opening sequence for being traitors, and if that’s the sort of violence that’s unleashed in a human-to-human conflict, just wait until the undead come into the picture.
The prerequisites to serve as Spider-Man include a long list of superhuman traits: outsized strength, speed, and durability; powerful precognition; extreme stickiness, and so on. But just as essential as the qualities that come from bites by special spiders is a more mundane knack: Spider-Man must be an amazing multitasker. And no on-screen Spider-story has captured that quality more viscerally than Marvel’s Spider-Man 2, Insomniac’s latest, greatest, fastest-selling PlayStation superhero opus. Graphically, mechanically, and most of all tonally, it’s an unsurpassed Spider-Man simulator, a game that represents how it feels to be Spidey in civvies with as much care as it conveys how it feels to be Spidey inside the suit.
Both in print and in his many movie and video game incarnations, Spider-Man always struggles to juggle his job, his schooling, his friendships, and his love life while moonlighting as a crime fighter. It’s what makes him so relatable: He’s the youthful, harried hero who has trouble making rent and racks up massive sleep deficits. Saving the city pays poorly, and the hours are awful. Those are the biggest drawbacks to being Spider-Man, aside from the unceasing exposure to supervillains and the way one’s aunts and uncles tend to die in one’s arms.
Spider-Man 2 gets that.The first scene featuring Peter Parker and Miles Morales opens on a clock: Time ticks away as Miles tries to focus on composing a college essay, and Peter, a newly hired teacher at Miles’s school, arrives late for class. Flustered, Peter tries to teach physics, starting with a lecture on surface tension. Soon, tension surfaces in Spider-Man 2, as a crisis forces student and teacher to play hooky. Together, they defuse the threat, and Peter gets fired for his trouble, without completing a single lesson. There’s a lesson in that, though: Good luck holding down a day job while being constantly on call.
Insomniac’s follow-up to Marvel’s Spider-Man and Spider-Man: Miles Morales embraces the “bigger and better” approach to sequels. Compared to its predecessors, the game features more boroughs of New York City, more combat mechanics, more traversal systems, more enemies, and more upgrade options. And, most importantly, more Spider-Men: Both Miles and Peter are playable this time. The newly expanded city isn’t just big enough for both of them; it’s too big for both of them.
Spider-Man 2 rarely lets you forget that you’re falling down on at least one of your jobs. As you sprint, swing, and glide across the city as Peter or Miles, you’re bombarded by requests and notifications. Texts and calls come in, podcasts pop up, and an app alerts you to active crimes in your vicinity. Everyone wants to know who and where you are. Everyone asks for your help. Everyone tries to steal some of your time. The need to maintain some semblance of work-life balance becomes a common refrain.
“Don’t push yourself too hard, Parker,” MJ urges Peter.
“When you get caught up in one part of your life, it’s easy for the rest to fall away,” Martin Li cautions Miles.
Even the Spider-Men—who, adorably, address each other as “Spider-Man,” their formality suiting the Sisyphean task they tag team—express their uncertainty aloud. “It’s just a lot right now,” Miles laments to his mom. “So much to take care of in the city. Super stressed about my college essay. Pete’s busy doing other stuff.” In one side activity, Peter confides, “It’s hard to balance your own personal life with other responsibilities. Believe me, I know.” In another, he muses to himself, “I should keep an eye on her. And the other on these cultists. I need more eyes.” Most spiders have eight, but Peter and Miles have four put together. It’s not enough.
Miles suffers from impostor syndrome with a side of grief and writer’s block. Peter, the more seasoned Spidey, takes on too much responsibility and frequently comes up short. One can see why Peter might be seduced by a symbiote, which can’t help him pay the late Aunt May’s mortgage but can make him feel like he’s “finally everything everyone needs me to be.” The real Peter would never sound so sanguine about satisfying a city full of dependents—with no assists from fellow superheroes, including the conspicuously absent Avengers. (Additional Marvel licenses must be pretty pricey.)
It’s not as if the movies give short shrift to Spider-Man’s overstuffed calendar, but it’s even easier to empathize when you’re steering the Spideys yourself as they’re pulled in conflicting directions. At some of the game’s quieter moments, the stunning set pieces and colossal brawls take a backseat to more intimate moments befitting a friendly neighborhood Spider-Man: revisiting Peter’s high school, or taking in Coney Island, or reuniting a woman with her loving but fading grandfather, or exploring Harlem’s musical legacy. But Peter and Miles have a whole city to safeguard, and pressing demands always interrupt these reveries. The pressure is enough to compress a Spider-person into a tiny white cube.
Yet as stressful as Spider-Man 2 makes it seem to be Spider-Man, the game is a great hang (pun partly intended). Yes, it’s sometimes overwhelming, as when the game’s wide array of sidequests and collectibles compete for your attention, or you suffer from decision fatigue while trying to decipher several skill trees, or wave after wave of tough-to-target goons surround you (“How are there thismany?” Peter asks in one encounter), or a boss has health bars galore, or you dodge when you’re supposed to parry, or yet another supervillain emerges from the woodwork. At one point, a glimpse inside Peter’s psyche reveals one of his deepest, darkest fears: that the bad guys he keeps putting away will keep escaping from custody. I would worry about that, too, if I fought Vulture, Lizard, and Doc Ock and Co. as often as Spidey does.
Plus, one would think Spider-Man fans would be as subject to superhero fatigue as those of any masked, spandexed character, what with 10 movies and many more games saturating the Spidey market over the past two decades. (Calling this game Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 helps distinguish it from Spider-Man 2, and the other Spider-Man 2, and The Amazing Spider-Man 2, and the other Amazing Spider-Man 2.) Yet all three on-screen Spidey universes and multiverses—the animated Spider-Verse, the MCU (which now links to the live-action Sony Spider-Man Universe), and the Insomniac Spider-Man timeline—are firing on most cylinders, which makes the repetition tolerable. Yeah, you kinda know where things are going when Otto or the Osbornes or the symbiotes show up, but to varying degrees, each panel of this Spidey-IP triptych leans into the sense that we’ve seen stories like these before.
On that score, Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 benefits from featuring Kraven the Hunter as one of its Big Bads. Kraven comes to NYC in search of quarry that can put up a fight. (It’s so hard to find good prey these days.) Naturally, he assembles a selection of the most dangerous game: supervillains. Kraven, a character created in 1964, feels fresher than the rest of the roster because, unlike the other five members of the original Sinister Six—or Venom, for that matter—he hasn’t yet appeared in a movie (notwithstanding a couple of closecalls in Spidey flicks and an extended delay for the 2024 solo film that was previously scheduled to be released this month). There’s no competing portrayal to spoil his first impression.
Nor can the previous Insomniac Spider-Man games, deservedly celebrated as they are, steal the sequel’s thunder. For one thing, they lack web wings. Spider-Man 2’s tweak to the franchise’s winning formula for traversal sounds gimmicky: suit extensions that let Spidey soar across the city? He’s a spider, not a bird or a plane! In practice, though, they’re exquisite, adding a dose of depth and strategy to what were already joyous journeys. Crossing the city is an exercise in stringing together a combo of swings, glides, and point launches, a gameplay loop so fulfilling it’s sometimes deflating to reach your destination. Spider-Man may be a street-level hero, but in Marvel’s Spider-Man, you’re usually better off airborne.
That’s especially true in the latest game, because on a clear day in Marvel’s Spider-Man 2, you can see for miles. Three years into the PS5’s lifespan, Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 is one of the first releases for the system to feel fully next-gen, after years of cross-generation releases that straddled the divide between past and present PlayStations and Xboxes amid chip shortages that made shiny new consoles difficult to find. Built by an accomplished first-party studio to take advantage of the PS5’s power, Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 is a gorgeous game whose use of spatial audio, adaptive-trigger integration, and nearly unnoticeable loading combine to provide a distinctly PlayStation experience. There’s no time to stare at loading screens when Peter and Miles are forever running late.
“We are tired, anxious, stressed, numb,” MJ says. “But we have never lost hope.” If you’re tired, anxious, stressed, and numb while playing Spider-Man 2, you may need to put down the controller, or at least turn down the difficulty level (which can be customized extensively). The game is too fun to feel numb about. But a good deal of its magic comes from illustrating why Spidey’s existence is so taxing, despite the quips and suits and swinging. Spider-Man is never really off duty, and being constantly on would wear anyone down. To paraphrase something often said about Spidey’s hometown: It’s a nice life to visit, but I wouldn’t want to live it. For part of this all-time-great gaming year, though, I was happy to walk in multiple Spider-Men’s shoes—and, better yet, glide in their web wings.
Microsoft’s Xbox Game Pass subscription service is having another banner year in 2023, with over 450 games now available for console players and over 400 for PC players.
The service has recently been bolstered with the addition of two huge Xbox Game Studios exclusives, Starfieldand Forza Motorsport, while Cities: Skylines 2 is a big-deal day one addition for the PC crowd. Atlus’ JRPG classics Persona 4 Goldenand Persona 3 Portable made their debut on Xbox consoles earlier in the year, and Tango Gameworks’ surprise release Hi-Fi Rushtold a cathartic rock ’n’ roll story with clever mechanics. Blockbuster titles are well represented with the likes of Assassin’s Creed and Hitman, cult favorites like Lies of P popped up, and Game Pass has continued its strong tradition of curating the best of the indie world with the likes of Cocoon. Even Grand Theft Auto 5 — and its extremely popular online mode — has returned to the service once more. That’s a lot of “free” video gaming to be done!
With the sheer size and the bounty of choice it offers, Game Pass can be a bit overwhelming to digest. But we’re here to help. Here are the 25 PC and Xbox Game Pass games that you should be checking out if you subscribe to Microsoft’s flagship service.
[Ed. note: This list was last updated on Oct. 24, 2023, adding Cocoon, Lies of P, and Party Animals. It will be updated as new games come to the service.]
Assassin’s Creed Origins
Image: Ubisoft Montreal/Ubisoft
Assassin’s Creed Originshas always been good — but it was only in hindsight, three years after its release, that I began to consider it great.
It’s a phenomenal concoction of historical tourism, sci-fi storytelling, and open-ended combat. It also displays a confidence that the more recent Assassin’s Creed Odyssey and Assassin’s Creed Valhalla can only partially match. Whereas the two most recent entries embrace the insecure ethos of “content” that has so defined the last decade of open-world games, Origins is content to leave vast swaths of its world empty and to let things burn slowly, in ways both narrative and explorative. Its map unfurls over deserts, mountains, oases, and sun-swept cities slowly being buried in sand, all while its two central figures (Bayek and Aya) navigate one of video games’ most compelling romances.
It’s not completely averse to daily challenges and cosmetic DLC packs. But it’s the rare open-world game that trusts my attention span. It understands that pastoral beauty and tragic storytelling, successfully interwoven, are worth more than any number of distractions its successors can throw at me. —Mike Mahardy
Assassin’s Creed Origins is available via Game Pass on Windows PC, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X.
Chicory: A Colorful Tale
Image: Greg Lobanov/Finji
Chicory: A Colorful Tale tells the story of a small dog who accidentally inherits a magical paintbrush. As you travel around the black-and-white open world, you use your new paint powers to bring color back to the environments. Everything is your canvas, and you can color it all to both solve puzzles and customize the setting to your liking.
The gameplay of Chicory is cute and relatively simple, even as you unlock new powers. But the reason it made it to the No. 2 slot on Polygon’s 2021 Game of the Year list is the story it tells about the destructive powers of self-doubt — the way it cruelly infects even the greatest artists out there.
Chicory is a game that’s not about coloring in the lines or even making something beautiful. It’s about making something — painting something, in this case — that you are proud of, that makes you happy. And if that creation also brings joy to those around you? Hey, that’s great too. —Ryan Gilliam
Chicory: A Colorful Tale is available via Game Pass on Windows PC, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X.
Cities: Skylines
Image: Colossal Order/Paradox Interactive
There’s a reason Cities: Skylines is often held up by literal city planners as the pinnacle of the genre: It doesn’t fall into the trap most city-builders do of treating all its resources and systems as mere data points on a list, gaming by way of a spreadsheet. Cities: Skylines is the real deal, letting you get into the weeds of urban micromanagement and understanding how and why metropolises morph in response to the needs of their citizens. (It’s also proof that planned cities are a crime against humanity.)
Cities: Skylines forces you to grapple with the beautiful, messy truth of what your citizens are: people. In other words, Eric Adams, please play Cities: Skylines! —Ari Notis
Cities Skylines is available via Game Pass on Windows PC, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X.
Citizen Sleeper
Image: Jump Over the Age/Fellow Traveller
Citizen Sleeper is a hyper-stylized tabletop-like RPG set in space. In a capitalist society, you find yourself stuck on a space station. You’ll need to manage your time, energy, and relationships to survive the collapse of the corporatocracy and the anarchy that follows. You’ll roll dice and make decisions to get paid and help those around you.
Aside from its interesting setting, Citizen Sleeper features a vibrant cast of impactful characters, making each interaction memorable. It follows an excellent trend of table-top inspired games to encourage you to find your own objectives, and to revel in the story when things fall apart. It’s packed with tense decisions, great writing, and striking visuals. —Ryan Gilliam
Citizen Sleeper is available via Game Pass on Windows PC, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X.
Cocoon
Image: Geometric Interactive/Annapurna Interactive via Polygon
A mysteriously beautiful, exquisitely paced puzzle adventure from some of the minds behind Limbo and Inside, Cocoonshares those games’ wordless delivery and stark aesthetic. But it’s more abstract and contemplative, and perhaps even more involving. It’s a game of pocket universes, one inside another, inhabited by buglike techno-organic life-forms — including the player character, a scurrying little beetle-thing. The conceit is that you can step up out of one reality and move it around another on your back, in a gently glowing sphere that also interacts with the world around it, before diving back in — or swapping it for another entirely.
Like so many puzzle adventures, it’s essentially a game of locks and keys, plus the occasional ingenious boss fight. But like the very best of them — Fez, for example, or Portal — Cocoon plays games with perception and reality that rewire your brain in pleasantly tortuous ways. —Oli Welsh
Cocoon is available via Game Pass on Windows PC, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X.
Crusader Kings 3
Image: Paradox Interactive via Polygon
Imagine if Succession unfolded between the years 867 and 1453, in the throne rooms, banquet halls, and torchlit back corridors of European castles. Monarchs rise and fall, small-time fiefdoms become bona fide kingdoms, and nonmarital children exact revenge after decades of being shunned. Crusader Kings 3is the story of the Roy family if we could pick any character, see them through to their death, and assume control of their orphaned heir — at which point, we can completely alter the course of the dynasty through petty gossip and underhanded murder attempts.
In Paradox Interactive’s vast suite of grand strategy games with complex systems that give way to thrilling emergent storytelling, none have made me cackle with glee quite as much as Crusader Kings 3. In one playthrough, I wed my firstborn son to the daughter of a powerful neighboring king, only for said daughter to declare a holy war on me one decade later. In another, I strong-armed one of my vassals into remaining loyal, shortly before knighting his cousin and sworn rival; I didn’t want to be a jerk, but my characters were jerks. I was just following the script down the path of least resistance.
Much like Succession, Crusader Kings 3 is at its best when tensions finally boil over between the emotionally stunted members of a dysfunctional family. Unlike Succession, though, Crusader Kings 3 never has to end. —Mike Mahardy
Crusader Kings 3 is available via Game Pass on Windows PC and Xbox Series X.
Death’s Door
Image: Acid Nerve/Devolver Digital
Death’s Door is a cute little Soulslike game. You play as a raven who works as a kind of grim reaper for the bureaucratic arm of the afterlife. It’s your job to adventure in the world and claim the lives of a handful of bosses. The world of Death’s Door is charming, as are its characters, with excellent dungeons to explore and puzzles to solve. There are also giant enemies who will test both your skills and patience.
Still, Death’s Door has a friendly air around it. It wants you to succeed, and does a nice job easing you along with easy-to-read enemy and boss patterns. It’s a great, challenging Game Pass game to cut your teeth on before venturing into even more difficult titles. —Ryan Gilliam
Death’s Door is available via Game Pass on Windows PC, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X.
Doom (2016)
Image: id Software/Bethesda Softworks
2016’s Doom builds off of one of the oldest franchises in gaming history with speed, acrobatics, and an absolutely killer soundtrack. Doomguy moves extremely quickly, swapping between a variety of guns, grenades, melee attacks, and a giant chainsaw to blow up demons off of Mars.
The game is bloody, metal as hell, and surprisingly funny. Doom makes you feel like a god, capable of clearing any hurdle the game could throw at you, and it doesn’t offer a single dull level in its lengthy campaign. —Ryan Gilliam
Doom (2016) is available via Game Pass on Xbox One and Xbox Series X.
Forza Horizon 5
Image: Playground Games/Xbox Game Studios via Polygon
Forza Horizon 5 is the latest racing game to land on Xbox and Game Pass. It’s a visual feast filled with some of the most realistic-looking cars you’ve ever seen. But anyone who loves any of these Forza games will tell you that the Horizon series is so much more than its graphics.
Horizon 5 takes place in a fictionalized Mexico, and gives you the freedom to drive around a massive map in whatever car you want. You can drive a nice sports car while off-roading, or drive a hummer off a massive ramp.
Forza Horizon 5 gives you the freedom and choice to drive how and where you want inside a legion of incredible cars. —Ryan Gilliam
Forza Horizon 5 is available via Game Pass on Windows PC, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X.
Grand Theft Auto 5
Image: Rockstar North/Rockstar Games
Grand Theft Auto 5 is one of the most celebrated games of the last decade. In that time, it has appeared on three different generations of consoles, seen numerous graphical improvements, and gotten new modes, like its sweeping first-person alteration.
The main story focuses on three criminals from three very different backgrounds bumbling their way through numerous heists in the city of Los Santos — a fictional version of Southern California. And in order to tell the stories of Michael, Franklin, and Trevor, the game implements a feature that allows you to swap between the protagonists at will, offering a new perspective on the city and letting you play multiple roles per heist.
Grand Theft Auto games usually live long past their time, but GTA 5 has remained especially relevant due to GTA Online, the sprawling MMO-like experience that Rockstar Games created inside the world of San Andreas. It’s the massive GTA 5 sandbox — plus a little extra — without any of the constraints found in the story mode.
The parts of GTA 5 that annoy — such as the more misguided aspects of its American commentary, or the occasional tailing mission — are distant memories compared to the chaos you can cause every five minutes. If futzing around a semi-realistic metropolitan area is something you really enjoy, it’s hard to imagine anything on this list entertaining you for as long as Grand Theft Auto 5 will. —Ryan Gilliam
Grand Theft Auto 5 is available via Game Pass on Xbox One and Xbox Series X.
Halo: The Master Chief Collection
Image: 343 Industries/Xbox Game Studios
The Xbox brand might never have taken off without the Halo series, the first-person shooters that helped to popularize local competitive multiplayer on consoles before taking the party online after the launch of Xbox Live. The Master Chief Collection package includes multiple Halo games, all of which have been updated to keep them enjoyable for modern audiences.
But what’s so striking about the collection is how many ways there are to play. You can go through the campaigns by yourself. If you want to play with a friend but don’t want to compete, there is co-op, allowing you to share the games’ stories with a partner, either online or through split-screen play. If you do want to compete, you can do it locally against up to three other players on the same TV, or take things online to challenge the wider community.
These are some of the best first-person shooters ever released, and they’re worth revisiting and enjoying, no matter how you decide to play them. Sharing these games with my children through local co-op has been an amazing journey, and this package includes so many games, each of which is filled with different modes and options. It’s hard to imagine ever getting bored or uninstalling the collection once it’s on your hard drive.
This is a part of gaming history that continues to feel relevant, and very much alive. —Ben Kuchera
Halo: The Master Chief Collection is available via Game Pass on Windows PC, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X.
Hardspace: Shipbreaker
Image: Blackbird Interactive/Focus Entertainment
Hardspace: Shipbreaker is another game poking fun at corporate greed and its general indifference toward the working class — seen in other excellent building games like Satisfactory. But Hardspace takes it further than just tongue-in-cheek poking by asking: What happens when the workers have had enough? Hardspace: Shipbreaker’s pro-union message is a delightful backdrop for an incredibly deep and stress-filled puzzle game.
As a Shipbreaker, your job is to break apart and recycle small spaceships. With your handy welding tools and futuristic gravity tethers, you’re able to carefully carve up these once-great hulks and repurpose them for the future. Sometimes that means throwing all the metal plates into the furnace to be melted down, and other times you’ll need to comb through the skeletons, grab salvageable items, and extract them still intact.
As you improve your skills, the game will test you with harder and larger ships. Suddenly, you’ll have to start worrying about the active nuclear reactors that are still in these vehicles, or pressurized cabins that explode if you open them in the wrong order.
And all of this danger circles Hardspace: Shipbreaker back to the conversation it starts at the very beginning. Hardspace is a game about focus, and how taking your eye off the ball for even a second can end in explosive death, or worse: a career spent toiling under forces that couldn’t care less about you. —Ryan Gilliam
Hardspace: Shipbreaker is available via Game Pass on Windows PC and Xbox Series X.
Hi-Fi Rush
Image: Tango Gameworks/Bethesda Softworks via Polygon
Rhythm games, for players who prefer to shoot, dodge, punch, and jump on their own time, can be a tough sell. But such is not the case with Hi-Fi Rush, the action game from Ghostwire: Tokyo developer Tango Gameworks. It provides an array of visual cues to help rhythmically challenged players, but crucially, it doesn’t require that protagonist Chai attacks according to the game’s metronome. Instead, its rhythm elements are an optional layer to interact with, offering score chasers something to aspire to. For everyone else, the game’s vibrant world, rock n’ roll storytelling, and entrancing traversal stand well enough on their own. It’s a cathartic triumph of a game.—Mike Mahardy
Hi-Fi Rush is available via Game Pass on Windows PC and Xbox Series X.
Hitman World of Assassination
Image: IO Interactive
Hitman, Hitman 2, and Hitman 3 are some of the best sandbox puzzle games ever made. As Agent 47, you’ll climb buildings, sneak around parties, and murder spies and debutantes with all manner of tools. Hitman World of Assassination includes the campaigns from all three of the games in IO Interactive’s recent World of Assassination trilogy, giving you more than a dozen maps to play on. Just last week, it also added Freelancer mode, which functions like a roguelike as Agent 47 kills his way through four major crime syndicates, fleshing out his safehouse as he goes.
The Hitman series may be about violence and murder, but it manages to stay lighthearted and fun with its wild physics and silly scenarios. It’s the perfect series to goof around in if you feel like being stealthy, or just want to see what happens when you drop a giant chandelier on a crowd of snobby jerks. —Ryan Gilliam
Hitman Trilogy is available via Game Pass on Windows PC, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X.
Lies of P
Image: Neowiz
One of 2023’s most delightful surprises, Lies of P is a Soulslike starring a noticeably hot Pinocchio, of all things, from relatively unheralded Korean developer Neowiz. It turns out to be one of the most original and interesting takes on the genre from outside FromSoftware — although more so in its strong storytelling and themes than its gameplay, which is heavily influenced by Sekiro and Bloodborne in its aggressive, rhythmic focus on parry-and-thrust.
As Pinocchio lies and battles his way around a crumbling Belle Epoque town that’s been overrun by its servant class of automatons, Lies of P’s grim tale bends to the player’s choices in ways that convince and intrigue. This works particularly well with Pinocchio’s dual nature as a half-human half-puppet who can be modified with gameplay-altering tools; Lies of P presents an illusory society that you can tinker with and change, just as it tries to manipulate you. —Oli Welsh
Lies of P is available via Game Pass on Windows PC, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X.
Mass Effect Legendary Edition
Image: BioWare/Electronic Arts
The Mass Effect franchise was gigantic for the Xbox 360 era, but it didn’t transfer to future platforms well — purchasing and downloading the entire story became confusing and expensive when moving to the Xbox One and Xbox Series X. But 2021’s Legendary Editionfinally made the entire Mass Effect trilogy accessible in one package.
The story follows Commander Shepard, a futuristic military hero, who’s tasked with gathering a collection of alien misfits for a variety of missions. Each game is wonderfully crafted, with stand-alone stories and breakout characters that don’t rely on the series’ wider narrative. As a trilogy, the games build on each other with meaningful choices that carry over to the next entry, giving weight to your choices.
The Legendary Edition is the way to experience Mass Effect, and it’s a must-play whether you’re on your first run to save the galaxy or your fifth. —Ryan Gilliam
Mass Effect Legendary Edition is available via Game Pass on Windows PC, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X, but only for those that have Game Pass Ultimate.
Party Animals
Image: Recreate Games/Source Technology
Look, it’s not rocket science. Sometimes you just want some truly dumb, violent nonsense to play with your friends, and fulfilling that need is just as important for a well-rounded subscription service like Game Pass as serving up expansive RPGs and intriguing indies. Party Animals is a multiplayer party brawler about cute critters knocking the stuffing out of each other. That’s it. It’s not Smash Bros., and nor does it pretend to be; it’s more like an aggressively cute Gang Beasts, or a Fall Guys that’s just about fighting. It’s a little slow, but that just makes it easier to revel in its soft-bellied slapstick. Turn your brain off and enjoy. —Oli Welsh
Party Animals is available via Game Pass on Xbox One and Xbox Series X.
Pentiment
Image: Obsidian Entertainment/Xbox Game Studios
Pentiment is the most immediately striking and recognizable game on this list. Inspired by the art of classic manuscripts, Pentiment sucks you into its beautifully designed version of 16th-century Europe, when books were still being written by hand in monasteries.
You play as Andreas, a young artist looking to make his fortune in an ever-changing world. And as you explore a small village and the grounds surrounding it, and go to work drawing magnificent pictures in custom manuscripts, you’ll meet new people and further flesh out Andreas’ personality and background.
The story will take you through murder, scandal, and a variety of other dramatic events in Andreas’ life. But the plot is secondary to the game’s incredible style and dialogue. —Ryan Gilliam
Pentiment is available via Game Pass on Windows PC, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X.
Persona 4 Golden
Image: Atlus via Polygon
Persona 4 Golden follows a boy who goes to stay with his uncle and cousin in a small Japanese town. But almost immediately after his arrival, a serial killer starts murdering civilians, all of which have an unknown thread connecting them.
As with all Persona games, Persona 4 Golden allows you to play out your time in school, improving your character’s social stats and friendships before diving into dungeons to help further the plot. But the cast of characters in Persona 4 Golden is unlike any other in the series, offering some of the most memorable party members in any RPG.
Now on Xbox, Persona 4 Golden looks wonderful and plays beautifully. It’s a smart turn-based RPG that’s loaded with conversations to be had and mysteries to solve. —Ryan Gilliam
Persona 4 Golden is available via Game Pass on Windows PC, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X.
PowerWash Simulator
Image: FuturLab/Square Enix
PowerWash Simulator is the perfect game to sit on your couch and space off to. As the name suggests, you’re a professional power washer, and your job is to use your washing tools to obliterate grease, grime, and goop off of vehicles, buildings, and even entire playgrounds.
There are some minor upgrade and currency systems, but PowerWash Simulator mostly takes a minimalistic approach — you power wash stuff, no more, no less. Sure, you can take special jobs where you wash something wild like a Mars rover, but it’s really just about making things clean. And while it might sound like boring yard work, it’s actually quite meditative.
Blasting the black film off of a colorful slide provided me with one of the biggest serotonin bursts I’ve gotten from any piece of media in years. It’s a delightful, peaceful game that never fails to relax me after a long week. —Ryan Gilliam
PowerWash Simulator is available via Game Pass on Windows PC, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X.
Slay the Spire
In Slay the Spire, I play as one of three unique characters, in order to fight my way through a randomly generated map filled with battles, treasure chests, and RPG-like encounters. Combat is similar to that of a turn-based RPG, but instead of selecting attacks and spells from a menu, I draw cards from each character’s specific pool of cards. These cards allow me to attack, defend, cast spells, or use special abilities. Each character has their own set of cards, making their play styles radically different.
I also learned to buck my expectations for the kinds of decks I should build. The key to deck-building games is constructing a thematic deck where each card complements the others. In card games like Magic: The Gathering, this is easy enough to do, since you do all your planning before a match — not in the moment, like in Slay the Spire. Since I’m given a random set of cards to build a deck from at the end of each encounter, I can’t go into any run with a certain deck-building goal in mind. I have to quickly decide on long-term deck designs based on what cards are available to me after a battle. The trick with Slay the Spire is to think more creatively and proactively than the typical card game requires. —Jeff Ramos
Slay the Spire is available via Game Pass on Windows PC, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X.
You start the game by inheriting a farm from your grandfather, and you then move to a sleepy town to take over the diminishing acres. For the next 10, 20, 50, 100-plus hours, you work to turn that farm into a modern utopia.
This is easily the most relaxing game on Game Pass. All you do is plant seeds, care for animals, mine some rocks, and befriend the villagers. There’s plenty of drama to be had — with the Wal-Mart-like JojaMart and an army of slimes trying to stop you from mining — but at the end of the day, you’re still going to pass out in your farmhouse and get ready to plant more strawberries the next morning. —Ryan Gilliam
Stardew Valley is available via Game Pass on Windows PC, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X.
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder’s Revenge
Image: Tribute Games/Dotemu
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder’s Revengeis already a classic Turtles brawler. If you could’ve overheard a bunch of kids talking about their dream TMNT game while playing the original Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles arcade cabinet at a local pizza bar in 1989, or Turtles in Time in 1991, this is the Turtles game they’d be imagining.
But over 30 years later, Shredder’s Revenge implements some features that distinguish it from the days of the coin operated arcade. There’s a world map, side-quests, new heroes, experience points, and online matchmaking that help modernize the throwback trappings. Shredder’s Revenge manages to balance itself nicely between the world of retro and revamp.
With only 16 “episodes,” it’s the perfect Game Pass game to jump into with some pals at a sleepover — as long as there’s pizza, of course. —Ryan Gilliam
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder’s Revenge is available via Game Pass on Windows PC, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X.
The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim Special Edition
Image: Bethesda Game Studios/Bethesda Softworks
The Elder Scrolls 5, better known as just Skyrim, is a classic. And while you can play it on almost any console or device known to humankind at this point, it’s still worth playing on Game Pass if you’ve never given it a chance, or are just craving another journey in its sprawling world.
Like most Bethesda RPGs, Skyrim is a first-person game with a giant, living world. There are dungeons to crawl, stories to uncover, and a variety of guilds to join. But you can also go off the beaten path and discover your own fun in Skyrim — it rewards you for being curious. It’s the kind of Game Pass game that you can play for hundreds of hours and never get bored. —Ryan Gilliam
The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim Special Edition is available via Game Pass on Windows PC, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X.
The only control you have over the game is what character you select, what items you choose during your run, and where your character moves. Depending on your weapons of choice, knives, whips, flames, magic bolts, bibles, or holy water fly out of your character in every direction, decimating hordes or pixelated movie monsters, earning you cash for your next adventure.
Though extremely simple on its face, Vampire Survivors is one of the best games of 2022. It perfectly walks the line between peaceful and stressful, requiring the perfect amount of attention for success. It also facilitates growth through skill and through roguelite progression, ensuring that each run is a bit different from your last. —Ryan Gilliam
Vampire Survivors is available via Game Pass on Windows PC, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X.
Early on in Martin Scorsese’s historical drama Killers of the Flower Moon, there’s a quiet moment between Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio) and the woman he will eventually marry, Osage heiress Molly (Lily Gladstone). The absorbing way Scorsese stages the drama makes it clear that this relationship will not end well, but the soundtrack is strangely twinkling, as if this were the start of a grand romance. Then the lyrics kicked in:
…karma is my boyfriend Karma is a god Karma is the breeze in my hair on the weekend Karma’s a relaxing thought Aren’t you envious that for you it’s not?
I was not, in fact, hearing the late, great Robbie Robertson’s score for Killers of the Flower Moon — I was getting sound bleed from Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour playing next door. And I would continue to get that bleed throughout Killers, because while “Karma” marks the end of The Eras Tour’s set list, the film immediately started running again. At 169 minutes long, it’s only 37 minutes shorter than Scorsese’s epic, one of the few currently playing movies that get anywhere near the drama’s 206-minute run time.
Through conversations with friends and colleagues, posts on social media, and collected observations of theater layouts and showtimes, I learned that I am far from alone. The sonic power of Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour is bleeding into Martin Scorsese’s meditative masterpiece in a number of multiplexes, creating a miasma of cinematic emotion that neither artist could anticipate.
Image via X
On the one hand, this is extremely annoying. Part of the reason we go to the theater is because it supposedly allows us to experience movies the way the filmmakers intended, optimally presented in a space that’s free of distractions. Killers of the Flower Moon wrestles with a horrifying true chapter of American history. It’s a quiet and mannered film, perhaps more so than Scorsese fans might expect. Hearing “Blank Space” while the Osage people are getting systematically murdered can feel disrespectful at worst, incongruously funny at best.
And the sonic overlap itself is kind of amusing. Two wildly different reasons to go to the movies are running together, as “Wildest Dreams” is faintly heard over wide-angle shots of the Oklahoma plains. It’s an offline version of the online media environment, where context collapse is normal, and random juxtaposition can yield darkly comedic results.
I didn’t particularly love watching Killers of the Flower Moon this way, but I didn’t hate it, either. It was like a series of intrusive thoughts I learned to tune out while contemplating something I found engaging and worthwhile. There I was, ruminating on the parasitic nature of white entrepreneurs on Native lands, and unbidden, I would think of that one YouTube video where a guy who did a viral Gollum voice covered “I Knew You Were Trouble,” because I heard a few bars of the song leaking in from the theater next to me during a quieter moment. But I also grew up in a noisy home, so I can rely on muscle memory here.
I don’t think anyone should deliberately try to see Killers of the Flower Moon this way. I don’t believe I got any insight from this aural serendipity that I wouldn’t have gotten had I watched each movie in a more soundproof environment. Someone else might! There could be real TheDark Side of the Rainbow/Another Brick in the WALL-E potential here. Maybe when both movies are available digitally, someone will make a “Killers of the Taylor Moon” cut. Accidentally, in theaters, though? Not ideal.
But I don’t think it’s a reason to stay home. Like The Eras Tour, Killers of the Flower Moon deserves to be seen on the biggest screen possible. The minor inconvenience of occasionally overhearing a track from 1989 (or, God forbid, Reputation) is worth the trade-off.
Perhaps theater managers who read this piece — feel free to pass it along if you know any — will take this kind of sound-bleed issue into account, and work to make it less of a normal occurrence. Exhibitors, please take Taylor’s words into account: You need to calm down. You’re being too loud.
Twitch is further broadening its simulcast rules, the livestream platform announced on Friday. As shared during TwitchCon in Las Vegas, streamers can now live broadcast streams onto even more platforms — YouTube and Kick, for example. That said, streamers with an “agreement with Twitch that requires exclusivity” won’t be able to do so.
“We truly believe that Twitch is the best service to be a live, interactive creator, and we want to give streamers more freedom in just how they want to build their communities,” said Twitch VP of community product Jeremy Forrester during an interview with Polygon at TwitchCon.
This news comes on the heels of Twitch bleeding big-name talent. On Oct. 19, Kick signed massively popular streamer and co-owner of FaZe Clan Nickmercs in a one-year contract worth roughly $10 million, according to a Forbes report. This summer, the upstart company also signed Amouranth, Twitch’s most popular female streamer, and former pro-Overwatch player xQc (the latter of whom, Kick offered a $100 million deal). This is not to mention talent that moved to YouTube: In the last three years, YouTube signed Valkyrae, Ludwig, Sykkuno, LilyPichu, and more. Some of these streamers left in the wake of Twitch changing its revenue share split from 70/30 (in favor of streamers) to 50/50.
Forrester said this talent departure was not the motivator for the expanded simulcast policy, instead calling it “community driven” and saying that it was an example for Twitch developers to demonstrate that they “listen” to creator’s “concerns, and react to them when we can.”
The most interesting part of the new guidelines might just be all the way at the bottom of the FAQ. Streamers who left Twitch now have a chance to become Twitch Partners again. Per the guidelines, Twitch Partners whose previous agreements were “terminated” because they left for another service — and they notified Twitch beforehand, thus not violating the agreement — will be “eligible to reinstate their Partnership status.”
Twitch also seems to finally be acknowledging the value of cross-platform discovery. In August, Twitch updated its simulcast guidelines to include TikTok and Instagram. During TwitchCon, streamers told Polygon that TikTok had become a vital way to draw in new fans — TikTok’s short video format basically functions like a highlight reel for Twitch streamers to post their funniest moments. “Being able to curate the highlights from your stream and feeding that into the TikTok algorithm is your chance for an entirely new audience to see you,” streamer Alex Labat told Polygon in anticipation of TwitchCon. And earlier this month, Twitch introduced its own short video feature, “stories.”
Even as simulcasting options broaden, there are still rules to follow that more or less ensure streamers won’t use Twitch to direct traffic to their other platforms, or attempt to interact with their fan communities on various platforms at the same time. Streamers must “ensure” the quality of a Twitch users’ experience is “no less than the experience on other platform services” — and this includes engaging with the Twitch community via chat. Nor can streamers use a third-party app to for “merging chat features,” for example. Streamers also can’t provide links during a Twitch stream, encouraging followers to leave Twitch for a simulcast on another platform.
“We believe that creators will do it with the intent to help bring people to Twitch,” Forrester said, optimistically.
You may have felt it: Twitch, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube are all competing for an increasingly overlapping user base as social media platforms all introduce similar features.
But for streamers and influencers, these platforms have symbiotic relationships — one platform can be important for growth in another. Twitch and TikTok may seem antithetical, as one targets long-form, hourslong broadcasts over the other’s bite-sized clips, but Twitch streamers have realized that both platforms can be crucial for audience growth.
TikTok is an attention behemoth — Twitch’s user-base numbers don’t even come close — that can be essential to broader success on Twitch as a livestreaming platform. Twitch seems to recognize this relationship, having released new tools this year to make it easier to reuse Twitch content on TikTok. Twitch’s Clip Editor is a web-based application that lets streamers edit clips, including the ability to convert them into portrait mode. Twitch also has CapCut, a more in-depth editor, that makes editing more accessible. TikTok recently added a feature that lets users post to TikTok directly from Twitch and CapCut, closing the loop on the ease of creating short-form content. And earlier in October, Twitch itself introduced a new short-form “stories” feature.
Alex Labat, a Twitch streamer and TikTok creator, has seen exponential growth to his Twitch streams after using TikTok to promote “highlights” of his content, like his infamous Twitch Plays streams, where he gets Twitch Chat to use text commands to play games like World of Warcraft.
“Twitch is where you want to be to see those [unscripted] moments happen in real time,” Labat said. “The ‘you had to be there’ moments. TikTok, on the other hand, is where you go to highlight and/or showcase those moments. Being able to curate the highlights from your stream and feeding that into the TikTok algorithm is your chance for an entirely new audience to see you, for them to say, ‘OK. I have to see what this is about.’”
Some of Labat’s most popular TikToks only required editing Twitch clips into short-form videos; the effort, he says, feels low risk with the potential for high reward. TikTok videos can get tons of views on the platform itself, but the other crucial element that Labat says is often ignored is how often TikToks are reused and reposted on other social media platforms. “Instagram Reels, tweets… sometimes when things take off you aren’t even the arbiter of that growth because something you’ve produced has been shared/remixed on a platform you haven’t even touched,” he said.
Short-form content is also more likely to be viewed by other content creators doing reaction videos and the like; Labat credits a massive Twitch traffic spike to popular World of Warcraft streamer Asmongold viewing his Twitch Plays video on stream. “Very rarely will you ever see a streamer watching someone else’s stream while they’re live,” Labat added.
It’s hard to track whether TikTok audiences are sticking around for longer Twitch streams, but Labat said he does see TikTok users getting involved in the community. Some of his TikTok viewers even signed up for Twitch, after which he helped “onboard” new viewers.
“TikTok people will make it known,” Labat said. “‘Hey. I’m here from TikTok, sort of unsure how things work here.’ And I commend my community for this greatly, they welcome them with open arms.”
Bringing another platform into the equation, Labat said Discord is the other crucial part of making all these different content avenues work. It bridges the gap between TikTok and Twitch, ultimately bringing his community together. “Discord provides that space so that people can find me and where I’ll be providing that content, regardless of said platform,” he added.
Season 2 of HBO’s pirate comedy/romance Our Flag Means Death takes some big turns by episode 7 — maybe not as big as the season 1 turn, when inept pirate captain Stede Bonnet (Rhys Darby) and Ed “Blackbeard” Teach (Taika Waititi) realized they had romantic feelings for each other, but still… a whole lot of things happen that we figured viewers would want to talk about, once they’d seen it for themselves. So when Polygon sat down with creator and showrunner David Jenkins to talk about season 2, we split the conversation into two parts: an overview of the season’s biggest ideas, and this spoiler-focused conversation about all the surprises in episode 7, including its explosive ending.
[Ed. note: Read on at your own risk; spoilers abound ahead.]
Photo: Nicola Dove/Max
To recap: In episode 7 of Our Flag Means Death season 2, Stede and Blackbeard have just had sex for the first time, and they seem all set for their happily-ever-after together — until Blackbeard abruptly leaves Stede to pursue a job as a fisherman. The crew visits the Republic of Pirates, where Oluwande (Samson Kayo) expresses feelings for Zhang Yi Sao (Ruibo Qian), even though he was previously uncomfortable with her expressing feelings for him when she took over his ship, and even though he and his friend Jim (Vico Ortiz) had a romantic liaison in season 1. They also learn that The Swede (Nat Faxon) has happily settled in as one of 20 husbands to Spanish Jackie (Leslie Jones), even though he was forced into that relationship to save the rest of the crew.
Yes, that summary does sound like something out of a soap opera, now that you mention it. But this doesn’t: At the end of the episode, a trap set by Prince Ricky (Erroll Shand) obliterates Zhang’s fleet, and the pirates’ haven is destroyed when the English fleet sweeps in to kill or capture the whole cast. Jenkins talks us through it all below.
This conversation has been edited for concision and clarity.
Polygon: One thing that really surprised me in season 2 is that you have two different coercive relationships where a man is being uncomfortably forced into an intimate relationship with a woman, and then he later decides he likes it. What kind of conversations went into those relationships and the gender tropes you’re reversing there?
David Jenkins: With The Swede and Spanish Jackie — she owns [her husbands]. They live in her basement, and she owns them, basically. So already, you’re [ick noise]. But then I love that The Swede really likes her. She’s a gangster, she’s a mob boss. There is a gender aspect to having her in that role. But then he says, “I’ve found parts of myself that I never knew existed, and other parts I thought were long gone.”
I just liked the idea of Leslie [Jones]’s character and Nat Faxon’s character being together and happy, balancing each other. She’s already got a wild thing going — she’s got 20 husbands. To me, to see that relationship start as kind of a joke, Oh, Leslie’s character’s scary and his character’s timid, and it turns into No, actually, they balance each other pretty well — that’s kind of sweet. It’s less about the fact that she essentially owns him, it’s about the fact that they do care about each other. It’s kind of nice.
Photo: Nicola Dove/Max
But you have very much the same dynamic with Zhang and Olu. When they start out, she’s got all the power in the relationship, and she’s kind of predatory about claiming Olu. He’s intimidated and forced into it, and he comes around on deciding he likes her. It just feels like an odd beat to repeat.
Well, she has all the power in the relationship until she doesn’t. And then she realizes that she’s in love with this guy — he is soft and kind and sweet. And that’s powerful. I think they’re mirrored in Blackbeard and Stede’s relationship — they’re each each other’s manic pixie dream girl.
I think there is something in the show about how piracy is a brutal way of life. It’s essentially Mad Max, this world. There’s no law, there’s just strong and weak. And in stories like Game of Thrones, we see how that plays out. It’s a lot of women getting raped in stories and you’re like, [resigned ick noise]. In Our Flag, a lot of these relationships aren’t consenting relationships — they’re power-dynamic relationships, because it’s Mad Max. So a thing I like to see in this show is, Well, why is the more powerful person interested in this weaker person? What are they trying to balance?
In a world where might makes right, and some people just need to align themselves with someone strong, it’s interesting to be like, Well, what does Blackbeard need? What does Spanish Jackie need? What does Zhang Yi Sao need, the most powerful pirate in the world? What happens when she gets into a relationship? What is she looking for? She’s a modern person, what does she need? So you’re always gonna get those weird power dynamics to start with, I think, and then you just try to get to: What’s underneath that? Why are they doing what they’re doing? What are they looking for?
Photo: Nicola Dove/Max
Speaking of what Blackbeard needs, I think some fans will think that him leaving Stede in episode 7 is a form of revenge. It so closely parallels what Stede did to him. You can read it as them being very much alike, running from commitment, or as him trying to hurt Stede. What do you want to say to people freaking out after episode 7?
Well, there’s a thing I talk about a lot — I really, really liked the Bradley Cooper/Lady Gaga version of A Star Is Born. I like how the dynamic changes between them. Everything we do is collapsed on this show — we talk about these lofty things, but we don’t have the time to execute everything we might like to do. Like, episode 4 is a mini Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, just a very small version of it.
In this case, we liked the idea that Blackbeard found this guy and made him a legitimate pirate, but now that he’s a star, Blackbeard’s questioning what he wants to do now that he’s lost his appetite for piracy. And Stede’s turned into Lady Gaga’s character. He’s famous now, because he killed the scariest pirate, so that power is inverted. It’s interesting to look at how a relationship changes now that Blackbird isn’t the star anymore and Stede isn’t a hanger-on. Stede got what he wanted; he’s a real boy. Is Blackbeard jealous? Is he uncomfortable with it? When power dynamics shift in a relationship, that leads to trouble. And then it really is just like, What are they going to do? Are they going to make it through it? Can they rebalance? Because that is a sign of a healthy relationship.
That episode is also a big turning point for Zhang and Olu, and for Olu and Jim. What went into the decisions around them moving in different directions after their connection in season 1?
I think that relationship was always seen in the room as a friend relationship that got romantic. That tension was interesting to us — it’s like, Well, what if we don’t play them as jealous? What if we play it as, when you love a friend and it becomes romantic, and then you see someone who makes them happy and you know you’re not it, you feel jealous? But also, they’re your friend. You want to see them happy. I think a lot of times, particularly in straight relationships, it’s traumatizing, and could be more about the jealousy. But here, I think it’s nice to see it this way: They truly care about each other enough to just want to see their friend with someone good, someone who takes care of them. In my life, those are the best relationships [with exes]. I do see those among my friends, but I don’t see it dramatized a lot, I just see the negative component dramatized. I like it this way — they’re friends, and they just want to see each other do well.
Photo: Nicola Dove/Max
This has never really been a show about villains, but the end of episode 7 feels like a shift in that regard.
I think a lot of the internal forces in Our Flag are the villains. It’s like, Can you let yourself be loved? Do you know what you want in love? If you know what you want, are you healthy enough to get it? When you start going into the tropes of [Blackbeard impression] Oh, should I be gay or not? or Oh, my friends did me dirty — we’ve seen that a lot. It’s good dramatic fuel, but I don’t think those are the things that drive the show.
I think the things that drive this show are a bunch of people who care about each other and are trying to figure out how to have relationships. And relationships are hard. Usually, you’re your own bad guy or gal or person in a relationship. It’s rarely [someone] doing something terrible to you — it’s you just trying to figure out your own shit. Hopefully, your friends help.
The big ending of episode 7 does suggest, though, that there might be more outside pressure coming to the cast, even if it’s just a short-term blip.
I think this is a story about the age of piracy coming to an end. This way of life is coming to an end. And every Western that’s good is that story: This way of life we made is coming to an end, and it can’t last. […] I think every story about outlaws is about trying to preserve a way of life against normative forces that are kind of fascistic.
All of which is a big historical moment, as far as the history of piracy, and it’s part of Stede and Blackbeard’s real-life story. Was that element coming in from history, the way you took little parts of Stede and Blackbeard’s relationship from history?
Using historical beats are good, because they give the story some shape — until they’re not useful, and then you just ignore them. When you feel like you’d rather eat a sandwich, just ignore the history. And then when you feel like, OK, we’re in emotional soup here, we need some downward pressure, then you bring history back in. The balance of the show is 90% ignoring history, and then 10%, bring it in, whenever we’re like, Ah, gotta move the story forward! Remember, the English are out there, and they’re really bad!
The season 2 finale of Our Flag Means Death airs on Max on Oct. 26.
Halloween is nearly upon us, and what better way to prepare for the spookiest holiday of the year than to dive deep into the best stories the horror genre has to offer?
We’ve pulled together a list of some of the best short horror games to play with only a few days left before Halloween. Whether you’re looking for a chilling psychological horror experience or frantic splatter-core nightmare, these are some of the best games to play this season.
If you like folk horror movies like The Wicker Man and Enys Men, you’ll love Helltown. Developed by Nicolas Lamarche and Gabriel Bolduc Dufour, Helltown follows the story of a postman assigned to deliver packages to a secluded rural neighborhood called Little Vale. After their first day on the job, things quicky take a sinister turn as disturbing visions manifest into an insidious plot rife with demonic cultists and unspeakable horrors. An open-world horror exploration game, Helltown offers multiple endings and collectibles and is the perfect game for those who enjoy sinking into the unknown.
Fans of slow-burn psychological horror with oppressive atmospheres and an emphasis on strong sound design should definitely check out No one lives under the lighthouse. Much like Robert Eggers’ The Lighthouse, starring Willem Dafoe and Robert Pattinson, this game puts players in the role of a lighthouse keeper who assumes stewardship of a small island off the coast of the United States after the former keeper deserts their post. Unlike that aforementioned movie, you’re all alone; with no one else to keep you company as you tend the light of the tower and conduct chores around the island. Or are you?
In this experimental first-person horror game, players assume the role of a sled dog musher hired by a mysterious scientist to safely escort him across the frozen plains of the arctic to a remote research facility. Along the way, the pair encounter increasingly strange and disturbing phenomenon that calls into question the scientist’s motivations, if not the entire expedition as a whole. Can the scientist be trusted, and what’s up with all these strange visions?
In this role-playing horror game (see the title?), you are Liana, a young girl recovering from a life-saving operation. Upon returning home, she awakes one morning expecting to meet her mother, only to instead be greeted by what appears to be a mannequin-like figure resembling her mother. What’s going on here? As the week wears on, Liana will have to unravel the mystery behind her peculiar situation before time runs out.
The second game from Jamie Gavin, a Galway-based game developer who works under the pseudonym “Enigma Studio ‘’ alongside composer Karl Barnes, Mothered is the middle entry in a loose trilogy of games set to conclude this year with November’s Echostasis. If you enjoyed this one, you should definitely check out Mothered: Home — the “DLC sequel” is even available to play for free via the Haunted PS1 “Spectral Mall” Demo Disc.
Benedetto “Ben” Cocuzza is a game developer known for unique low-poly survival horror games inspired by ’80s VHS aesthetics and classic slasher horror movies. Taking cues from The Texas ChainSaw Massacre and The Hills Have Eyes, Stay Out of the House is a stealth game where players assume the role of a young woman kidnapped while on a road trip with her boyfriend across the border of Oklahoma. In order to escape, players will have to sneak their way through the maze-like interior of a masked madman’s dilapidated house without alerting either him or his deranged family members.
Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 is finally here, and on the cusp of the PlayStation 5’s third birthday, assumes the throne as the console’s most technically impressive game to date.
I said effectively the same thing last fall about God of War Ragnarök, but in this line of work, there’s always something on the horizon that has the potential to make you look foolish in retrospect. (And hey, I did say that Ragnarök could be the PS5’s most technically impressive game yet — back then. A lot can change in 11 months!)
Insomniac Games has brought to bear all of its experience developing for the PS5 — this is the studio’s fourth project for the platform, following 2021’s Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart — in delivering an open-world superhero adventure that makes the most of the console’s hardware. It’s the first entry in the franchise built specifically for this system. The two previous games were 2018’s Marvel’s Spider-Man, which debuted on PlayStation 4, and 2020’s PS5 launch title Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales, which was a cross-generation game, so it had to be designed in a way that would allow it to run on PS4 as well as PS5.
In Rift Apart, which debuted exclusively on PS5, Insomniac showed what it could do when it didn’t have to worry about supporting older hardware: dimension-hopping action that relied on the PS5’s speedy SSD. The studio has built upon that work with Spider-Man 2, making even better use of the SSD to allow for instantaneous fast travel and other remarkable transitions. And the Spider-Mans’ hometown of New York City — three boroughs of which are now available, with Queens and Brooklyn lying across the East River from Manhattan — looks as amazing as our two heroes, rendered with real-time ray tracing in every graphics mode.
You may be wondering about those modes, and about which one is the best option. There’s a lot on offer, but the long and short of it is that you’ll get a great experience at all times.
Spider-Man 2’s graphics modes, explained
Insomniac’s terrific hair strand system is rendered in a somewhat fuzzy way in Spider-Man 2’s Performance mode, as you can see in this screenshot featuring Black Cat. The strands would be clearer and more finely detailed in the Fidelity mode.Image: Insomniac Games/Sony Interactive Entertainment via Polygon
There are two ways to play Spider-Man 2: Fidelity mode and Performance mode. You’ll find them under the “Graphics” area of the settings menu’s Visual section, and unlike in many other games, you’ll also find detailed descriptions of each mode and the associated options.
As you’d expect, the image quality and resolution are at their highest in Fidelity mode, which has a frame rate target of 30 frames per second (and is the default setting). The Performance mode makes trade-offs in resolution and other areas to target 60 fps. Both options use dynamic resolution scaling, adjusting the amount of pixels being rendered in order to hit the frame rate in question.
Neither mode can quite maintain a flawless locked frame rate. Playing the game’s intro sequence in Performance mode, for instance, I noticed some minor hitching during Sandman’s attack in Lower Manhattan as the screen filled up with billowing dust clouds. But across 15 or so hours with the game thus far, I’ve only run into a few instances of this issue, lasting for a couple of seconds at most.
The Fidelity mode operates in a resolution range from 2160p — i.e., native 4K — down to 1440p, and scales the output to 4K using Insomniac’s temporal injection technique for anti-aliasing, according to the studio. That lower end, 1440p, is where the Performance mode tops out; the average resolution there fluctuates between 1080p and 1440p.
Spider-Man 2’s ray-traced reflections do a beautiful job of accurately representing the choppy surface of the East River. (Captured in Fidelity mode.)Image: Insomniac Games/Sony Interactive Entertainment via Polygon
Either way, ray-traced lighting — in the form of reflections (including on water surfaces) and window interiors — is always on in Spider-Man 2. It’s just that in Performance mode, ray-tracing effects are “simplified for some use cases,” according to the game. This is a major development, ensuring a cohesive look no matter how you decide to play; combined with the increased level of detail in the game world, there’s an unmistakable upgrade over the visuals in the previous Spider-Man titles.
Spider-Man 2 also supports 120 Hz output — a feature that Insomniac added to Rift Apart in a post-launch patch — so you’ll have more visual options if your PS5 is hooked up to a 120 Hz panel. Enabling this setting allows the Fidelity mode to run at a target of 40 fps instead of 30 fps, and the improvement in fluidity and input latency is palpable. It’s a great middle ground between the Performance mode and the standard Fidelity mode, delivering the image quality and clarity of the latter setting at a frame rate that feels more responsive. It’s the way to go if you’re lucky enough to be playing on a 120 Hz display like my LG C1 television. The only drawback is that at 40 fps, the resolution (understandably) can drop a bit further, with the average ending up somewhere between 1296p and 4K, according to Insomniac.
The third setting for the visuals in Spider-Man 2 is for variable refresh rate (VRR), which can be used with both graphics modes. It further complicates the picture with two options: “smoothed” and “uncapped.” The former setting keeps the frame rate cap in place (30 fps or 60 fps, depending on the chosen mode) and helps maintain it by smoothing out any drops below the target. The latter setting is for people who want the most responsive possible experience: It unlocks the frame rate, allowing the game to run from 40-60 fps in Fidelity mode and 60-90 fps in Performance mode. (With frame rate prioritized over resolution here, the pixel count can fall as low as 1152p in Fidelity mode and 1008p in Performance mode, but no instances of resolution drops stood out as offensive to my eyes.)
Which Spider-Man 2 graphics mode is better, Fidelity or Performance?
In this scene of Peter Parker’s Spider-Man looking down toward the streets of Midtown Manhattan at dusk, note the increased level of detail in the Fidelity mode (left). There’s more traffic on the roads. Lampposts are visible from this high vantage point, but they’re missing in the Performance mode (right) — as are minor elements such as air conditioning vents on rooftops. But the ray-traced reflections in the windows of the building that Peter is perched on? They look pretty much identical across both graphics modes.Image: Insomniac Games/Sony Interactive Entertainment via Polygon and Image: Insomniac Games/Sony Interactive Entertainment via Polygon
I’ve played Spider-Man 2 in both graphics modes over multiple hours, and I don’t believe there’s an obvious winner here. Granted, I’ve spent the vast majority of my time in Fidelity mode playing with the 120 Hz option enabled. It still feels great at 30 fps, but the ability to get an additional 10 fps — or more, if using VRR with an uncapped frame rate — while keeping all the visual bells and whistles is a meaningful benefit.
If you aren’t playing on a 120 Hz panel, I would lean toward Performance mode. The visual compromises — both in terms of clarity (due to the reduced resolution) and in terms of the game world’s level of detail and density — are notable, but they aren’t severe enough to make a gigantic difference in image quality.
Sure, there are fewer cars and pedestrians on the streets of New York, and the strands of hair on the characters’ heads are less detailed. But this is where the steadfast presence of ray tracing across both graphics modes makes all the difference: Even with its lower-quality ray-tracing effects, the Performance mode upholds the game’s overall visual presentation. And anyway, how much will you really notice the shortcomings when Miles or Peter is flying high above the city at something like 100 mph? I’m already at the point where the combat encounters are getting difficult, and I appreciate Performance mode’s increased responsiveness in those sequences.
Image: Insomniac Games/Sony Interactive Entertainment via Polygon
It’s worth noting that you do kind of have to make a choice and stick with it during a session. While I often swapped between the two options in Horizon Forbidden West, exploring the environment in quality mode and switching into performance mode for combat sequences, Spider-Man 2 forces you to restart from a checkpoint when changing the graphics mode. (I imagine the developers have a good reason for this, but it’s a strange hang-up, since the game appears to switch seamlessly into Fidelity mode as soon as you enter the photo mode.)
Spider-Man 2’s array of graphics options can be confusing, even overwhelming. The great thing is that if you don’t want to worry about the various modes, you can just leave the defaults in place and be secure in the knowledge that you’ll have a terrific-looking and smooth-playing experience regardless of the settings. Insomniac Games has utilized the PS5’s hardware to its fullest extent — that is, until its upcoming Wolverine game, when the studio will surely find ways to top itself again.
Happy Friday, Polygon readers! Each week, we round up the most notable releases to streaming and video rental, highlighting the biggest and best new movies for you to watch at home.
No Hard Feelings, the coming-of-age sex comedy starring Jennifer Lawrence, arrives on Netflix this week alongside Old Dads, the directorial debut of comedian Bill Burr. The action comedy-drama Polite Society comes to Prime along with the Chinese World War II thriller Hidden Blade starring Tony Leung, while the horor thriller Cobweb featuring Antony Starr (The Boys) lands on Hulu. There’s plenty of new films available to rent as well this week, like Saw X; the latest installment in the long-running horror franchise starring Tobin Bell, and more.
Genre: Comedy Run time: 1h 43m Director: Gene Stupnitsky Cast: Jennifer Lawrence, Andrew Barth Feldman, Laura Benanti
Jennifer Lawrence stars in this raunchy and endearing comedy as Maddie, a young woman struggling between her job as an Uber driver and a part-time bartender to pay off the house she inherited from her late mother. After her car is towed, Maddie is presented with the opportunity of a lifetime: Seduce Percy (Andrew Barth Feldman), the college-bound son of a wealthy couple on their behalf, in exchange for a brand new set of wheels. Simple enough, right? Yeah, that’s what Maddie thought too.
Like most funny stories, No Hard Feelings seems like a bad idea at first. It’s a movie in which Jennifer Lawrence, in her first lead role in a full-on comedy, spends approximately 103 minutes trying to seduce a socially awkward 19-year-old for financial gain. It’s also wildly funny, and a great reminder of how good J-Law is at lighting up a screen.
Genre: Comedy Run time: 1h 44m Director: Bill Burr Cast: Bill Burr, Bokeem Woodbine, Bobby Cannavale
Three old friends become fathers later in life, only to be confronted with the generational annoyances that come with interacting with anyone born (or anything created) after the 1980s. Old Dads is Bill Burr’s directorial feature debut and shares a co-writing credit with writer-producer Ben Tishler.
Genre: Horror thriller Run time: 1h 28m Director: Samuel Bodin Cast: Lizzy Caplan, Woody Norman, Antony Starr
This horror-thriller from the creator of the scariest show on Netflix follows Peter (Woody Norman), a troubled young boy who — after hearing mysterious knocking sounds coming from the walls of his home — attempts to seek help in unearthing a terrible secret hidden from him by his parents.
Bodin attempts to invoke dread with long shots of the film’s few distinctive set elements — the aforementioned pumpkin patch, or an old grandfather clock and icebox that each hide a hidden passage — but he doesn’t do much to render those images as something powerful or sinister. It’s as if Cobweb is set in a haunted house where nothing actually happened long ago, even as it hides a girl’s voice in its walls.
New on Prime Video
Polite Society
Where to watch: Available to stream on Prime Video
When a teenage girl on her path to being a stuntwoman learns that her sister is betrothed to a man, she suspects the man and his mother are up to no good. So she does the only thing you can in such a situation: try to sabotage the relationship and beat the shit out of the guy in the process.
Polite Society sounds like an uproarious fun time, and it’s one of the movies I’ve most looked forward to catching on streaming after a brief limited U.S. run. After you see it, make sure to read this interview with the director about Polite Society’svaried influences.
Hidden Blade
Where to watch: Available to stream on Prime Video
Image: Well Go USA Entertainment
Genre: Period espionage thriller Run time: 2h 8m Director: Cheng Er Cast: Tony Leung, Wang Yibo, Zhou Xun
This Chinese World War II thriller stars the incredible Tony Leung as the Director of Shanghai’s Political Security Department, who finds himself in the middle of a time of great upheaval. The Japanese occupation is in its dying embers, China’s Communist Party is on the rise, and Leung’s character finds himself caught in the middle of it all. It’s a tense, gorgeous, occasionally opaque thriller with a great leading performance by one of the finest actors of his generation.
Silver Dollar Road
Where to watch: Available to stream on Prime Video
Genre: Documentary Run time: 1h 40m Director: Raoul Peck Cast: John C. Barnett, Classie Curley, Melvin Davis
I Am Not Your Negro director Raoul Peck turns his sight to story of the Reels family in this new documentary. Following the plight of the family’s fight to preserve their claim to their waterfront property in North Carolina from predatorial developers, Silver Dollar Road draws on archival footage and interviews with the family to tell their story.
Surrounded
Where to watch: Available to stream on Prime Video
Image: MGM
Genre: Western Run time: 1h 40m Director: Anthony Mandler Cast: Letitia Wright, Jamie Bell, Michael K. Williams
Letitia Wright (Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, Small Axe) stars in this new Western as a freedwoman who impersonates a man in a plot to claim a gold mine. Her journey brings her face-to-face with the legendary outlaw Tommy Walsh (Jamie Bell), whom she holds captive after her stagecoach is ambushed by a gang of marauding thieves and killers. Surrounded also features the final performance by the late Michael K. Williams, who completed filming prior to his death in 2021.
Genre: Documentary Run time: 1h 32m Director: Errol Morris Cast: John le Carré
John le Carré is a personal favorite author for me. His spy novels are notable for their groundedness — as a former spy himself, he had a lot to draw from — but also for their cynicism towards the heartlessness of that particular trade. Esteemed documentarian Errol Morris (The Thin Blue Line) turns his camera towards the life of the late, great le Carré, one of the finest and most important authors of the 20th century.
Genre: Action-comedy Run time: 1h 31m Director: Kirk DeMicco Cast: Lana Condor, Toni Collette, Annie Murphy
This animated comedy follows an awkward high schooler who discovers that she’s descended from a long line of warrior Kraken monsters. Destined to inherit her grandmother’s throne and defend the seas from tyrannical mermaids, Ruby must master her newfound powers and choose her own path as she prepares to embrace her destiny.
New to rent
Saw X
Where to watch: Available to rent on Amazon, Apple, and Vudu
Image: Lionsgate
Genre: Horror Run time: 1h 58m Director: Kevin Greutert Cast: Tobin Bell, Shawnee Smith, Synnøve Macody Lund
Tobin Bell reprises his role as the machiavellian Jigsaw killer in the 10th installment of the long running Saw horror franchise. A prequel set between the events of the original film and 2005’s Saw II, Saw X follows John Kramer as he travels to Mexico to undergo an experimental treatment in order to cure his cancer. When he realizes that the entire program is a total scam, John enlists the help of his apprentice Amanda Young (Shawnee Smith) to orchestrate a series of elaborate “games” in order to exact his own twisted brand of justice.
Lynch/Oz
Where to watch: Available to rent on Amazon, Apple, and Vudu
Genre: Documentary Run time: 1h 48m Director: Alexandre O. Philippe Cast: Amy Nicholson, Rodney Ascher, John Waters
This documentary takes a magnifying glass to the career of David Lynch, one of the most unique and experimental storytellers of his generation, and how his life-long love for the 1939 film The Wizard of Oz has inspired his work. Split into six chapters, the film features narration by several notable directors, including Karyn Kusama, Rodney Ascher, and David Lowery.
Ubisoft and Netflix’s new animated series Captain Laserhawk: A Blood Dragon Remix has very little to do with the Far Cry game series, from which it draws part of its title. Viewers of the mixed-media show don’t need to know anything at all about Far Cry, or its strange, neon-infused spinoff from a decade ago. But series creator Adi Shankar said it would be “disingenuous” to not referenceFar Cry 3: Blood Dragon, the 2013 video game that was a shocking aesthetic swerve in Ubisoft’s open-world survival adventure game.
Shankar said that calling his new mashup show, in which the worlds of Assassin’s Creed, Beyond Good & Evil, and the Tom Clancyverse collide, is him “paying homage, paying credit” to Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon.
“When you look at how important Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon was, it’s a seminal fucking piece of art,” Shankar said in an interview with Polygon. “At some point people are going to look back and say there were seminal things [in that game] that seeded this online art movement, which continues to grow. Blood Dragon was one of them. So this is me wanting to acknowledge that.”
Captain Laserhawk is more like a reverential cousin to Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon. Both pieces of media are set in dystopian futures, and steal liberally from ’80s-era influences: synthpop music, VHS tapes, video games, and effortlessly cool action stars. Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon’s hero was a mishmash of the T-800 Terminator and Kyle Reese wearing an NES Power Glove holding RoboCop’s hand cannon. Captain Laserhawk’s Dolph Laserhawk is similarly cybernetic, with a gun arm that evokes Mega Man’s Mega Buster or Samus Aran’s arm cannon.
Far Cry bad guy Pagan Min does make an appearance.Image: Netflix
There are clear similarities and distinct differences between the two Blood Dragons. Shankar described his show as “more of a vibe” as opposed to “adapting the ‘tome’ of Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon.” In fact, when Shankar’s show was first announced back in 2019, it was called Captain Laserhawk: A Blood Dragon Vibe.
Captain Laserhawk is “part of the same lineage” that the CRT-filtered, laser beam-slathered Far Cry game spinoff was, an aesthetic that has permeated through other works of art over the past decade. Shankar specifically namechecked Destiny 2, The Weeknd’s music videos, and the Duffer brothers’ Stranger Things as examples of contemporary works existing on the same creative lineage.
“It all just kind of organically happened via the internet and Blood Dragon was a seminal moment in that,” Shankar said.
And while the Far Cry 3 and Blood Dragon influences may be a small part of Shankar’s animated series, especially compared to how much Beyond Good & Evil influence it contains, there is some Far Cry at the show’s heart — and at its periphery.
“Well, you know [Far Cry 4’s] Pagan Min is in this, reinterpreted through a JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure lens,” Shankar said. And, he teased, “the universe is populated with other Far Cry characters. They exist, and you may not see them here, but they’re out there in the universe.”
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