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There are quite a few comments on the Steam page for USC: Counterforce and even Rock, Paper, SHOTGUN originally gave up on the game immediately, because the devs decided to make the…

Those who are fed up with the AI infestation in Windows 11 rejoice, for with a simple Powershell script you can remove all those unwanted features thanks to the efforts of…

Your enjoyment of Stellar Cafe comes down to two things: how you feel about AI in video games and how good of a conversationalist you are.

I've had some experience with AI-driven NPCs in games before, specifically in Skyrim (with mods) and former-social-VR-turned-MMORPG Riff XR. The difference with these two examples is that those games have much more to offer than said AI NPCs whereas Stellar Cafe lives and dies on the characters and your interactions with them. It makes for a unique experience that rolls credits before the fairly simple premise wears thin.

Developer AstroBeam's claim to fame is being helmed by Devin Reimer, one of the co-creators of Job Simulator, and Stellar Cafe feels very much inspired by that VR classic while taking the concept of sentient robot interactions to the next level. You play as, well, yourself, with James, your robot barista, asking your name and using it for the rest of the game. Having played dozens of games where the player can name the main character, only to watch voice-acted NPCs never actually say it, this was surprisingly an immersive touch.

After talking shop with James, you learn that James is throwing a party for Patch Day, an upcoming holiday, but the nine other RSVPs have only replied 'maybe.' James requests your help to find out why each robot is on the fence and convince them to turn that 'maybe' into a 'yes.' The rest of the game plays out like a linear sandbox. You progress through the robots in groups of three across three cycles (days), but how you solve their problems is entirely down to your creativity.

For example, one bot can't attend the party because they have to work at a job they hate and would rather quit. Through a series of prompted responses, you assist this bot in writing a resignation email. After that email is done, it gets sent to the supervisor who replies in short order. I played the first three scenarios in the game twice (including this one), using wildly different approaches each time, and the responses were indeed different. Another example is Captain (one of the few names I remember as I write this review) who needs your help to come up with a story pitch. The sky is the limit since your dialog choices and the responses are not pre-determined. I can see this game being played multiple times to see just how wacky of a response you can get from the robots.

Frankly, these characters felt more realized with better personality traits and voices than I've encountered in most VR games. I enjoy puzzle games in general and it was a trip to have the puzzle actually talk back to you. Having said that, a little goes a long way here. Each encounter can be completed inside 10 minutes and some of them landed better than others. I won't give any more specifics to avoid spoilers, but there were two in particular I could not wait to move on from. Also, there are one or two phrases that every robot says that got old pretty quickly.

Another unique part of the game is that it is entirely driven by your voice, including the movement. Utilizing your Quest's microphone, you instruct your AI assistant, Visor, to move you from location to location (the counter, the booths, and the tables) and of course you spend the entire time talking. There are physical interactions as well, with some bots having tablets to pick up and view, and of course, plenty of custom drinks from James.

All of the voice interactions work perfectly fine, but the tablets were a bit jittery at times. Stellar Cafe can be played with controllers or hand-tracking and the game suggests using the latter. Unfortunately, my Quest kept detecting my controllers, to the point where I had to turn on hand-tracking. That's not a shortcoming of the game itself but Meta's operating system, though I still wanted to point it out in case other players bump into it. There were also instances where I looked around the cafe during a conversation and the bot registered it as me shaking my head no, forcing me to redo a prompt or response.

Stellar Cafe's full runtime is about 2 hours, including the ending. However, I can see players who enjoy the live AI interaction toying with the bots for hours on end. There were a few hiccups in the interactions, like sometimes James would make me a drink and deliver it to me, then tell me the drink would be ready soon. To the game's credit, I called James out on this every time it happened and he responded appropriately, apologizing and saying something about his timing circuits misfiring. Nicely done.

Visually, Stellar Cafe isn't exactly pushing the boundaries of standalone VR. If you've played any Owlchemy Labs game (Job Simulator, Vacation Simulator, etc.), it's about that level of visual fidelity. However, take your time and look around the cafe. There are a ton of little touches that show a level of care and sense of humor in the single-level game design. The television above James plays a rotation of news broadcasts, weather reports, a humorous riff on the Home Shopping Network, and more. I got a kick out of the employee of the month plaques too.

Finally, to address the elephant in the room: yes, this is ostensibly an artificial intelligence game. If you are uneasy or outright opposed to the use of AI in video games, Stellar Cafe is not going to change your mind. It's not a revolutionary step forward for the medium, but it is an interesting thought experiment into how this technology can be applied.

Stellar Cafe - The Final Verdict

Stellar Cafe is a lighthearted, relatively short AI experience that wraps up its simple story before outstaying its welcome. I do wish it were longer, but what's here is quite enjoyable and worth a pickup as a glimpse into what feels like an inevitable future for gaming, especially social sim settings like this.

UploadVR uses a 5-Star rating system for our game reviews – you can read a breakdown of each star rating in our review guidelines.

CharacterBank set out to work on Knights of Fiona aiming to take what they learned from Ruinsmagus into a more expansive and ambitious role-playing game.

Part of that journey involves making it multiplayer.

“ Ruinsmagus was a full single-player experience when we launched it, and we heard a lot from players about wanting to keep playing and exploring that world, so creating this large world that players could keep visiting was our biggest goal with this experience,” explains Shuto Mikami, the CEO of CharacterBank, on the origins of this new title. “Plus, with that previous game, the actual gameplay is almost more linked to a shooter game in how you played it, and we wanted to create something that felt more like an RPG. Using magic that didn’t feel like shooting bullets, swordplay, bows, introducing these styles that allow the game to feel more like this genre.”

I jumped into Knights of Fiona for the first time in an exclusive demo at the studio’s offices in Kyoto, Japan, looking at their effort to build something that feels like a true, traditional RPG adventure. I can see similarities to the hub world of Ruinsmagus and this title, but this time the hub is one continuous and larger town that feels more alive, even in these early stages. We were still required to warp to some locations of the town, but that should change with further development.

Rather than feeling limited to just you and a very small cast of characters, you have a team of party members and a supporting cast each as visually distinct and personality-driven as the last. The train station, the main starting point for a lot of missions, has moving trains and a large space to explore.

It’s when jumping into the quests themselves that the distinctions and evolution of this experience compared to CharacterBank’s prior work becomes most apparent. As Mikami notes, the first thing that stands out in the gameplay loop compared to Ruinsmagus is just how much additional depth and variety exists in terms of combat. You have bows, swords of all sizes, mage staffs and more at your disposal, and not only does each class feel distinctly unique to one another, weapons within those same classes feel unique and can be further upgraded to improve their strength and suit your style.

Firing an arrow, for example, requires a full-bodied, two-handed pull back of the bow. Aim and fire with the assistance of a guide for the arrow’s flight path, which allows us to attack from a safe distance countered by the slower nature of these weapons. Using swords of all sizes has a distinct feel and heft despite the typical limitations of the virtual form that makes it impossible to differentiate the weight of a virtual object, instead built into how you swing these weapons and approach combat. If magic can feel the closest to the combat of Ruinsmagus, the way you aim and the various spells that differ between staffs allow for a degree of control and variety. Even then, more than just swinging aimlessly, you have multiple actions assigned to various buttons for varied attacks, and everything from positioning to learning attack patterns is important for victory.

The game further encourages you to switch between these weapons, not just because of the weapons themselves but everything to do with upgrades and passive abilities that support your loadout. These come in the form of cards received randomly as rewards after each quest as well as from the in-game shop. These cards will also impact passive abilities that can improve base strength and introduce additional augmentations to your weapon’s abilities. You can further merge weapon cards to improve the level and experience of weapons beyond merely using them in action to essentially craft new weapons, and place passive cards in open slots to give you an edge in battle. The rarity and power of these cards increases based on difficulty chosen for each quest, with encouragement to revisit quests to get these abilities.

Gameplay focuses on fun over realism in combat and mechanic design, he explains. “We brought in the real weapons to try so we had an idea of how we wanted to replicate the feel of them in the game. That being said, one of the things we were considerate about was that, when we were designing for the sword and the bow, was that it wasn’t too technical. We want to make sure this is accessible for casual players and people who just want to jump in and experience this world.”

Which is important when creating a multiplayer experience you can play with friends. Another distinct characteristic of Knights of Fiona is that this is an online game at its core. All quests are taken on as a party, whether CPUs or online with friends, and you can engage in proximity voice chat and explore the hub world together also. Playing the game with just a few of the developers at their offices, lots of the fun of the experience was derived merely by exploring and talking amongst ourselves, just as much as it was fighting through hordes and large boss fights.

How you approach missions varies wildly based on your party and the quest itself. Playing through most of the first chapter including its finale during our session, we experienced the story as we saw off the first major threat, going from fighting early low-level hordes in open fields as we learned to gain the trust of the town to fighting off against the game’s first boss, an angry fire-breathing dragon. This set-piece is a clear statement of intent for the team’s ambition as we rush through waves of enemies and projectiles on the burning bridge that enters the town, only to come across a large bright-red dragon with eyes intent to kill, breathing fire and shaking the world with every attack. With a group you can split duties and distract the dragon, while alone you’re faced with a battle of wits and agility, not just strength.

It’s impressive, but only a small idea of what’s to come. Enemies of world-ending, literally titanic proportions are being teased, to such a scale that simply looking up at them in VR makes you feel like an ant, and I can barely even speculate how you would overcome their might. It’s promised to be longer but varied in setting as you trek out on a globe-trotting adventure in order to save it, even if your home in Gallia remains a hub. All with a rich cast of characters to support you along.

While the core story will have a definitive ending, it’s possible to replay missions on new difficulties for new weapons and ability cards, and while the team haven’t confirmed definitive plans at this stage, they’re open to the idea of much more.

According to the game’s director, HOI, multiplayer and online elements are about more than merely keeping players coming back, but creating something that can stick with people. Talking about their hopes for the game, they noted, “I want people to finish this game and think, I want to spend more time in this world, I want to get to know these characters more, about their relationships, what other adventures they may go on and the like. I want people wanting to learn more about this world. Lately, as soon as a game, a manga or an anime has finished, it’s forgotten by the next weekend, which is a little sad considering the love and work that went into it. Whether on their own or with other players, we want people to keep coming back to experience more in this place.”

In an introductory prologue, we arrived in this place unaware of the dangers it was soon to face in the oncoming war. Its people are losing hope, and that’s where you come in. You end up entrusted with leading the resistance to this fight by the leaders of Gallia, including some of its ruling figures like the large, tree-like Kelnund and Leonhardt, make allies with the knight Geisenberg, and find support from characters in the town like the purple-skinned alchemist Nebulous Babbege.

With characters, each design is as distinct as they are intriguing, soaked in a visual design conveying a history beyond what we are privy to in this adventure. Lots of time was spent on the design process before a line of code was made from design to even assigning characters their own Myers-Briggs-style personality types, HOI explains. “I often find that if you think about the story and create the world before you think about its characters, you end up creating characters that feel like gods in their world, which isn’t a good thing. So the first thing we would consider with every character is what is their personality, what are their motivations, what are their desires, what or who do they love, things like that.

“For example, we’d consider the role that a character is expected to take upon, how they feel about that role, the pressures elsewhere, things like that. The characters would be born from considering their internal emotions based on the life they have around them. Who could they talk to about these things? What are their more immediate problems and concerns? When it came to thinking about the setting, well, Gallia is a very medieval-inspired setting, so we considered philosophies of the time, what would the internal political debates of the location be, what sort of world and ruling would we have here, what does class division look like in this setting, we’d consider all of this from the earliest stages.

“Then we would bring in the designers. Maybe we would have some rough sketches of the settings, characters and ideas, but the designers would help to brush them up and help build them out further, or the designers would create it all from scratch based on the original designs. We also have a bigger cast, which helps. In Ruinsmagus, we had Iris as our main character, but she also had to be a guide for the player, she had a lot of roles to fill. Fiona started in this place, but with more characters we could think more about how she would react to different things and then give her deeper character development from there.”

Another distinct characteristic of Knights of Fiona is that this is an online game at its core. All quests are taken on as a party, whether CPUs or online with friends, and you can engage in proximity voice chat and explore the hub world together also. Playing the game with just a few of the developers at the office, so much fun was derived just by exploring and talking and having fun in this area. While the core story will have a definitive ending, it’s possible to replay missions on new difficulties for new weapons and ability cards, and while the team haven’t confirmed definitive plans at this stage, they’re open to the idea of new stories, time-exclusive skins and more to support the online service and to keep the game as something to return to with friends.

Even in this early stage, the game feels alive. The opening hub town includes lots of areas to explore and create your own fun. While not currently active due to the game not yet launching to the public, community integration in the town hall exists in the form of a notice board to allow fanart shared in Discord with players.

Currently in place of fan art are doodles from the staff, and you can see the love for these characters in all the fun sketches made by the team (with particular love for my own early favorite Nebulous Babbege). You can feel the love for this game, this world, and what it means to the team behind it in all the subtle details in the town and world, the care and refinement in card art for weapons and abilities and in the art in the town, and how much it means. For director HOI creating the story, he mentioned that one of the key inspirations was the challenge and responsibility of creating a new game and the expectations, something that weaves its way into the world and ideas driving Knights of Fiona.

Beyond simply being something new and much fun to play through even at this early stage, you can feel that this is the game that CharacterBank as a studio have been working toward for some time. It brings across ideas from much of their other works, builds beyond what they were able to achieve in Ruinsmagus, and charts ambitious ground for RPGs in VR. To support post-launch additional content the team is launching a Kickstarter campaign.

With everything considered, it's a tall order. If the team can fully deliver on all of its ideas, we could be in for something truly special.

Back when the VR space was beginning to see a renewed rise, Facebook (now Meta) went all-in on the technology, dedicating Billions to the production of VR hardware and software. While the Quest platform has succeeded in many aspects, the platform has failed to make the company mountains of cash and so unfortunately two of the most notable VR studios under their wing (Twisted Pixel and Sanzaru Games) have now been seemingly shut down.

Taking to Twitter, a former designer at the studio Twisted Pixel wrote: “I've just been laid off. It appears the entire @twisted_pixel games studio has been shut down. @SanzaruGames too.”

For the uninitiated, Twisted Pixel is the studio behind last year’s well-received Deadpool VR. Designed as a Quest exclusive, the project released just a few months ago on the 18th of November and went on to be nominated for Best VR game at the TGAs. Twisted Pixel Games were acquired by Meta back in 2022.

Sanzaru Games meanwhile were acquired by Meta all the way back in 2020 as part of the company's early VR efforts. The studio was known best for creating Asgard’s Wrath, generally agreed to be one of the best VR titles around.

Both Sanzaru Games and Twisted Pixel were great studios which still had plenty more to offer in the VR space. It’s a shame to see Meta ending these studios before they are able to achieve their full potential.

KitGuru says: What did you think of these two studios? Is Meta completely abandoning VR? Let us know your thoughts down below.

It's been over a decade now since the release of Bloodborne and despite continuous cries from fans to see more from this world – or even a basic 60fps patch – the game remains locked to the specs of the OG PS4’s hardware. While it appears as though more Bloodborne isn’t coming any time soon, the game’s creator Hidetaka Miyazaki has offered updated thoughts on this modern classic, calling it “perhaps the strongest reflection of my type of flavouring of a game that one can experience.”

In an interview with the publication Game Informer (paywalled), FromSoftware’s Hidetaka Miyazaki reflected on his time working on 2015’s PS4 exclusive Bloodborne, claiming it to be “a special game for me” in part due to the fact that “it was probably the most challenging development cycle we've had from a studio perspective.”

The other main reason it remains special is that Miyazaki “imparted a lot of my own ideas into this game,  whether it be the story, the world-building component, or even the game mechanics and the game systems that are in place” – ultimately calling Bloodborne “perhaps the strongest reflection of my type of flavouring of a game that one can experience.”

Given the reverence that Miyazaki has for Bloodborne, here’s to hoping that another project set in this highly-interesting world does come to fruition at some point or another in the near or distant future.

Discuss on our Facebook page HERE.

KitGuru says: What do you think of Miyazaki’s comments? Is Bloodborne your favourite FromSoftware game? What would you like to see from the series in the future? Let us know down below.

Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice released back in 2017 to a ton of praise owing to the game’s narrative, music, and transformative binaural audio design. After years of anticipation, its sequel – Senua’s Saga: Hellblade 2 launched to a more tepid reception, with a core complaint being the game’s relative lack of interactivity. It appears as though Ninja Theory are planning to right their wrongs, with a 3rd Hellblade game reportedly in development with an increased focus on gameplay.

As part of a recent episode of the Xbox Two podcast, known Microsoft leaker Jez Corden offered an update on Ninja Theory and their next project, stating:

“Ninja Theory, from what I understand, the next game is Hellblade 3, and it’s going to be a bit more interactive than Hellblade 1 and 2.”

Corden later clarified that the game in question may not be Hellblade 3 exactly, but it will be “in the Hellblade universe,” adding that “it does sound like they want to make it more of a game.”

Hellblade 1 was already a unique title which offered a memorable experience despite its relative lack of interactivity. That said, its sequel unfortunately doubled down on this aspect a bit too much, leading to it feeling like little more than a tech showpiece.

While there is no expectation for the next Hellblade to turn into a character-action title, having a bit more to do gameplay-wise would be welcome – as long as it doesn’t compromise on the game’s vision.

Discuss on our Facebook page HERE.

KitGuru says: What do you think of these early Hellblade 3 claims? What did you think of Senua’s Saga? Was it lacking in the gameplay department? Let us know your thoughts down below.

Meta and Ray-Ban owner EssilorLuxottica are discussing doubling or even tripling their smart glasses production capacity, Bloomberg reports.

Just under a year ago, when revealing that 2 million units of Ray-Ban Meta glasses had been sold so far, EssilorLuxottica told investors that it planned to increase annual production capacity to 10 million units by the end of 2026, citing the "great success" of the product.

Then, in its Q3 investor call in October, EssilorLuxottica said that its smart glasses business was doing "exceptionally well", to the point where it now accounted for more than a third of its revenue growth, telling investors that it was accelerating the timeline for the 10 million annual production capacity.

Now, Bloomberg reports that Meta and EssilorLuxottica are discussing doubling this production target to 20 million annual units, with the possibility of tripling it to 30 million if future demand justifies it.

According to Bloomberg, Meta is hoping to build on its lead in the smart glasses market and expand its footprint before competition from Apple and Google arrives.

Google has repeatedly teased smart glasses with a HUD at events like TED and I/O, and announced last year that it's working with the eyewear companies Gentle Monster and Warby Parker on Gemini smart glasses, and will work with Kering Eyewear in the future. Multiple South Korean news outlets have reported that Samsung plans to launch a Meta Ray-Ban Display competitor this year, powered by Google software, a similar strategy to the Galaxy XR headset.

Meanwhile, in October Bloomberg reported that Apple moved staff off the cheaper and lighter Vision headset project to prioritize shipping smart glasses sooner. Apple's first glasses could be revealed as soon as this year ahead of a release in 2027, the report claimed.

Meta Closes Deadpool VR, Asgard’s Wrath & Resident Evil 4 VR Studios

Meta has shut down Twisted Pixel Games (Deadpool VR), Sanzaru Games (Asgard’s Wrath), and Armature Studio (Resident Evil 4 VR), UploadVR can confirm.

UploadVRDavid Heaney

Meta and EssilorLuxottica's reported discussions come as Meta laid off over 10% of Reality Labs, its smart glasses, VR, and "metaverse" division, including the entirety of three of its VR game studios. The company previously confirmed "shifting some of our investment from Metaverse toward AI glasses and Wearables", and reducing spending on VR content to increase investment in smart glasses production capacity seems to be this strategy in action.