Warning: This review contains full spoilers for The Pitt Season 2, Episode 3!

My big takeaway from last week's episode of The Pitt is that the series has acquired an enhanced sense of humor in Season 2. There's definitely a more lighthearted quality to the goings-on in the emergency ward right now. That doesn't necessarily change in Episode 3, though this one veers a little more in the direction of heartwarming character moments. As before, the takeaway isn't so much, "Gee, this series has lost its edge," as "Crap, they're buttering us up before things really take a turn, aren't they?"

Episode 3 chronicles what appears to be the last (relatively) calm and peaceful hour of the day shift before chaos breaks out. As such, it's able to devote a lot of time to furthering the handful of key medical cases that have cropped up so far. If anything, my one complaint about this episode is that it emphasizes the patients over the doctors a bit too much.

That's especially frustrating when it comes to Dr. Langdon (Patrick Ball), a character I really feel isn't getting the full attention he deserves so far in Season 2. It's also a bit weird to see so little of Mel (Taylor Dearden), given how much emphasis the previous two episodes placed on her malpractice suit and generally frazzled mental state. But, to be fair, I wonder how much the weekly format plays into that problem. Will it be as noticeable to anyone who binges the whole season later on? Probably not.

In any case, what we do get out of Episode 3 is a lot of scenes that emphasize the compassion these doctors show for their patients. That continues to be the theme of the scenes with unhoused patient Troy Digby (Charles Baker), and with the Louie (Ernest Harden Jr.) subplot. And it comes across in various other storylines, such as the husband and wife who reconnect after a terrible motorcycle accident, or the terrific scenes between Robby and the Jewish burn victim. Her references to the tragic real-world Pittsburgh synagogue shooting of 2018 are haunting.

As much as the show does a great job of conveying the agonizing, soul-sucking nature of working in a major American hospital ER, it's also nice to see the flip side. These doctors and nurses genuinely care about their work and about bettering the lives they come into contact with. These patients are real people with real pain and suffering, not names on a spreadsheet. These scenes don't come across as hokey or maudlin, but they do serve to inject a much-needed dose of optimism into a series full of pain and suffering.

Another highlight of Episode 3 is seeing the Kylie Conners (Annabelle Toomey) case play out and reach its dramatic crescendo. After Dr. Santos nearly pushes Kylie's father to physical violence, it turns out there's a much more benign explanation for the girl's many injuries. The series really needed to knock Santos down a peg and remind us that she can't be right about every personal crusade she undertakes, and that's what we get here. It'll be interesting to see how and if this defeat weighs on her going forward.

As much as this is a heart-warming and oddly soothing installment of the series, the final moments make it clear that it won't last. The Pitt is about to get a huge influx of new patients. I wouldn’t say the new season is off to a slow start by any means, but it will be a nice change of pace seeing the tone darken and the tension in the ER start to ramp up in Episode 4. Just how bad can it get? Considering how early in the day we still are, I'd guess pretty bad.

There isn't really a better way I could describe Hytale, the new survival crafter from some former Minecraft modders, than to say it's basically Minecraft 2. From the block-by-block breaking and building, to the stylized environments and enemies, to the procedural world generation, this feels like the, "What would we change if we had the chance to start over again?" version of the now legendary 2009 classic. Many games have been influenced by Mojang's trendsetter, but this one is more of a cover song than a subgenre. And while developer Hypixel Studios’ lawyers might not love hearing me say that, I honestly don't think it's a bad thing. Even in Early Access, it's a good cover!

All of this will be pretty familiar if you've put any time at all into Minecraft, but with some streamlining here and there. You no longer have to begin your journey punching trees, for instance, since basic tools are made with sticks and rubble that can be collected easily with your bare hands. Also, breaking the trunk of a tree will cause everything above it to collapse and drop its resources, which was almost enough to win me over on its own. I still to this day hate having to chop upwards to hollow out a tree in Minecraft!

Movement is also a lot more modern and fluid. You can jump up to three blocks high and pull yourself up, which feels like such a huge quality-of-life improvement over the one-block jump limit in Minecraft. It's even possible to take a running leap at a ledge, hit the side, and pull yourself up. We've got proper parkour now, and I don't know that I would ever want to give it up.

Building has some welcome additions as well. There are actual roof pieces, for instance, so you don't need to repurpose stairs. Most block types can be rotated using the R key before placing them. Half slabs can even be placed vertically to create thinner, interior walls. However, the way they're aligned on the grid and the lack of corner pieces mean you either end up with oddly offset layouts or missing corners, which is a bit of a shame. I wish they could dynamically snap together the way fences do.

It also just runs better than Minecraft on my Ryzen 7 3700X, 32GB RAM, and RTX 4070 Ti-powered system. Even with the draw distance cranked up, my framerates sit comfortably above 60. I haven't had time to stress test it with anything as elaborate as a 1:1 recreation of Minas Tirith or whatever, but for now it's like butter.

Combat is fine. There are a handful of different weapon types, from swift-slashing double daggers to a classic sword and shield setup with more defensive options. Each one has its own unique charge attack and a special meter that can be filled up to release a devastating finisher. Archery can be exciting, but I feel like arrows drop off too quickly to allow for really impressive long-range shots. And I suspect this has to do with the fact that enemies shot from even the current max range often have a really hard time figuring out where the shot came from, which makes it a bit too exploitable.

I'm quite impressed with the enemy variety already, with everything from goblin bomb-throwers to really terrifying lava toads that can catch you with their tongues and pull you in for a very painful bite attack. There are a handful of new creatures to fight in every biome, like yetis in the cold mountains and flying insects in the desert. The way they spawn can feel strange and off-putting though. Especially when exploring underground, it seems like they'll tend to clump up just on the edge of the small safe zone around a player, so I often turn back to leave the way I came only to find an almost literal wall of enemies behind me.

The biomes themselves have a pretty good variety as well, ranging from a chill fairy tale forest all the way up to intimidating basalt islands that can only be accessed with some intense mountaineering. What's even cooler is that every surface biome has its own associated subterranean environments that can spawn below it. Underneath the desert, you might run into harrowing hives for giant insects. Deeper underground are scorching lava tunnels filled with fire-themed enemies.

As someone who usually plays Minecraft on Large Biomes mode, though, they do feel a bit cramped, and this can't be adjusted yet. If you're standing in the desert and you can see a swamp and a lava island just over the next hill, it gives the impression that the world is more of a theme park patchwork than a real place. Hytale also doesn't support the kinds of extremely deep caverns and monumental mountains that came to Minecraft in the last couple years when they raised both the floor and ceiling for world generation significantly, which contributes to that diorama feeling.

That said, the generated structures scattered around enhance exploration quite a bit. Trork strongholds full of hidden loot chests, often guarded by about a dozen minions and a stronger chieftain, offer exciting targets with worthwhile rewards, at least the first time through. There are even villages of neutral Kweebec, though at this point they only have a limited selection of items to sell. And some of them, like recipes and new seeds for farming, feel a little bit pointless at the moment since there isn't much difference between the dishes you can cook other than the broad tiers of quality.

There's very little direction in the Early Access launch version of Hytale, either. The main hub area, the Forgotten Temple, is a rotunda of literal Under Construction signs. I even stumbled into some dungeons out in the world where I'd be excited to throw the doors open only to find one of these barriers promising there will be something here, some day. It's not clear what the larger, overarching goal is supposed to be. You can progress through the different tiers of materials that are found in increasingly dangerous biomes, but I quickly ran out of things to do after that.

I'm not sure if there will eventually be a story or bigger bosses to find or anything like that. I haven't run into them yet if they exist already. The only really specific endgame activity revolves around craftable Fragment Keys, which teleport you to a smaller challenge map to collect rare resources within a strict time limit. I found the whole system a bit underbaked so far, though they are one of the only efficient ways to acquire certain late game materials.

After watching Final Fantasy VII Remake Intergrade’s gorgeous opening cutscene on Switch 2, I instinctively reached for the PlayStation 5 controller sitting on my coffee table instead of my Switch 2 Pro Controller. That’s not to say VII Remake looks exactly as good on Switch 2 as it does on the beefier PS5, but this is an impressive port that’s easily up there with the best third-party games we’ve seen so far in the Switch 2’s first year, and I’m still not used to games looking this beautiful on my Nintendo console.

That strong first impression held up as I blasted through the familiar first hours of Cloud’s adventure in Midgar – which remains one of my favorite RPGs of the decade – with solid performance both handheld and docked. Digging through the menus also revealed tons of options to streamline progression for newcomers looking to see what all the hype is, or for returning fans who just want to blast through the epic adventure at a quicker pace on the go. No matter your experience with prior editions of VII Remake, the new Switch 2 version checks pretty much every box you could ask for from a portable version. If you’re a Nintendo-only gamer who’s been waiting for this one for a while, you shouldn’t hesitate to dive in.

FFVII Remake on Switch 2 Looks Great When Docked

When playing on my TV, VII Remake on Switch 2 impressed across all aspects: cutscenes, exploration, and most crucially, its fast-paced combat. It’s a small shame that it runs at 30 fps both handheld and docked, but I didn’t notice a single dropped frame during gameplay. It might’ve occasionally hiccupped during cutscenes, but I only noticed while examining it with a hypercritical eye for the purposes of this evaluation. It’s pretty safe to say that when docked, you can expect extremely consistent performance. It may not be 60 fps like on the other consoles, but it felt perfectly playable and responsive at all times.

I’m impressed with the little details I remember loving in VII Remake back in 2020 that have carried over here: the way the light reflects off Cloud’s Buster Sword as you run around still looks really nice. It targets 1080p while docked, missing out on the Switch 2’s highest capabilities but still looking really good nonetheless, with detailed character models and environments. Some NPCs popped in the distance when I was exploring the Sector 7 slums, but to my memory, that’s how it was on PS4 as well. And whether I was fighting a swarm of Shinra security officers or the hulking Scorpion Sentinel within a Mako reactor, VII Remake always kept up with the action, even when swapping between Cloud, Barrett, and Tifa to perform flashy abilities and Limit Breaks. Pro tip for Pro Controller users: I mapped the left and right d-pad to the GL and GR backpaddles on my controller, using them to conveniently swap between characters in combat.

Handheld Is a Totally Reasonable Way to Play

Playing in handheld is similarly impressive, but all of the minor complaints I noted about docked mode are slightly magnified. It’s still a solid 30 fps for the most part, but I noticed more dips during cutscenes specifically. But that doesn’t impact the combat, which always felt really smooth and totally fun. The resolution also takes a hit as you’d expect, and I noticed certain details like Cloud’s hair looked a lot blurrier. But when everything is in motion, VII Remake still looks nice on the Switch 2’s small screen, and it’s a completely viable way to play through it. It’s eye-catching to see modern AAA games run this well on a handheld device, and I think this era of games that originally came out on PS4 are the best fit for really solid ports to Switch 2. Final Fantasy VII Remake, as well as things like Street Fighter 6 that we saw last year, are third-party games that have dedicated versions on both PS4 and PS5, which have generally seemed to scale well to Switch 2.

Intergrade’s DLC Expansion Is Here, Too

Unlike Nintendo, which is still selling Breath of the Wild’s nine-year-old DLC content separately from its new Nintendo Sw itch 2 Edition, Square Enix has included everything in the Intergrade package for $40. That means you also get Episode INTERmission, an additional bite-sized campaign starring Yuffie, an optional party member from the original Final Fantasy VII who is now a central part of the Remake project. It takes about five hours to reach INTERmission’s credits, and it’s a really solid followup to the main campaign.

Streamlined Options for Casual Players or Double Dippers

There’s a lot here that makes a full replay pretty enticing. First, you can fast-forward through cutscenes at either 1.5- or 2-times speed, making it a snappier revisit for those who already know everything that happens but still want to see it play out. And, the brand-new Streamlined Progression menu adds options you’re probably used to seeing in modern remakes and remasters of old-school RPGs, like the HD-2D Dragon Quest games or even the most recent version of the original Final Fantasy VII itself. Having access to things like constant maximum health and magic points, an infinitely full Limit gauge, or the ability to deal 9999 damage on every hit lets you tailor your playthrough however you’d like, and it’s really cool to see those options come to a modern game. There’s also a nifty Head Start mode that hands you high-level characters and plenty of money, equipment, and abilities right from the beginning. I’d never recommend someone plays with these activated for their first playthrough, but it’s definitely fun to revisit old favorites by way of a frictionless power trip that lets you see all the sights again. It’s worth noting these features aren’t exclusive to Switch 2, Square Enix also updated the PS5 and PC versions with the same options, and everything is included in the new Xbox Series X|S release as well.

This Isn’t the Final Final Fantasy

Final Fantasy VII Remake is just part one of Square Enix’s currently unfinished Remake trilogy, with 2024’s Final Fantasy VII Rebirth representing the middle chapter, and a third and final entry yet to be formally revealed. If you’re worried about starting the series with just one entry on the platform so far, Square Enix has already committed to bringing Rebirth to Switch 2 and Xbox Series X|S, as well as the in-development third game. So you can jump in worry-free: the full story will eventually make it to Switch 2, and this first port is a great way to get things started.

Secretlab just launched preorders for its highly anticipated lineup of Pokémon gaming chairs and, not surprisingly, they're selling out quickly. These themed Titan Evo chairs - decked out in your choice of Gengar, Eevee, and Pikachu regalia - have all pretty much sold out of their first wave of preorders and have moved onto their second or third waves. I have no clue how many "waves" there will be for this initial batch, but if you want your chair to arrive within the first half of 2026, you should probably put in your preorder as soon as you can.

Preorder the New Secretlab Pokemon Gaming Chairs

Paramount+ has just gone through its first price increase since 2024, and the change is happening just ahead of UFC 324 coming to the platform. If you're new to the streaming service or looking to return, you're probably wondering if there's a way to save some money on a subscription right now.

Unfortunately, there don't seem to be any promo codes or coupon offers going on today. That's not to say there isn't any way to get a discounted subscription, but the usual special promotions for any of the Paramount+ plans are non-existent right now. What's more, the long-standing Paramount+ free trial has officially been removed alongside the price increase. With those things in mind, here are the options available right now.

Paramount+ Deals for January 2026

There are currently only two ways to save on a subscription: Signing up as a student or opting for an annual plan.

Students Get 50% Off

The Nintendo Switch 2 was the best-selling console of 2025 in the U.S., both in unit sales and dollar sales, selling a total of 4.4 million units in the U.S, and continuing its streak of selling faster than the original Nintendo Switch over the same period.

This comes from Circana's full-year reporting on the U.S. games market courtesy of analyst Mat Piscatella, and shouldn't come as a shock to anyone. The Switch 2 has been at the top consistently since it launched earlier in the year, amid a period of decline for the steadily aging PS5 and Xbox Series consoles.

Battlefield 6 was the best-selling game of last year, and the Nintendo Switch 2 Pro Controller was the best-selling accessory.

Overall, the U.S. games market reached $60.7 billion in sales for all of 2025, and $7.8 billion in December alone. That's up 1% and 3% year-over-year, respectively.

In hardware, spending was up 9% year-over-year to $5.4 billion for the year, and up 6% year-over-year to $1.2 billion in December. The Nintendo Switch 2, as the best-selling console of the year, managed to sell 4.4 million units, 94% higher than the original Switch at the same amount of time after its own launch, and 35% ahead of the PlayStation 4. It also continues its reign as the fastest-selling video game console hardware platform, with Piscatella pointing out on Bluesky that the Game boy Advance remains the fastest-selling hardware platform overall after seven months on sale.

Over in software, December spending was up 3% to $5.9 billion, with subscription services seeing the biggest increase of 24% year-over-year. Overall full-year spending was only up 1% year-over-year, with subscription spending increasing 20% offsetting declines in everything else except mobile spending.

While Battlefield 6 was the best-selling game of the whole year, Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 took the crown in December, despite its precense on Game Pass making its impact on Xbox much harder to tally. Fortnite saw the highest total active users across PlayStation and Xbox in 2025 of any game, with over half of all active users on the two platforms playing Fortnite at least once.

As for other games, the top five sellers for the full year should shock no one who's been watching the numbers all month: after Battlefield 6 was NBA 2K26, Borderlands 4, Monster Hunter: Wilds, and Call of Duty Black Ops 7, again noting that Call of Duty was a Game Pass Day 1 title. The rest of the list was populated by a series of expected sellers, with some standouts such as The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion: Remastered coming in at No.9, Elden Ring: Nightreign at No.14, Pokemon Legends: Z-A at No.17 (though Nintendo doesn't report digital sales, so it's possible this would have been higher), and Split Fiction at No.19. Grand Theft Auto V clocked in at No.20 as players await the release of Grand Theft Auto VI, probably this year.

And finally, just looking at December, standout games including Metroid Prime 4: Beyond, which launched into No.7 overall for the month, and Flight Simulator 2024, which released on PlayStation in December and shot from No.114 in November to No.16 last month. Over on PC for December, both Elden Ring and Elden Ring: Nightreign saw jumps likely due to the new Nightreign DLC.

December 2025 U.S. Top 20 Best-Selling Games:

1. Call of Duty: Black Ops 7
2. NBA 2K26
3. Battlefield 6
4. Madden NFL 26
5. EA Sports FC 26
6. Pokemon Legends: Z-A*
7. Metroid Prime 4: Beyond (NEW)*
8. Minecraft*
9. Donkey Kong Bananza*
10. Ghost of Yotei
11. EA Sports College Football 26
12. Grand Theft Auto V
13. Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds
14. Forza Horizon 5
15. Red Dead Redemption II
16. Flight Simulator 2024
17. Kingdom Come: Deliverance II
18. Kirby Air Riders*
19. Super Mario Galaxy + Super Mario Galaxy 2*
20. Marvel's Spider-Man 2

Full Year 2025 U.S. Top 20 Best-Selling Games:

1. Battlefield 6
2. NBA 2K26
3. Borderlands 4
4. Monster Hunter: Wilds
5. Call of Duty Black Ops 7
6. Madden NFL 26
7. EA Sports College Football 26
8. EA Sports FC 26
9. The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion: Remastered
10. Call of Duty: Black Ops 6
11. Ghost of Yotei
12. MLB: The Show 25*
13. Minecraft*
14. Elden Ring: Nightreign
15. Kingdom Come: Deliverance II
16. Forza Horizon 5
17. Pokemon Legends: Z-A*
18. WWE 2K25
19. Split Fiction
20. Grand Theft Auto V

* Indicates that some or all digital sales are not included in Circana's data. Some publishers, including Nintendo, do not share certain digital data for this report.

Rebekah Valentine is a senior reporter for IGN. Got a story tip? Send it to rvalentine@ign.com.

Skytech Gaming is offering a fantastic deal on a powerful 4K-capable gaming PC during a month when prebuilt prices are constantly on the rise. Right now you can pick up this Skytech O11 Vision AMD Ryzen 7 7700 Radeon RX 9070 XT gaming PC for just $1595.99 with free shipping when you apply three coupon codes: "NY100", "SMS50" and "SWARM". The Radeon RX 9070 XT is an outstanding graphics card that can run the latest games in 4K.

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Text-based games, management RPGs, and visual novels – of whatever kind – rarely make the most exciting previews. It's just not easy to build a rich interest in the world and characters of a story you can only get the slightest taste of. I'm very pleased to say that a few hours with Sovereign Tower broke that trend entirely.

Whosoever turns the key in the giant magic lock on the tower becomes king. So, as the mystically-appointed lord of the tower, your poor faceless wanderer becomes a very important person overnight in what developer Wild Wits calls a "story-rich, Round Table management RPG." It's an entertaining concept that draws its characters and dialogue equally from fantastical tradition and modern life. Couple that with a deliciously detailed art style and a sense of what's most entertaining to do in both management games and visual novels.

That's enough to sell it, I think, but it also has some nice surprises and a weird little twist on the genre as a whole. I had a pretty darn good time with it, and I'm looking forward to more.

King of the Castle

In each turn of Sovereign Tower, you have to do two things: accept audiences, then assign knights from your round table to various quests. Taking audiences is a simple concept: Sit on the throne and deal with problems people bring you. The decisions you make there can alter the path of the story, bring up new quests for your knights, or avoid problems. They'll also affect the sovereign's standing with the realm's four factions: the Nobility, People, Merchants, and Scholars.

Some problems go away if you just throw money at them, and the taxes you get at the start of every cycle can pay for some of that—but those are the same taxes you use to pay for stuff like cool new swords and horses and magic potions, so do you really want to spend them on boring stuff like bridges or whatever? Probably not.

That sounds pretty normal, but it's the weirdos that show up to need things from you or to join your kingdom that make it memorable. I encountered a stinky jester, proud emissaries unable to admit they couldn't solve their own problems, clever peasants, annoying nobles, and even an assassin. Talking with them solidifies the personality of your blank-slate Sovereign, raising their stats in Audacity, Tyranny, Wisdom, and Kindness to unlock alternate decisions in future events.

The Knights are the flavor that'll really have to carry the game, and from what I saw they might do it. I met a huge guy that acted like a child, a very fancy boy, an extremely overdramatic guy, a nice lady who loved forest critters, the most goth knight ever, and even a straight-up actual wolf. Each of them had their own unique little events and dialogue that popped up from time to time, each of which affected your sovereign's relationship with them. They also had history to learn, as well as more straightforward stats, all of which affect their performance on missions.

Figuring out which knight would be best for each quest was an actually interesting choice. Equipment like a specific horse to ride, a sword to use, or a magic potion can give them temporary stat boosts, but it's often the bonuses or penalties from their personality traits that make the difference between a failure and success or between mere success and an outstanding victory.

For example if you're doing something that's a bit of public relations? Probably should send the more charismatic knight, but not the really arrogant one. Watching each knight's background and figuring out which of the little highlighted keywords apply to the current mission is a fun bit of understanding the characters.

And there's a real penalty for failure. Your knights each have an armor score, which if it goes to zero means that knight's, well, dead and gone. Your blacksmith can only fix one knight's armor each cycle—so you need to be reasonably sure that the task you're sending a knight on is one they can at least survive if they fail.

Shining Armor

None of the characters, nor the entire game as I saw it, would have nearly as much personality without the visual art on display in Sovereign Tower, and I've got to take a moment to run through the influences and elements that make it up. Starting with the simple choices of colors to draw from: The warm pastels, earth tones, and jewel tones are lovely, then they're combined with copious golden shades and tints to express lighting. It's a palette of colors that's something between stained glass or rich watercolor on thick paper.

The characters are drawn with a lot of emotion and movement, too, for what are otherwise relatively flat portraits. You can feel the shrug in how Urusla stands, for example. You can see the carefree attitude in the angle of Angelica's head. And, well, everything about Gideon tells you exactly who he is and how he behaves. It's not just great illustration work in that you can feel the motion, it's that you can immediately start to feel who the characters are just from how they look.

It's clear that these are artists who understand how to work their chosen medium, and if you'll put up with me for a nerd moment, it is deeply reminiscent of the Art Nouveau period in design from France, Belgium, and the Netherlands. Particularly the advertisements, posters, and calendars of justly-famous artist Alphonse Mucha. It's a fitting choice, too: Mucha's work often used the kind of medieval romantic and even fairytale themes that Sovereign Tower seems to use in its stories—I imagine he'd approve of being the inspiration here.

I think that's where I'd place this whole game's artistic style, too: It's a blend of medieval fantasy and Arthurian romance setting, the art of Mucha, and the writing of a wryly clever modern comic book. There's basically nothing to dislike in that.

The Clever Twist

It's not a surprise to people who like this kind of game that there are going to be secret events and pathways through the story to uncover, as well as desperate outcomes and painful prices to pay when choosing poorly at certain decision points. I found that Sovereign Tower must have more than a few, since I managed to stumble into at least two hidden story outcomes while playing just by assigning an unexpected or suboptimal knight to a specific quest.

The frustration with these kinds of events, however, is that they can give you unwanted outcomes or change the story when you weren't expecting them to or were aiming for another outcome. The only choice you've got at that point is often to play the entire visual novel over again just to see a new path or the immediate consequence of a tough choice.

The real good choice that Sovereign Tower makes is to have a built-in do-over mechanic. See, there's a demon that lives in a cage in the tower basement, which I'm sure isn't scary or plot-relevant at all because the demon helps you do something very useful: Step back in time. Don't worry—the demon assures me this is because it has absolutely no bad intentions and is bound to help you—much like all the other magical things that live in the tower.

With the demon's help you can turn back time, especially when some choice you've made would lead to a disastrous end. I expect you'll also be able to use the power to avoid the worst ends in the game, and I'm betting most players will want to use it at least once or twice to avoid making whatever NPC they've chosen to romance not mad at them about something. There's also the hint, given in the trailer and screenshots for Sovereign Tower, that you'll be able to use the demon's power to unlock alternate dialogue in situations you've seen before—tagged with an "Omniscience" stat that surely won't upset or alarm people who don't realize you're time travelling.

Overall, from the art and the writing, I'm pretty intrigued by Sovereign Tower and it's going on my list of games to watch out for. Sure, the game mechanics are pretty simple, but when the story and characters are interesting in this way I'm glad the game rules are getting out of the way to let me entertain myself—failing and succeeding on my own terms.

If you’ve been looking to grab some Amazon devices for a super low price, you’ll want to check out Woot’s sale. From Ring Doorbells to Echo Smart Speakers, everything is an extra 20% off. That’s not the only great deal at Woot, as you can grab a Samsung Frame TV for the lowest price we’ve seen. Moving on to Amazon deals, a LEGO F1 model car kit, Razer’s Black Shark V3 Pro Headset, and Tom & Jerry: The Golden Era Anthology are all seeing healthy discounts. Check out all the top deals below:

TL;DR: The Best Deals Today

20% Off Already Discounted Amazon Devices

Already discounted Amazon devices are an extra 20% on Woot today. When you use the code DEVICES20 at checkout, you’ll see an extra 20% taken off the price at the Amazon-owned company. It’s an awesome sale with items selling out quickly. In fact, a few products I had saved were already gone by the time I went back. Still, whether you’re after a Kindle device, Ring security cameras, Echo smart speakers, Fire TV sticks, and more, there are plenty of deals you’ll want to hop on. Many of these devices are either Amazon refurbished or in like-new condition, but you’ll get a nice 90-day warranty for peace of mind.

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We’ve finally gotten our first good look at Star Wars: Maul - Shadow Lord, the latest animated series in this ever-expanding franchise. Shadow Lord follows Sam Witwer’s iconic villain as he sets about rebuilding his criminal empire in the era of the Empire. And while he may be the star of the show, there are a few other familiar faces popping up in this series.

Let’s take a deep dive into the new Shadow Lord trailer to break down both the returning favorites and the new additions to the Star Wars ranks. How does this series fit into Maul’s complex storyline? Here’s what you need to know.

Sam Witwer as Maul

Naturally, the former Darth Maul is the star of the show with this new series. For a character that was seemingly killed off in his first appearance back in 1999’s Star Wars: The Phantom Menace, Maul has certainly taken on a second life thanks to The Clone Wars and other animated series. Shadow Lord aims to fill in some major blanks with Maul’s story and connect the dots between the end of The Clone Wars and Maul’s cameo appearance in 2018’s Solo: A Star Wars Story.

For those who haven’t been following Maul’s journey over the past decade-and-a-half, the character made his unexpected return in The Clone Wars, where we learned that he survived his duel with Obi-Wan Kenobi through the power of sheer hate. Maul was restored to some semblance of sanity and health and set about building a criminal empire called the Shadow Collective with the help of his brother, Savage Opress, and the Mandalorian faction known as Death Watch.

And yet, fate still hasn’t been kind to Maul in the years since. He narrowly survived a reunion with his old master, Darth Sidious (though Savage wasn’t so lucky). In the final Clone Wars story arc, “The Siege of Mandalore,” Maul was defeated by Ahsoka Tano and taken into Republic custody. He narrowly escaped after the events of Order 66 played out, and that’s pretty much where we find him now in Shadow Lord. He’s a free man again, but his criminal organization is in shambles, and the newly formed Empire is hunting him along with the other surviving Jedi.

As the series opens, Maul’s journey to rebuild the Shadow Collective takes him to a new Star Wars planet called Janix. This advanced planetary metropolis has mostly been a free player in the larger galactic order up till now, meaning there’s a lot of opportunity for an ambitious crime lord looking to re-stake his claim on the underworld.

“It's one part Gotham, one part Metropolis and a hundred percent Star Wars with all these different levels and layers,” Executive Producer Matt Michnovetz told StarWars.com. “It's a city essentially built into a crater on this planet that is untouched by the Empire. It's got a functioning democracy and law enforcement doing a good job of policing their own community. It's a rich environment for crime and gangsters, but so far there's been a very peaceful accord between all of them in the interest of business.”

Shadow Lord is set early on in the reign of Palpatine’s Empire, at least in Season 1. The question is how much time the show will ultimately cover. Will we see Maul grow to become the master of the powerful Crimson Dawn organization, as he is in Solo: A Star Wars Story (which is set about 10 years before A New Hope)? Will the series advance even further to reveal what happens after and why Maul becomes stranded on Malchor in Star Wars Rebels? There are a lot of blanks the series can fill in with this character, even if we already know how his story ultimately ends.

Gideon Adlon as Devon Izara

Maul: Shadow Lord will introduce a number of new characters to the Star Wars canon, but probably the most important of these is Devon Izara. From what we can glean from the trailer, Devon is one of the Jedi who survives the Jedi Purge, only to find herself on the run and battling against Stormtroopers and the Sith Inquisitorius.

It appears that Devon becomes an unlikely ally of Maul’s in this series, despite the two characters coming from opposite sides of the Jedi/Sith tracks. As Devon is sure to learn, the old rivalries don’t necessarily matter in this new era where survival is everything.

“Devon is a young person who's living through challenging times and realizes that the future she once thought she was going to have is no longer possible, and so she has to adapt,” said Michnovetz.

Maul is certainly fond of recruiting minions to become his latest Sith apprentice. He did it with his brother, and he tried to do it with Ahsoka on Mandalore. We suspect he sees a similar opportunity in Devon, a chance to shepherd an impressionable young Force user and, in turn, forge himself into a true Sith master capable of exacting vengeance on Sidious.

Whether he ultimately proves successful in turning Devon to the Dark Side will probably be one of the key questions in the series. But some fans are already speculating that we’re about to see Lucasfilm add another popular Expanded Universe character to the modern Disney canon. The theory is that Devon will eventually become Darth Talon, another Force-sensitive Twi’lek and a major villain from the comic book series Star Wars Legacy.

In those comics, Talon is active more than a hundred years after the fall of the Empire, but that hasn’t stopped the fires of speculation from burning. And it’s worth remembering that George Lucas himself was a big fan of Talon and reportedly wanted her included in the canceled Darth Maul video game. Maybe he’ll finally see a version of that desire realized.

Wagner Moura as Brander Lawson

While Maul will face plenty of opposition of the lightsaber-wielding variety (and we’ll get to those characters shortly), it looks as though one of his main new antagonists in the series is a humble cop named Captain Brander Lawson. Brander is a police detective on Janix, one who has so far managed to keep the peace in the chaotic early years of the Empire’s reign. Maul’s arrival surely threatens that fragile peace.

Brander wears a uniform similar to that of Kyle Soller’s Syril Karn in Season 1 of Star Wars: Andor. That gives us a clearer picture of what his place is in the law enforcement hierarchy. He’s not an Imperial officer, but part of the local Janix police force. We suspect that, as much as Brander and the Empire are aligned in their desire to see Maul brought to justice, he’ll be butting heads with them as they start to assert more dominance over the Janix sector.

Richard Ayoade as Two-Boots

Richard Ayoade is adding another Star Wars role to his repertoire with Shadow Lord. Just as he voiced the droid Q9-0 in The Mandalorian, Ayoade will play a different droid character called Two-Boots in Shadow Lord. Two-Boots is Brander Lawson’s faithful partner and companion. He gets his name from - you guess it - the unusual pair of boots he wears on the job.

Star Wars fans will get a chance to become acquainted with both Brander and Two-Boots before the animated series premieres in April. They’re also central figures in the Marvel Comics prequel series Star Wars: Shadow of Maul.

“This is a sci-fi story, but it's also a crime story,” writer Benjamin Percy told Marvel.com. “It's a story about cops, criminal syndicates, a neon-lit, shadow-alleyed city that hides many sins and secrets. I'm teamed up with an artist who's already a Star Wars veteran and legend: Madibek Musabeckov. His art is gritty and grounded and perfectly matches the noir tone. We've been in close contact with Lucasfilm—reading scripts and watching episodes of this fantastic new animated series—and our story will serve as a prelude to what viewers will see play out on the screen.”

Vanessa Marshall as Rook Kast

Maul will have at least one other ally in his early quest to rebuild his shattered empire. It turns out some Mandalorians are still loyal to him, even after the fall of their world. Vanessa Marshall will reprise her role as Rook Kast, the leader of Maul’s Mandalorian super commandos. She’s likely a fugitive from the law, like Maul himself, and sees an opportunity in Maul’s criminal scheme.

A.J. LoCascio as Marrok

We first encountered the mysterious Marrok in Ahsoka Season 1, where he was one of several lightsaber-wielding villains going up against Rosario Dawson’s Ahsoka Tano and Natasha Liu Bordizzo’s Sabine Wren. Marrok proved to be a silent but deadly mercenary, and we eventually learned that the reason is that he was resurrected as a zombie by Nightsister magic.

But at this earlier stage in the Star Wars timeline, Marrok is still (as far as we know) an ordinary flesh-and-blood member of the Sith Inquisitorius. He even carries the esteemed rank of First Brother. He’ll even have actual dialogue this time around, with A.J. LoCascio cast in the role for the first time.

“The Empire is consolidating the galaxy from the core worlds out, and the Inquisitorius is stronger than ever,” Michnovetz said. “They're hunting Jedi and other Force users, doing all kinds of nasty work. The galaxy at large is sort of dealing with this slow rise of the Empire and different groups have different understandings of what the Empire is. The same thing goes for the Inquisitors. They’re secret mercenaries that show up out of the darkness.”

We may even learn how Marrok dies his original death in this series. The safe bet is that either Maul himself or Devon gets the upper hand on this character.

Clancy Brown (?) as Eleventh Brother

Marrok won’t be the only Sith Inquisitor to appear in Season 1 of Shadow Lord. We also catch a glimpse of Eleventh Brother, a character who previously appeared in the anthology series Star Wars: Tales of the Jedi and Tales of the Empire. We assume Clancy Brown will once again voice Eleventh Brother.

Like Marrok, it appears that Eleventh Brother has been tasked with hunting down Maul and bringing him to Imperial justice. Unlike Marrok, though, we know he won’t be getting killed off in this show. That honor was already claimed by Ahsoka in Tales of the Jedi.

The Other Shadow Lord Characters

Disney’s press release for Maul: Shadow Lord drops several other key names. We know that the cast also includes Dennis Haysbert as Master Eeko-Dio-Daki, Chris Diamantopoulos as Looti Vario, Charlie Bushnell as Rylee Lawson, David C. Collins as Spybot, and Steve Blum as Icarus. For now, it’s hard to put those names to faces we see in the trailer, but let us know in the comments if you have any ideas.

For more on the future of the Star Wars franchise, find out what to expect from Star Wars in 2026 and see why we only need one thing from Lucasfilm’s new Presidents.

Jesse is a mild-mannered staff writer for IGN. Allow him to lend a machete to your intellectual thicket by following @jschedeen on BlueSky.

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Open box with 90-day warranty

Forza Horizon 6 is set to release for Xbox Series X|S and PC on May 19 — unless you buy the most expensive edition, which comes out May 15. This latest installment of the reliably excellent Microsoft racing series whisks drivers to Japan to get their speed on. It’s available now to preorder in a number of editions (see it at Amazon). Below, you can find out what comes in each one, how much they cost, and more. Let’s put the pedal to the metal and take a look.

Standard Edition

Deluxe Edition

Xbox

• Get it at Xbox Store (digital) - $99.99

PC

• Get it at Steam - $99.99

The deluxe edition includes the game, the preorder bonus detailed below, plus the following:

• Car Pass - 30 new cars, with one new vehicle made available each week starting May 19.
• Welcome Pack - 5 special pre-tuned cars and a Car Voucher, which can be used to claim any car available from the Autoshow. You’ll also receive 3 tickets to redeem any Common or Rare clothing items.

Premium Edition

Xbox

• Get it at Xbox Store - $119.99

PC

• Get it at Steam - $119.99

If you want everything possible included with the game, plus early access, you’ll want to preorder the premium edition. It comes with the game, as well as the following:

• 4 day early access (May 15)
• Car Pass
• Expansion 1
• Expansion 2
• VIP Membership
• Time Attack Car Pack
• Italian Passion Car Pack
• Welcome Pack

On Game Pass Ultimate

Premium Upgrade Bundle

• Get it at Xbox Store - $59.99

If you have Game Pass, but you want to get all the extras included in the Premium edition, you can purchase the premium upgrade bundle.

Preorder Bonus

Preoder any version of Forza Horizon 6, and you'll receive a "pretuned and exclusive" Ferrari J50 in the game.

What Is Forza Horizon 6?

Forza Horizon 6 is the newest installment of Microsoft’s open-world racing game. You play as a tourist who joins the races as a novice and works the way up the racing ladder. It’s set in Japan, with a variety of biomes scattered around, from the skyscraper-dense, neon landscape of Tokyo to winding mountain roads and snowy vistas. It features over 550 real-world cars, which is the most in any Forza Horizon to date. That includes special Forza Edition cars fitted with extreme modifications, as well as rare Aftermarket Cars you can collect.

What About the PS5 Version?

Games that used to be Xbox exclusives are no longer Xbox exclusives in this brave new world we find ourselves in, which means Forza Horizon 6 is coming to PS5. Unfortunately, Microsoft hasn't announced a release date for it. But with Forza Horizon 5's excellent sales numbers on PS5, you can bet it will arrive on Sony's console eventually.

More Preorder Guides

Chris Reed is a commerce editor and deals expert for IGN. He also runs IGN's board game and LEGO coverage. You can follow him on Bluesky.