I've been reading fantasy books almost my entire life. While I do sometimes venture into sci-fi and other less magical fiction genres, I've kept my literary life pretty much locked in on fantasy. That being said, I've always loved how much romantic relationships play a role in a fantastical setting. There can only be so much adventure without a bit of romance to ground it, after all.
Romantasy isn't exactly new, but it has exploded in popularity in recent years. Thanks to Rebecca Yarros' Empyrean series, romantasy absolutely dominated the Kindle charts as well as pretty much every bestseller list last year. If you're new to the genre and looking for some recommendations for what to read first, I've gathered together a few of my favorites, as well as top picks from my colleague (and romantasy enthusiast) Jessie Wade.
Fourth Wing (The Empyrean)
Rebecca Yarros' Empyrean series is arguably the most popular romantasy series available right now. It's got magic, dragons, sex, danger, and an academic setting to bring it all together. The story follows Violet Sorrengail as she is forced to follow in her family's footsteps and join the elite academy of dragon riders. Survival is no guarantee as she endures a constant threat of danger from her mother's enemies, deadly dragons, and unexpected romantic feelings.
There are currently only three books in the series, but Yarros recently confirmed she's already working on the fourth. In the meantime, there's a Fourth Wing TV series currently in the works for Prime Video and a companion card game was released last year.
A Court of Thorns and Roses
A Court of Thorns and Roses (also known as ACOTAR) is the first of three Sarah J. Maas picks we've featured here, because she's truly a master of the genre. A Court of Thorns and Roses follows the perspective of Feyre Archeron, a human girl from a riches-to-rags family who finds herself being dragged off into the magical land of faeries after a hunting incident. It's a fantastical story of self-discovery and romance with an unexpected fairy tale twist that I won't spoil for you.
There are currently five books in the series so far with a sixth one on the way, though a release date has not yet been revealed. The series was supposed to be getting a TV adaption from Hulu, but unfortunately the project was scrapped early last year.
The Twilight Saga
Twilight wasn't the first romantasy series by any means, but it was the first one to become a household name. The Twilight movies got a lot of flack for being overly cheesy, but the Twilight books themselves are actually incredible. Stephanie Meyer's romantic tale of a high school girl falling in love with a vampire is hard to put down once you get started and there's so much depth captured in the books that never actually made it to the screen. If you're basing your opinion of Twilight entirely on the film franchise, you owe it to yourself to go back to the source material.
There are a total of five books in the Twilight Saga. There's the first four novels, which tell the story through Bella's perspective, and then a fifth companion book that shifts to Edwards point of view.
Quicksilver (Fae and Alchemy)
Callie Hart's Fae and Alchemy series exploded into the romantasy scene with Quicksilver back in 2024 and hasn't really slowed down since. The story follows a 24-year-old girl named Saeris Fane with strange alchemical powers and a penchant for picking pockets. After an unfortunate run-in with Death himself, she gets suddenly transported to the icy land of the Fae where she finds herself intertwined with a handsome Fae warrior and a centuries-long conflict.
There are currently only two books in the series, but the third book is already confirmed for a November 2026 release. The series is set to receive a Netflix adaptation following a seven figure bidding war for the rights to the story. The adaptation is still in its early stages and doesn't yet have a release date.
Throne of Glass
Throne of Glass is another epic romantasy from Sarah J. Maas. There's a lot of debate online about whether ACOTAR or Throne of Glass is the better series, but you'll need to fully read both before you decide which side you're on. The story follows a young girl named Celaena Sardothien, an assassin with a traumatic past who is pulled from the depths of slavery to win back her freedom by becoming the king's champion. She's forced to contend with nobles, killers, and a hidden magical world as she navigates her feelings for the men who surround her.
The Throne of Glass series is made up of seven books and one prequel, and is already complete. There is supposedly a TV adaptation in the works from Hulu, called Queen of Shadows, but there hasn't been any sort of update about it for years now.
The Serpent and the Wings of Night (Crowns of Nyaxia)
The simplest way to describe Carissa Broadbent's romantasy series would be to call it "Hunger Games meets vampires," but there's a lot more to it than that. The series is planned to be split up into three distinct duologies over the course of six books, each of which follows a different main character. The first pair of books, known as the Nightborn Duet, follows the story of Oraya. She's a human who has been raised by a vampire king who's only chance of continued survival is to enter a deadly tournament held by the goddess of death. As part of the competition, she teams up with a vampire from a different vampiric house named Raihn and a slow-burning romance ensues.
The Nightborn Duet has been completed with book one and two of the series, and the Shadowborn Duet begins with book three. The final book in the Shadowborn Duet is currently set to be released in July of 2026.
From Blood and Ash (Blood and Ash)
Jennifer L. Armentrout's Blood and Ash series has action, adventure, and all of the sexy moments you'd expect from a modern romantasy. What really sets the series apart, however, is the unique fantasy world and just how truly spicy things get after the first book. From Blood and Ash tells the story of Poppy, a girl caught between gods and mortals whose role as a Maiden leaves her forbidden from experiencing pleasure. She was born to ascend and be found worthy by the gods, but that doesn't stop her from longing for more.
The Blood and Ash series is currently made up of six books, with a seventh on the way for 2026. Armentrout has confirmed that the final book in the series will be titled The Throne of Bone and Ash.
Bonus: A Shadow in the Ember (Flesh and Fire)
If you like Jennifer Armentrout's Blood and Ash books, it's also worth checking out the prequel series, Flesh and Fire. The first book, A Shadow in the Ember, follows another Maiden named Seraphena Mierel, who is chosen to be the Consort to the Primal of Death. The series is now concluded with four total books, and the characters from Flesh and Fire make welcome appearances in the Blood and Ash series.
House of Earth and Blood (Crescent City)
The last Sarah J. Maas pick on our list is her Crescent City series. Unlike Throne of Glass and ACOTAR, House of Earth and Blood is a bit more tame (in terms of romance) and rooted in more of an urban fantasy setting. The story kicks off with Bryce Quinlan, a half-fae and half-human girl, who teams up with an angel named Hunt to track down the demon who killed her friends. The series has a nice blend of mystery, magic, and slow-burning romance all wrapped up in some epic fantasy world building.
There are currently three books in the series with a fourth planned for sometime in the future. Maas has yet to give any details about when it will be released.
Powerless
If you're looking for a YA romantasy series that doesn't get nearly as spicy as the more adult books on our list, Powerless is a great starting point. It's all about a society divided between "Elites" with powers and "Ordinaries" who are powerless. The story follows Paedyn Gray, an Ordinary who poses as an Elite psychic to avoid being banished from the kingdom of Ilya. When she unsuspectingly saves one of the kingdom's princes, she finds herself thrown into a brutal competition for Elites and falling into a forbidden romance that could end in her doom
The Powerless trilogy is now complete as of April 2025 with the release of Fearless.
Arcana Academy
Elise Kova's Arcana Academy is one of the newest books on this list, so there's currently only one book available. Kova isn't new to the romantasy scene, however, and you may know her from her Married to Magic series, or more recently, Saga of the Unfated. Arcana Academy breaks away from the usual tropes of faeries and vampires with a main character who wields magical tarot cards in a fantastical academy setting.
The second book in the Arcana Academy series, titled Prince of Swords, is currently set to be released on July 21, 2026.
Jacob Kienlen is a Senior Audience Development Strategist and Writer for IGN. Born and raised in Portland, Oregon, he has considered the Northwest his home for his entire life. With a bachelor's degree in communication and over 8 years of professional writing experience, his expertise is spread across a variety of different pop culture topics -- from TV series to indie games and books.
“Hell is not other people. Hell is yourself.” - Ludwig Wittgenstein
It begins with a group of children looking down a hole. A boy in a hood, the remains of a hangman’s noose around his neck, pilots a boat adrift at sea. I do not know where he has come from or where he is going or if he was one of the ones staring into that well’s abyss. I only know the way forward. Red lights peak through the dark and fog. They are my compass, and I follow them. Buoys. Where they guide me, I do not know, but there is no other path. The ocean is so vast, and my boat is so small. For a time, I am alone. At the fourth buoy, the boy stops the boat and pulls aboard a girl. When he reaches for the hare mask covering her face, she pins him to the small outboard’s wooden bottom, her hands ripping at his mask until he kicks her away. They stare at each other from opposite ends of the boat. It might as well be a chasm. “I thought you were dead,” the boy offers. “Where are the others?” the girl asks. The boy doesn’t know. She takes a lantern and stands at our boat’s bow. The buoys are still our guide, but the girl lights the way forward.
By the time I reach the end of Reanimal, the latest horror puzzle platformer from Little Nightmares developer Tarsier, I have forgotten all of this, and lost track of what parts of this opening are most important. I am too busy trying to make meaning from what I have seen, too focused on trying to connect the pieces of Reanimal’s puzzle, to understand how we got here. But stories, at least the good ones, the ones that know what they’re doing, tell you what they’re about from the beginning. And Reanimal is a very good story. Remember this, it tells you. Remember all of this.
Together – I play the boy, my co-op partner plays the girl. There is no way to select who plays who; it simply works out this way – we sail through jagged cliffs, past mines larger than our boat, bisect a forest of jagged, barren trees. Then the banks of the river we have followed fade, and a large industrial building looms out of the fog ahead of us. It is a remarkable image in a game of remarkable images. Reanimal certainly knows how to set a scene.
There is very little overt explanation.The boy and the girl are brother and sister, but this fact is never told to you. You learn it through the way they help each other up, comfort each other when things go wrong. Their relationship is something you experience, the questions largely left for you to answer. Why does she attack him after he fishes her out of the sea? What happened to them before they were in the boat? Reanimal unspools its story slowly, and asks you to fill in the gaps yourself. To remember what you’ve seen, to put together the imagery, the symbols, notice patterns in the shapes throughout its world. I’m unsure of what they’re after until we find another child separated from us by steel bars blocking a drain pipe. “You came back,” he whispers. “I knew you would. You should leave… while you still can.” But we don’t. The girl’s earlier question is the answer to mine. We are here to save the others. Our friends.
Reanimal can be played alone, but it's more meaningful to take the journey with someone else.
We navigate broken buildings, push through dark forests, leap across gaps, crouch into places only a child can fit. Often, we need to work together. The world is so big, and we are so small. It takes two of us to lift a metal trapdoor. I hold a lever to still a rotating metal shaft so my partner can pilot the girl across. On the other side, she knocks down a piece of wood so I can cross a gap. Reanimal is simple, elegant. You walk, run, jump, interact with and carry objects, boost one another to ledges neither of you can reach alone, and occasionally fight off foes in the clumsy way a child might. Little distinguishes the boy from the girl, save that she can attach her lantern to her hip while carrying something else. The boy’s lighter, on the other hand, is only usable if his hands are free. It’s a subtle distinction, but an important one, and my partner and I often made significant choices about who would do what based on how much light it would cost us, and whether we felt we could sacrifice it.
Reanimal can be played alone, but I found it more meaningful to take the journey with someone else, to coordinate and work together, to congratulate ourselves on our success and discuss our failures before trying again. Like the boy and the girl on screen, we are experiencing this together. Like them, we are not alone. That subtle distinction – of working with a living, breathing person – made it much better than it would have been had I spent the whole experience with a computer-controlled girl who always did exactly what she was supposed to. That’s not what this story is about, and I am deeply grateful that, in an era which has largely abandoned local co-op, Reanimal offers it.
Both Reanimal’s gameplay and the choices it offers are satisfying, but simple. It is less a game you play and more a world you move through and experience without the obvious artifice of a video game. There is no HUD, no meters, no minimap. The camera is often fixed to show you exactly what Tasier wants you to see, and the sense of visual composition here is remarkable. Even horror can be beautiful when framed the right way. Often, the answers to the gameplay questions Reanimal presents are obvious – though not less satisfying for it – and the only way forward, though occasionally we get lost. What carries us ahead are not the puzzles themselves, but the desire to see what’s next. If you are expecting great leaps from the studio’s work on the first two Little Nightmares, you will not find it here, and I’m not bothered by that. You don’t return to your favorite restaurant angry the menu hasn’t changed, and here the chef is a master of his craft.
The environment is not our only obstacle. We start to notice the horrors as we search for the missing wheels to a handcar. A body leans against a wall, its belly a gaping hole left by something that forced its way out – or in. A plunger applied to a clogged toilet reveals a key and the deformed, deflated skin of what was once, perhaps, a man; his features are off, deformed, his face caught between that of a person and a pig.
What we’re up against isn’t obvious until we come across the second of the wheels we need for the handcart, and the man/animal skins around us come to life, slithering after us like snakes. We do the only thing we can do: we run. It gets worse from there; the first living human we encounter is impossibly tall, his face a Halloween mask of sagging skin, empty eye sockets, a maw that is always open. He skitters after us like a spider, biting our heads off if he catches us. He is not the worst of it; not even close. We spend most of Reanimal running from something. I don’t want to say more. These are terrors you really should see for yourself.
But I can say this: the place the boy and girl have returned to is wrong. There is a theory that hell is the worst moments of your life, replayed over and over again, without ceasing, simultaneously something you recognize and fresh at the same time. What does it say that the boy and girl have seemingly returned here by choice after having escaped? “I told you to leave,” the boy we encountered tells us later. Or are they all trapped here, together, in a hell we can’t leave? Only one thing is certain: we are off the edge of the map. Here be dragons.
As we continue, the world opens up to us. We navigate dark forests, the flooded ruins of cities, active warzones, and until the end, whatever shattered this place is only partially clear. Our journey is only partially linear. Returning to the boat allows us to explore, to explore this flooded place and find what lies off the beaten path. It is here that Reanimal is most obviously a video game, rewarding the curious with new masks, collectible concept art, and so on, but it never feels out of place or forced, and doesn’t detract from the atmosphere. Nor does the occasional replay of a chase sequence because you don’t initially know what to do or where to go, which is enough to spell your end. Reanimal’s atmosphere, its art, its sense of place and character and mystery carry the day at every turn, through the odd confusion, annoyance, or visual bug. It compelled us to see it through to the end, to understand the tale it was trying to tell in its roughly six-hour journey through hell. I think I understand. But I know there is much we missed, and I want to return to see it through, and see what, if anything, changes as a result.
Secretlab is known for high-quality chairs, which have consistently been featured at the top of IGN's list of the best gaming chairs. Secretlab's latest flagship chair, the Titan Evo Nanogen, currently holds the title as the 'overall best,' and is now getting its first discount of 2026. This is one of the more premium gaming chairs you can buy right now, so any sort of discount is notable.
The Secretlab Titan Evo Nanogen Edition Is on Sale
The Titan Evo Nanogen doesn't come cheap, but what you get for the price is a premium experience. It's a bucket-style seat that is comfortable right out of the box. The 'Nanogen' part of the name refers to Secretlab's in-house-developed Nanogen hybrid leatherette and nanofoam composite seat cushion.
The usual price of this chair is $799, but the Presidents Day sale drops that down to $750. It may not seem like much, but this is likely the lowest price we'll see on this chair all year. It's also still cheaper than a comparable Herman Miller gaming chair while offering more features tailored to gamers.
Both the Pure White and Pure Black versions of the chair are on sale right now. These are the newest versions of the Nanogen and are currently still marked as preorders. Secretlab has an estimated shipping date of March 8 2026, with a note that it could arrive earlier than that.
Secretlab is also discounting a number of its themed Titan Evo chairs as part of this sale, including the popular Genshin Impact editions. The original Titan Evo may not be as nice as the newer Nanogen, but it's still one of the best gaming chairs on the market right now.
It's that time of year: filing your tax return. It's a good day for people who overpay their taxes throughout the year and receive a nice fat check in return. It's not so good of a day for people who have claimed too many exemptions. Whatever the case, most Americans will need to file a tax return no later than April 15 and that's just two months away.
File Your Federal and State Tax Returns for Free
TurboTax is offering a great incentive where you can file both your federal and state returns for $0, guaranteed, with no hidden fees through Turbotax's DIY mobile app. There are a list of requisites to be eligible:
You didn't file with TurboTax last year (or didn't file at all)
You must file your tax return no later than February 28
You must file through TurboTax's DIY mobile app
This only applies to Do it Yourself, not TurboTax's Expert products
The best part about this deal - besides the fact that it's free - is that it works for any tax situation, for example even if you have to report cryptocurrency or stocks (Schedule D), freelance business income (Schedule C), or rental income (Schedule E). That makes it even better than TurboTax's Free Edition software, which only works for customers with simple Form 1040 tax situations. The mobile app also supports automated data entry; you can snap a photo of your W-2 and TurboTax will import the data from over 1 million employers automatically. Give it a try, since it won't cost you anything.
Eric Song is the IGN commerce manager in charge of finding the best gaming and tech deals every day. When Eric isn't hunting for deals for other people at work, he's hunting for deals for himself during his free time.
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