It’s been about a year and a half since we first caught wind of Dune: Awakening, the massively multiplayer online survival game set on the planet of Arrakis. On Friday, Funcom released a story-focused trailer at Summer Game Fest, teasing that the game will focus on an alternate telling of the story of Paul Atreides — but we’ll have to wait until Gamescom in Aug. 2024 for a gameplay trailer.
The game drops players first-person into the world of Dune (well, at least, the world of Arrakis) where they’ll traverse the desert, using the land and relying on its other inhabitants to survive and thrive. Players will be able to join house Atreides or the Harkonnen, or live a quieter existence as a crafter or trader — but they won’t be able to kill or ride sandworms, unfortunately.
The game harnesses the simultaneously desolate and claustrophobic setting of the desert to push players to their survival game limits: You’ll have to avoid the sun, evade sandworms, craft tools, and find water wherever it exists (and yes, that includes enemies’ bodies). But it’s not all treacherous walks through Arrakis — vehicles include thopters, thumpers, and sand bikes, and the Voice is at your disposal should you need to sway your enemies one way or another.
While past Dune games have (very successfully, mind you) leaned on real-time strategy to encapsulate the vibe of the books and films, Dune: Awakening promises the most immersive experience yet. We’ll have to see if it delivers on that promise when it’s released on PlayStation 5, Windows PC, and Xbox Series X.
We are so back. And by “we,” I mean video games. At a half-dozen slickly produced promotional events over the next week, games will be teased in the form of captivating cinematic trailers with promises to push the medium forward.
The annual Summer Game Fest extravaganza, host Geoff Keighley’s replacement for E3, kicks off the promotional activities on Friday, June 7. The rest of the weekend is also filled with similar hours-long events from Xbox, Activision, Ubisoft, Devolver Digital, and other organizers who have rallied smaller, indie-created games for a combined show of force.
There’s an expectation that the annual parade of trailers for exciting new games will include plenty of games that won’t be out for many months, if not years, after their unveilings. To be clear, that happens every year. And I’m here to remind you that there are countless unreleased games that were announced with gusto at similar events in years past — some of which have slipped from the public consciousness, and we’re convinced that if they don’t show up in a meaningful way over the next couple weeks, it’s so over.*
*It’s not really over, especially given the volatile state of the video game industry. But we’re getting pretty worried/impatient about the following games and honestly hope they show up, look great, and will be critical and commercial successes — all of them.
Monolith’s Wonder Woman game
Announced in 2021, developer Monolith Productions promised to bring its patented Nemesis System from Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor to a game based on Wonder Woman. We were excited about it, even with the taste of Wonder Woman 1984 relatively fresh in our mouths, but haven’t heard a peep about the game since then. DC’s approach to video games based on its characters has changed since the announcement of Wonder Woman, and we remain hopeful that Monolith can capture the magical feeling of battling wisecracking Orcs in a game that gives us control of Diana Prince and her golden lasso.
Ubisoft’s Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell remake
Another announcement that dates back to 2021? Ubisoft Toronto’s plan to remake the original Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell. The new Splinter Cell promises to take advantage of 20 years of technical innovations and to rework parts of the game’s story “that may not have aged particularly well,” creative director Chris Auty said in 2022. Showing off the Splinter Cell remake at Sunday’s Xbox Games Showcase would go a long way to appeasing longtime Xbox fans, with a deeper dive ideally poised for Monday’s Ubisoft Forward event. Just sayin’.
Skate. (Skate 4)
Credit to Electronic Arts: The publisher and development team, Full Circle, has been very transparent about the development of the next Skate game — which is called skate., not Skate 4, officially — and opened up playtesting to in-progress versions of the game. But please give us the new Skate already! How about a release date? Barring that, can I get a beta key? I want to flump, too.
Capcom’s Pragmata
It’s been four years since Capcom revealed Pragmata at Sony’s big unveiling of the PlayStation 5. Pragmata’s been delayed several times since then, and the last we heard about it was when Capcom pushed it back indefinitely. Is Pragmata joining the increasingly long list of games coming in 2025? It’s starting to feel like it.
Rare’s Everwild
We’re nearing the five-year anniversary of Everwild’s unveiling. Eighteen months later, we learned that developer Rare had reportedly rebooted the game with “a complete overhaul of the game’s design and direction.” Frankly, we just want to find out what Everwild even is — especially since Rare has proven that given the right development resources, it can turn good games into great games.
Transformers: Reactivate
Call me an idealist, but I’m always willing to give a Transformers game the benefit of the doubt. Sometimes you get an unexpected surprise — a Transformers: Devastation, if you will. So when Splash Damage teased Transformers: Reactivate in 2022 with a moody cover of Bon Jovi’s “Dead or Alive,” I was immediately on board. But we haven’t heard much about the cooperative online action game since, and that’s a shame. I’ve been in transform-and-roll-out mode for the past 18 months and I’m concerned.
Perfect Dark
Announced at 2020’s The Game Awards, developer The Initiative’s Perfect Dark reboot promised to revive a long-dormant franchise and serve as a cornerstone of the Xbox Series X’s lineup of game exclusives. But the studio and owner Microsoft have said very little about their new Perfect Dark and what we can expect from Joanna Dark’s return. We continue to wait for it, alongside Xbox Game Studios’ Avowed, Contraband, Fable, The Outer Worlds 2, and State of Decay 3.
Kingdom Hearts 4
We’re now two years out from the announcement of Kingdom Hearts 4, a reveal timed to the Square Enix-Disney role-playing game franchise’s 20th anniversary. It increasingly looks like we’ll have to wait for Kingdom Hearts’ 25th birthday to actually get our hands on Sora’s next adventure. Given how long it’s taken Square Enix to realize its Final Fantasy 7 remake trilogy — to say nothing of its next mainline Dragon Quest game — we don’t actually expect to see Kingdom Hearts 4 showing up any time soon. There’s a painful dose of reality.
Hollow Knight Silksong
It’s not happening, is it? Any time soon, I mean. That’s fine. Everything’s fine.
For two decades, the words “cinematic” and “blockbuster” have been, for most game directors, synonymous. During this window, which stretches back to the original God of War and Halo, we’ve enjoyed (or, for others, endured) big-budget video game creators aspiring to emulate their blockbuster film counterparts.
If — somehow — you’ve never seen the films of Steven Spielberg or Michael Mann, you’ve nonetheless experienced them via contact highs from Uncharted, Grand Theft Auto, and practically every other Big Game released this millennium.
But Indika, a game that sounds like a weed strain and plays like being stoned and scrolling through the Criterion Channel, has me hopeful that we’re approaching, with narrative video games, a turning point for what it means for a game to be “cinematic.”
What fuels that hope is Indika’s creative similarities to a micro-budget indie horror film from the ’90s.
The Blair Witch effect
Is it possible for one game to change the look of an entire medium? And why would it be Indika, a game most readers haven’t played, or even heard of?
25 years ago, The Blair Witch Project inspired countless parodies with a single shot. You know the one. You can see it in the trailer, the poster, or at the top of this story. The lead actress-slash-camera operator holds a cheap camcorder inches from her face. Tears well in her eyes, and a flashlight casts hard shadows across her dry skin.
She’s terrified. She’s a mess. She’s barely in focus or even in frame.
At that time, few commercial directors would film a shot so crudely, nor would a celebrity offer the audience such an intimate look inside their nostrils. Filmgoers expected movies to conform to a certain look, sound, and feel. But The Blair Witch Project didn’t resemble anything in theaters; it looked like a cheap documentary you’d find on the local PBS station. It looked real.
Photo: Haxan Films
With that emphasis on “realism” above all else, the amateur camerawork accomplished its goal — scare the shit out of people — better than any expensive shot on an industry-grade camera could.
The filmmakers had taken the empathic visual language of the documentary form and weaponized it. Look again at the shot. You don’t see an actress staring into the camcorder; you see a person. And so, as happens when you look someone in the eyes, a connection forms. This person, you think, could be you. Alone. In the woods. Something unknown stalking through the branches.
The camerawork of The Blair Witch Project wasn’t cinematic, not in the classical sense. But in time, what audiences expected film and TV to look like would change to meet that image. Do we have the sprawling found-footage horror genre without it? Or the mega-popular docu-sitcoms like The Office and Modern Family?
The creators of The Blair Witch Project, because of their limitations (no money! No sets! No actors!) looked for inspiration where others didn’t have to, and wouldn’t choose to. The film’s success then gave future creators big and small permission to follow its lead, forever changing what a Hollywood movie could look and feel like.
Indika and the film school games
Indika, the fantastic new adventure game from Odd Meter, tells the story of a young nun who loses her grip on reality in an alternate-history version of 19th-century Russia. Tortured by a voice in her head that may or may not be a demon, Indika partners with a sickly man who may or may not be divinely chosen by God. Together, they embark on a perilous road trip through beautiful forests, abandoned towns, and literalizations of biblical allegory.
Indika is the latest — and one of the most impressive — examples of a sea change in the look and feel of cinematic games.
You don’t have to play Indika to see what I mean (though, hey, you really should). In the announcement trailer, the game’s creators borrow liberally from filmmakers rarely associated with games. These directors, who can’t afford the spectacle and scale of big-budget filmmaking, rely on more audacious (and affordable) craft to distinguish their work.
“We tried to use a standard limited set of [virtual camera] lenses to depict the limitations of inexpensive auteur cinema,” Indika game director Dmitry Svetlow told Polygon over email. He cited Poor Things director Yorgos Lanthimos, Russian filmmaker and slow cinema pioneer Andrei Tarkovsky, and former Monty Python member and infamous weirdo auteur Terry Gilliam as inspiration.
Emma Stone as Bella Baxter in Yorgos Lanthimos’ Poor Things.Image: Searchlight Pictures
In Indika, the stark exterior landscapes and cold architecture resemble the striking but antiseptic sets of Lanthimos. In the game’s nunnery, a SnorriCam shot — in which the camera is strapped onto the actor and aimed at their face — recalls Blair Witch, of course, but also the works of ’90s music video director turned ’00s filmmaker Spike Jonze and Robert Webb’s comedy sketch series Sir Digby Chicken Caesar.
Where Blair Witch borrowed the documentary aesthetic to force audiences to straighten their backs and pay attention, Svetlow and company are reaching into the toolbox of low-budget filmmaking to do something similar with games.
Or, to put it crassly, Indika doesn’t just look like art films but feels like them. The story opens with the player inhabiting the habit of the titular young nun and fetching a pail of water from a well, then doing it again. And again. And again and again. Her steps up and down a grimy, snow-crunched slope in the abbey echo Tarkosvky’s long shots (like this one of a man carrying a candle for seven minutes) that were intentionally tedious, forcing us to feel time passing not just in a movie or a game, but in our life as we experience them.
To make the game more cinematic, Svetlow wrote the team needed a “greater focus on dramaturgy, on the quality and depth of characters, as well as the necessary level of presentation of events.”
In Indika, you don’t save the world or nail sick headshots. You accumulate poorly hidden collectibles and earn points, though they’re worth nothing and, by the standards of other games, a waste of time — something the game’s loading screens emphasize any chance they get. (“Don’t waste time collecting points, they are pointless.”) Sometimes Indika comes across a bench, and if you direct her to sit down on it, the game hands over the “film editing” to the player, allowing them to swap between different camera angles, some of which Indika doesn’t even appear in.
You could move on, directing Indika to stand back up and continue about her business. Or you could let the camera rest, your mind wandering as your eyes lock onto a field of mud and snow. In a medium full of realistic 3D worlds rife with kinetic empowerment, Indika encourages you to indulge in a moment of peace and ceding of control.
Change happens slowly and then all at once
Can we be certain games like Indika will influence their big-budget peers? They already have.
Here’s just one example: In 2009, Naughty Dog released Uncharted 2, a game rife with some of the most iconic blockbuster moments in the history of video games. Its opening, in which the hero climbs up a train that dangles off a cliff, may have inspired the latest Mission: Impossible, which ends with Tom Cruise doing something very, very similar.
But tucked into Uncharted 2 is a sequence meant to contrast with these sorts of set-pieces. Around the midpoint, Nathan Drake hikes through a Tibetan village. He doesn’t climb any deadly cliffs. Nothing blows up. Nobody gets shot. This was, in its time, unusual — a moment in which the player could exist in a beautiful 3D environment without being required to destroy the village or its population.
The Tibetan village sequence (and I swear this was acknowledged publicly, though now I struggle to find any quote) was cribbed from 2008’s The Graveyard, a short art game from the now-defunct micro studio Tale of Tales. In the game, an elderly woman walks the path of a graveyard, sits on a bench, reflects, and then returns from where she came. To younger readers, this will sound tedious. But to game critics at the time, this scene dropped into our minds like a new drug — a total shock to the system.
Nathan Drake in Uncharted 2.Image: Naughty Dog/Sony Computer Entertainment America
With The Graveyard and Uncharted 2 and many other (mostly indie) games of that time period, the video game industry witnessed a surge in what would be dubbed “walking simulators,” a somewhat derisive term for a powerful idea: You make a beautiful, rich virtual space, then afford your players some time to exist within them.
If The Graveyard could reshape the assumptions of cinematic video games, then why shouldn’t Indika help to bring the style of low-budget and arthouse filmmaking to Indika’s many peers?
That’s the magic of this moment in video games: Indika isn’t alone in its ambitions to challenge our assumptions of what makes a game cinematic. Indie developers have been steadily pushing against the confines of what games look and feel like for over a decade. To the Moon. El Paso, Elsewhere. Disco Elysium. I could double my word count with nothing more than titles.
But what’s different now, and what Indika reflects, is the independent games scene accelerating up an exponential hockey stick of creative output.
Image: Odd Meter/11 bit studios
Much like The Blair Witch Project (and countless other indie films since its release) was made possible by the first boom of consumer-level cameras and filmmaking tools, Indika and its ilk reflect a new era of game production where a small team — thanks to cost-effective and ultra-powerful dev tools — can take a risk on a personal project. In fact, with modern game engines, indie game developers can accomplish visual feats indie filmmakers could only imagine.
“We recreated a non-existent fairy-tale world; to do this for cinema would have cost an order of magnitude more,” Svetlow told Polygon.
Since I finished Indika, I’ve played three more oddly “cinematic” games — Arctic Eggs, 1000xResist, and Crow Country — and it feels like every week another new game appears, its creators taking a bat to the expectations of what a game should look and feel like. Now and then the bat is bound to connect and pop open this medium, releasing an entirely new style that artists will pounce on, like kids grabbing candy from a smashed piñata.
Perhaps Indika, in time, will reveal itself to be one of these special games. The Blair Witch of video games, launching a thousand projects that build on the arthouse aesthetic. Or perhaps this abundance of creativity will — not with one bold release or one inspirational aesthetic — radically change the idea of what makes a game “cinematic” to the point that we’re less worried about how a game can look like a film, and these interactive narrative experiences that we’d previously compare to great films can have a look that’s recognizably and thrillingly their own.
I hope we get there. In the meantime, I’ll be grateful to play games that aspire to match ambitious and inventive directors, rather than playing yet another video game that could be mistaken for Free Guy.
The market for high-end collectibles like rare Pokémon cards has exploded in recent years, and GameStop seems to want a piece of it. The gaming retailer told some store managers this week that it would begin testing buying Professional Sports Authenticator (PSA) graded trading cards later this month as it flails around for a new business strategy while its meme stock shenanigans continue.
New Pokémon Scarlet And Violet Trailer Features Hot Profs, 4-Player Co-Op, And Lechonk, The Hero We Deserve
“Exciting news,” read an internal message shared over on the GameStop subreddit yesterday. “We are happy to announce that we are officially getting into Graded Collectibles. Starting tomorrow, all associates will have access to the Main Menu Learning Course around accepting PSA Graded Collectibles (Just Trading Cards for now).” The company said the program’s rollout would begin next week in just 258 stores to start, including some located in Texas where GameStop is headquartered.
It’s not clear yet how the program will work, if GameStop plans to resell the cards in-store, or what the limit will be on the prices it can pay. Some self-identified employees on the subreddit have speculated that the stores will only be allowed to buy collectibles graded PSA 8 and above. Still, the prices for those can run from, say, $50 for a Raging Bolt Ex from the recent Temporal Forces Pokémon set to over $29,000 for a rarer Charizard from the original base set.
The backbone of GameStop’s business once upon a time was used video games. After players completed a new release, they could sell it back to the company for a fraction of the MSRP, which GameStop would then turn around and sell to a new player for almost the full cost of the new version of the game. This “circle of life” propelled GameStop to huge profits in the early 2010s, but has fallen apart as the majority of game purchases have gone digital.
More recently, the company has doubled down on branded merchandise and collectibles like Funko-Pops and statues of video game characters to make up the shortfall. Despite raking in $1 billion thanks to a meme-fueled stock bonanza, GameStop’s pivots to cryptocurrency, PC gaming gear, and even TVs hasn’t yielded a new path forward for its ailing business. All along the way, GameStop employees have born the brunt the company’s excesses, failings, and resulting cuts.
It’s unclear if GameStop’s longstanding reputation for poor trade-in deals will extend to its new collectibles program. “10% market price take it or leave it,” joked one person on Reddit. “5% market price cash, 10% market price in store credit, and they sell them at 500% market price.”
NEW YORK (AP) — The average time of a nine-inning game is 2 hours, 36 minutes through the first full month of the major league season, down 1 minute from 2023 in the second year of the pitch clock.
Over objections from the players’ association, MLB lowered the timer to 18 seconds from 20 with runners on base while keeping it at 15 seconds with no runners.
Last year, the average increased gradually through the season, from 2:37 through April to 2:38 in May, 2:39 in June, 2:41 in July and August to 2:44 in September.
The season average of 2:40 was down 24 minutes from 2022 and the lowest since 1985.
Capcom has released a list of fixes and updates it will make to Dragon’s Dogma 2 “in the near future” — including the much-requested option to start a new game when save data already exists.
Dragon’s Dogma 2 only offers a single save slot, and presently, players who want to start the game again — perhaps to try a different specialization — can only do so by manually deleting their save file at the system level first. This can be a fiddly process involving disabling cloud saving and, for Steam players, actually locating their game save on the hard drive.
Capcom said it would add “the option to start a new game when save data already exists” as part of the first wave of updates to Dragon’s Dogma 2. This doesn’t mean it will actually add a second save slot for a new character; the update will simply make it easy to overwrite your save from within the game itself.
To all Dragon’s Dogma 2 players!
We’re planning to release patches including the following updates and fixes in the near future, and will release them as soon as they are ready for distribution on each platform.
Capcom also said it would add a frame rate cap of 30 frames per second to the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X versions of the game. As it is, the game runs with an uncapped frame rate, meaning it can sometimes run faster than 30 fps, but this can result in inconsistent and juddery performance (especially for players without variable refresh rate displays). A 30 fps cap should ensure a more consistent and stable feel to the game.
Capcom also said it would add options to switch off the motion blur and ray tracing graphical effects to console versions of Dragon’s Dogma 2, but it warned that doing so “will not affect the frame rate significantly.” Frame rate improvements will come in “future updates,” it said. PC players will now get better-quality results from the DLSS.
Another target for an early fix is the Art of Metamorphosis item that allows you to change the appearance of your character. Previously in very limited supply, the stock of this item is being increased to 99 at Pawn Guilds. This change appears to be targeted at criticism of the game’s microtransactions, which include the sale of Art of Metamorphosis at $1.99. With this change, it will only be inability to afford the in-game price that would push players toward paying real money to change the looks of their character or Main Pawn. (No changes were announced for other rare items available to buy as microtransactions, such as Wakestones or Portcrystals.)
Other changes coming soon will make it possible to acquire your own dwelling earlier in the game, as well as various text display and bug fixes.
Capcom said it would release the updates “as soon as they are ready for distribution on each platform.”
Big surprise: 3 Body Problem, Netflix’s new show based on a trilogy of sci-fi novels that regularly deal with advanced quantum science theories, doesn’t offer a lot in terms of easy answers. Why did Vera Ye kill herself? What do people see when those shaky countdowns get to zero? And who, really, are the incoming aliens known as the San-Ti (Chinese for “three-body [people]”)?
Many of the answers to the latter question revolve around a virtual reality game encased in a sleek chrome headset that resembles something Apple would sell for several thousand dollars. Early in Episode 1, Jin Cheng (Jess Hong) is given one of these devices on a visit to Ye Wenjie (Rosalind Chao), the mother of Jin’s recently deceased friend Vera. Wenjie claims Vera was gaming regularly in the weeks before her death, which piques Jin’s interest since her particle physicist friend would never deign to carve out time for video games.
Headset affixed, Jin finds herself in a hyperrealistic desert landscape. The words “Level One” echo loudly. The headset is able to affect every sense, not just seeing and hearing, effectively transporting her mind to a new plane of being. Jin marvels as the wind ripples the traditional garb she’s been outfitted in, smiles and squints as a massive sun rises over a stately pyramid, and screams in terror when the wind picks up, revealing a desiccated, still-alive humanoid figure buried at her feet. I’m not a big fan of tutorial levels, either.
Eventually, one of Jin’s friends, snack magnate Jack Rooney (John Bradley), gets his hands on her headset. But his experience playing the game is even more bonkers. When Jack first puts on Jin’s device, which was evidently intended just for her, a woman (Sea Shimooka) appears behind him and sternly observes, “You were not invited,” before cutting him down with a sword. The same thing happens when another friend, Auggie (Eiza González), tries to play. The San-Ti want only a select few people to use their tech. But with time, Jack finally makes the cut. A shiny headset of his own comes with a card that reads: “We invite you to play.”
Initially, the VR portions of 3 Body Problem do resemble some kind of incredibly immersive game. Putting on the headset and engaging with the AI once again, Jin meets a suave NPC, the Count of the West, and another simply referred to as Follower, a young girl Jin immediately takes a shine to. The Count welcomes Jin to “Civilization 137” and tells her that this world has “chaotic” and “stable” eras. She must deduce whether an era is chaotic or stable, and if she’s wrong, the civilization is destroyed.
As in any good game, you need a big end-of-level boss. Here in Level One, it’s Emperor Zhou—a real-life tyrant king from about 3,000 years ago. The Count, desperate to appease the emperor, tells Zhou that he can use divination to predict the next stable era, which just so happens to be in eight days and will last 63 years. Jin, a trained scientist rather than a mystic, disagrees with the Count’s assessment. But Zhou is on board with the Count’s prediction and dismisses Jin’s interjections about “the laws of physics: everything we know to be true about the world.”
“Which world?” he asks her.
The emperor moves forward with the Count’s plea to “awaken your dynasty and let it prosper.” But that decision quickly proves to be misguided, as Zhou’s civilization is completely obliterated by a massive ice storm. Nevertheless, Jin’s foresight in choosing science over mysticism results in her passing Level One. Several doomed civilizations later, Jin and Jack solve Level Two together: This world is part of, get this, a three-body star system, moving unpredictably between the gravity of three suns, causing constant ecological disasters and apocalypses. Throughout the “game,” they’re tasked with explaining complex modern physics to NPCs who are based on important figures in Earth’s history and whose temperaments range from “unimpressed” to “cartoonishly hostile.” And I mean cartoonishly. At one point, Kublai Khan tries to boil Jin and Jack in a big pot, which is something Wile E. Coyote would attempt. A series of comedic cameos adds to the heightened reality and playfulness of these scenes compared to the rest of the show, like when League of Gentlemen alum and Sherlock cocreator Mark Gatiss—in character as Isaac Newton—spits at Jin to “shut the fuck up, troll!” after she questions his (very cool) human-powered binary computer. The San-Ti are at least hip to a bit of gamer lingo, then.
It’s a fascinating way to tell the San-Ti’s story, which becomes clearer and clearer with each progressing level. This game is not a puzzle; the three-body problem is unsolvable. Any species existing within such an unstable star system will always face eradication, eventually. It’s a demonstration by the San-Ti that they have no choice but to abandon their planet and find a new home.
Jin and Jack are invited to Level Four, which, as it turns out, is basically an initiation. Donning the headsets one more time, they are greeted by the game’s “guide,” that mysterious woman with a sword. “There is only one solution when your world is doomed,” the woman says. “Flee,” Jin whispers in response. And so, after 9,478 total civilizations have been built, destroyed, and rebuilt, the San-Ti are accepting an invitation to Earth that—surprise—Ye Wenjie extended to them at the end of Episode 2. Wenjie, exasperated with the cruelty she experienced at the hands of her fellow human beings during the Cultural Revolution, believes the San-Ti could save humanity—even if, and perhaps explicitly because, the San-Ti warned Wenjie that her “world will be conquered” if she responded to the their messages sent decades before Jin’s VR excursions.
Jack and Jin, as “Level Four champions,” are invited into a sect of humanity that’s led by Wenjie and is preparing to welcome the San-Ti, whom they call “Our Lord.” The game is designed not only to literalize the history of the San-Ti, but to select players who will be sympathetic and malleable to the San-Ti’s own ends. “Your cingulate cortex [an area of the brain commonly associated with emotion and empathy] activity was the highest we’ve ever recorded,” true believer Tatiana (Marlo Kelly) tells Jin.
Inside the careful and occasionally humorous craftsmanship of the games, there are more hints to be gleaned about the nature of the San-Ti. First—and this is the one that’ll stick in most people’s minds—they have the ability to “dehydrate” themselves, essentially pausing all biological functions and flattening into a rolled-up canvas so that they can preserve themselves during the chaotic eras of their home world. When a stable era arrives, any surviving, hydrated San-Ti toss them into pools of water and they come back to life, like those compressed hand towels that start out looking like tiny pills that you sometimes get at Chinese restaurants. Though the San-Ti civilizations are based on human ones in the game, they clearly have a very different biology. “We don’t look anything like this,” the sword woman tells Jin and Thomas Wade (Liam Cunningham) in a final demonstration later on. When asked what they do look like, she calmly tells Wade he “wouldn’t like it.”
More troublingly, the game’s design betrays the implication of the San-Ti’s authority over humanity. In each level, Jin and Jack are presenting their ideas to some of the most powerful and notably violent figures in history. This is not the San-Ti asking for help; they’re already on their way. This is them explaining how things will work once they arrive.
By the season’s end, there’s still a lot about the headsets that remains mysterious. Why did the San-Ti, a species that takes things very literally (to the point that they’re incapable of lying or understanding the concept of a fairy tale), construct such a narratively complex fable to highlight their perspective? They clearly know the broad mechanics of a video game, but not Little Red Riding Hood?
In the end, though, another useful purpose for the headsets emerges: outright threats. The woman with the sword is an avatar for the Sophons: four 11-dimensional supercomputers folded back into the size of a proton (seriously, don’t think too hard about this) and quantum entangled with one another on the San-Ti fleet, allowing for instantaneous communication even though they’re 400 years from reaching Earth. The Sophons can be anywhere, see and hear anything, cause mass hallucinations, and even disrupt the laws of physics, slowing down humanity’s scientific progress so that it’ll be less able to defend itself when the San-Ti arrive. They’re omnipresent gremlins designed to drive everyone employed at the United Nations insane, basically.
By the end of the first season, humanity’s relationship with its alien counterpart, the San-Ti, has already deteriorated to the extent that they publicly announce their intention to conquer Earth. As 3 Body Problem’s first season progresses and Earth and the San-Ti fleet morph from uneasy allies into all-out belligerents, the headsets become less prominent in the story. There’s only so much you can do to recruit more pro-San-Ti influencers after you’ve called all of humanity “BUGS” on an LED display in Piccadilly Circus. But, curiously, Tatiana herself receives a headset at the end of Season 1, even though she was already all in on the San-Ti cause. “If one survives, we all survive,” the card included with her device reads. Expect to see some different tricks from the headset when Season 2 inevitably drops. For the rest of those who received them, the San-Ti’s message is clear: Play ball and help, or die with Earth Civilization no. 1.
Tom Philip is a Scottish writer based in Brooklyn, New York. He’s written about entertainment and culture for GQ, Vulture, and The New York Times and contributed some truly awful jokes for the likes of ClickHole, The New Yorker, and CollegeHumor. You can yell at him on X here: @tommphilip.
Arguably the biggest addition, though, is Diablo 4 on March 28, the first new Activision Blizzard title to hit Game Pass since Microsoft’s acquisition of the company was completed last year. Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer said that players shouldn’t expect all Activision Blizzard games to drop onto Game Pass the moment the deal was finalized, but this signals the start of more additions to come. New Diablo 4 players will also have plenty of time to play this RPG for dozens of hours before the paid DLC Vessel of Hatred releases later this year.
There’s also Supermassive Games’ The Quarry, a previous PS5 console exclusive and spiritual successor to Until Dawn. This time, a group of teenage counselors have to survive a night at an abandoned camp while being stalked by violent creatures and mysterious locals. As the player, you have to make a series of choices on behalf of all the characters to try and ensure everybody makes it out alive. (Spoiler alert: It’s very unlikely you will succeed.)
If none of those games are for you, this is still a very packed list of new titles for the rest of March into April. Here’s the full list:
Lightyear Frontier (Game Preview) (Cloud, PC, and Xbox Series X|S) — March 19
MLB The Show 24 (Cloud and Console) — March 19
The Quarry (Cloud and Console) — March 20
Evil West (Cloud, Console, and PC) – March 21
Terra Invicta (Game Preview) (PC) – March 26
Diablo IV (Console and PC) – March 28
Hot Wheels Unleashed 2 – Turbocharged (Cloud, Console, and PC) – March 28
Open Roads (Cloud, Console, and PC) – March 28
Ark: Survival Ascended (Cloud, PC, Xbox Series X|S) – April 1
F1 23 (Cloud) EA Play – April 2
Superhot: Mind Control Delete (Cloud, Console, and PC) – April 2
As you can imagine, with the release of MLB The Show 24, last year’s MLB The Show 23 will be leaving Xbox Game Pass at the end of the month, along with two other games:
Hot Wheels Unleashed (Cloud, Console, and PC)
Infinite Guitars (Cloud, Console, and PC)
MLB The Show 23 (Cloud and Console)
Xbox Game Pass costs $10.99 a month, while PC Game Pass costs $9.99 a month. PC Game Pass includes EA Play access, which offers another 70 games on PC. Xbox Game Pass Ultimate, at $16.99 per month, gives subscribers access to everything — the PC Game Pass and Xbox Game Pass libraries, EA Play on both console and PC — as well as access to online multiplayer. Xbox Game Pass Core (formerly called Xbox Live Gold) costs $9.99 per month or $59.99 per year.
Only fragments of the board have been recovered, researchers said, adding that it may have intentionally been destroyed.
Photo from the journal Lucentum
During an excavation in northwestern Spain, archaeologists unearthed a “very unusual” collection of ceramic objects.
After careful analysis, they determined the pieces once composed an Iron Age board game, making it one of the oldest recreational artifacts ever found in Spain, according to a study published on Jan. 31 in the journal Lucentum.
The ceramic pieces were found near the walls of an ancient settlement in Galicia — an autonomous community on the Atlantic coast — during an excavation in 2021.
Why exactly it was destroyed is not clear, though it may have been done so intentionally before it was deposited along the settlement’s walls, researchers said.
The ceramic tokens found alongside the board fragments Photo from the journal Lucentum
Among the pieces found were fragments of a flat board, which had a series of holes carved into it, as well as 25 ceramic tokens, researchers said.
Using radiocarbon dating, researchers determined they were created sometime around the Iron Age, which stretched from about 1200 to 1000 B.C.
However, determining further details proved to be a “headache” due to the fractured nature of the artifact and the lack of comparable findings.
Initially, researchers thought the complete object may have functioned as a mold or cast for metal production. However, this option was ruled out as there was no other evidence of metallurgy.
Eventually, they settled on labeling it as a board game — though further research is needed to prove this hypothesis.
The apparent board game bears some similarities to other prehistoric games from other cultures, including senet, an Egyptian game, as well as Mancala, which originated in Jordan.
In addition to being one of the oldest known recreational artifacts found in Spain, it is the first-ever one to be found in the northwestern region of the country, researchers said.
Google Translate was used to translate the study published in the journal Lucentum.
Helldivers 2 was compared to Starship Troopers when it was first released, but since then, the squad-based third-person shooter has become closer to the post-Judgment Day future in Terminator. While the first mission order, to retake territory from bugs called Terminids, was a success, things went downhill once the game introduced the Automatons, the much harder-to-kill robots that attack Super Earth planets.
Just this week, players lost the planet Malevelon Creek to the Automatons while just barely liberating Mort after around 10 million Helldiver deaths, according to a post in the official Helldivers 2 Discord (via Gamesradar). Despite some gains, the Automatons have pushed back Super Earth’s forces for now. Starting Thursday, players will see a message stating the major order to liberate planets under Automaton control has been a failure, and players should change course:
Despite the valorous efforts of the Helldivers, Automaton marauders have invaded Super Earth territory. Patriotic citizens mourn as their sufficiently-sized homes burn to the ground. Super Earth citizens demand justice, and they will receive it. But for now, the Terminid Control System is ready for activation.
While players can still fight on Automaton worlds, most will likely shift their priorities to Terminid territory, starting with Veld, which features a hive that “eluded detection and has been gestating un-Democratic vermin for weeks.”
Helldivers 2 launched with the Terminids, and while they proved to be a challenge, players banded together and were able to complete the first major order and reap the rewards. That was not the case with the Automatons, which proved to be way tougher than their organic bug brethren. Besides the fact that even the smallest units are covered in tough-to-pierce armor, the game introduced missions that required way more strategy and teamwork than previous ones. Along with some surprise real-time work from Arrowhead Game Studios devs, the failure was inevitable.
Image: Arrowhead Game Studios/Sony Interactive Entertainment via Polygon
The mission type that specifically threw players for a loop was escort missions, which required Helldivers to help researchers and other citizens trapped on planets being invaded by Automaton fleets escape into an extraction point. Sounds easy enough on its face: Follow some unarmed civilians as they run from one side of a relatively small area to another. It was a common objective with the Terminids as well. However, anybody who’s played one of these Automaton missions through will tell you that after the first 10 or so get rescued, you’ll get bombarded with Automatons of all kinds. And because these missions take place in one small space with a lot of chokepoints, and the NPCs aren’t the best at self-preservation, it’s easy for players and civilians to die over and over… and over.
Players on the Helldivers subreddit have been trying to plan out strategies for this specific mission type since the campaign started. The consensus has been to have a full four-person team, with three people luring enemies into the outskirts of the mission area and one person focusing on stealth tactics to escort civilians (that means using smoke stratagems or specialty scouting armor sets). However, this only works if people are willing to constantly communicate in voice chat. Depending on your difficulty level, you still might run into some extremely heavy spawn rates that will decimate your team regardless of how coordinated you are. And with its 40-minute clock, there is a lot of time for things to go horribly wrong. Plus, players have reported bugs, like NPCs standing in front of the extraction point without entering.
I spoke with a player who identified himself to Polygon as Alessio, aka Zarrusso on Reddit, who posted a clear, comprehensive visual guide on how to tackle these missions this week, basically putting all the disparate Reddit threads and YouTube videos on the topic together. The guide suggests landing as far away from the objective as possible, along with a set of stratagems to equip.
Image: Arrowhead Game Studios/Sony Interactive Entertainment
“On difficulty 6 [Extreme] and all of the above, the difficulty spikes greatly and we couldn’t kill the enemies fast enough and the civilians kept dying after taking one step outside,” he wrote. “So after getting some advice from YouTube and Reddit and just playing the missions, I put together that little strategy. And now I play those missions on difficulty 7, 8, and 9, and I have completed like 90 percent of my escort missions.”
These escort missions require way more strategy than others. Some Automaton objectives are nearly identical to Terminid ones (kill a certain number of enemies; launch an ICBM), so they didn’t have a large barrier to entry and therefore didn’t need nearly as much coordination between players, especially on lower difficulties. “The other missions don’t require this much strategy. On lower difficulties, you can pretty much do them without thinking but still need to bring the right weapons,” Zarrusso explained.
The Automaton escort missions, though, have been a completely different challenge for players, despite being similar to previous ones. This led to many people spamming easier 15-minute objectives instead. With this many failures on the board, it’s no wonder the community didn’t succeed in their collective fight.
But also, failure might’ve been the point all along. In a pre-release video, deputy game director Sagar Beroshi revealed Helldivers 2 would have a game master who would introduce twists and story moments, watching players as they complete missions and responding in real time. Players still have a degree of control over how mission orders go, but like in a tabletop RPG, the GM will move players in a specific direction, sometimes with a little improv. This might include something small like giving players an extra stratagem mid-round, or something much more globally impactful.
“The enemies have goals, right? They will look at what you’ve done, respond to the ways in which you have — you as the community, that is — has behaved, and react in a way that changes the face of the galaxy thereafter,” Beroshi said.
A recent PC Gamer article features a quick interview with CEO Johan Pilestedt, who explained this dev’s name is Joel and he apparently “takes his job very seriously.”
“Joel, in his infinite wisdom decided, ‘What happens when a faction wins a portion of a war? Well, they mine everything.’ That’s where the incendiary mine segment came from,” Pilestedt gave as an example, referring to the period where players got access to the incendiary mine stratagem for free.
Helldivers 2 will continue to surprise players with these tactics. “We have a lot of systems built into the game where the Game Master has a lot of control over the play experience. It’s something that we’re continuously evolving based on what’s happening in the game,” Pilestedt said. “And as part of the roadmap, there are things that we want to keep secret because we want to surprise and delight.” This will likely be with mechs, which have been teased and have been the subject of leaks, along with other new enemies and stories. It’s all a good reminder that your best efforts might be in vain, but you can turn the tides of war, and that makes for a more complex play experience.
Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth has a playable demo on PlayStation 5, allowing you to step into Cloud’s implausibly polished Doc Martens ahead of the game’s Feb. 29 release.
Here’s a rough rundown of what to expect from the Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth demo, and what progress will carry over to the main game.
How to download the FF7R demo?
You can download the Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth demo directly from the PlayStation Store on your PS5. The demo is 48 GB.
How long is the FF7R demo?
The Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth demo covers the “Nibelheim” episode set a few years prior to the main game. You’re cast as Cloud and hair metal model Sephiroth in a flashback sequence. Depending on how methodically you play, it will take you about an hour or two to complete.
On Feb. 21, Square Enix added a segment covering Junon, one of the explorable open-world areas of Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth. You’ll be able to try out some gameplay features (like the new synergy moves between party members) not available in the first portion of the demo. Since it’s a bit more open-ended than the Nibelheim chapter, your playtime may vary. Polygon had a chance to play this particular demo during a Sept. 2023 preview event. You can read more about what to expect from this segment of the demo in Polygon’s hands-on Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth preview.
Since the demo initially went live, Square Enix patched improvements to the game’s “performance” graphical mode.
Does progress carry from the FF7R demo to the main game?
Having save data from the demo on your PS5 will grant you a number of items to use in the full release of Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth. You’ll get the Kupo Charm — an accessory that boosts how many resources you receive — plus a smattering of potions, ethers, and other items, referred to as the “survival set.”
Completing the Nibelheim episode will allow you to skip that segment in the full game. Any progress made during the Junon area, however, won’t carry over; that particular section has been “altered to make the content more compact,” so it’s not representative of what you’ll experience in Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth.
Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth comes out on PS5 on Feb. 29, 2024.
Tyson and Riley are back with another offseason episode! For today’s new-era “game changer,” they are joined by Mike Gabler from Season 43. They expand on the season’s edit of Gabler’s ambiguous job, talk about the secret to making a good Survivor audition tape, and then discuss the reasoning behind Gabler’s decision to donate all of his winnings to charity.
Hosts: Tyson Apostol and Riley McAtee Guest: Mike Gabler Producer: Ashleigh Smith Theme Song: Devon Renaldo
Palworld, the game that looks like, “Pokémon, but with guns,” was released Friday and is already one of the biggest releases of the year.
According to its developer, Pocketpair, the game has sold over one million copies within “about” eight hours of its release. Pocketpair shared the impressive sales number via X, but did not add any further clarification as to what that sales number included. Palworld launched to both Steam and Xbox Games Pass, so it’s unclear if that number includes copies of the game that Xbox Game Pass subscribers download as part of the service.
Polygon reached out to a representative of Pocketpair and asked the team to clarify what the sales number included. We will update the article as we hear back.
Regardless if the sales number counts the Xbox Game Pass downloads or not, Palworld has had an absolutely massive release day. According to Steam Charts, the game has over 340,000 concurrent players on Steam on Friday afternoon, beating out other popular titles like PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds and Baldur’s Gate 3.
Palworld has been drumming up buzz for a long time now. Basically it stuck out for the contrast between its cute creatures and brutal conditions — previous trailers have shown its adorable monsters fighting with military-grade machinery and creatures toiling away in factories. It basically looks like a militarized Pokémon game, but with additional survival elements as well.
City-building survival game Frostpunk 2 will put settlers in the same perilous conditions as the first game — in a time of ice age, where the environment becomes bleaker and bleaker. But, according to a new gameplay trailer, it looks like it will up the ante from the original game’s unforgiving, dystopian conditions. The sequel is slated to come out sometime in the first half of 2024 on PC, and will debut on Game Pass.
In Frostpunk, you manage a city of settlers in a town near London during the industrial revolution, weathering a cataclysmic environmental event. Ice storms have ravaged most of humanity; you must find a way to keep the generators for heat, while assigning workers and making constant tradeoffs in order to keep people fed, housed, and, most of all, alive. The game’s motto was “The city must survive” — your citizens believe they are some of the last living humans, and letting the generator die means freezing to death.
Frostpunk 2, which is set 30 years after the original, takes these ideas and runs with them — the city has lasted this long, the motto is now “The city must not fall.” It looks as if each of the core conceits of the original game got a glow-up. The top-down design of the city is just as vivid and picturesque. But the gameplay trailer reveals more sophisticated UI features in the building layout, including what appear to be design elements related to new heating technologies. When Frostpunk 2 was first announced in 2021, the announcement trailer noted generator technology evolved to run on oil — but that these upgrades would come at a price.
In Frostpunk 2, players must navigate political conflict and worker rebellion. It appears workers now have agency to fight back against the Steward’s — that’s you, the player — choices, in the form of voting things down. The gameplay trailer shows the inside of a civic building, in which workers vote on equal pay. The trailer also shows off a few narrative flashpoint moments, where citizens ask for specific things, or voice specific complaints: At one point, a miner named Ian Mactavish shouts “where are the homes you’ve promised.”
That might be the most frightening bit this sequel promises, honestly — being able to put faces and names to the working population. The original game gave you basically no good choices: You’re forcing people to work 18 hours, feeding them sawdust, and attempting to puzzle out whether militarism or religion is the best way to enforce adherence. It looks like in the sequel, you’ll have to face the brutal consequences of your choices.
Federal officials have pledged up to $1 billion for an elevated train connecting SoFi Stadium and other venues to the Crenshaw Line, marking a major milestone for a marquee project that could open ahead of the 2028 Olympic Games.
The Federal Transit Administration commitment would finance half of the project’s $2-billion price tag.
To lock down the award, the city of Inglewood and the Metropolitan Transportation Authority must clear several more hurdles, including securing the other half of the money and making substantial progress to prepare the project for construction.
“It’s going to improve the fan experience,” said Inglewood Mayor James Butts, who has championed the project. “Fans, our residents and the employees deserve affordable and efficient transit options. This system will be good for the environment. It will again create jobs.”
Known as the Inglewood Transit Connector, the fully automated three-stop people mover will roll through Inglewood’s downtown and ferry fans to the city’s growing list of entertainment venues, which include the Kia Forum and the soon-to-be opened Inuit Dome. It’s expected to ease traffic during major events.
The city and Metro, which together form the project’s joint powers authority, say they have secured about 85% of the total $2-billion tab, counting the federal commitment. Although that commitment is not finalized, officials say it signals the viability of an ambitious project they aim to open before the 2028 Olympic Games.
“This federal support is a force multiplier on our momentum and an endorsement of all levels of government working together to benefit the public. We will get the next step done,” said Lisa Trifiletti, who is overseeing the project for the authority.
And although officials hope the people mover will be running by 2028, Federal Transit Administration documents show that it isn’t expected to open until 2030 and will cost $33 million a year to operate.
If the connector does open in time for the Olympics, Inglewood, a city of about 104,000, would be center stage, starting with the opening ceremonies at SoFi Stadium. Transit officials plan on creating a car-free Olympics and have been using events at SoFi, including Taylor Swift’s Eras tour, as a testing ground for not only the Olympics but how to deal with changing ridership patterns.
Backers say the elevated people mover and the tourists it brings will also help revitalize downtown Inglewood. But dozens of business will be forced to relocate to make room for it. And transportation experts question whether the people mover, which has increased in price by more than half a billion dollars over the last few years, is worth the cost and will deliver on its promises.
On a busy weekday, hundreds come through the door of Fiesta Martin Bar & Grill at Florence Avenue and Market Street. Esaul Martin, who runs the downtown Inglewood restaurant with his sister, is among those who will be forced to relocate.
“We don’t have a choice in what to do,” he said. The outside patio is teeming on weekends, and he has a steady local clientele.
Though his family owns several restaurants in town, he said, this is the most successful.
“Most people aren’t happy about it,” Martin said about other businesses nearby. “The options that they are giving us doesn’t come close. Either it doesn’t have parking, it’s too small, or the rent is four times this.”
Martin has hired a lawyer. But, he said, no relocation fee can replicate what he has created here. And he worries about his 45 employees.
Butts said change is hard, but the relocation packages are generous.
“This is major progress in the evolution of the city. Things are not going to be the way they are,” he said. “The benefits of this project far outweigh the angst of displacement, because everyone in Inglewood wins.”
Transit experts say the other big winners are people like Rams owner Stan Kroenke.
The $5-billion SoFi Stadium, home to the Rams and Chargers, opened in 2020. It had bypassed the lengthy environmental review process typically required in California, which would have quantified the traffic, pollution and noise that would come with a 70,000-seat stadium. Often, the developer must mitigate those impacts.
Instead, the project was approved six weeks after it was announced.
“There is definitely a good case to be made that at least there should be some financial contribution from the stadium owners,” said Jacob Wasserman, a research project manager at UCLA Institute of Transportation Studies. “It is going to serve the customers there who pay money to go see events and games. All transit serves businesses, and it’s a public service, but I think that this is disproportionately focused on these event venues.”
Butts said providing transportation is the job of municipalities.
The authority estimates that the people mover will have 4 million boardings in 2028 and nearly 8 million by 2078, which Wasserman said is likely overly optimistic.
Environmental studies show regular weekdays will be much quieter, bringing 414 passengers during peak hours and carrying 11,450 riders the hour after games.
Three pre-qualified teams are now preparing bids for the project, and the authority expects to choose one this summer.
Is it worth it?
James Moore, founding director of the USC Transportation Engineering Program, said it probably isn’t. He pointed to the half billion dollars it cost to connect the Oakland Airport to BART, which, he said, ended up having no measurable effect on either airport traffic or BART ridership.
“The bus was doing just fine,” he said. “If the goal is to connect riders from the event generator to the rail line, this is an expensive way to do it.”
It’s been more than a decade since Crystal Dynamics, the developer best known for the Tomb Raider series, first introduced players to its reimagined take on Lara Croft. 2013’s Tomb Raider painted Lara as someone capable of adapting and overcoming nearly any situation while maintaining a level of emotional depth and self-awareness, a quality the game’s sequels would go on to further explore.
The original was an excellent game that I’ve completed on no fewer than three occasions, and while her most recent outing, 2018’s Shadow of the Tomb Raider, has its merits, I still stand by 2015’s Rise of the Tomb Raider as the most engaging and interesting version of Lara Croft for how it emphasizes her vulnerability. The result is a story that combines all the hallmarks of what you’d expect from a great Tomb Raider game: suspenseful supernatural elements and a thrilling and romantic notion of archaeology, all tied together with an intriguing and surprisingly emotional story.
Image: Crystal Dynamics/Square Enix
Following the events of the first game, Lara is still traumatized by her trial by fire on the island of Yamatai and her father’s recent disappearance. Her quest to find her father and restore her family’s legacy leads her to the frigid peaks of Siberia and into the path of Trinity, a “Knights Templar meets military contractor” organization with a pseudo-religious goal of world domination. Unfortunately, this places Lara alone in the unique position to foil their plot, by saddling her with a truth that no one else will believe.
Lara fully understands the gravity of the situation, but never lets this inflate her ego. Instead, she’s more preoccupied with the specter of death that inevitably follows her attempts to do the right thing. Lara can never fully atone for how her choices led to the deaths of so many close to her in the past, regardless how well equipped or tough she is. This theme is so pervasive, it even echoes in Rise’s gameplay by presenting us with a Lara who needs to be more resourceful and cunning to overcome her environment.
Image: Crystal Dynamics/Square Enix
Rise of the Tomb Raider doesn’t quite elevate Lara to the level of apex predator we get in Shadow of the Tomb Raider, but she’s clearly far more capable than she was in her first adventure. The result is a character in the midst of becoming the Lara Croft known to players around the world, a more confident and prepared protagonist who can still be humbled. This version of Lara shines when she’s on the back foot, and Rise of the Tomb Raider does everything it can to keep her off balance with a more capable foe and a relentlessly adversarial environment.
I’ll admit that on its standard difficulty, Rise of the Tomb Raider doesn’t present much of a challenge. Because of that, I consider Survivor Mode, the hardest difficulty, to be the definitive Tomb Raider experience. While you won’t succumb to starvation or dehydration, at this difficulty, the player’s health doesn’t regenerate, checkpoints are disabled, and foes are far more deadly. As if that wasn’t enough, by default, the game also will not highlight interactable items in the environment. While you can turn on the “Survival Instincts” at any time during your playthrough, dialing down the difficulty isn’t an option, which further reinforces that there’s no going back once the journey starts.
Image: Crystal Dynamics/Square Enix
This dialed-up difficulty has the benefit of making the game more immersive and forcing you to carefully consider and prepare for every encounter. A handful of bad guys normally wouldn’t be an issue, but when just a couple of bullets can put Lara in the ground, things get a little more tense. For an added challenge, I like to rely almost exclusively on stealth kills and Lara’s trusty bow during combat, resorting to firearms only when absolutely necessary.
Rise of the Tomb Raider still keeps some of the Metroidvania elements of its predecessor to guide you along its critical path, while the world feels more open and encourages exploration of its various regions. This is further reinforced by a more robust crafting system, which forces you to scrounge and hunt for many of the materials you need to upgrade your gear. The tomb puzzles hidden throughout the world aren’t quite as challenging as those found in Shadow of the Tomb Raider, but still do a great job at shaking things up between scavenging and combat encounters.
2013’s Tomb Raider did a fantastic job of establishing Lara as a character, and Shadow of the Tomb Raider makes for a fitting capstone to the latest trilogy. But for me, Rise of the Tomb Raider was the peak of Crystal Dynamic’s trilogy. Beyond its challenging gameplay, Rise offers a robust and complex narrative that shows us that the personality archetype of badass archeologist doesn’t have to constantly revolve around snappy one-liners.
Rise of the Tomb Raider is available on Xbox Game Pass.
Naughty Dog’s planned multiplayer game set in the world of The Last of Us is no more. The studio announced Thursday that it has “made the incredibly difficult decision to stop development on” what it’s been calling The Last of Us Online.
“We know this news will be tough for many, especially our dedicated The Last of Us Factions community, who have been following our multiplayer ambitions ardently,” the studio said in a post on its website. “We’re equally crushed at the studio as we were looking forward to putting it in your hands.”
The Last of Us Online was, at one point, supposed to be revealed to the public this year. The studio had released a handful of pieces of concept art for the game, but never showed gameplay.
Naughty Dog said developers at the studio had been in pre-production on The Last of Us Online since the development of The Last of Us Part 2, which it shipped in 2020. The online game was “unique and had tremendous potential,” the studio said, but it was also a daunting task that it did not have the resources to dedicate to.
“In ramping up to full production, the massive scope of our ambition became clear,” the developer explained. “To release and support The Last of Us Online we’d have to put all our studio resources behind supporting post launch content for years to come, severely impacting development on future single-player games. So, we had two paths in front of us: become a solely live service games studio or continue to focus on single-player narrative games that have defined Naughty Dog’s heritage.”
In its announcement, Naughty Dog provided a silver lining for The Last of Us Online’s formal cancellation: “The learnings and investments in technology from this game will carry into how we develop our projects and will be invaluable in the direction we are headed as a studio. We have more than one ambitious, brand new single player game that we’re working on here at Naughty Dog, and we cannot wait to share more about what comes next when we’re ready.”
The original The Last of Us launched with multiplayer component of its own back in 2013, which was also available in the PlayStation 4 version, The Last of Us Remastered. TLOU’s Factions mode used deathmatch and team deathmatch game types found in many multiplayer games, and layered a metagame and story on top.
In a first in California Mega Millions history, two tickets purchased from the same Chevron station on Ventura Boulevard in Encino hit the $395-million jackpot, potentially creating controversy over the retailer’s share of the winnings.
The chances of winning a Mega Millions jackpot stand at an astonishing 1 in 302,575,350. The prospect of two separate transactions winning with the same numbers at one location can seem implausible, especially considering there are 23,000 lottery retailers across the state.
Whoever owns the two tickets would split the jackpot, but it is still unclear whether the two tickets were purchased by the same person or two players, which could result in controversy over whether the gas station owner is awarded $1 million or more for selling the tickets.
As of Monday, the jackpot has yet to be claimed, according to lottery spokesperson Carolyn Becker.
The identity of the person or people who purchased the tickets remains unknown. However, Becker said the lottery’s gaming system meticulously tracks each transaction statewide, and the law enforcement team investigating the winnings knows whether it was a single transaction or two separate ones.
The California Lottery isn’t revealing this information to “protect the integrity of the security review process once there’s a prize claim.” Potential jackpot winners coming forward must undergo a vetting process, involving a California Lottery law enforcement officer interview to verify that they are legitimate winners.
“It’s a really rigorous vetting process, particularly for these big jackpots, to make sure that the winner is actually the right winner and not some bad actor trying to claim to be the winner,” Becker said.
Becker said it could take weeks or months to release the information regarding the number of transactions. The identities will also be disclosed, adhering to California laws that require the lottery to publicize the winner’s complete name and location within a year.
Although two winning tickets being sold in one location is unusual, Becker said it is not impossible.
“Perhaps one person wanted to try their luck on two different rows for whatever reason, or maybe a couple of buddies wanted to try their chances with the same exact numbers,” Becker said.
When store manager Nitessh Karla arrived at the gas station Saturday morning, a barrage of voice mails greeted him, with one from state lottery officials telling him his store had sold the winning tickets.
“I got a telephone call [saying] ‘Your store hit the jackpot.’ Then I checked the machine and found out someone won the lotto,” Karla said.
Apart from the occasional Scratcher winner collecting a smaller jackpot, Karla said he had never witnessed a win like this in his nine years at the store.
Karla is skeptical that two customers purchased the winning tickets.
“Personally, I think it is the same guy. Maybe he forgets he already bought it and buys it again,” Karla said.
How the tickets were purchased is pivotal to whether Karla’s store receives only $1 million or nearly $2 million in lottery bonuses.
A retailer who sells a winning ticket is eligible to receive a bonus of half of 1% of the jackpot, capped at $1 million. But if a retailer sells two tickets that both win on the same game, it could be considered two transactions and result in more than $2 million in bonuses.
Becker said this bonus payout is “unprecedented in California in terms of a jackpot of this magnitude.” The California Lottery’s legal team is reviewing the regulations’ language, she said.
“Our lawyers are looking at it because if it’s one person, the retailer will get a million dollars,” Becker said. “The question is, do they get more than that? Do they get two bonuses that add up to more than a million dollars?”
The winning numbers for Friday’s game were 21, 26, 53, 66, 70, and the Mega number 13. This was the 10th Mega Million jackpot won in 2023.
The jackpot for the next Mega Millions drawing Tuesday will be $20 million.
With the store’s newfound notoriety, Karla said he has seen an increase in customers buying lotto tickets and Scratchers, hoping the store’s luck hasn’t dried out yet.
Join Ben and Matt James as they chat about whether the Game Awards should be about awards, the most exciting announcements from the show (0:00), and their anticipation for the Fallout TV adaptation (16:00). Then they take a spoiler-free journey through the immersive world of the Naʼvi as they delve into Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora (20:45). Finally, they discuss the evolution of movie-based games and name their all-time top five movie tie-ins (47:00).
Host: Ben Lindbergh Guest: Matt James Producer: Devon Renaldo Additional Production Supervision: Arjuna Ramgopal
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