Welcome to Video Games Weekly on Engadget. Expect a new story every Monday or Tuesday (or Thursday?), broken into two parts. The first is a space for short essays and ramblings about video game trends and related topics from me, Jess Conditt, a reporter who's covered the industry for more than 13 years. The second contains the video game stories from the past week that you need to know about, including some headlines from outside of Engadget.

Please enjoy — and I'll see you next week.

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I’ve been playing the Switch 2 alongside 3.5 million of my closest friends since Nintendo’s new console came out on June 5, and I’m having an excellent time. Although to be perfectly transparent, a vast majority of my play has been dedicated to Mario Kart World, a game I’ve been looking forward to for months and that perfectly scratches the couch co-op itch I’ve been meaning to ask my doctor about. Mario Kart World is colorful, bright and infinitely replayable, and one feature that’s getting a lot of attention is its elevated skill ceiling. This installment introduces new mechanics like wall riding and rail grinds, which significantly alter how the game is played at its highest levels, where shortcuts and strategic pathing are a must. There’s too much variability in Mario Kart for it to be a professionally competitive franchise, but that doesn’t stop people from getting extremely good at it, and players are already trying to milk the most milliseconds out of the new moves in Mario Kart World. It’s going to take a while, since these mechanics are surprisingly complex, and I’m excited to see what secrets the community uncovers in the near future.

While that’s happening, I’d like to highlight something on the opposite side of the skill spectrum. Mario Kart World is far less frustrating in moment-to-moment gameplay than Mario Kart 8, and I think this is one of its greatest strengths. I don’t have empirical data here, but it’s a distinct feeling I have every time I play: Getting hit with shells, running over banana peels and bouncing into obstacles is more forgiving than ever. These moments are less jarring than they were in Mario Kart 8 specifically, and it takes noticeably less time to recover and get back into the race after taking a red shell to the behind. Either the stun time is shorter, the post-collision acceleration is faster or there’s some witchy combination of these factors happening, but whatever the cause, I deeply appreciate the effect. 

Mario Kart World is flow-friendly and accessible, and these subtle tweaks diminish some of the series’ most annoying aspects, like resetting after a barrage of explosive bullshit gets hurled into your bumper. The only item in Mario Kart World that feels like a true hard stop is the lightning bolt, but at least that one affects every character around you with the same momentum-jamming force.

Meanwhile, the tracks in Mario Kart World are so very, very pretty — looking at you, Starview Peak and Rainbow Road — the character roster is stacked with super adorable fresh faces, motorcycles are more stable than previous games, and the 24-player Knockout Tour is a fun test of skill. With the potential for 23 items to be aimed at your back, it makes sense that Nintendo would try to make recovery more seamless this time, and I just wanted to say that I notice it and appreciate it.

Now, to figure out this wall riding thing.

The news

Xbox is preparing for a post-console world

Xbox president Sarah Bond announced that the company’s next generation of hardware will be powered by AMD, just like the Xbox Series X/S and the coming ROG Xbox Ally handhelds. That’s cool, but it also offers some clues about the future of Microsoft’s gaming division, and things are looking more decentralized with each new morsel. Xbox appears to be positioning itself as a platform-agnostic software provider, leaning into PC and handheld play, and running an all-inclusive storefront that follows you across devices. It really sounds like the next Xbox could be more of a PC that lives under your TV, rather than a dedicated, closed-system video game machine. Ouya was just 12 years too soon, it seems.

The SAG-AFTRA video game strike is over

Did you hear that sonorous, well-articulated sigh of relief? SAG-AFTRA suspended its strike against 10 major video game studios, following nearly a year of negotiations over AI use and actor compensation. The union and the studios signed a deal that includes wage increases for more than 24 percent of performers and protections around the deployment of AI and digital replicas.

Bungie hits pause on Marathon

Maybe this is for the best. Bungie has indefinitely delayed Marathon, citing a need to overhaul the game as it currently stands. The delay follows a slew of bad news out of Bungie, starting in July 2024, when the studio laid off 220 employees, or 17 percent of its workforce. In May 2025, Bungie was caught using stolen artwork in the Marathon alpha and several former employees accused the studio of fostering a toxic environment. Whether Marathon really requires a revamp or Bungie just needs a moment to breathe, a delay feels like the right move.

EVERYONE CALM DOWN, Borderlands 4 will not cost $80

It will cost $70.

Bloober Team is the Silent Hill studio now

It’s official — Bloober Team is remaking the original Silent Hill for Konami. The project follows Bloober’s highly successful reimagining of Silent Hill 2, which landed in October 2024 and garnered oodles of acclaim from critics and players alike. There’s no word on a release date for the new remake, but it’s joining a trio of other in-development projects in the Silent Hill universe: Silent Hill Townfall from Annapurna Interactive and No Code, Silent Hill: Ascension from Bad Robot and Genvid, and Silent Hill f from author Ryūkishi07.

Read our Switch 2 review

Senior reviews writer Sam Rutherford is a beast for collecting all of his thoughts on the Switch 2 so quickly and with such fabulous insight, and it’d be a shame if you didn’t get to absorb all of that delicious knowledge for yourself. This has been my review of Sam’s review of the Switch 2 — a console that is also pretty fantastic, by the way.

Summer Game Fest never ends

Summer Game Fest 2025 officially wrapped up on June 9, but the embargoed stories, interviews and our hands-on impressions from the show just keep on coming. Since we last spoke, Engadget’s SGF 2025 crew has published articles about Resident Evil: Requiem, Mixtape, Mouse: PI for Hire, Onimusha: Way of the Sword, Grounded 2, End of Abyss and Pragmata.

Cool games out now: FBC: Firebreak, Tron: Catalyst, Playdate and the Kris list

Every Saturday morning on Engadget, contributing reporter Kris Holt publishes a roundup of fantastic-sounding and freshly available indie games, so be sure to check for that regularly. This week, the Kris list features The Alters, Dune: Awakening and Instants, among other shout-outs. In related new-game news, Remedy’s extraction shooter FBC: Firebreak and Bithell Games’ isometric action experience Tron: Catalyst are also available now. And finally, we’re halfway through Playdate Season Two, which has already provided a firehose of oddball experiences — all lovingly parsed through each week by Engadget weekend editor Cheyenne Macdonald.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/video-games-weekly-mario-kart-world-is-the-opposite-of-punishing-110039837.html?src=rss

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© Nintendo

Mixtape is the answer to the question, “What if the movie High Fidelity was a video game?” It’s not a perfect analogy, but it’s pretty damn close, and either way it’s a sign that Mixtape is going to be a fabulous slice of late-1990s, early-2000s nostalgia, complete with a banging soundtrack.

You can hear it in the trailers — Mixtape absolutely nails the classic Moviefone tone, and it seems that this vibe extends to the full game. I played roughly 30 minutes of Mixtape at Summer Game Fest 2025, and in that time I became enamored with the game’s lead character, a rebellious and insufferably cool teenager named Rockford who’s about to leave suburbia to pursue her dreams of becoming a music supervisor in New York City. She talks directly to the player as she introduces her two also-very-cool best friends and cues up the game’s music, breaking the fourth wall just like John Cusack. Most of the game plays out in a third-person view, following along as Rockford and her friends casually skate down tree-lined streets, flee from the cops in a high-speed shopping-cart sequence, and hang out in her bedroom, looking at Polaroid pictures and CDs while planning the best way to steal liquor from her parents’ stash.

Mixtape comes from The Artful Escape studio Beethoven & Dinosaur, and it similarly uses music as a core storytelling and scene-setting device. This makes perfect sense, considering the studio’s founder, Johnny Galvatron, is a legit rock star based in Melbourne, Australia. Leaning into musicality also worked out well for The Artful Escape, which earned Beethoven & Dinosaur a BAFTA award in 2022. Mixtape’s soundtrack is populated by the top teenage-dirtbag bands from the 80s, 90s and slightly beyond, including DEVO, Roxy Music, The Smashing Pumpkins, Iggy Pop, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Joy Division and the Cure (but not Wheatus, as far as I can tell, just to be clear).

Visually, Mixtape has a painterly 3D aesthetic with gorgeous golden light and purple shadows, reminiscent of Life is Strange or Telltale’s The Walking Dead series. In action, the characters move in a windswept, Spider-Verse animation style that doesn’t interrupt the gameplay flow. Even soaring down the snakelike asphalt on a skateboard, Rockford responds immediately to controller input and her ride isn’t interrupted by stray or late animations. Mixtape looks lovely and feels great.

Annapurna Interactive

There are also surprising little moments with alternative mechanics in the game’s first half hour, including a scene straight out of Wayne’s World where you make the trio headbang in a car, and another where you control two tongues making out in a close-up, Ren & Stimpy kind of cartoon realism. When Rockford explains what a music supervisor is, real-world reference images fill the screen in a tongue-in-cheek educational interlude. Throughout all of this, the music continues to roll, each song purposefully placed and given time to shine.

It would be easy for Mixtape to feel like a cheap nostalgia grab, an exploitation of Millennial players’ memories of skipping CDs and pre-cellphone party planning, but that simply isn’t the case so far. Mixtape feels like a love letter to the early aughts, filled with surprising mechanics, beautiful graphics and all the right references executed extremely well.

Mixtape is due to hit Steam, PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S in 2025, published by Annapurna Interactive.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/mixtape-turned-me-back-into-a-millennial-teenage-dirtbag-200337301.html?src=rss

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© Annapurna Interactive

It's early June, which means it's time for a ton of video game events! Rising from the ashes of E3, Geoff Keighley's Summer Game Fest is now the premium gaming event of the year, just inching ahead of… Geoff Keighley's Game Awards in December. Unlike the show it replaced, Summer Game Fest is an egalitarian affair, spotlighting games from AAA developers and small indies across a diverse set of livestreams. SGF 2025 includes 15 individual events running from June 3-9 — you can find the full Summer Game Fest 2025 schedule here — and we're smack dab in the middle of that programming right now.

We're covering SGF 2025 with a small team on the ground in LA and a far larger group of writers tuning in remotely to the various livestreams. Expect game previews, interviews and reactions to arrive over the coming days (the show's in-person component runs from Saturday-Monday), and a boatload of new trailers and release date announcements in between.

Through it all, we're collating the biggest announcements right here, with links out to more in-depth coverage where we have it, in chronological order.

Tuesday, June 3

State of Unreal: The Witcher IV and Fortnite AI

Epic hitched its wagon to SGF this year, aligning its annual developer Unreal Fest conference, which last took place in the fall of 2024, with the consumer event. The conference was held in Orlando, Florida, from June 2-5, with well over a hundred developer sessions focused on Unreal Engine. The highlight was State of Unreal, which was the first event on the official Summer Game Fest schedule. Amid a bunch of very cool tech demos and announcements, we got some meaningful updates on Epic's own Fortnite and CD PROJEKT RED's upcoming The Witcher IV.

The Witcher IV was first unveiled at The Game Awards last year, and we've heard very little about it since. At State of Unreal, we got a tech demo for Unreal Engine 5.6, played in real time on a base PS5. The roughly 10-minute slot featured a mix of gameplay and cinematics, and showed off a detailed, bustling world. Perhaps the technical highlight was Nanite Foliage, an extension of UE5's Nanite system for geometry that renders foliage without the level of detail pop-in that is perhaps the most widespread graphical aberration still plaguing games today. On the game side, we saw a town filled with hundreds of NPCs going about their business. The town itself wasn't quite on the scale of The Witcher III's Novigrad City, but nonetheless felt alive in a way beyond anything the last game achieved.

It's fair to say that Fortnite's moment in the spotlight was… less impressive. Hot on the heels of smooshing a profane Darth Vader AI into the game, Epic announced that creators will be able to roll their own AI NPCs into the game later this year.

Wednesday, June 4

PlayStation State of Play: Marvel Tōkon, Silent Hill f and the return of Lumines

Another company getting a headstart on proceedings was Sony, who threw its third State of Play of the year onto the Summer Game Fest schedule a couple days ahead of the opening night event. It was a packed stream by Sony's standards, with over 20 games and even a surprise hardware announcement.

The most time was given to Marvel Tōkon: Fighting Souls, a new PlayStation Studios tag fighter that fuses Marvel Superheroes with anime visuals. It's also 4 versus 4, which is wild. It's being developed by Arc System Works, the team perhaps best known for the Guilty Gear series. It's coming to PS5 and PC in 2026. Not-so-coincidentally, Sony also announced Project Defiant, a wireless fight stick that'll support PS5 and PC and arrive in… 2026.

Elsewhere, we got a parade of release dates, with concrete dates for Sword of the Sea (August 19) Baby Steps (September 8) and Silent Hill f (September 25). We also got confirmation of that Final Fantasy Tactics remaster (coming September 30), an an all-new... let's call it aspirational "2026" date for Pragmata, which, if you're keeping score, was advertised alongside the launch of the PS5. Great going, Capcom!

Rounding out the show was a bunch of smaller announcements. We heard about a new Nioh game, Nioh 3, coming in 2026; Suda51's new weirdness Romeo is a Dead Man; and Lumines Arise, a long-awaited return to the Lumines series from the developer behind Tetris Effect.

Thursday, June 5

Diddly squat

There were absolutely no Summer Game Fest events scheduled on Thursday. We assume that's out of respect for antipodean trees, as June 5 was Arbor Day in New Zealand. (It's probably because everyone was playing Nintendo Switch 2.)

Friday, June 6

Summer Game Fest Live: Resident Evil Requiem, Stranger Than Heaven and sequels abound

It's fair to say that previous Summer Game Fest opening night streams have been… whelming at best. This year's showing was certainly an improvement, not least because there were exponentially fewer mobile game and MMO ads littering the presentation. Yes, folks tracking Gabe Newell's yacht were disappointed that Half-Life 3 didn't show up, and the Silksong crowd remains sad, alone and unloved, but there were nonetheless some huge announcements.

Perhaps the biggest of all was the "ninth" (Zero and Code Veronica erasure is real) Resident Evil game. Resident Evil Requiem is said to be a tonal shift compared to the last game, Resident Evil Village. Here's hoping it reinvigorates the series in the same way Resident Evil VII did following the disappointing 6.

We also heard more from Sega studio Ryu Ga Gotoku about Project Century, which seems to be a 1943 take on the Yakuza series. It's now called Stranger Than Heaven, and there's a (literally) jazzy new trailer for your consideration.

Outside of those big swings, there were sequels to a bunch of mid-sized games, like Atomic Heart, Code Vein and Mortal Shell, and a spiritual sequel of sorts: Scott Pilgrim EX, a beat-em-up that takes the baton from the 2010 Ubisoft brawler Scott Pilgrim vs. the World: The Game.

There were countless other announcements at the show, including:

• Troy Baker is the big cheese in Mouse: P.I. for Hire

• Here's a silly puppet boxing game you never knew you needed

• Killer Inn turns Werewolf into a multiplayer action game

• Out of Words is a cozy stop-motion co-op adventure from Epic Games

• Lego Voyagers is a co-op puzzle game from the studio behind Builder's Journey

• Mina the Hollower, from the makers of Shovel Knight, arrives on Halloween

• Wu-Tang Clan's new game blends anime with Afro-surrealism

Day of the Devs: Snap & Grab, Blighted and Escape Academy II

As always, the kickoff show was followed by a Day of the Devs stream, which focused on smaller projects and indie games. You can watch the full stream here.

Escape Academy has been firmly on our best couch co-op games list for some time, and now it's got a sequel on the way. Escape Academy 2: Back 2 School takes the same basic co-op escape room fun and expands on it, moving away from a level-select map screen and towards a fully 3D school campus for players to explore. So long as the puzzles themselves are as fun as the original, it seems like a winner. 

Semblance studio Nyamakop is back with new jam called Relooted, a heist game with a unique twist. As in the real world, museums in the West are full of items plundered from African nations under colonialism. Unlike the real world, in Relooted the colonial powers have signed a treaty to return these items to their places of origin, but things aren't going to plan, as many artifacts are finding their way into private collections. It's your job to steal them back. The British Museum is quaking in its boots.

Here are some of the other games that caught our eye:

• Snap & Grab is No Goblin's campy, photography-based heist game

• Please, Watch the Artwork is a puzzle game with eerie paintings and a sad clown

• Bask in the grotesque pixel-art beauty of Neverway

• Pocket Boss turns corporate data manipulation into a puzzle game

• Tire Boy is a wacky open-world adventure game you can tread all over

The rest: Ball x Pit, Hitman and 007 First Light

After Day of the Devs came Devolver. Its Summer Game Fest show was a little more muted than usual, focusing on a single game: Ball x Pit. It's the next game from Kenny Sun, an indie developer who previously made the sleeper hit Mr. Sun's Hatbox. Ball x Pit is being made by a team of more than half a dozen devs, in contrast to Sun's mostly solo prior works. It looks like an interesting mashup of Breakout and base-building mechanics, and there's a demo on Steam available right now.

Then came IOI, the makers of Hitman, who put together a classic E3-style cringefest, full of awkward pauses, ill-paced demos and repetitive trailers. Honestly, as someone who's been watching game company presentations for two decades or so, it was a nice moment of nostalgia. 

Away from the marvel of a presenter trying to cope with everything going wrong, the show did have some actual content, with an extended demo of the new James Bond-themed Hitman mission, an announcement that Hitman is coming to iOS and table tops, and a presentation on MindsEye, a game from former GTA producer Leslie Benzies that IOI is publishing. 

Saturday, June 7

Monument Valley 3, eggs, Camper Van: Make it Home and niche streams

The Wholesome Direct arrived on Saturday, just in time to soothe that weird hangover we all got after the IOI showcase. The Wholesome Direct is a celebration of all things adorable, quaint, peaceful and sweet, and this year included mainstream news about Monument Valley 3 coming to consoles and PC, following a stint as a Netflix exclusive. There was also a release date announcement for the cozy but twisted shop-management sim Discounty, which is about as spooky as the Wholesome Direct ever gets. There’s something sinister about the small town in Discounty, and while we’re still not sure if it’s demons or just the looming specter of capitalism, we know for sure the game is coming to PC, Switch, PS4, PS5 and Xbox Series X/S on August 21.

Meanwhile, Omelet You Cook hit Steam during the showcase as a nice little surprise. It’s a game about making eggs for picky students in a cafeteria, and of course pleasing Principal Clucker (who is a chicken, yes). Simply put, it looks delicious. The final game we want to shout out from this year’s Wholesome Direct is Camper Van: Make it Home, a perfect little crossover of interior design mechanics and slightly miniaturized objects, which makes for a super cute experience. It came out during the showcase, and it’s live now on Steam.

There were dozens of other announcements during the 2025 Wholesome Direct stream, and the entire thing is worth a watch. You can do so at your leisure, ideally cuddled up with a blanket and a nice drink, right here.

Saturday was also the time for all of the hyper-specific game streams to shine. We saw the Women-led Games show, Latin American Games Showcase, Southeast Asian Games Showcase, Green Games Showcase and Frosty Games Fest. Party!

Sunday, June 8

A new Xbox handheld, Outer Worlds 2 and Black Ops 7

The last big event of the weekend was Xbox, which had its usual breathless showcase. The major news, especially for a publication like Engadget, was the ROG Xbox Ally and ROG Xbox Ally X, two new Xbox-focused PC handhelds. Internally, they're a lot like ASUS' ROG Ally handhelds, but the grips have been smoothed out to feel more like an Xbox controller in your hands.

The software experience is also different. The Xbox Ally handhelds run Windows 11, but in Microsoft's version of Steam Big Picture mode there'll be fewer background processes and… just a generally lower overhead compared to regular Windows handhelds. Thankfully, Microsoft isn't locking things down, as it'll be able to access other "popular storefronts," which we're taking to mean Steam and Epic. The Xbox Ally will be available closer to the holidays, but price is a huge question mark: The ROG Ally costs significantly more than the Steam Deck and Switch 2. Is Microsoft going to subsidize these things, or are they going to cost $600-$800 like ASUS' own-brand versions?

Side note: A quick screw you to Microsoft for using Hollow Knight: Silksong to show off the new handheld. We're all starving out here, and this was not helpful. I guess the news that it'll be playable on day one on the handheld at least narrows down the release date to "between now and whenever this thing comes out."

Less of a surprise was Outer Worlds 2, which Microsoft said would be at the show well ahead of time. We got a release date — October 29 — and a deep dive into the game's new systems. It looks like an expanded title compared to the original, with an improved combat system and a more fleshed out set of companions. We hope to have more on what's new real soon.

The One More Thing of the show was a new Call of Duty game, Black Ops 7. Truly, when a game comes out every year is it really worth blowing your one more thing on? If only Microsoft had an Xbox-branded handheld to show off, that would've been a really cool note to end the show!

Here are the other bits and pieces worth reading about from the Xbox show:

• ​​Persona 4 Revival is real and coming to PS5, PC and Xbox

• At Fate’s End already looks like the must-play indie game of 2026

• The new trailer for Clockwork Revolution is a wild, extremely steampunk ride

• Psychonauts developer’s trippy island adventure Keeper comes out on October 17

• Beast of Reincarnation is a 'one-person, one-dog' RPG launching in 2026

• Final Fantasy 16 suddenly arrives on Xbox Series X/S

• Asobo Studio's next Plague Tale game is a prequel arriving in 2026

The rest: Paralives and Blippo+

Paralives has been in the works for what feels like forever, but you'll be able to play it this year: It enters early access on December 8. The indie take on The Sims looks charming as all hell in its latest trailer, and I can't wait.

Blippo+ has been a great distraction since it launched with Playdate season 2, and we found out Sunday that it'll be coming to more platforms soon — in full color, no less! It'll arrive on PC and Nintendo Switch in fall 2025.

Monday, June 9

Now you're all caught up. There's just one event on Monday, and it's the Black Voices in Gaming showcase. It starts at noon ET, and we've embedded the steam below for your viewing pleasure.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/everything-new-at-summer-game-fest-2025-xbox-handheld-resident-evil-requiem-and-more-185425578.html?src=rss

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© Engadget

Sword of the Sea is a game about letting go. Its main mechanic involves surfing across vast desert dunes on a thin blade, slicing through glittering sands and scaling ancient towers on a quest to unearth the secrets of civilizations past. It plays best when you forget about the controls entirely, and just surrender to the slick physics and let your little character flow. With enough exploration, you’ll naturally discover glowing orbs and shining gold gems, and the sands will transform into deep, crystal clear seas with fish swimming through the air, carving wet paths through the dirt. Your character, dressed in flowing robes and a gold mask, rides the orange hills and the blue waves with the same easy athleticism, reacting instantly to every input on the controller.

Charge up a jump and then complete sick tricks with a few quick inputs, or unleash a bubble of sonic energy to smash nearby vases, uncovering bits of currency in the shattered pieces. The protagonist moves in whatever direction you push, stopping immediately when you let go of the analog stick. There are giant chains to grind, a hover ability in some areas, and half pipes generously positioned around the environments. Control prompts pop up when you’re first introduced to an ability, but the text fades quickly and you’re left alone in the desert. There are no waypoints in Sword of the Sea, but the environment tells a clear story, inviting you to solve puzzles in the mysterious temples dotting the landscape. Find glowing orbs on the rooftops and hidden down secret passageways to unlock the buildings’ secrets, opening up new areas.

I played about 20 minutes of Sword of the Sea at Summer Game Fest, but I wanted to surf its dunes for a lot longer. It’s the kind of game that makes the real world fade away, no matter how chaotic or intrusive your immediate surroundings are. It’s built on rhythm and vibes, and it encourages a meditative flow state from its first frames. Learn the controls and then forget them; play with pure intuition and it’ll most likely be the right move.

“The game is about surfing, and it's really about the process of learning to surf and getting comfortable with surfing, and then trying things that are a little bit beyond your abilities, failing, and then figuring it out and actually accomplishing them,” Sword of the Sea creator Matt Nava told Engadget on the SGF show floor. “And in the process, you kind of realize that surfing is all about harnessing the power of something greater than yourself. You’re not paddling — the waves carry you. The zoomed out camera, the little character; in a lot of games, they're right on the character, because the character is the focus. But in this game, it's about how the character is a part of the environment, that is the focus. And I think that's a constant in a lot of the games that we've made.”

Nava is the creative director and co-founder of Giant Squid, the studio behind Abzû and The Pathless. Even with these two successful games under his belt, Nava is still best known as the art director of Journey, thatgamecompany’s pivotal multiplayer experience that hit PlayStation 3 in 2012. Nava has spent the past decade attempting to build explicitly non-Journey-like games with Giant Squid, and while Abzû and The Pathless both have his distinctive visual stamp, they’re the opposite of Journey in many ways. Where Journey was set in a dry, desert landscape, Nava’s follow-up, Abzû, took place in an underwater world. After that, The Pathless was mostly green, rather than dusty orange.

Giant Squid

With Sword of the Sea, Nava let go. He dropped all preconceptions of what he should be making and mentally said fuck it. He finally allowed himself to manifest the game that came naturally to him.

“In this game, it's very much taking on, accepting and proclaiming that this is me,” Nava said. “I did Journey. I'm doing orange again. And I'm going back to the desert because I have way more ideas that we couldn't do in that game … It’s like I’ve been living in my own shadow for a long time in a weird way. It's like, why am I doing that? I should just be who I am and continue to explore the art that is my art.”

Sword of the Sea is a specific and special game, and even though it’s set in an orange desert, it doesn't feel like Journey. The game also includes music by Austin Wintory, the Grammy-nominated composer behind Journey, Abzû and The Pathless. Together, Nava and Wintory form a formidable foundation.

“A lot of video game scores, they just make a music track for the area,” Nava said. “If you're in the town, you hear town music, and then it just repeats. But that's not how it works here. The music advances as your story advances, it reflects where you are on your surfing adventure, what you're learning how, how far your character has gone on this character arc. And so that's where the music of a video game like ours should be.”

As Nava and I chatted, someone sat down to play Sword of the Sea on a nearby screen, and when I glanced up, I saw that they were gliding through an area I didn't find in my runthrough. A giant animal skeleton was half-buried in the sand, bright white vertebrae dotted with gold gems for the player to collect. There are a lot of secrets in Sword of the Sea, Nava assured me. The best way to find them is to just let go and play.

Sword of the Sea is due to hit PlayStation 5, Steam and the Epic Games Store on August 19.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/sword-of-the-sea-is-what-happens-when-matt-nava-strides-back-into-journeys-shadow-233148894.html?src=rss

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© Giant Squid

Camper Van: Make it Home has everything you'd want out of a home-decorating simulator, but it's all on wheels and slightly miniaturized, and something about that combination is extra peaceful. The game is available on Steam right now, following a surprise drop during the Wholesome Games Showcase, which is part of Summer Game Fest 2025.

In Camper Van: Make it Home, players solve organization puzzles and use their interior design skills to craft the mobile homes of their dreams. There's even space to decorate outside of the vehicle, and the accessories change along with the environments and seasons. Camper Van: Make it Home is just a perfect encapsulation of pastel dreaminess and cozy creativity.

Camper Van: Make it Home is developed by Spanish indie team Malapata Studio, with financial support from Wings. The game has been on a little journey from Kickstarter, where it garnered more than 2,000 backers in 2023, to today's full release on Steam.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/pc/camper-van-make-it-home-takes-interior-design-on-the-road-170043811.html?src=rss

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© Malapata Studio

Relooted is a heist game about reclaiming African artifacts from the Western countries that stole them, developed by independent South African studio Nyamakop. Relooted is set in a future timeline where Western nations have signed a treaty to return plundered items to their African regions of origin, but things aren't going to plan. Western leaders are instead hiding the artifacts away in private collections, so it's up to a ragtag crew based in Johannesburg, South Africa, to strategize and steal them back.

Relooted is broken into missions, and each one includes a briefing about the artifact, an infiltration planning stage, and the heist. Gameplay is a mix of puzzle and action as you case each building, set up your run, and then execute the plan. Once you grab your target artifact, the security alarms go off and you have a limited amount of time to escape, so thorough preparation is key.

In the Day of the Devs reveal video for Relooted, producer Sithe Ncube cites a wild statistic from a pivotal 2018 report on African cultural heritage, saying, "90 percent of sub-Saharan African culture heritage is in the possession of Western collections. That is millions upon millions of deeply important cultural, spiritual and personal artifacts, including human remains, that aren't in their rightful place."

The locations in Relooted are fictional, but the 70 artifacts you have to steal back are real, and they're all currently in Western and private collections, far from their original homes and owners.

Nyamakop is one of the largest independent games studios in sub-Saharan Africa, with about 30 developers working on Relooted right now. Its previous game, the globular platformer Semblance, was the first African-developed IP to ever come to a Nintendo console, hitting the Switch in 2018. In order to get Semblance on the Switch, Nyamakop co-founder Ben Myres had to bootstrap his way around the world, buying one-way tickets and finding new partners on the fly in a daisy chain of game festival appearances. Here's how Myres explained it to Engadget at E3 2018:

"The entry curve into being an indie game developer in South Africa is like a cliff face. Because you don't have the contacts, the platform holders like Xbox, Sony. You don't have reps that live in your country. The press that matter are all here. There isn't a big enough market locally to sell to, so you have to make works to sell to the West, which means you have to go to Western shows and you have to meet Western press. So basically, if you're not traveling a ton, you're not going to be able to make it."

Nyamakop has grown significantly since 2018, and Relooted is an unabashedly African game built by a majority-POC team, Myres and Ncube said in 2024.

"There is the thing about making games for Africans — we say that a lot," Ncube told GamesIndustry.biz. "We say that should be a thing, we should make games for Africans because we're playing games that were made in the West. But will people even play those games, if you make them? And then if you make games targeting people ... even if you were to make one that's really good, there's no guarantee that you'll have a lot of people playing it. So I think there's some level of confusion, I can say, in terms of unexplored aspects of the African games market."

Relooted is in development for Steam, the Epic Games Store and Xbox Series X/S, and while it doesn't yet have a firm release date, it's available to wishlist.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/rescue-african-artifacts-from-colonizers-museums-in-the-heist-game-relooted-000035161.html?src=rss

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Neverway already looks, sounds and feels like it's going to be something special — in a grim, grotesque and hellishly depressed kind of way. (Side note: That could be a nice tagline, no? It's grim! It's grotesque! It's hellishly depressed! It's... Neverway! OK, I'll stop.)

Neverway is a life-sim RPG starring Fiona, a young woman who quits her dead-end job to live on a remote island farm for a while, where she ends up becoming the immortal herald of a dead god. Fiona has to fight through nightmare realms and battle repulsive horrors, while also tending her land and maintaining relationships with townsfolk. She's able to meet and date more than 10 distinct characters, and forming friendship bonds unlocks combat abilities. The game features farming and fishing mechanics, and there's also a crafting system for secondary tools like the hookshot, which supplements Fiona's primary weapon, a sword.

Neverway comes from Coldblood Inc., an independent Vancouver studio founded by Brazilian-Canadian developers Pedro Medeiros and Isadora Sophia. Medeiros is the pixel artist behind Towerfall and Celeste, two stunning indie games, and Sophia is an ex-senior software engineer at Microsoft and the creator of the open-source Murder Engine, which powers Neverway. The game also features music by Disasterpiece, the composer behind Fez and the top-tier horror film It Follows, with sound design by Martin Kvale of NokNok Audio. OuterSloth, the indie game fund established by Among Us creators InnerSloth, is providing financial backing for Neverway, and Coldblood Inc. is self-publishing it.

Though Neverway was officially announced one month ago during the Triple-i Initiative showcase, it still made a splash as part of the Day of the Devs event tied to Summer Game Fest 2025 this week. Neverway is heading to PC at an undetermined future time, and it's available to wishlist on Steam now.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/pc/bask-in-the-grotesque-pixel-art-beauty-of-neverway-000046814.html?src=rss

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If you've ever dreamed of being a student at a school built entirely out of escape rooms and silly puns, Coin Crew has the game just for you. Escape Academy 2: Back 2 School is heading to PC in 2026, and it's available now to wishlist on Steam. It's the sequel to Escape Academy, which is one of our absolute favorite puzzle games in recent years, particularly when played as a couch co-op experience.

Escape Academy 2 expands the campus into an open world, allowing players to explore and uncover secrets between classes, ramping up the student role-playing vibe. Coin Crew also drew inspiration from games like Animal Well and The Legend of Zelda series, which incorporate riddles and mysteries into the standard exploration gameplay loop, creating a free-roaming puzzle flow.

The original Escape Academy attracted more than 4 million players, and the sequel appears to be even bigger and radder. There's no release date for now, but Coin Crew is looking for playtesters through its Discord channel. The Escape Academy series is published by iam8bit, and the sequel was revealed during the Day of the Devs showcase tied to Summer Game Fest 2025.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/pc/escape-academy-2-back-2-school-is-an-open-world-puzzle-game-spanning-the-whole-campus-000055295.html?src=rss

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Killer Inn is a little bit murder mystery and a little bit third-person action game, and combined, it looks like a lot of fun. Square Enix and developer Tactic Studios revealed Killer Inn during today's Summer Game Fest kickoff stream. A beta for the game is coming to Steam soon and it's available to wishlist now.

Killer Inn is a lot like the movie Clue, or the TV show The Traitors, or the social improv game Werewolf, or the video game Spy Party — it's all about uncovering players' true intentions and concealing your own, with a murderous twist. Each round includes 24 players, some of whom are wolves, while the rest are lambs. As a lamb, the players' goal is sniff out the wolves and survive their attacks, and the wolves are out to blend in with the herd, stealthily killing when they can. Each kill leaves behind a clue for other players to find. The game ends when one team has eliminated all members of the opposing group.

It isn't pure social strategy — there are various weapons, traps, poisons, bits of armor and masks to use, and a range of characters to choose from. Killer Inn is playable solo or with up to four players.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/pc/killer-inn-turns-werewolf-into-a-multiplayer-action-game-220859571.html?src=rss

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Nioh 3 is heading to PlayStation 5 and PC in 2026 and you can get a taste of its Sengoku setting and dark samurai action on Sony's console right now. A demo for the game is live today on PS5 and it'll be available through June 18, courtesy of developer Team Ninja and publisher Koei Tecmo.

The game reveal was a nice surprise during Sony's State of Play event today, and it came with a trailer showcasing big, demonic creatures and frantic action scenes. Much like its predecessors, Nioh 3 is a dark fantasy action RPG set in 15-century Japan. The original Nioh came out in 2017 and its sequel landed in 2020, with a handful of Dead or Alive installments released in between.

Nioh 3 introduces a new combat system to the series that lets players swap between two distinct fighting styles, Samurai and Ninja. Samurai is similar to previous Nioh titles with a focus on close-range martial arts, while Ninja enables quick reactions like dodging and aerial moves. Players will be able to change combat styles on the fly. Nioh 3 features an open world — Team Ninja calls it an "open field," actually — to explore, as well.

"Aside from the new battle styles, Nioh 3 also enables players to enjoy an open field that offers a new freedom of exploration to the unique tension and confrontations that have become a defining characteristic of the Nioh series," Team Ninja head Fumihiko Yasuda said on the PlayStation Blog. "Experience unexpected encounters with formidable yokai, explore suspicious villages riddled in violent secrets, and take on the daunting challenges of The Crucible."

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/playstation/nioh-3-is-heading-to-ps5-and-pc-in-2026-complete-with-two-distinct-combat-styles-222458806.html?src=rss

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Grasshopper Manufacture founder Suda51 made an appearance at Sony's State of Play showcase to reveal Romeo is a Dead Man — a game that has no relation to the 2000 action masterpiece Romeo Must Die, as far as we can tell. Romeo is a Dead Man stars Romeo Stargazer, a dude who was pulled back from the brink of death, gained time-shattering powers, and became a universe-hopping special agent for the FBI. Using a sword and guns, Romeo battles various sci-fi robots and beasts across multiple universes, featuring hyper-bloody gameplay.

By the time I finished watching the debut trailer for Romeo is a Dead Man, I'd completely forgotten that it started out with a hand-drawn cartoon family enjoying a nice curry dinner. It quickly devolves into a black-, white- and red-splattered fever dream of exploding heads and doorway demons, providing the first hint that this is definitely a Suda51 project. Grasshopper Manufacture's previous games include Killer7, No More Heroes, Lollipop Chainsaw and Killer is Dead, and its latest release seems to fit right in with these titles.

Romeo is a Dead Man is a third-person action game, and it's due to hit PlayStation 5 in 2026.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/playstation/suda51-returns-with-a-sword-swinging-gun-slinging-sci-fi-action-game-214628508.html?src=rss

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Welcome to Video Games Weekly on Engadget. Expect a new story every Monday, broken into two parts. The first is a space for short essays and ramblings about video game trends and related topics from me, a reporter who's covered the industry for more than 13 years. The second contains the video game stories from the past week that you need to know about, including some headlines from outside of Engadget.

Please enjoy — and I'll see you next week.

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It’s the week of Summer Game Fest, so I’m mentally wrapped up in a complex web of embargoes, meetings, schedules and cryptic invites, and I can already smell the plasticky, sanitized air that accompanies video game conventions of all sizes. Mmm, smells like pixels.

This will be my third SGF and I’m looking forward to it, as usual. I appreciate the event’s focus on independent projects, diverse creators and smaller-scale publishers, particularly with shows like Day of the Devs, Wholesome Direct, Women-Led Games, and the Latin American and Southeast Asian games showcases. I deeply believe that innovation in the industry stems from these untethered, experimental spaces, and SGF has consistently provided room for these types of experiences to shine.

I appreciate SGF even more after spending seven years wandering the cavernous halls of the Los Angeles Convention Center, covering the Electronic Entertainment Expo. E3 was exciting in its own right and I feel privileged to have attended it so many times, but it was also a soulless kind of show. E3 was unwelcoming to independent creators and packed with corporate swag, and by the time Sony decided to stop attending in 2019, it felt like an expensive, out-of-touch misrepresentation of the video game industry as a whole. The best parts of E3 in its final years were the unaffiliated events hosted by Devolver Digital, which took place in a nearby parking lot packed with Airstream trailers, food trucks and fabulous, up-and-coming indie games. It felt a lot like SGF, in fact.

I wrote about this phenomenon in 2018, in a story that questioned whether the video game industry needed E3 at all. Perhaps because I’m a witch but mostly due to the pandemic, E3 shut down in 2020 and it never re-emerged as an in-person show. The Entertainment Software Association hosted one virtual session in 2021, but nothing afterward, and E3 was officially declared dead in December 2023. Meanwhile, the video game market has continued to grow, driven by a maturing indie segment, mobile play and harsh crunch-layoff cycles at the AAA level.

Now, the ESA is back with a new video game showcase called iicon, the Interactive Innovation Conference, heading to Las Vegas in April 2026. The industry’s biggest names are involved, including Microsoft, Sony, Nintendo, Epic Games, Electronic Arts, Disney, Amazon and Take-Two Interactive, and the show is poised to be “a space for visionaries across industries to come together,” according to ESA president Stanley Pierre-Louis. E3 2.0 has arrived, and it seems to be as AAA-focused as ever. For what it’s worth, Summer Game Fest has its own version of a AAA thought-leader summit this year with The Game Business Live.

Meanwhile, the ESA has remained silent — even when directly asked — as some of the industry’s most influential companies roll back their diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, at a time when women, POC and LGBT+ employees are enduring active existential threats. And during Pride Month, no less.

All of this is to say, I’m stoked for Summer Game Fest this year. It all kicks off with a live show on Friday, June 6, and we have a rundown of the full schedule right here. We’ll be publishing hands-on previews, developer interviews and news directly from SGF over the weekend and beyond, so stay tuned to Engadget’s Gaming hub.

The news

Playtonic layoffs

Playtonic, the studio behind Yooka-Laylee, has laid off an undisclosed number of employees across multiple departments, including production, art, game design, narrative design and UI/UX. In a message shared on X, the studio’s leaders said, “This isn’t simply a difficult moment, it’s a period of profound change in how games are created and financed. The landscape is shifting, and with it, so must we.” Playtonic’s latest game, Yooka-Replaylee, is due to come out this year. Though Playtonic is a small, privately owned company (with a minority investment from Tencent), the timing of the layoffs fits the established playbook of many AAA studios, which operate with periods of crunch and bulk layoffs baked into their business plans.

EA cans Black Panther

Electronic Arts revealed its plans to make a single-player, third-person Black Panther game back in 2023 as part of a broader Marvel push at the studio, but apparently, things have changed. EA canceled its Black Panther project and closed the studio that was building it, Cliffhanger Games. EA Motive, the team behind the stellar Dead Space remake, is still working on an Iron Man game, as far as we know.

Roll7 returns to Steam

Any time I can gas up Rollerdrome or OlliOlli World, I’m going to do it. After being delisted from Steam more than a year ago, Rollerdrome and OlliOlli World have returned to the storefront to fulfill all of your flow-state needs. Both games come from Roll7, a London-based studio that Take-Two purchased in November 2021 and shut down in May 2024, removing Rollerdrome and Olli Olli World from Steam in the process.

Playdate Season 2 is live and it’s good

Have we convinced you to get a Playdate yet? Whatever your answer, Playdate Season 2 is live right now, adding two new games to the crank-powered system each week until July 3. Engadget’s resident Playdate expert Cheyenne Macdonald has a review of the initial batch, which includes Fulcrum Defender from Subset Games, Dig! Dig! Dino! from Dom2D and Fáyer, and Blippo+, a fever dream masquerading as a video game. And while you’re in this headspace, check out Igor Bonifacic’s enlightening interview with Subset Games co-founder Jay Ma.

Ex-Ubisoft bosses face sexual harassment trial in France

Three former Ubisoft executives appeared in French court on June 2, accused by multiple employees at the studio of sexual harassment, bullying and, in one defendant’s case, attempted sexual assault. The lawsuit alleges Serge Hascoët, Tommy François and Guillaume Patrux regularly engaged in misconduct and fostered a toxic culture at Ubisoft, and it follows a public reckoning at the studio in 2020, plus arrests in 2023.

The Switch 2 is coming

Nintendo’s Switch 2 officially comes out this week, on June 5. We'll have a review of the new console as soon as we can, but in the meantime you can find all of the information you need regarding pre-orders in our handy guide.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/video-games-weekly-i-still-dont-miss-e3-214108810.html?src=rss

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