Gaming

I’m seeing Saw X tonight. The ever-wearier death game horror movie franchise has been toying with soft reboots since 2017’s Jigsaw and 2021’s Chris Rock-led Spiral, but neither really got the series back off the ground. Saw X is a prequel injected between the 2004 original and its 2005 sequel, and marks the first time

As my spaceship emerges from interstellar travel to orbit a once-distant alien world, I know that once I’m down on its surface, it won’t feel like a world at all. Instead, what Starfield will give me is a series of zones, awkwardly stitched together in a way that makes it hard to pretend they make

Alan Wake was heralded as a generational leap in character-driven video games when it launched in 2010, winning over fans and firmly cementing creator Remedy Entertainment as an innovator in gaming. After a couple well-lauded games, the studio is back for Alan Wake 2, and for a few hands-on hours, I got to dive back

Cyberpunk 2077 is a big game with a big map and a lot of noise in the margins, and that’s before you even account for the just-released Phantom Liberty expansion. It has a myriad of side-quests, and they frankly vary in quality; The peaks and valleys of Night City become pretty apparent the longer you

Sarah Elmaleh didn’t expect to find herself on the frontlines of a medium-defining fight over the use of AI in game development when she entered the video game industry over a decade ago. The voice of Katie in 2012’s seminal indie hit Gone Home, Elmaleh arrived in California just in time for the 2016 voice

Starfield offers a plethora of planets and moons to discover. But what do you do when you’re actually wandering around down there on some rando planet in a distant star system? Outside of questing, Starfield features an incredibly lightweight exploration feature called surveying. This is a great way to go sightseeing, but also profit a

You probably saw a ton of headlines about Xbox leaks this week: new hardware, upcoming games, Game Pass costs, acquisition strategies. A trove of unredacted documents accidentally uploaded to a federal court’s case server gave the world an unprecedented look into the secret machinations of the gaming wing of a $2 trillion tech giant. But

Vendors are a crucial component of Starfield, as you’ll need to make use of the RPG’s merchants in order to get better gear, obtain necessary parts to fix a damaged ship, buy healing items, and sell off all your contraband to earn enough credits to eventually buy that house in Akila City. The bars and

There’s been a lot of attention given to Baldur’s Gate 3’s sex, sexiness, and sexuality since it launched in August. Larian Studios’ Dungeons & Dragons RPG has received both high praise and some criticism for its party of adventurers doing the horizontal tango. It’s received acclaim for its lack of restriction and focus on player

Baldur’s Gate 3 continues to evolve. The hit fantasy RPG received its much-anticipated and sprawling Patch 3 update today, which brings Mac support, a Magic Mirror feature to redesign your player character’s appearance, and an overwhelming number of bug fixes and tweaks. Unboxing The Baldur’s Gate 3 Collector’s Edition Off English Larian Studios’ patch notes

Cyberpunk 2077’s big 2.0 update is out today and it fundamentally changes large swaths of the original game. We’ve been playing it a bit as part of our Phantom Liberty coverage and had a broad sense of the changes, but CD Projekt Red has finally released extensive patch notes to tell you every minute detail

Pokémon 151 is surely the most anticipated set of the long-running Pokémon Trading Card Game in years. Featuring the original 151 Kanto Pokémon, united into one single set for the first time ever, it’s finally out on September 22. With some of the most beautiful cards we’ve ever seen in the live game, it’s unquestionably

Xbox Game Pass gives you access to a library of hundreds of titles, including new releases like Starfield and Lies of P, on Xbox consoles and PCs. The popular Microsoft subscription service starts at $10 a month, but you can get Game Pass for less — even free — if you know how. The key is

Lies of P frustrates me. The first Soulslike from developers Neowiz Games and Round8 Studio, this gothic action-RPG keeps kicking my ass no matter how many times I level up. It’s aggravating. And yet, I keep pulling myself from the comfort of my Starfield spaceship to descend into the chaos of “Pinocchio Souls” for one

If last week’s episode of Ahsoka—which featured lengthy, surreal scenes centered on Anakin Skywalker and Ahsoka Tano—was showrunner Dave Filoni catering to both Clone Wars and prequel fans, then the newest episode, “Far, Far Away,” is for Rebels loyalists. But not just Rebels loyalists, as Ahsoka episode six feels like Star Wars is finally giving

We knew that Intel’s Meteor Lake would begin an important new era with a design that stacks a few “chiplets” like pancakes into a single next-generation PC processor. But now we know something else: One of those chiplets will house a super low-power CPU that can keep a laptop ticking without as much of a

These companies are bleeding me dry. Starfield on Game Pass. Sea of Stars on PS Plus. Ahsoka on Disney Plus. The Last of Us on (HBO) Max. Subscription services used to make me feel like I was getting away with something. Cheaper, easier entertainment at the click of a button. No commercials, Fewer risks. Hassle-free.

Starfield is here, and it’s already shaping up to be one of the best games of 2023. The massive space roleplaying game from Bethesda Game Studios launched widely last night and is now available on Xbox Game Pass.  There’s a lot to Starfield, with more than 1,000 planets to explore and hundreds of missions available.

Lies of P is a tough game. Everything can kill you, from the hardest of bosses to the most predictable of trash mobs, which is to be expected of a Soulslike game. Although there’s no difficulty setting to make the Bloodborne-inspired RPG any easier, there are some tips you can take with you as you

Oh, hey there. It’s weekend time once more and that means we’re taking a look at what’s been keeping us busy on our gaming machines. It’s been a pretty busy time of year for game releases, so there’s the usual new stuff in the pages ahead but also one stone-cold classic and even one game

Final Fantasy VII Rebirth’s new trailer was undoubtedly the star of the show in Sony’s September 14 PlayStation State of Play presentation. The highly anticipated second installment of the Final Fantasy VII remake looks better than ever and damn, that trailer was packed full of fascinating morsels. Advertisement Three minutes in length, the trailer showed

The Crew is a weird franchise. The first game was focused on a story involving car gangs and criminals. The second game kept the map from the first—a scaled-down recreation of the United States—but ditched the narrative and focused on exploration and adding more types of vehicles to operate. Now the third game, The Crew

Ahsoka episode 5 is here, something we—and by “we” I mean Clone Wars fans, Anakin Skywalker apologists, and Star Wars nostalgists—have been awaiting for a very long time. Will Anakin get redemption? Will Ahsoka get closure? Will the live-action version of this thing we’ve seen before crackle with new energy, imbued by the powerful acting

Unity, the cross-platform game engine that powers games like Rust, Hollow Knight, and Pokémon Go, has introduced a new, controversial fee for developers, set to take effect next year. Indie developers quickly responded to the announcement, with many suggesting the costs of this policy would kill smaller games, while confusion spread as devs wondered how

Baldur’s Gate 3 can be overwhelming in its options, and that extends to its various character builds, ability loadouts, and, yes, spells. They’re so numerous, in fact, that just narrowing them down to the very best for this list was a challenge, and I’m sure plenty of people will read these selections and have differing

Geeta, the League Champ from Pokémon Scarlet and Violet was a bit of a let down. Her design is a serve and her background plot (of possibly being a terrible boss all the Paldea gym leaders resent) is actually pretty compelling, but her actual team and battle strategy is so anticlimactic she’s often tagged as

Even if you’ve just barely scratched the surface of Starfield, Bethesda’s massive new spacefaring RPG, you’ve probably met companion Sam Coe. The single dad who always wears a cowboy hat is available to join your crew early on along with his daughter, Cora, who tags along on your ship. And because he’s bisexual, he’s romanceable

Eternights, a hack-and-slash dating sim by Studio Sai, wears its Persona inspirations on its sleeve. When I played the game for the first time earlier this year at Summer Game Fest, I said its action combat felt flimsy and its characters seemed generic, though I was at least interested to see if those aspects would

Starfield is packed with many sights to see, secrets to uncover, factions to join, junk to pick up, and, most importantly: quests. One of the best side quests discovered thus far involves a ship full of some unlucky people stranded in a planet’s orbit. Fortunately (or unfortunately), you’ve arrived and are ready to put your

In the months (nay, years) leading up to Starfield’s September 6 release, the hype for the Bethesda RPG grew and grew until it was a heretofore unseen beast, a giant Kaiju of expectation that threatened to take down Sony, upend 2023’s GOTY race, and suck up all of gamers’ precious free time. Diablo IV –