Mummy fans, you’ve got a lot going for you right now. Lee Cronin’s take is dropping trailers and visuals left and right, and the film is set to be released in just over two months. On top of that, Brendan Fraser and Rachel Weisz are returning for a sequel to the beloved 1999 adventure film — and we now have a release date for that project.

According to the official release calendar for Universal Pictures, the fourth installment in The Mummy franchise — which currently has no official title just yet — will hit theaters on May 19, 2028. It’s a ways away, for sure, but at least there’s a date on the books!

Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett, two of the members of the directorial collective and production company Radio Silence, will serve as directors on the project. By now, you know these guys well; they’ve directed two of the three most recent Scream sequels, both 5 and 6, and both Ready or Not and its sequel film, which is hitting theaters at the end of next month. They also made one of the best V/H/S segments to date, the finale segment of the original film titled “10/31/98.”

David Coggeshall, the writer behind Orphan: First Kill, will write the script for the upcoming Mummy sequel film — and it seems as though the plot of the next movie will be fulfilling a dream for Fraser himself.

"The one I wanted to make is forthcoming," he explained to The Associated Press back in November. "And I've been waiting 20 years for this call. Sometimes it was loud, sometimes it was a faint telegraph. Now? It's time to give the fans what they want."

"The one I wanted to make was never made," he also noted, revealing of the third installment, Tomb of the Dragon Emperor: "the third one was a model of… how can I say this to the AP reporter? NBC had the rights to broadcast the Olympics that year. So they put two together and we went to China."

After The Mummy was released in 1999, the first sequel titled The Mummy Returns debuted two years later in 2001. The third film premiered in 2008, though Weisz did not return for it and was replaced by Maria Bello. Thankfully, though, she’s back and it's hoped she and Fraser will bring the heart and charm of the original right back to this beloved franchise… in 2028, that is.

Lex Briscuso is a film and television critic and a freelance entertainment writer for IGN. You can follow her on Twitter at @nikonamerica.

Crime 101 opens in theaters on Feb. 13.

A few minutes in to Crime 101, with the streets of Los Angeles whipping by, a tense, thudding soundtrack gnawing at you while carefully laid plans are set up with unassuming close-ups only to be paid off in full-circle moments, you might start to think that you’ve seen this movie before. If you find yourself enjoying the cross-cut montage of the main characters crossing paths on the 101 and the evocative LA-at-night atmosphere, you wouldn’t be entirely wrong in feeling a little deja vu.

Like an entry level college course from which the film takes its name, Crime 101 is proficient in all the right elements of a heist movie. Director Bart Layton and the stacked cast led by Chris Hemsworth, Mark Ruffalo and Halle Berry do what they can to take some chances around the periphery, veering from the formula in a few interesting ways. But like a high-end thief who strays from his MO, the movie ultimately pays for it in the end.

Crime 101 doesn’t actively do anything bad. In fact, the film tries to do a handful of interesting things, but only does each of them half as well as it could have with a little more focus. The pull of familiar heist movie tropes, the cat and mouse of Heat or the “one last score and I’m out” of… well, Heat again, proves too strong and too thoroughly reproduced in Crime 101 for the variations to comfortably fold in. It all adds up to a pretty standard heist flick featuring some flourishes to the formula that feel more out of place than like a creative riff on the genre.

For example, Chris Hemsworth’s Mike Davis is an awkward, almost cripplingly shy man who, at times, seems to be neurodivergent. It’s definitely a departure from Thor or any number of the comedic supporting roles he’s shone in over the years. He’s a charismatic presence on screen no matter who he’s playing and his performance here works in the moments where he struggles to connect with a would-be love interest or when he scrubs himself down before a job to avoid leaving DNA evidence behind. However, the characterization gets a little lost when he shows no compunction about car chases or shaking down insurance executives.

Mark Ruffalo’s Detective Lubesnick and Halle Berry’s broker Sharon, even Hemsworth’s thief, all suffer under the unjust treatment of awful bosses and the same dead-end sense of futility. Both Sharon and Detective Lubesnick wear the bitterness well, but are dismissed by their superiors in ways that are equally frustrating and formulaic. The trio also share a clarity as to who the real villains are in their world, leading to no small amount of Robin Hood style class warfare, with the film dipping a toe into a thread of wealthy white people buying and hoarding Black and Native American art while stopping short of a proper eat-the-rich kind of theme.

The real problem is none of this is allowed to be what the movie is “about” because Crime 101 is so determined to fall in line with the crime thriller genre that the flourishes feel more like bugs than features.

On the upside however, Barry Keoghan is an energetic little blast of a character. His version of the dangerous wild card thrown into the mix brings a rabid energy to the proceedings. He’s desperate to prove himself, bouncing back and forth between a skilled criminal and a clear psychopath.

Nick Nolte (now with 100% more gravelly-voice) does his thing as the elderly fence / father figure to Mike, but doesn’t get much else to play with outside of what the elderly fence / father figures usually get to do in movies like this.

Frankly, one of the real highlights is a one-and-a-half scene cameo. Jennifer Jason Leigh, in her screentime with Mark Ruffalo, helps make a tragic scene grounded and hilarious as an argument erupts about how much of a “beach guy” Lubesnick may or may not be. As far as scene partners go, they’re a pair I’d love to see more of.

By the end of the movie, though, the scales are tipped toward familiar crime movie tropes as opposed to the variations on the pattern. There are interesting ideas at play throughout the film that get swapped out like one getaway car for another in service of a plot that’s less compelling than any one of them.

Ultimately, there really isn’t anything wrong with Crime 101. That might be its biggest problem, though.

February 27 is Pokémon's big 30th anniversary of its original launch in Japan, and while details are slowly trickling in on how Nintendo and Game Freak plan to celebrate, TIME Magazine is already getting into the spirit.

The 96-page special edition issue of the magazine is coming out with three different covers, each featuring iconic pocket monsters from over the year - one cover depicts Mega Charizard X, one has Lugia and Ho-Oh, while the third shows off Rayquaza. You can purchase any of the three covers for $14.99 each on Amazon now.

Oscar-nominated racing blockbuster F1 is getting a sequel, producer Jerry Bruckheimer has now confirmed.

Speaking to BBC News today, Bruckheimer confirmed he was "working on a sequel," though did not share further detail on a filming schedule or plans for a release. It's unknown, too, whether F1 star Brad Pitt will return for the second film.

The quick confirmation comes as something of a surprise, just days after executives from both F1 and Apple TV hinted at the possibility of a F1 follow-up while simultaneously suggesting that any public confirmation was still a year away.

"Stay tuned," said Formula 1 boss Stefano Domenicali at an Apple TV press event last week. "We're going to tell you something more in the future. Never say never. But we need to digest more the success of this movie because it was something unique. And if you want to think of a new one, it has to be really, very, very good. Therefore, if this will happen, it will not be for next year. But maybe next year we're going to be here, and hopefully we have something more to announce."

Bruckheimer, who apparently didn't get that memo, today said he planned to be involved again — including in casting decisions. "I never worked with Brad Pitt before and it's really a thrill to work with Brad," he added, without confirming whether the Fight Club, Ocean's 11 and Troy star had yet been tempted back on board for the sequel.

Work on F1 2, or whatever it gets called, seems to still be in its early stages — and that's not surprising, considering the fact that the first F1 is still to see out its award season. Released last summer, the movie earned $630 million at the global box office and garnered four Academy Award nominations for Best Picture, Best Film Editing, Best Sound and Best Visual Effects.

"F1: The Movie follows the sports movie playbook almost perfectly," IGN wrote in its F1 movie review, "finding ways to be just that much better at nearly every stage of its 156-minute runtime – creating a super fun racecar flick in the process that eventually finds its way to victory lane."

Tom Phillips is IGN's News Editor. You can reach Tom at tom_phillips@ign.com or find him on Bluesky @tomphillipseg.bsky.social

A lengthy, 60-plus minutes Sony State of Play is heading our way this Thursday, February 12, and promises new looks at “third-party and indie games headed to PS5, along with the latest from teams at PlayStation Studios.” So, what upcoming games can we expect to see fresh reveals for and gameplay of? Well, here’s what we think is likely to show up, as well as a few out-there guesses.

Exclusives

Seeing as it's shaping up to be PlayStation’s biggest game of 2026, you’d perhaps have expected Wolverine to show up in Thursday’s stream. Well, a late spanner has been thrown into the works via Insomniac’s official X account, which claims that we won’t be seeing any more of its latest Marvel game until “Spring 2026”. Last time I checked, February was in Winter, so maybe we’ll have to wait a little longer.

Spring 2026.

— Insomniac Games (@insomniacgames) February 10, 2026

At the last State of Play, back in September 2025, Insomniac Games gave us a first look at Marvel’s Wolverine in action. As one of Sony’s tentpole releases for this year, it certainly wouldn’t be a shock to see some more X-Men gameplay, as well as perhaps a release date for Logan’s latest adventure. Could we also catch a glimpse of Daredevil, who has been teased to be making an appearance, too?

PlayStation Studio’s first big exclusive of the year comes in the shape of Marathon, Bungie’s extraction shooter, which will be looking to emulate the success of last year’s Arc Raiders. It’s been a bumpy road for the Destiny developer, such as a plagiarism scandal and poor reception to its alpha, but this week’s State of Play will be one of the last chances for it to convince players to hop into its world on March 5.

Later in Spring, we have Saros, Housemarque’s follow-up to Returnal, which will be dropping on April 30. We’ve seen it pop up regularly on recent State of Play streams, and it would make perfect sense to see it here, too, seeing as we’re only 10 weeks away from launch.

Another PS5 console exclusive is Marvel Tokon: Fighting Souls, the upcoming superhero fighting game from Guilty Gear Strive developer Arc System Works. Due for release this year, the flashy-looking fighter suffered from an unfortunate leak earlier this week that revealed a few key details about the game, such as the size of its roster. It would not be a shock to see some of this information officially confirmed as fact on Thursday.

PS5 console exclusive Phantom Blade Zero is a hotly anticipated wuxia action RPG coming from Chinese developer S-Game. The lead character is called Soul, so you can probably guess what genre this project borrows heavily from, too. It’s all looking very impressive, and maybe we’ll get yet another look at it in action this week ahead of its September 9 launch.

Then there’s the freshly revealed Horizon Hunters Gathering, yet another spin-off of the mechanical monster-hunting series created by Guerrilla Games. A 3-player live-service co-op action game, it's getting its first playtest at the end of this month, so, again, it wouldn’t be a surprise if we were to get a further look at some gameplay in this State of Play.

Unveiled at The Game Awards, 4:Loop is a PS5 and PC exclusive that appears to infuse some roguelike elements with the co-op shooting of games like Helldivers and Left 4 Dead. That makes more sense when you consider that Left 4 Dead creator Mike Booth is behind the project, working with Bad Robot Games, the video game wing of film director J.J. Abrams' production company. No release date has been given yet, but playtesting will start soon, with maybe a timing for that revealed at this State of Play.

One exclusive that we don’t think is coming this year, but would certainly love to see more of, is Naughty Dog’s Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet. The Last of Us and Uncharted studio’s upcoming sci-fi action-adventure has gone very quiet since its initial reveal back at the 2024 Game Awards. So, is it time for a deeper look into what this new world has to offer? Let’s hope so.

As for what the other PlayStation Studios are up to, your guess is as good as mine, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t expect one or two surprise reveals or updates. This State of Play stream is over an hour long, after all, so surely there’s something brand-new in there? Perhaps a look at the next project from God of War developer Sony Santa Monica, or a look into the world of Ghost of Yotei: Legends from Sucker Punch? Maybe the time is right for a first sighting of Gran Turismo 8, or an update on the development of Haven Studios’ Fairgames — if we don’t see this one soon, we’ll really start to get worried about it. Then there are two of Sony’s most creative studios, Media Molecule and Team Asobi. We’ve certainly been waiting a lot longer for a follow-up to Dreams than we have Astro Bot, but you never know what’s been going on behind those doors...

Multiplatform

Will we see GTA 6 at this Sony State of Play? No. I will eat my whole fist if we do.

There are a fair few other exciting games that we wouldn’t put body parts on the line for in terms of their likelihood, though. Resident Evil Requiem is imminent, so now seems like as good a time as any to show us one last slice of Leon Kennedy action before the big day on February 27. Sticking with survival horror, Konami has curiously announced a Silent Hill stream will be taking place just two hours after the State of Play. Is this a signal that a more in-depth look at a new Silent Hill game will be at that show, following its reveal just minutes prior as part of PlayStation’s stream? Perhaps this week is when we’ll see Bloober Team’s remake of the original in the series, or – more likely – our first proper look at the Annapurna-published Silent Hill: Townfall, which was first announced in 2022 and has been MIA since.

Back at Capcom briefly, and you can likely expect to see something from one of, if not both, Pragmata and Onimusha: Way of the Sword. Final Fantasy 7 remake director, Naoki Hamaguchi, recently teased that Square Enix will “share more updates than ever before” about the project this year. Does that mean a potential reveal of the third part in the modernised RPG trilogy will happen at this State of Play? Or could we get an Intergrade-style bridging chapter as DLC for Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth?

But, before we get too sidetracked, let’s stick with games closer on the horizon, such as Hitman developer IO Interactive's 007 First Light, and Lego Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight from Warner Bros. Games. Both are coming this May, and their respective developers could share further info on Thursday. Before those, though, March will bring with it Crimson Desert, Pearl Abyss’ ambitious open-world action-adventure that looks set to push the PS5 to its limits. No stranger to a trailer, we can likely expect it to turn up here, too.

As for later in the year, Marvel 1943: Rise of Hydra recently shifted out of its original window of early 2026 to “beyond early 2026”, so your guess is as good as mine as to when we’ll be playing Amy Hennig’s Captain America and Black Panther in World War 2 story. Legendary PlayStation hero Lara Croft will be returning in a “reimagining” of her original game, titled Tomb Raider: Legacy of Atlantis, and Finnish developer Remedy is back with another entry in its connected universe, Control: Resonant. Also announced at The Game Awards was the pleasantly surprising Star Wars: Galactic Racer from the makers of Burnout and Need For Speed that is scheduled to drop in 2026. All of these are possibilities.

As for indies, outside of the announcement of a PS5 version of Hades 2, there are a few destined for PlayStation that I’d personally love to see more of on Thursday. Namely, Beethoven & Dinosaur’s coming of age story Mixtape, old-school cartoon-inspired shooter Mouse P.I. For Hire, and Japanese convenience store sim inKONBINI: One Store. Many Stories.

What game are you most looking forward to seeing more of at this week’s Sony State of Play? Let us know in the comments!

Simon Cardy is a Senior Editor at IGN who can mainly be found skulking around open world games, indulging in Korean cinema, or despairing at the state of Tottenham Hotspur and the New York Jets. Follow him on Bluesky at @cardy.bsky.social.

Amazon's been a great place to find discounts on video games lately. Hidden among the retailer's selection of PS5 deals at the moment is Battlefield 6, which has dropped to $39.88 (see it here). It's not just the PlayStation version that's seen a price drop, though. Xbox fans can also scoop up it up on Series X for the same price (see it here).

Overall, this is a 43% discount for each platform, which is some great savings to make a move on. According to price tracker camelcamelcamel, it's also just a few dollars away from both PS5 and Xbox Series X's lowest price at the retailer of $35, so why not grab it now if you've been itching to drop in?

Battlefield 6 (PS5/Xbox Series X) for $39.88

Playground Games gave us a first look at gameplay from its Fable reboot earlier this year in January’s Xbox Developer Direct, and among its viewers was the series’ original creator, Peter Molyneux.

IGN recently spoke to the former Lionhead Studios developer in anticipation of his new God game, Masters of Albion, and took the opportunity to ask for his thoughts on what he saw from this new incarnation of Fable.

“When I was watching the Fable trailer, I just felt myself tearing up”, reveals Molyneux. “I know that I could probably be slaughtered for saying that, but I am someone who cries frequently, and I felt incredibly emotional, and the reason I felt emotional was: F*** me. This thing that we created, it's going to live, it’s going to carry on. This world, which we loved creating so much, and other people loved, has a life.”

“And for me, the saddest thing would be to see it diminish, which is one of the reasons I'm really going back to God games. So that was the overall emotion. I thought it was really smart of them to retell Fable 1 rather than have the burden of continuing the Fable story. I loved seeing some of those references. I thought it was super smart to have the kid’s family turn to stone. I thought that was really smart. And so those were all the plus points.”

But… there’s always a but. Although there was plenty that the series’ original creator enjoyed in Playground’s grand unveiling, it didn’t completely hit the nail on the head for Molyneux — with the game's tone and visual design not quite to his tastes.

“I mean, if I was critical, which I think you want me to be, there was a slight antiseptic feel about it," Molyneux states. “But I mean, they've got months and months to build in that character and almost that dirtiness that you want in the world. I never thought Fable as being clean and all the angles being sharp and defined. It's more chaotic. It's more what Old England probably used to be, which was not straight lines, the place, it's more crinkling, and all the buckle belts on people are ridiculously large, and the boots and the hands ridiculously large because that is part of the character. So there’s a little bit more of that character, which I would probably foolishly and ridiculously ask for.”

But these minor quibbles with the current aesthetic certainly aren’t getting in the way of Peter looking forward to getting his hands on it when it arrives later this year. When asked if he plans to play Fable, he replied: “Absolutely. For sure. Not as someone looking for the flaws and faults, but as someone who truly loves and adores that universe.”

I, too, cannot wait to jump back into the fairy tale world of Fable. You can check out all of the latest updates on Playground’s upcoming fantasy RPG here, including how it plans to utlilise a surprising storytelling technique from The Office, and how you’ll be able to marry each and every one of its 1,000 NPCs.

Simon Cardy is a Senior Editor at IGN who can mainly be found skulking around open world games, indulging in Korean cinema, or despairing at the state of Tottenham Hotspur and the New York Jets. Follow him on Bluesky at @cardy.bsky.social.

Masters of Albion, the new God game from 22cans, may well be “the culmination” of legendary developer Peter Molyneux’s career to date, but we may not see its end for many years to come — due to it being the first part of a planned trilogy.

“So this is an epic,” Molyneux tells IGN. “We are thinking about three epic chapters, I suppose you'd call them. Then what we'll be releasing into early access will be chapter one, and it's going to take us quite a few years to get to chapter three.”

“But this chapter one, it has a story. It starts as a classic story of a hero coming and finding his power. There was an adversary who was doing something awful. There was a confrontation. It's a classic. This first chapter is a classic beat of that narrative story. There's going to be love, loss, hate, and betrayal in that first episode of the story. So it is a complete game. We are just thinking bigger rather than, right, this is the game. That's it. We've always been thinking about this bigger story.”

It’s ambitious, a word that has followed Molyneux around for much of his career, whether that be the technologically driven Project Milo, or the experimental Curiosity – What's Inside the Cube? While some of these projects may not have fulfilled their initial promise, many of the British developer’s games have become favourites over the decades. Not least, Fable, of which Molyneux compares in narrative structure to Masters of Albion.

“If you think of Fable, there was Fable 1,” says Molyneux. “We were always thinking when we were thinking of Fable; right, we want time to move on a lot, and so the next issue of Fable is hundreds of years in the future. We thought of that before we even finished Fable 1.

“Whereas something like Black & White, we didn't really think beyond Black & White 2. So when we came to Black and White 2, that felt a little bit clumsy because there wasn't a continuation. So Masters of Albion will finish on a huge… well, I can't say anything. There is a hint in the gameplay trailer at the very end.”

The best laid plans are all well and good, but Molyneux is also fully aware that for two more chapters of the Masters of Albion series to be made, there needs to be both hunger from its audience, and the financial heft to do so.

“My overall desire is that Masters of Albion just brings joy to people,” Molyneux continues. “And if it brings joy to people and there are enough people, we'll definitely be going forward with Master Albion 2 and 3. But you need money to do this.”

Masters of Albion will be released on Steam on April 22, 2026. Do you plan on playing it? Let us know in the comments below. For more, you can check out more details on the god game, or read about what made watching the new Fable’s gameplay reveal so emotional for Peter Molyneux.

Simon Cardy is a Senior Editor at IGN who can mainly be found skulking around open world games, indulging in Korean cinema, or despairing at the state of Tottenham Hotspur and the New York Jets. Follow him on Bluesky at @cardy.bsky.social.

“It's all allowing players that freedom,” says Peter Molyneux. “And that's what we've been exploring with Masters of Albion.”

The god game thrives on freedom, and, arguably, is nothing without it. No one knows that better than Peter Molyneux. The lead developer of landmark god games such as Dungeon Keeper, Populous, and Black & White, he’s returning to those roots after years away with Masters of Albion, a self-declared “culmination” of all his work to date that blends those god game greats with other milestones from a long career that also birthed Fable.

Freedom very much is the word I heard most often when speaking with Molyneux recently. His upcoming project, developed at his studio 22Cans, is not only inspired by his own vaunted library, but also by modern masterpieces that have reframed our understanding of player freedom.

“I look at the true greats, things like Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom”, Molyneux reveals. “I wouldn't dare to say that our games are anywhere close to as good as those games, but I'm inspired by the fluidity, the seamlessness of those experiences. You're not going through level-up screens. It is just seamless. I'm really inspired by that.”

The latest two Zelda games are heralded for how reactive their versions of Hyrule are, and how their systems beg to be experimented with. You can see a similar ambition in the latest gameplay trailer for Masters of Albion, which showcases the numerous ways you can interact with the world of Albion. You can approach from many different perspectives, from the more traditional city building and infrastructure management layer, to RPG-esque missions full of sword and shield combat, to running the rule over its open world via a massive hand that floats over your townspeople as if The Addams Family’s Thing has risen to deity status.

“The hand really is the star of the show”, says Molyneux. “Giving players the ability to reach into a world, to manipulate things, to move things around, to combine things in ways that we may have never thought of is incredibly alluring for me and really fascinating to experiment with. And the interesting thing is, the more we develop this idea and the more we create it, the more other ideas come around the hand. There are some real surprises in that thing.”

The hand, of course, has played a starring role in Molyneux’s Black & White games, but revisiting the concept has allowed 22cans to add a number of new surprises. Among them, I’m teased, is the ability to contort its four fingers, thumb, and palm into whichever shape you choose, and each and every occupant of Albion will react expressively to that. I’m not saying that you might want to raise only your middle digit up when confronting a tiny person who refuses to behave the way you’d like them to, but you do really want to, don’t you?

There are other, more playful ways to annoy your devoted townsfolk. Want to make a laughing stock of one of your villagers? Then have him parade around the streets dressed in armour made of sausages, created through the detailed factory system that allows you to substitute chainlink for chains of pork. This playfulness and sense of humour are things we’ve come to expect from Molyneux’s games, but crucially, all of these quirks play into Masters of Albion’s world systems, too.

Not only a flicking off device, the hand also plays into the surprisingly deep city-building side of things. This isn’t your standard “drop a mine near a valuable source of ore” situation, but one that lets you express yourself in the architectural design and colour of your buildings. While a snap-together block building system allows you to create towers and factories and housing complexes of your own design, be aware that your arrangements have consequences, including shifting your moral alignment — something familiar to any fan of the Black & White series. But there will also be other, more surprising consequences that evoke the odd systems of Lionhead’s Fable days, such as the rather ominous-sounding arrival of a housing inspector…

Molyneux explains that choices like colour and shape can cause a property inspection, and while he’s careful not to spoil the consequences of a failing grade, it sounds like something worth avoiding.

”You want to be careful that you don't trigger the housing inspector, because when [he] comes and he doesn't like that you've created a slum where everyone's packed together… he does not like that sort of stuff,” he teases.

While things like the housing inspector will take time to occur in-world, Molyneux also wants to ensure that there’s instantaneous fun to be found in designing towns and individual buildings. He’s doing away with the genre staple construction timers, instead getting straight into the buffs and nerfs each new block might bring.

“I love playing city-building games, but I always get frustrated that I have to build a mine here and that's it,” Molyneux states, clearly frustrated by the time spent waiting for resources to start flowing. “[In Masters of Albion] you can build anything you want, anywhere you want, and it works immediately. There are no wait timers. If you've got a farm and you've got a mill and you've got a factory, you can say, ‘I'm just going to put them all into one building’ and you can make this thing that looks like Howl's Moving Castle with all these workstations for your workers, and it will work as you are building it. You don't have to wait for bricks to come to build it. I really want it to feel more like Lego than anything else, that immediacy of what you are building.

Like Howl’s Moving Castle, there’s nothing rooting you to the spot. “You could go back to your original town, which is Oakridge, and you could say, ‘Do you know what? I'm going to move the whole of Oakridge to Wyrmscar, so I'm going to have everyone live in Wyrmscar.’ So this all comes back to god games being about freedom.”

But that freedom also needs direction, and that’s where Masters of Albion’s story comes into play. Launching into early access on April 22 will be chapter one of a planned trilogy, for which a full “epic” story is planned. While tales will play out in the world as you (literally) build it by hand, it appears the main thrust of its narrative structure can be found when Masters of Albion morphs more into a Fable-like shape, as you possess its heroes and venture out on RPG-like quests, slashing enemies down with a sword or turning them to dust with magic.

“One of the things that we haven't done a good job of explaining is that there is a narrative story”, admits Molyneux. “It’s a huge epic story that winds through the entirety of the game. You saw a couple of times in the gameplay trailer that when the gold scroll was clicked on, that's a quest. If it's a gold scroll, it's on the golden line. It's a story quest. If it's a silver scroll, it's an optional quest.

“And all those quests, they give you more stuff”, he continues. “They may give you one of the currencies in the game, they may give you more blocks that you can build with, they may give you more parts that you can design things with.

“You'd be travelling through a land in Fable, and you'd see a chest, and you go and open that chest,” Molyneux explains. “We've got that in here. You can go and open a chest just like in Fable, you can stumble upon a scene that is playing out, and you can get involved in that scene. And so we've been inspired by the open-world nature of Fable 2 and Fable 3.”

Masters of Albion does sound ambitious, but ambition is something we’ve learned to take as a given from Molyneux’s work over the years. Whether these many complex, intertwining systems all come together and work in harmony is, of course, yet to be seen. I’m hopeful, though, because without big swings like Masters of Albion, genres such as the god game would be left to stagnate. That’s something Molyneux is highly aware of, due to the complex nature of their conception.

“It's very hard, in my experience, to sit down and say, ‘Right, I'm going to design a god game.’ Because so much of it is the visceral feeling of connecting these gameplay systems together. It is a very frightening design process that you'd think, ‘Oh, I wish I could just make a first-person shooter. I know what a first-person shooter is.’ It's a terrifying development process to make a god game.”

Masters of Albion will be released into early access on April 22, 2026, and is available to wishlist now on Steam. For more, check out how 22Cans plans for Masters of Albion to be a trilogy, and Molyneux’s emotional reaction to watching the gameplay reveal of Playground Games’ upcoming Fable.

Simon Cardy is a Senior Editor at IGN who can mainly be found skulking around open world games, indulging in Korean cinema, or despairing at the state of Tottenham Hotspur and the New York Jets. Follow him on Bluesky at @cardy.bsky.social.

HBO's Game of Thrones prequel, A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, has quickly become one of this year's best shows. Thanks to its heavier focus on levity and wholesome moments (it's not without its predecessor's violent moments, though), interest in the show's source material has skyrocketed since it premiered in January.

The Hedge Knight graphic novel adaptation, the first of George R.R. Martin's three Dunk and Egg short stories, is currently sitting at #3 on Amazon's Comics and Graphic Novels charts, even outselling Absolute Batman Vol. 1. The second book, The Sworn Sword, is at #7, while The Mystery Knight has yet to break the top 100.

Following the Spider-Man and Cyclops action figures, a new Marvel character is making its way into the S.H.Figuarts and TAMASHII NATIONS Gamerverse line-up: Wolverine. For those who can't wait to add Logan into their collectible collection, this figure is now available to preorder for $99.99 with a release date of September 25 this year.

That's still quite a ways away before it's officially released, but don't wait too long to get a preorder in if it's caught your eye. Figures like these can sell out fast, so it's always worth getting an order in ahead of time.

Preorder S.H.Figuarts Gamerverse Wolverine Action Figure

Similar to the other figures in this lineup, the Wolverine action figure is close to six inches tall. He comes with some great interchangeable parts as well, including different faces that show gritted-teeth or him shouting. Alongside that, claw parts are included for both of his fists, of course, and he comes with a backdrop sheet that shows off his Fatal Claw move from Marvel vs. Capcom, which you can see below.

Honestly, there's truly no better time to pick up this action figure, what with the new Wolverine game from Insomniac coming out later this year. Again, if it's caught your eye, now is the time to get a preorder in before it sells out.

If you're on the hunt for even more action figures to grab right now, both Hasbro and Mattel have some exciting releases lined up. To keep up with the Marvel fun, Hasbro has revived its classic Marvel Super Heroes Secret Wars toy line, and for those who have Masters of the Universe on their mind this year thanks to the upcoming film, Mattel has revealed a new lineup of Masters of the Universe movie toys for fans to check out.

Hannah Hoolihan is a freelancer who writes with the guides and commerce teams here at IGN.

Marvel's Spider-Man developer Insomniac Games has set expectations ahead of tomorrow's big State of Play broadcast from PlayStation, as anticipation mounts for a fresh look at its upcoming Wolverine game.

Sony's State of Play show is due to air tomorrow, February 12 at 2pm Pacific / 5pm Eastern / 10pm UK time, and run for at least 60 minutes — suggesting PlayStation has plenty up its sleeves.

But will we get a new flash of adamantium during the showcase? Perhaps not. Overnight, Insomniac Games has posted on social media to lay out when we'll next see more of Marvel's Wolverine — seemingly ruling out any big reveal this week.

When asked "when more info" by a fan, Insomniac Games' official account has now responded: "spring 2026."

With spring not due to start for another month, that answer seems decisive. Still the news is perhaps surprising, considering the fact that Insomniac appeared to drop a pretty obvious hint at Daredevil being in the game only last week, and the fact that this month's leaked PlayStation Plus games apparently will include Insomniac's Spider-Man 2 (which would have been a nice chaser to a new Wolverine trailer). But perhaps Sony is instead planning a dedicated Marvel's Wolverine State of Play to show the game in the months to come?

Sony's last major State of Play broadcast, held back in September 2025, finally treated fans to a proper reveal of Wolverine gameplay, at least. The game is likely PlayStation's biggest first-party launch of the year — and, of course, we're already tracking all of its Marvel Easter eggs. As a reminder, Wolverine currently sits with a vague-ish launch window for the second half of 2026 — though when this will be narrowed down further, we'll just have to wait and see.

Tom Phillips is IGN's News Editor. You can reach Tom at tom_phillips@ign.com or find him on Bluesky @tomphillipseg.bsky.social

It was just yesterday that I published a 10/10 review for Logitech's new X2 Superstrike mouse, which earned our top gaming mouse recommendation for its responsive inductive clicks and unique haptic feedback, layered on top of the same shape and fundamental components as the already-excellent Superlight 2. Today, I woke to see Redditors had already spotted Chinese brand Ausdom has replicated the mouse with a new variant of the G03 V2 Ultra, which costs around £60 – £100 less than the new Logitech flagship.

It’s pretty safe to say that generative artificial intelligence has become a divisive issue within the games industry and wider player community. As the technology becomes more prevalent, companies and studios are being pushed to offer clarity on their use of it. Within the past few months alone, Baldur’s Gate 3 developer Larian has faced significant backlash against its use of generative AI, and RuneScape studio Jagex has promised no AI will be used for any assets a player can “touch, hear or feel.”

ZA/UM, the developer behind Disco Elysium and the upcoming Zero Parades: For Dead Spies, has offered its view on the issue, and it’s a pretty simple one: “No AI.”

Talking to IGN, ZA/UM’s head of studio, Allen Murray, offered his perspective on the situation: “I think about the world right now, where everybody's dealing with AI in a creative space, and what I see is there'll be a hunger for this singer-songwriter in a cafe. I want a really human experience, right? I don't want a computer-driven creation.”

“I think we'll see more of that,” he continued. “There's always this desire for storytelling and something created by humans that has meaning, that you can relate to. And so I think there'll be a resurgence in that.”

When pushed to clarify the studio’s stance on the technology, Murray gave a simple statement. “No AI,” he said. “As a stance, we don't use it.”

Jim Ashilevi, writer and VO director at ZA/UM, added, “It's all just us being messy and human all the way through. And if it's embarrassing, and if it's not as polished as it would be if you went and used AI or whatever, that's fine. Because all we really care about is just being ourselves, basically.”

“You can feel it when you play our games,” continued Ashilevi. “You can see and feel the fingerprints of real human beings when you exist in those worlds and when you read the stories that we like to tell. I think there's a certain rugged and kind of unpolished quality to the kinds of stories and worlds we like to create.”

Artificial intelligence and large language models (LLMs) were not particularly prevalent during the development of Disco Elysium, but during the creation of Zero Parades they have risen to become a major force in the world of tech. Google’s new “Project Genie” AI tech has demonstrated a (very limited) ability to create playable worlds based on simple prompts, while Sony has patented AI systems that create podcasts hosted by PlayStation characters and an assist function that can help players overcome challenges in video games. Not every creative is convinced though, with Rockstar’s co-founder Dan Houser suggesting that AI is akin to “when we fed cows with cows and got mad cow disease.”

ZA/UM’s vision for its new RPG is rooted in traditional development processes, through which it hopes to create a story about “what it means to lose everything and then keep going regardless.”

Matt Purslow is IGN's Executive Editor of Features.

Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie is in select theaters now.

Half the fun of watching guerrilla productions like Jackass or Borat is the thrill of a flimsy artifice couching publicity stunts as if they’ve been pulled off “for real.” The camera, visible or otherwise, follows eager protagonists who ensnare an unsuspecting public into infantile shenanigans – a tradition dating back to the 1948 debut of TV prank show, Candid Camera. In the most technical sense, Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie exists in that same vein, making it a delight to watch with an audience. However, it’s also a time-travel movie incorporating footage from earlier versions of the concept, forcing the story to twist around itself with head-spinning proficiency, leading to one of the most absurd, laugh-out-loud comedy films in years.

How exactly do you employ a sci-fi conceit while blurring the lines between real and unreal in a mockumentary where messing with actual people is the point? If you’re Canadian comedians Matt Johnson and Jay McCaroll, who play fictional avatars of themselves and enact hare-brained plans to get hired at a music venue, well…you just do. The result, born from the duo’s against-all-odds creative ethos, is a jaw-dropping blast that constantly raises the same core question as Alfonso Cuarón’s 3D space scorcher, Gravity: “How the hell did they make this?”

For the uninitiated: The legacy sequel, directed by BlackBerry director (and Matt and Mara actor) Johnson, follows his and McCaroll’s short-lived Viceland TV show from 2017-2018, Nirvanna the Band the Show, itself a sequel to their independent web series Nirvanna the Band, which ran from 2007 to 2009. You don’t need to have seen either one to watch the new movie, since it opens with footage they shot on cheap handycams in 2008, introducing us to the duo’s core dynamic: A hyperactive, fedora-sporting Johnson ropes the more laid-back McCaroll into trying to score a music gig at Toronto bar & restaurant the Rivoli under the copyright-skirting moniker, “Nirvanna the Band.” This is despite them never having actually written a song, or even contacted the venue’s management. After a mini-episode’s worth of buffoonery, the film skips forward to 2025 and finds the makeshift musicians in a state of arrested development. Johnson – who behaves largely the same, but has put on some weight – is still trying to convince a now-haggard McCaroll that his next plan will actually work, at the risk of a potential creative schism.

This (re)introduction to the characters also serves to convince new viewers to stick around for the ride. It’s hard not to, when Johnson’s latest ploy involves the publicity stunt of parachuting off Toronto’s iconic, nearly 2,000-foot-tall CN Tower, a scheme whose absurd logistics are funny enough until, shockingly, we actually see Johnson and McCaroll con their way up to the top of the structure for real. This dizzying feat – shot by off-screen comrades with hidden HD cameras – doesn’t go exactly as planned (in reality or in the fiction), but it’s pulled off with enough panache that any computer-generated seams are completely invisible, buying loads of goodwill from anyone who might still need convincing.

Nearly 20 years into trying and failing to play at the Rivoli, McCaroll is at the end of his rope. However, Johnson’s ultimate, galaxy-brained ploy is yet to come – traveling to the year 2008 by turning the pair’s RV into a Back to the Future-style time machine fueled by a long-defunct Canadian novelty drink. Before they know it, the duo finds themselves in an earlier version of downtown Toronto populated by Goth fashion, billboards for The Dark Knight, and – most impressively of all – younger, wide-eyed versions of themselves, accomplished through a combination of body doubles, ingeniously-edited archival footage, and meticulously recreated sets. The scenes where the older and younger pairings almost come into contact, combining old and new footage shot nearly two decades apart and skillfully spliced together, are a fist-pumping triumph.

The movie’s mischievous plot involves not only fetch quests to try to return to 2025, but the hilarious horrors of alternate timelines and even stranger publicity ploys whose staging blurs the lines between fiction and reality. All the while, the story’s emotional core pivots around the now forty-something Johnson and McCaroll coming within inches of their past selves, and in the process, reflecting on this timeline’s Obama-era, iPhone 3G optimism – not to mention the limitless promise of being able to self-distribute video content for the first time. This is in sharp contrast to their many regrets and failures during the intervening years. Much like the recent Jackass Forever, it’s a prank film about the passage of time, told with the same scrappy DIY sensibility as the original web series, albeit with Johnson employing more crash zooms and rapid movements to emphasize both comedic and dramatic moments.

Will this peek into the past finally convince McCaroll that he’s better off without his over-enthusiastic, man-child bestie? In Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie, quite literally anything is possible, including the production improvising entire plot developments around a real shooting outside the home of Toronto rapper Drake. It’s ambitious and audacious, to say the least.

Each roguish set piece remains grounded in the emotional dynamic of its leads, who – despite their jejune conduct and sensibilities – imbue these broad, middle-aged-loser versions of themselves with genuine pathos. The movie’s mockumentary style, whose aesthetics are hilariously adjusted for each era, harbors both the daring realism of an elaborate hoax as well as the gooey “aw, shucks” melodrama of two men realizing how much they need each other. It’s a pitch-perfect medley of styles and a nonstop hoot with a crowd.

No Man's Sky's next big update, Remnant, is here, introducing something developer Hello Games has "been wanting to give players since the very beginning": a gravity gun.

Called the Gravitino Coil, the powerful anti-gravity module for your multi-tool will turn the sci-fi game into "a physics playground," allowing you to "grab large objects and fling, toss, or carefully carry them around the world." It can also be used as a ballistic weapon, allowing you to grab sentinels or heavy objects, turning them into projectiles.

We'll now also be able to collect and recycle the salvage and debris found on planets, turning them into "highly prized" resources, and construct new trucks, tipping flatbeds, and haulers to transport resources back. By carefully sorting and depositing the materials you find — being careful not to accidentally blow yourself up with the "highly volatile" stuff, of course — you'll reap "great rewards."

"You can work alone or join a salvage crew with friends," Hello Games explained. "It creates this really fun and tactile new loop of searching for wrecks, loading trucks full of cargo and hauling across the alien landscape to industrial yards to gain new loot and rewards."

There's also other rewards up for grabs, as well as vehicle parts, a steampunk armor set, and vehicle customization to "create bespoke tracks and haulers for your needs."

Last but not least, there's a new limited-time community expedition on the way, where players can band together to clean up and salvage materials like a space-age trash collection crew.

To me, and I’m sure many others, the Pokémon franchise as a whole has always been “cozy.” Set in a (mostly) idyllic world with cute best friends who are always by your side, how could it not give you warm fuzzy feelings at least occasionally? We’ve had some relaxing Pokémon games over the years, but we’ve never quite had a game that embraced this secondary cozy aesthetic fully into its gameplay–until now, with Pokémon Pokopia. I played the first hour of Pokémon’s first life-sim, and the sheer amount of discovery to be made hooked me. I also played Pokémon Pokopia in multiplayer mode in a more developed world, plus, I learned more straight from the developers.

Pokémon Pokopia begins with a Ditto waking up after a long, undefined slumber. It remembers its trainer in its hometown, with the nameless narrator commenting, “You look so happy with your trainer petting you!”

Aw, that is so sweet, and so sad–Ditto’s trainer is nowhere to be found, and that’s Ditto’s–(you, the protagonist’s)–motivator. In a bid to try to find its trainer, Ditto transforms into a human that looks like its trainer the best they can. Enter the character creator, in which you get to choose between seven hairstyles, 28 haircolors, hats, clothes, and bags. No, you can’t just be purple, that wouldn’t be very human-like!

Shigeru Ohmori, the primary director of Pokémon games since 2014 and Pokémon Pokopia’s Concept and Senior Director, explained the thought behind making a Pokémon the main character and why it transforms into a human. “I wanted to create something where you can directly communicate with Pokémon,” Ohmori said.

Ohmori worried if they had a trainer as the playable character, as in the other mainline titles, it becomes the trainer giving orders to Pokémon, which they wanted to avoid. By keeping it all Pokémon, an atmosphere of friendship and teamwork is created.

There are two reasons Ohmori decided to make specifically Ditto the main character, too: one to benefit the gameplay, and another to benefit the story. Because Ditto can transform into other Pokémon and use their moves, it was the best option (I argue Mew could fit that bill too, but of course Mew wouldn’t have those adorable “simple eyes and slack mouth,” as Professor Tangrowth puts it.)

The other reason feeds the narrative motivations of Pokémon Pokopia. No one else knows what Ditto’s trainer looks like, so Ditto transforming into the trainer it misses is essentially asking the other Pokémon, “Do you know this human being?” Again, so cute, so melancholic, and I love it.

An Unobtrusive Tutorial

The tutorial, fortunately, is nicely integrated into what would be the regular flow of gameplay, and lets you start doing stuff outside its confines very quickly.

After meeting Professor Tangrowth, I found the Pokedex, and then found my first–then second–then third–Pokémon friend, expanding my abilities and how I could affect the world with each one, further enhancing my ability to create a wider variety of habitats to attract a wider variety of Pokémon.

Bulbasaur taught me the move Leafage, allowing me to create tall grass at will. Squirtle taught me the move Water Gun, so I could revitalize the dry ground and grass in the aptly named Withered Wasteland, the environment you start in. Charmander didn’t teach me a move, but instead taught me that you can ask Pokémon to follow you somewhere so they can perform an action based on their Specialty. In Charmander’s case, they lit a fire for me. As for other Specialty examples, Tiburr’s Build helps you build structures, and Bulbasaur’s Grow, makes plants grow faster.

Of course, to find more Pokémon, you need to make a variety of Habitats. The most basic habitat is four squares of tall grass, easily made by Leafage. You can also move objects around with Ditto’s ability to store and then spit-up materials, like, a Punching Bag. This is, canonically, the move Stockpile. Holding the collect button down actually makes Ditto continuously suck up anything around it, causing its face to hilariously and disturbingly resemble The Scream painting.

Other habitats include ones like the self-described “Boulder-shaded tall grass,” which attracts Fighting-type Pokémon like Timburr and Machop, and “Hydrated flower bed,” made of four flower beds placed beside–you guessed it–water. After a bit of time passes, a square in your new habitat may shake, indicating there’s a Pokémon there to meet.

Like the Pokedex for tracking Pokémon, there’s a Habitat dex for tracking habitats, and there are quite a number to discover!

Though I loved just experimenting, it isn’t all completely guess work. Occasionally, you’ll find a sparkle on the ground that’s a “trace of Pokémon” which gives you a hint about a yet-to-be-found Pokémon’s preferred habitat you haven’t discovered yet.

The Core Loop - All Pokemon All the Time

This cycle of attracting new Pokémon, learning new skills oivr discovering new specialties from them, then making more new habitats to attract even more new Pokémon, is the corest-of-core loops in Pokémon Pokopia, and is already incredibly engaging and fun without even considering the crafting and world customization you can do. This isn’t an accident.

“When thinking about development of the game, [the team] started thinking about the cycles of the user's motivation,” said Takuto Edagawa of KOEITECMO GAMES, Pokémon Pokopia Chief Director. “What the user wants to do, what they would want to start to do within the cycle. So, for example, filling up the Pokedex or creating more habitats, then that would create meeting more Pokémon.”

“Every single step in the game,” Edagawa continued, “The core of it is to be with the Pokémon, communicating with Pokémon. So wherever you go, there is always Pokémon… that is the largest difference compared to other [life sim] games.”

This core cycle that focuses on the Pokémon first and foremost is ingrained into the “main objectives” that propel the story as well. Just after meeting the Kanto Starters, you discover a decrepit Pokémon Center nearby. The PC there automatically launches the Poke Life Environment Improvement App, which dishes out both important tasks tied to progression, like increasing an area’s Environment Level or rebuilding the Pokemon Center; and smaller daily objectives, like collecting a certain number of sturdy sticks.

The stick collecting is self-explanatory, but to increase the Environment Level of the area, you must attract more Pokémon and improve their Comfort Levels. Again, another touch point with Pokémon.

Placing furniture a Pokémon wants within the bounds of its habitat–which you can see by pressing in on the R-stick–will increase its Comfort Level. Bulbasaur, for example, specifically asked for a bed, so I crafted a Straw Bed from leaves for them.

The Poke Life app rewarded me for my efforts with new unlocks and Life Coins. These can be used to buy a variety of things at the PC, like furniture, seeds, Pokémon hints, building recipes, and more. After increasing the Environment Level, Professor Tangrowth had more for me, too.

Multiplayer and More

There seems to be a lot more to Pokopia than everything I already talked about. I haven’t even touched on building buildings or what looks to be a huge number of collectibles–like Human Records, which included things like a diary that gave a glimpse of what Professor Tangrowth’s life was like with their human, and a document on Pokémon Greetings that taught me an emote!

The four-player multiplayer session gave me a look at a developed world, where Pokémon’s Habitat’s were developed so thoroughly they lived inside houses! The inside of the houses had furniture and decorations, like plushies, and the little town was manicured with sidewalks, fences, lamp posts, and even a stage.

My time with multiplayer was short, and I’m restricted from what exactly I can reveal, so I can’t say much more about it besides that it was fun. I can see friends ushering each other to stay on task, because it is just so easy to get distracted in Pokémon Pokopia, and that sounds like the best kind of hectic. (I was that friend in my group. I’m sorry!)

Edagawa said that, on average, depending on how you play Pokémon Pokopia, it will take between 20 and 40 hours to reach the “end” credits. But, that’s not really the main motivation to play Pokémon Pokopia–it’s to make a world to live with Pokémon. As for the post game, “There’s more things to experience after the end credits… I believe that players are encouraged to and will be motivated to continue to play the game,” Edagawa said.

There will also be motivation for players to log in intermittently. Pokémon Pokopia Producer Kanako Murata of The Pokemon Company said “When you play day-by-day, there may be something that, on a specific day, something special that might happen in the game.”

Considering how many hours some friends of mine have put into Animal Crossing: New Horizons, I think they’re right, especially for those whose motivations are to create a unique place to live with Pokémon. For me, I hope Ditto and the crew learn what happened to create this apocalyptic, empty world, but regardless, I’m excited to restore it with my best Pokémon friends.

Pokémon's upcoming Dragon Quest Builders-like sandbox, Pokopia, isn't just a Pokémon-themed block-building playground. It has a main story that some are suggesting has some post-apocalyptic vibes to it, and according to the game's director, it can take anywhere from 20 to 40 hours to finish... with more to do after the credits.

This comes from our own interview with Takuto Edagawa, the chief director of Pokémon Pokopia. We asked about the approximate length of the game, and this was the response:

So for this game, the main motivation for this game is typically not to go to the end roll [credits]. The whole concept is to create the world with Pokemon and live with the Pokemon. However, as an average, it'll be about 20 to 40 hours, but it would really depend on how the players play the game.

There's more things to experience after the end roll [credits]. So it depends on what you mean by contents, but I believe that players are encouraged to and will be motivated to continue to play the game.

This fairly open-ended response isn't a surprise given what we know of Pokopia. It's a sandboxy sim where you, a Ditto transformed into a human shape, hang out on an initially deserted island and get to work building habitats to convince more Pokemon friends to come live with you. It's very similar to Dragon Quest Builders, which makes sense as the developer, Omega Force, also helped out on Dragon Quest Builders 2. In addition to the story component, we can imagine this will have some fairly open-ended gameplay as to what you build, where, and how, and its multiplayer components will likely give the game some longevity too. As a result, it makes sense that players would have a wide range of completion times based on how much they dig into the building mechanics both during and after the campaign.

We also got a chance to go hands-on with Pokopia, including its four-player multiplayer offering, and experience its cozy, mysterious world for ourselves. The game is planned for release on Nintendo Switch 2 on March 5, 2026.

Have you ever fallen in love?

I did nearly a decade ago, with Overwatch, Blizzard’s hero shooter of near-immaculate design. But that relationship sadly became strained, distant even, ever since its decision to move on from those initial glory days and reinvent itself as a sequel. Well, now Overwatch has gone and seduced me all over again, like a Hanzo scatter arrow delivered straight from Cupid's bow. And it's all thanks to one woman: the corporate villainess tank, Domina. And it has absolutely nothing to do with those thighs.

This week saw the launch of a new era for Overwatch. Blizzard has ditched the “2”, implemented a long-overdue menu overhaul, kicked off a brand new, year-long story, and, crucially, added five brand new heroes to the roster. You’ve got Anran, a fire-fan-wielding damage-dealer; Emre, a tactical operative equipped with more firearms than actual arms; Mizuki, a cursed ex-yakuza member with a healing hat; and Jet Pack Cat, who is, well, a cat with a jet pack. And then last, but certainly not least, is Domina, an incredibly destructive tank with a deadly pulse-action laser beam, explosive crystal bombs, and a giant extra pair of mechanical arms that erupt out of her shoulders. I think I love her.

Vaira, if I should be so bold as to use her real name, is the sort of aggressive tank character that I’ve always been drawn to in Overwatch. With nearly 300 hours clocked in dive tank D.Va alone, it’s pretty clear that there’s nothing more satisfying to me than launching a behind-enemy-lines attack on an objective and absorbing all of the opposite team’s attention as I try to cause as much chaos as possible. Domina isn’t a dive tank, though. Yes, she can cause huge amounts of damage like everyone’s favourite South Korean mech enthusiast can, but if I were to compare her to anyone, it would be a powerful combination of the reworked Orisa and Reaper.

Domina is a force to be reckoned with when it comes to taking the enemy head-on, thanks to a couple of skills that deter foes. One is a very large shield that looms high over her and her teammates. I have to say I was initially worried about this ability, since I still carry mental scars from that period when Overwatch was a complete shield-fest five or six years ago — never again do I want to see a Bastion and a Torbjorn turret sitting behind an Orisa and Reinhardt shield combo on that dreadful first Paris choke point. But Domina’s force field has a fun wrinkle that plays tactically into both teams’ approach, as squares can be punched out of it with a moderate amount of damage, creating literal windows of opportunity for those faced with it. It’s a smart approach to shielding in Overwatch that, at least right now, feels balanced for both attackers and defenders.

Then there’s her sonic repulsors, a pair of energy blasts fired from the palms of her extra mechanical hands. They not only deal a bit of damage, but also boop people away from her. I’ve already had maybe too much fun pushing players off the edge of Illios and Lijiang Palace’s perilous points like a super-sized Lucio. Combine that with a crystal grenade that floats through the air towards enemies before detonating, and a laser beam that fires off a shotgun-like burst at the end of a trigger pull, like a devilish combination of Symmetra and Reaper’s weapons, and you have a hero who can single-handedly run an entire match. I did tell you it wasn’t about the thighs.

Look, I’ll admit that she’s probably too powerful right now and will, in all likelihood, be subjected to a nerf in the coming days or weeks. But while she’s here in all her glory, I can’t recommend Domina enough.

That’s not to say there isn’t plenty of fun to be found elsewhere in Overwatch right now — this entire update is a genuinely incredible shift for a game that only a short time ago faced an existential threat, and it’s inarguably more enthralling to play now than it has been in many, many years. That being said, I do still yearn for those glory days of 2017 to 2019, and find myself queuing to play its unranked 6v6 mode more than any other. It still feels the most balanced, satisfying way to play Overwatch, and if Blizzard was ever to fully revert back to the two tank, two support, two DPS team structure of old, I think Overwatch would truly own my heart once again.

As for now, I fear my beating chambers belong solely to Domina and her stacked set of skills that simultaneously feel fresh, but also referential to the Overwatch of old. As I’m writing this, I’m counting down the hours until I can play as her again and send people falling to their doom down an Illios well, or imprison them in her explosive Panopticon ultimate ability.

I can’t help but smile when I see that Overwatch is benefitting from its highest concurrent player numbers in over a year, and feel happy for the developers who have worked so tirelessly to make sure this universe that people love so much will not die. This update has made me fall back in love with a game I once held closer to my heart more than any, and a large part of that is down to how fun its five new heroes (but mainly Domina, let’s be honest) are. If Overwatch carries forward this momentum into the rest of 2026, it may become a problem for the rest of my social life.

Simon Cardy is a Senior Editor at IGN who can mainly be found skulking around open world games, indulging in Korean cinema, or despairing at the state of Tottenham Hotspur and the New York Jets. Follow him on Bluesky at @cardy.bsky.social.

Netflix will release a recorded version of Stranger Things: The First Shadow, the franchise's live stage show which includes important backstory for Henry Creel.

As reported by Collider, Netflix is expected to film the show this week with its original Broadway cast. A release date for the filmed version has not yet been announced.

Fans have recognized Stranger Things: The First Shadow as an important chapter of lore within the franchise, as it answers questions about Henry Creel, AKA the series' key villain Vecna, that some had expected from its divisive finale — and then from within the series' phantom extra episode that some fans incorrectly believed would follow.

A prequel to the main Stranger Things TV series, set during Henry Creel's teenage years, The First Shadow shows the growth of Creel's psychokinetic powers and finally reveals their true origin. Audiences also get to see the proto-villain at school with some other familiar faces, Jim Hopper and Joyce Byers (then Maldonado).

For fans, The First Shadow is a key part of the main series' story, so it makes sense that Netflix is now filming it for a wider audience who can't easily get to its Broadway or West End productions. Will its lore also help calm those who still feel the TV series' final episode (and wider final season) didn't do everything they wanted? Well, that remains to be seen.

The First Shadow originally launched in London in 2023, several years before Stranger Things ended, but was always planned to tell a story that dovetailed into the main show. Its script was written by series writer Kate Trefrey, who worked on the plot with Stranger Things creators Matt and Ross Duffer, as well as Adolescence and Harry Potter and the Cursed Child writer Jack Thorne.

The play also features the character of Dr. Martin "Papa" Brenner, whose TV actor Matthew Modine recently said he disliked the series' finale and hoped "for the fans" that the conspiracy theory around a secret final-final episode was actually true. (It is not.)

"Stranger Things was a generational event that barreled into a series finale with almost impossible expectations surrounding it," IGN wrote in our review of the Stranger Things series finale. "The Duffers certainly evolved into the successful blockbuster directors they so admired in their childhoods, but their enduring legacy will be mostly doing right by a cast of characters who beguiled the globe."

While the main series may have ended, there's still plenty more Stranger Things to come as well as The First Shadow. The Duffer Brothers are now working on a new live-action TV spin-off with fresh characters, and we've already got our first look at Stranger Things '85, an animated series showing further adventures with the original gang while they were younger.

Tom Phillips is IGN's News Editor. You can reach Tom at tom_phillips@ign.com or find him on Bluesky @tomphillipseg.bsky.social

Imagine E.T. snorted your dad off a space toilet. You’d be mad, but there wouldn’t be anything you could do about it. Unless you happened to have an arsenal of powerful alien guns and some tricked-out power armour. This is the story of you, an unassuming kid who just happens to love video games, and how Earth getting taken over by a vast interstellar drug cartel turns out to be the making of you.

The events of High on Life start at the outbreak of alien invasion on a seemingly normal day in sleepy suburbia. Your parents are out of town, your cokehead sister, Lizzie, wants to throw a wild party, and all you want to do is lose yourself in a Legally Distinct first person shooter. Relatable.

Out of nowhere arrives the G3 Cartel, led by a disgusting slimy slug man called Garmantuous; a blob of distorted flesh more hideous than Jabba the Hutt and twice as mean. He’s here because, sadly, human beings are a very potent recreational drug. In a spot of obscenely bad luck, evolutionarily speaking, we just so happen to be like catnip to the various species that make up galactic civilisation. So the G3 cartel is here to enslave us, stick us all in jars, and sell us on street corners, showing absolutely no regard for our rights as sentient beings. They even murder beloved Hollywood stars Jack Black and Susan Sarandon!

Fortunately, an early chance encounter with tips the scales ever so slightly back in humanity’s favour. You meet Kenny, a sentient gun from the planet Gatlus. The Gatlians are proud race of living weapons who are also enslaved by the cartel, subjected to a brutal bioengineered plague. Any survivors are pressganged into forming the bulk of the cartel’s lethal arsenal.

You know, I’m starting to think these guys aren’t very nice.

Kenny turns out to be an affable young gun with an axe to grind against the cartel and a plan for you both to get even. With his help, you escape the ravaging of Earth by warping your entire house to Blim City, an alien metropolis full of gleaming towers, fantastic technology, and, well… pawn shops, criminal gangs, filthy slums, and gobby delinquents. It is a city after all. They’re all Birmingham or Detroit or whatever when you get down to it.

So here’s Kenny's plan: you become a licensed bounty hunter and destroy the G3 cartel’s entire sordid operation by systematically murdering all of its top brass... which involves chaotically murdering much of its bottom brass. All of which is quite impossible without the help of Gene Zaroothian: a down-on-his-luck, formerly famous bounty hunter who has at some point resorted to selling his own legs for a bit of quick cash. In exchange for a permanent seat on your couch and custody of the TV remote, he sets you up with the aforementioned Tricked Out Power Armour and the all-important Bounty-5000, a vast alien computer that combines the functions of a contract board and a Stargate. He also sets you up with your first mission: head to the slums, recover Gene’s knife “Knifey”, and assassinate 9-Torg, a local crime boss. And also 5-Torg, her cloned sister, if you like.

While not strictly speaking part of the G3 Cartel, 9-Torg’s gang do business with them as drug runners and so it feels perfectly morally consistent to, y’know, murder them all. With Knifey recovered and the associated skills of knife crime and grappling unlocked, your crusade to save humanity from the scum of the universe begins in earnest.

Target 1: Krubis

Your first target is Krubis, the big cheese of G3’s mining operations on the planet Zephyr Paradise, with a thick New Jersey accent and drills for hands.

“Mining operation?”, you say? "I thought this was a drug cartel? What could they possibly be mining for?"

Drugs. They’re mining drugs. Specifically, a living drug called Furgles, another sentient race enjoying the dubious honour of somehow having evolved to give other aliens a really good high when snorted. They tend to live underground in caves, hence all the mining. Furgles share the planet with the Moplets, a race of Despair Bears with scrotums for faces who have been brutally enslaved by Krubis in order to keep the mines running.

Krubis, however, has a problem. With the discovery of humans, who have proven a much more potent narcotic, the demand for Furgles is set to collapse. He and his product is now fast slipping out of favour with Garmantuous, meaning his position within the G3 Cartel rests on very shakey ground. Which is what happens when you dig too many tunnels.

Soon enough, however, that’s the least of his concerns, because you kill him and take his gun, Gus, the JB Smoove voiced frog-faced shotgun with a vacuum function who can shoot large sawblades that you can use as platforms. He’s also the only Gatlian who has arms, which is ironic for a race of arms. You know, armaments. Ah, forget it.

Meanwhile, back home, while Lizzie has been getting into the alien dating scene, Gene has been making himself a bit too comfortable on the couch, and so you find the two at each other’s throats.

Target 2: Douglas

The second G3 target is Douglas, the cartel’s head of training. And also torture. And while some level of evil is required to work in recruitment, Douglas’ unrelenting cruelty and hedonism makes him extremely bad at his job, often making new recruits fight each other to the death despite the G3’s existential staffing problems. This, of course, means he’s fast slipping out of favour with Garmantuous, which seems to be a running theme here. How can such a chaotic and badly managed organisation be the dominant criminal conspiracy in the galaxy? It’s almost like someone else is really pulling the strings here...

Douglas is a small, vulnerable octopus creature who is obsessed with setting pointless, arduous training tasks. In disguise as Dr. Joopy, he almost convinces you to lead him back to the power armour he’s accidentally locked himself out of while on a bender, but the ruse is uncovered by Gus, and so you can just shoot him instead of playing his stupid games. Or not. Either way you end up fighting his suit, win, and acquire a new Gatlian companion: Sweezy, an obnoxious needler with a nifty time bubble alt fire which can be used to get into air ducts.

Target 3: Doctor Giblets

Clugg Nuggmin, Blim City’s magistrate, summons you to his office to congratulate you on your campaign against the drug trade, and offers his assistance in rescuing the human race by building a safe haven for your people and a giving you a device to teleport any humans you find directly there. Setting aside for now the high probability of this guy having a nefarious agenda, you proceed to the next assassination mission… stopping briefly to solve another domestic between Gene, Lizzie, and her dipshit boyfriend, Tweeg.

The next target? Doctor Giblets, the cartel’s deranged warp scientist, who’s currently hiding out on Zephyr Paradise. Current intel on Dr. Giblets says he’s gone into hiding after murdering all of his own men, and is in possession of a powerful Gatlian. Upon finding his secret base, however, you find only a Busted Gatlian, which is utterly broken and inoperable after being experimented on. Before you can deal righteous revenge on his abuser, though, Giblets accidentally trips over and... dies. Far from saving you the bother of a boss fight, though, this leads to one of the hardest battles in the game in the form of Dr. Giblets’ posthumous revenge.

Giblets ends up thoroughly dealt with, and the Busted Gatlian is delivered back to Gene to see if anything can be done for them. But Giblets wasn’t the only G3 boss on Zephyr Paradise performing horrific medical experiments.

Target 4: The Skrendel Brothers

Next on the hit list: the Skrendel Brothers, overseers of Skrendel Labs, a vast drug facility where the cartel are experimenting on humans in order to increase their potency. On the way there you rescue another Gatlian, Creature, and learn of the nasty experiments that have turned him into a gun that is permanently pregnant, capable of shooting his own offspring as projectiles. What is it with these guys and horrific medical experiments?

The Skrendel Bros are a compound being of triplets who combine into an ultra form during your final battle with them, which they obviously lose. By now you’ve become enough of a thorn in the cartel’s side to garner the attention of Garmantuous himself, who warns you to back off, with the implication that your long lost parents will be harmed if you don’t. However, it actually turns out that Garmantuous has Hollywood’s beloved Jack Black and Susan Sarandon, not your parents, in one of the game’s funniest twists and long-form gags. Which I completely spoiled in the intro to this recap. Hey, look, if you were bothered about spoilers, you wouldn’t be reading a recap, right?

In the meantime, it turns out that the busted Gatlian is a former resistance leader by the name of Lezduit, who's now a shadow of his former self due to mistreatment, but is still a hugely powerful firearm. However, it seems that he has a troubled past with Kenny...

Blim City Invasion

It wouldn’t be a video game without a perilous third act where you nearly lose everything. Firstly, Lizzie has gone missing, and so you head to Space Applebees in the slums where her boyfriend, Tweeg, works as a cook. That’s right, there’s a Space Applebees, in one of the funniest and most unlikely pieces of product placement ever featured in video games. This would be like having a licensed OMEGA watch in a Bond game that you only ever see covered in shit.

At Applebees, Kenny takes one of the game’s rare quiet moments to explain his unwitting part in the downfall of the Gatlian race, confessing that he became the personal firearm of a G3 smuggler and ended up, through cowardice and incompetence, leading the Cartel directly back to his home planet, triggering a war which his people lost due to a genetically engineered disease that turned most of them catatonic. Feeling the a huge strain from this guilt, Kenny vows to save humanity to atone for the genocide of his people. Which is all pretty heavy stuff for a daft Rick and Morty first-person shooter, but the pathos is regularly interrupted by an Applebees waiter just to keep things as light as possible. This is, without a doubt, the best bit in the game.

Moving on, it turns out Tweeg is a G3 agent tasked with infiltrating your home by romancing Lizzie and gaining her trust. He’s seen kidnapping her in his space RV and fleeing Blim City, but before you can chase, the place is overrun with Cartel, forcing a hasty escape involving once again warping your house to a new location. This time, you arrive on the toxic ruins of Gatlus, the home planet of the Gatlians.

Lizzie’s fine, by the way.

Target 5: Nipulon

The penultimate boss is Nipulon: Garmantuous’s right hand man and the G3’s chief of customer relations. He runs an infamous drug den and is, contrary to the wisdom of most high-level operatives in the illegal drug trade, partial to his own merchandise.

And, of course, like Batman’s Scarecrow or a tired parent with access to kid-grade Tylenol, Nipulon is skilled in weaponising drugs. This leads to one of the trippiest boss fights in modern gaming, in which we learn that, no matter the odds, any challenge can be overcome with the power of teamwork. And that handling firearms while intoxicated can sometimes lead to a positive outcome. Actually, you know what, I don’t think there is a moral to this story, it’s just a bunch of stuff that happens.

Finish the Fight

After dispatching Nipulon, Gene manages to save the powerful Gatlian Lezduit from oblivion: with no more guns to collect and no more upgrades to purchase, the only thing left to do is return to Earth and kill Garmantuous, permanently ending the tyranny of the G3 Cartel once and for all and saving the human race from the ignoble fate of becoming ecstasy for ALF.

Even the firepower of Lezduit won’t quite be enough to take down Gamantuous, however. The only way to kill this crime lord, surmises Gene, is to ram a bomb up his backside. And so, at the climax of a prolonged Bullet Hell battle, with an incapacitated Garmantuous showing his entire ass metaphorically and literally, the butt bomb enema fails to explode. The remote detonator is faulty.

Yes, the game’s punchline requires you to sacrifice one of your newfound friends by pushing them up the villain’s anus. A fitting end for the galaxy’s biggest asshole, for sure. The only question is: who to sacrifice?

The most prudent choice is Kenny, given how this noble sacrifice completes his redemption arc, but it doesn’t really matter because your choice is immediately undermined when it turns out that whichever gun you cast into the void immediately comes back after surviving the resulting explosion.

That’s right: Oh my god, they don’t kill Kenny. Except they might as well have done, because when the High on Knife DLC rolls around his character gets unceremoniously written out with a bit of exposition, for reasons that are beyond the remit of this recap.

Incidentally, the major revelations from the DLC are: Knifey is not a type of melee Gatlian but a native of the planet Australia 2, hailing from a race of pacifist knives who can’t stand him. And also that getting rid of the dysfunctional G3 Cartel doesn’t actually make humanity any safer from the intergalactic drug trade, but we already figured that out from the secret ending of the base game, in which the big villainous mastermind behind it all is revealed to be Dr. Gurgula. He's found in the bowels of the Human Haven set up by Magistrate Clugg, ostensibly to help you save your people but actually to recapture them and provide human subjects to Dr. Gurgula for even more horrible experiments. The game is pretty unequivocal that this reveal is a tease for the sequel, in which you, your sister, Gene, and at least some of the returning Gatlians are fugitives on the run from galactic authorities.

And that is the entire story of High on Life, or at least the stuff you actually need to know before you play High on Life 2.

We already knew that Overwatch fans were returning in their thousands with the advent of its new name and "story-driven era," but Overwatch hasn't just matched its original Steam release-day fervor, it has smashed it, more than doubling the platform's concurrent peak set back in 2023.

You'll remember that Blizzard's sequel unfortunately stumbled out of the gate, and while it saw a massive surge of players at the start, those numbers dropped in the following year. As time went on, user reviews complained about a number of issues such as monetization and controversies around the cancellation of the game's long-awaited PvE Hero mode.

Now, however, with the launch of yesterday's (February 10) first year-long storyline, The Reign of Talon, Overwatch — the game formerly known as Overwatch 2 — smashed its original concurrent Steam peak of 75,608. And while we'd already seen a spike in players over the weekend, Sunday's peak of 69,135 simultaneous gamers has been almost tripled, with SteamDB recording 165,651 concurrent Steam players overnight, marking an excellent start for the rebooted hero shooter.

The Reign of Talon focuses on the antagonistic faction Talon as it takes over around the world, while Overwatch continues to fight back. In-game events, hero trailers, animated comics, short stories, and map updates will tell a story across six seasons rolled out throughout the entire year, beginning with the launch of five new heroes as the new season kicked off yesterday.

Xbox has acknowledged widespread issues with the rollout of its enforced age verification process in the UK, leaving many users unable to fully access games and online features.

Overnight, a flood of complaints has arisen on reddit and social media from users who say they have been booted out of games to perform the console's age verification check — which in some cases is taking hours to complete, and for others is not completing at all.

In the meantime, users say they are unable to use apps such as Discord, or use Xbox voice chat in games with non-friends. An Xbox support page for the process now lists an error message, with a note from Microsoft saying it is "aware of the issue and working to fix it."

Microsoft first announced plans to implement mandatory age verification on Xbox in the UK last year, in compliance with the company's UK Online Safety Act. The legislation must be followed by all companies that facilitate online communication — and prompted the early rollout of Discord's similar age verification requirement that's soon to be made global.

UK Xbox users have been able to opt-in to age verification over the past few monhts to get ahead of the moment it is fully enforced, with warning messages on consoles flagging the fact that it will soon become mandatory. Now, a large wave of UK accounts appear to have had age verification made a requirement, with numerous reports appearing online since yesterday evening of users struggling to get the process working.

"This has to be one of the worst implemented things of all time," wrote SymbioticAxehead in a lengthy thread of complaints on reddit. "In the middle of a Helldivers 2 game I get booted right back to the sign-in screen, to be told upon signing in that communication outside of Xbox is now restricted."

@xbox @xboxuk @XboxSupport how are we meant to verify age when every method doesn't work. How can you be a tech company but can't even run shit properly fucking pathetic!!! #xbox #xboxverifyage #xboxdown pic.twitter.com/zyUeOpIWC9

— TylerGames590 (@TylerGames590) February 10, 2026

The user said they then attempted multiple methods for proving their age, including providing a mobile number, ID and then an age estimation via live video to continued errors.

Various users have flagged the fact that their Xbox accounts are more than 18 years old, but still have been caught up in the verification process. Others, meanwhile, say they made it through the process but still remain locked out of various bits of online functionality, with no suggestion of what to do next other than contact Xbox support.

"The amount of times I've tried to do any method of the verification tonight is stupid," wrote PdoubleEB. "Can't change privacy settings on my Xbox to allow me to see mods on games too. Can't chat on Discord. Utterly broken."

"Been trying to verify my ID for the past few hours," added ColossalNova. "It finally worked but I can't access anything still. No Discord access at all."

"Kicked out of Overwatch game, signed out of Xbox, forced to verify my age or else I can't socialize with people, now got an hour ban on Overwatch," wrote Warlock_Worm of their experience.

While Xbox is the first of the major console platform holders to discuss its plans to comply with the UK's Online Safety Act, it seems only a matter of time before PlayStation, Nintendo and other gaming companies publish similar requirements. IGN has contacted Xbox today for more on the current issues.

Tom Phillips is IGN's News Editor. You can reach Tom at tom_phillips@ign.com or find him on Bluesky @tomphillipseg.bsky.social

Konami is finally ready to share more about the last of the five Silent Hill projects announced back in 2022, Silent Hill: Townfall.

Coming hot on the heels of tomorrow's PlayStation State of Play broadcast at 2pm PT (5pm ET, 10pm UK), Konami will be revealing the latest updates from its horror series from 4pm PT, including "the latest news on Silent Hill: Townfall."

Konami similarly hosted a Transmission shortly after a State of Play last year, too. In that presentation, the publisher showed off a little of Silent Hill f in Sony's showcase, then went into more detail in its bespoke presentation afterwards, so it's plausible we'll see the same happen tomorrow (February 12), too.

Without doubt the most mysterious of the five projects announced at the Silent Hill Transmission in 2022, the one-minute teaser that announced Screen Burn's (formerly known as No Code) Silent Hill: Townfall spawned more questions than answers, complete with a secret message embedded in the spectrogram that ominously read "whatever heart this town had has now stopped." Four years later, we still know very little about the secretive project, and the silence has been so disconcerting to some that in late 2024, publisher Annapurna was compelled to publicly confirm the game was still in development.

With its abstruse messaging, secrets, and references to Silent Hill 1's Alessa, some fans hope that, unlike the two most recent projects, Silent Hill: The Short Message and Silent Hill f, Townfall will take us back to the mysterious town itself.

"Whelp, I think this puts to rest all the speculation that Townfall's been having a troubled development cycle lol," posited one happy fan. "Konami does this every year, they only focus on one SH project at a time and don't reveal anything about other projects until a few months after the most recent one has released. Expect to not hear anything else about the Silent Hill 1 Remake until 2027 for this very same reason."

We are excited to reveal the latest updates from the SILENT HILL series in a new SILENT HILL Transmission on February 12 at 4:00 PM PT. 🌫️

We’ll share the latest news on SILENT HILL: Townfall. The streaming link is coming soon so stay tuned! 👀

#SILENTHILL #Townfall pic.twitter.com/Se0uJDhUqJ

— Silent Hill Official (@SilentHill) February 11, 2026

"I still remember time when all this sub could talk about is old releases, now look at us, there is something new coming up almost every quarter of the year," joked another. "Say what you want but I am convinced Silent Hill fans are living major these days!"

"Yeah, I'm expecting the SOP into Transmission," another fan wrote on Discord. "Doubt we will see much of SH1R, but they might mention it in the Transmission. With Townfall we will have officially gotten everything from the original Transmission."

"We are absolutely getting SH Townfall gameplay finally!" added someone else. "Also a small chance of a[n] actual trailer for SH 1 Remake. Don't get your hopes up for that SH2 Remake DLC."

That latter note refers to the dozens of comments from fans desperately wanting the Born from a Wish DLC for Silent Hill 2: Remake. Right across Discord, subreddit, and X/Twitter threads — including the Townfall Transmission tweet — you'll find loads of fans asking for the Maria-centric story DLC, with others clamoring for some kind of Silent Hill Master Collection.

Silent Hill series producer Motoi Okamoto recently opened up on why Konami revealed three new Silent Hill games at once after a full decade of silence, saying the publisher was keen to stress to old fans and new that it was "serious" about resurrecting the flailing horror series.

Reflecting on how the series has performed since Konami's inaugural Silent Hill Transmission back in October 2022, Okamoto explained how the impressive Silent Hill 2 Remake was designed with "half new, half old customers in mind" to ensure it could attract new fans to the franchise.

Of all the projects revealed since that 2022 showcase — Silent Hill: The Short Message, Silent Hill 2 Remake, Silent Hill f, Silent Hill: Townfall, and media projects Silent Hill: Ascension and the movie, Return to Silent Hill — the majority have been received well by critics, fans, and new players alike, suggesting it was a gamble worth taking for the Japanese publisher.

Vikki Blake is a reporter for IGN, as well as a critic, columnist, and consultant with 15+ years experience working with some of the world's biggest gaming sites and publications. She's also a Guardian, Spartan, Silent Hillian, Legend, and perpetually High Chaos. Find her at BlueSky.