The haunted house has become a ripe location in which to set weird video games. Lorelei and the Laser Eyes, Blue Prince, Botany Manor and Layers of Fear spring to mind. The manor as a site of danger, supernatural peril, untrustworthy architecture – perfect, surely, for an unsettling experience. Or even a silly experience in unsettling surroundings.Creepy Redneck Dinosaur Mansion 3 promises much in its title. It presents initially as a high-concept dinosaur-hunting adventure in spooky house run by a sinister old mogul, then quickly reveals to the player that it knows it is a video game. A broken video game, that is, and it is up to us to patch it as we go.The player explores the mansion through text and puzzle vignettes, pushing the limits on every scenario in the hopes of finding bugs and glitches, ultimately in the hope of defying the wishes of the unseen developers and “finishing” the game themself. This is a big concept, but the game seems to be interested in telling us its ideas rather than showing them to us – or demonstrating them within the play itself.The combat system through which our butch, confused protagonist operates is a clever little game of match three, the rules of which bend and flex depending on what he is fighting. Sometimes it is a dinosaur with a gun. Sometimes it is a tripwire, sometimes it is a legion of clones – sometimes his own clone. Sometimes it is talking vegetables. Sometimes a dinosaur in a wig. The silliness is one note and becomes flat quickly, saved only by the pleasing nature of the puzzles.Still, in order to have an effective game of match three – or, frankly, Candy Crush – you have to use high-contrast colours to make it kinder on the player. There were rounds when I played in which the symbols were really difficult to differentiate, which interrupted the otherwise pleasing flow. This visual issue is not limited to the puzzles: the entire colour palette of this game is muddy. It neither commits to the gothic nor leans full chaos.The same issues applies to the text. The game is text based, but the dialogue and descriptive writing are as muddy as the visuals. The jokes are fine, though they aim to be subversive and shocking (dinosaur romance being a recurring gag). However, the game being about gameplay and game development means that much of the descriptions are couched in jargon. Discussions of files and version history are beyond inside baseball. So if you are a seasoned enough gamer to be up to speed with the meta language, surely you don’t need swearwords to be starred out. Surely we were all laughing at dinosaur romance five years ago. The writing is so close to great. It just needed to be sharper.Text-based gameplay in Creepy Redneck Dinosaur Mansion 3. Photograph: Strange ScaffoldThe art style is sketchy, but not in a way that evokes a deliberate aesthetic. There are times in which reality is said, by the text, to be bending and glitching. There are moments in which we disappear into voids and exit the world. There is even a somewhat climactic moment in which we enter the internet. Still, the visuals pull their punches. These strange occurrences can be evoked with drawings and don’t require flashy graphics. I recognise the illustrative style is deliberate but the game would have been better served by even a little more playfulness, or even intentionality, in the art style. Two moments did make me laugh – one involving some unexpected clowns, the other, pets – when the visual style actually did move into the meta and demonstrate some of what the game tells us it is about.I wanted to love this game. On paper it is outrageous. Strange Scaffold, the developer, is known for the weird – notably Clickholding, which is sinister, experimental and truly queries what a game is in its execution (there is a lot of clicking, and being watched in the action of clicking). Creepy Redneck Dinosaur Mansion 3 certainly is creepy, and set in a mansion, and does have dinosaurs and some really satisfying puzzles. It also has some great ideas and isn’t quite a failed experiment. While it doesn’t bend reality in the way that it seems to want to, it aims high, and if the player can manage the places where the aesthetic falls short, they’ll have a great time. They might even meet a nice, blond dinosaur they can take home with them.

When we meet Clair Obscur’s protagonist Gustave, he’s getting ready to say goodbye to his ex-girlfriend, Sophie. Once a year the Paintress, a giant god-like woman visible from across the sea, wakes, paints a number on a large monolith, and in the peaceful town of Lumière, everyone whose age corresponds with the number dies. This process, called the Gommage, has shortened people’s lives for 67 years, and now it’s Sophie’s turn. Immediately after this heart-wrenching goodbye, Gustave and his adopted sister Maelle get ready to set sail as part of Expedition 33, on a journey to defeat the Paintress and end her gruesome cycle.While stunningly beautiful, the continent you arrive at is no friendly place, and the path to the Paintress is filled with surreal monsters called Nevrons, which you fight in turn-based battles. Characters have a melee attack and a long-range attack, but most importantly, they have a large variety of unique skills including elemental magic attacks and strong attacks with multiple hits that have the chance to stun. Each member of your team has a special way of building up damage even further; Maelle for example uses a defensive, offensive or aggressive combat stance, inspired by fencing, while the magic that Lune wields builds up so-called stains that you can then spend to make other spells more powerful. Add to this long list of optional passive skills called Pictos, and soon you have a wide array of ways to enhance your characters. The interplay between building up action points to use skills, building up damage and defending is really interesting, and I enjoyed trying out different tactics, even as it meant that a lot of my time was spent in menus.An enigma wrapped in a mystery … Clair Obscur: Expedition 33. Photograph: Sandfall InteractiveIt can feel overwhelming, but each new skill gets introduced gradually, and permanent tool tips in the battle menu helpfully list each skill’s effect and cost. Clair Obscur’s combat can be quite a challenge, however, since battles use a parry and dodge system. If you don’t dodge at least, battles will quickly be over. Successful parries, which have a narrower reaction window than dodging, let characters answer with powerful counters, which can be crucial to beating your foes. Even regular enemies kept me on my toes with their many attacks, but the absolute screen-shaking force of a successful counter felt deeply satisfying every time. I continuously got a kick out of parrying because I’m the right kind of bad at it – it might get boring if you don’t get that hit of dopamine from occasional success, or feel frustrating if you struggle constantly. Enemies also feint incredibly often, which is meant to increase the difficulty of parrying but also lengthens their attacks, sometimes overly so.Developer Sandfall Interactive has been very open about taking inspiration from Japanese role-playing games. While combat is certainly a prominent example, I saw the influences everywhere: the menu design is as much Persona-inspired as the combat is, the enemies are as surreal as Bloodborne’s gruesome creations. But when it comes to storytelling, Clair Obscur shares the tendency of many JRPGs to over-complicate things.The dialogue though is well written and acted. Your party goes through some incredibly bad times, but they talk about it candidly and try to support each other as best they can. Optional conversations help you to get to know everyone better – some of Clair Obscur’s best writing is here. It’s the main plot where things eventually get exhausting. For the most part, Clair Obscur is the adult fantasy that Final Fantasy XVI tried to be. But it’s also an enigma wrapped in a mystery, and for hours and hours, it adds new questions and characters until it’s all revealed in an absolute dump of late-game information. Conversations, locations and gameplay repeat themselves in the final third, making things feel artificially lengthened.Towards the end, Clair Obscur constantly finds more ways to be even sadder than it was mere minutes ago, so unwilling to let you go that it forces you through lengthy boss fights accompanied by a whole soundtrack’s worth of operatic metal. It also culminates in a very frustrating ending that made me question everything I spent hours doing. Everywhere else, from combat to enemy design to music, I appreciated Clair Obscur’s flair for the epic, but too much subterfuge, too many tears, too many fights ultimately made for a seriously fumbled ending.

One thing you realise as you get older is that memories are plastic and that the stories you tell about your life change with every recollection, depending on who you are at the time. This is one of the themes – and indeed the mechanics – of Lost Records, a narrative adventure about four teenage girls who develop an intense friendship in rural Michigan during the summer of 1995. In the first instalment, they form a band, discover an old shack in the woods to use as a clubhouse, and encounter a supernatural force emanating from a deep hole they discover nearby. But as autumn draws in and the girls plan a climactic rock gig, tragic secrets are uncovered.Cleverly, the story is told mostly in flashback, as the characters meet again, decades later, in their long-abandoned home town – they’re older, wiser and with new perspectives on what happened to them as teenagers. Lead character Swann, a keen photographer whose video camera provides a key game interface in the first episode, is living a solitary life, while Autumn is still filled with anxiety and Nora is now an influencer. Missing is Kat whose terminal cancer diagnosis obliterates their world at the close of part one.Incredibly poignant … Lost Records: Bloom & Rage (Tape Two). Photograph: Don’t NodWhile the first instalment focused on the excitement and hubris of the teenage characters, this is a much darker story concentrating on the adults as they pick apart their lives. Through dialogue trees and interactive memory segments you help Swann navigate the meeting, as well as moments from the past. There is less of the video camera this time. In the first part, there were multiple occasions where you had to film certain scenes, creating a nicely personal bank of footage which could be edited and reshot. There is also much less actual gameplay: an early scene where you have to pack a box and a later stealth sequence where you sneak into Kat’s bedroom are the only real moments of ludic challenge. I missed taking more of an active role.What you get instead, are some incredibly poignant narrative scenes, as the girls battle with the reality of Kat’s diagnosis and the raw ambiguity of their feelings for each other. Two moments stand out especially: Swann and Nora meeting alone one afternoon, talking and exchanging gifts, every word, every gesture, communicating a mass of unspoken feelings. Then, Swann sneaking into Kat’s bedroom and helping her cut her hair before chemotherapy takes it. This is some of the most profound, sensitively structured and emotionally resonant writing about the teenage experience of love and loss I have ever encountered in a video game.Tape Two ends on an ambiguous note, though I think this is utterly true to the experience of playing. The mysterious hole in the woods, which the characters call “the abyss”, can be interpreted as entirely symbolic, as can all the supernatural events in the game, and this is a brave, credible narrative decision. Sometimes, there are no answers, and sometimes the magic we perceived around us when we were young turns out to have been something else entirely – perhaps just friendship or imagination, or the yearning to be something in the world.The effect is like Stranger Things directed by Kelly Reichardt – a realist fantasy in which silence and ambiguity come to the fore. Lost Records is ultimately a game about love, grief and self-recrimination, and the different intensities of those forces as we age. By the end you miss the optimism and verve of those girls in the woods, as though you were one of them – and quite possibly, in a lot of ways, you were.skip past newsletter promotionSign up to Pushing ButtonsFree weekly newsletterKeza MacDonald's weekly look at the world of gamingPrivacy Notice: Newsletters may contain info about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. For more information see our Privacy Policy. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.after newsletter promotion

One of my earliest memories is watching my mum and dad play the opening level of Super Mario Bros in cooperative mode on the Nintendo Entertainment System. This was the early 1990s, and they were joined at the hip on the sofa, laughing at the idea of two portly plumbers becoming gigantic after consuming copious amounts of magic mushrooms.‘An ordinary human being rather than the tragic myth he became’ … family photo of Thomas Hobbs with his father, Jonathan. Photograph: Thomas HobbsIn this moment I sensed their natural chemistry, while the intoxicating mix of 8-bit visuals and perky, synth-heavy music blew my toddler mind. Although it was irritating seeing them constantly fail to jump high enough to hit the top of the flagpole at the end of the level, I remember being transfixed by the TV screen, and I’m pretty sure this was the first time I connected properly with a video game.I was only four years old when my dad died. It happened suddenly, a heart attack when he was just 37, and I witnessed it on a bike ride ... It left my family for ever broken. But the formative image of dad at his most carefree and in love, clutching a rectangular controller hooked up to a grey slab of Japanese joy, remained. It was something I could utilise whenever my grief became too much. Most importantly, the memory allowed me to visualise my dad as an ordinary human being rather than the tragic myth he later became.Ours was a working-class household with limited space, so eventually the NES disappeared: no one could work out whether it was gathering dust in an old plastic bag in a relative’s loft, or if it had been accidentally thrown out. So I was shocked recently when my mum unexpectedly handed me the console after finding it during a spring clean. She asked me if I could try to fix it, so that we could keep it in the family.It had no leads, games, or controllers. It was also filthy with sticky clumps of dirt, particularly around the AV slots, and judging by the rust collecting at the cartridge slot, had serious water damage. After giving it a deep clean, hoovering all the damp dust out of the inside and buying a pricey device that converted the games into HD, I switched it on. Somehow, it still worked. Clearly, like most consumer devices produced in the 1980s, the NES had been built to withstand a nuclear winter should the cold war heat up.A retro ‘Nintendo Family Computer’, sold in Japan as a forerunner to the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES). Photograph: Oli Scarff/AFP/Getty ImagesThe last few weeks of rebuying games and getting lost in their fuzzy charms have been genuinely restorative for my mental health; a chance to reconnect with my roots. It took me about 15 minutes to figure out how to make a jump on the Fortress level of World 1 in Super Mario Bros 3, with spikes descending from the ceiling just as my squirrel suit was on the verge of flying to the other side. But by working out I simply had to be patient and duck inside a small space to avoid looming peril, rather than blindly rushing forward, I knew I was experiencing the same glorious lightbulb moment my dad would have enjoyed.I’ve been particularly obsessed with Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!! Despite the clunky 2D crowd and square-ish dimensions, there’s a genuine dynamism to the boxer’s movement and a feeling that David can defeat Goliath simply by bobbing and weaving and flipping the momentum with a well-aimed jab to the chin. While later boxing games might have been dripping with life-like bodily fluids, I have yet to find one that better replicates the magic of a boxer tasting blood and moving in for the kill than this 1987 NES game.Double Dragon has also been a revelation. This co-op fighting game gives you a big open space to navigate and – despite the graphical limitations – makes you feel like Bruce Lee: surrounded by foes, but with enough battlefield intelligence to use the environment to your advantage and kick knife-wielding enemies into the dust. With race-against-the-clock tension, one early sequence where you fight a couple of heavies on a moving conveyor belt made me feel like I was in a John Woo action movie.In these games the lack of a save mode forces you to continuously invest in improving, so the next time you hit the dreaded “Game Over” screen you’re more confident of avoiding the same mistakes. This grift is strangely addictive, and it’s easy to picture my dad taking a quick break after putting baby me to sleep, his mind on the allure of the hard-won achievements at the core of this more patient era of Nintendo gaming.Genuine dynamism … Mike Tyson’s Punch Out!! Photograph: NintendoKnowing he would have once had the same smile on his face while playing the NES has made him more tangible in my mind; it’s allowed me to see through his eyes. And, as my two-year-old son experiences his own dad going crazy over firing Flower Power-ups or defeating Dracula Duck during the final boss battle of the family melodrama that is DuckTales, I feel like I’m keeping my father’s energy alive.Retro gaming is very much on the rise in the UK and US, with many players rediscovering the delights of analogue-era consoles. Playing these old cartridges on the original machines provides a deeper appreciation of the evolution of gaming and it’s an escape from a world that feels far less carefree than the time in which these machines were thriving. Perhaps they also hope to re-ignite the memories of those who’ve passed, to remain connected to the loved ones who once invested their time into these devices.Rather than letting that old console become a house for spiders in your loft, dust it off, get playing. It might just help you to grieve, or relive a special memory that otherwise could easily have been lost. When I hear the opening chords of the Super Mario Bros theme song, I’m instantly back on that sofa with my mum and dad, smiling, assured that everything is going to be OK.

Out of all the episodes in the excellent seventh season of Black Mirror, it’s Plaything that sticks out to me and I suspect to anyone else who played video games in the 1990s. It’s the story of socially awkward freelance games journalist, Cameron Walker, who steals the code to a new virtual pet sim named Thronglets from the developer he’s meant to be interviewing. When he gets the game home, he realises the cute, intelligent little critters he’s caring for on the screen have a darker ambition than simply to perform for his amusement – cue nightmarish exploration of AI and our complicity in its rise.The episode is interesting to me because … well, I was a socially awkward games journalist in the mid-1990s. But more importantly, so was Charlie Brooker. He began his writing career penning satirical features and blistering reviews for PC Zone magazine, one of the two permanently warring PC mags of the era (I shared an office with the other, PC Gamer). In Plaything, it’s PC Zone that Cameron Walker writes for, and there are several scenes taking place in its office, which in the programme is depicted as a reasonably grownup office space with tidy computer workstations and huge windows. I do not think the production design team got this vision from Brooker.“Zone had far less of the corporate workplace feel than the episode showed, and much more of a kids in the basement, youth club-cum-nightclub vibe to it,” says Paul Presley, who worked on PC Zone at the time. “It was a handful of messy, cluttered desks stuck in a windowless basement office round the back of Oxford Street (later Tottenham Court Road). We’d have killed for floor-to-ceiling windows! Editorial, art and production were all on top of each other, music blasting from the office stereo, usually furnished by the neighbouring Metal Hammer magazine. Desks were personal spaces, overflowing with paper, mags, trinkets, swag and tons and tons of CDs.”In the sake of journalistic thoroughness, I also contacted another PC Zone alumnus Richie Shoemaker for his recollections. “Although there were windows along one side, they were below street level and smeared with London grime,” he says. “The sills were piled high with dusty magazines, broken joysticks and likely-empty game boxes. It was perpetual night for the best part of eight years down there.”Kids in the basement … the office of PC Zone magazine in the mid-1990s Photograph: Richie ShoemakerThe episode was more accurate on the games themselves – the first scene in the office shows Cam playing Doom, when the editor comes over, shows him the front cover of the latest issue of the mag with System Shock on the cover, then asks Cameron if he’s finished his review of Bullfrog’s classic adventure game Magic Carpet. “[Plaything] is good on the timelines,” says Shoemaker. “Playing Doom in the office was of course standard – although when I joined the team Quake was the lunchtime and afterwork deathmatch of choice. The Magic Carpet review did appear in the issue after System Shock (which was actually Charlie’s first cover review), but it got 96%, not 93% and was written by launch editor Paul Lakin – who went on to work at the Foreign Office.” He also reckons the episode’s grizzled old editor might have been inspired by then deputy editor, Chris Anderson, who according to Shoemaker was “quite a vampiric character who seemed to exist on a diet of cigarettes and Ultima Online.”Most fascinating to me though is the inspirational origin of the Thronglets virtual pet game. Most reviewers have been referencing Tamagotchi, the keychain pet toy that took the world by storm int the late 90s. Brooker himself has referenced it in an interview. However, a much more likely candidate was the 1996 title Creatures, in which players cared for generations of cuddly-looking critters. Although it looked like a cutesy pet game it was in fact a highly sophisticated artificial life experiment, created by the distinctly sci-fi-sounding CyberLife Technology. Players needed to try to establish breeding populations of the creatures – called norns – but your control over them was limited as they were coded with advanced neural networks and had functioning internal bodily systems regulating their behaviours and physical abilities. CyberLife made a big deal of the complexity and experimental nature of the game: the box came with a warning sticker stating “Digital DNA Enclosed” and the blurb on the back cautioned players that they would be unleashing the world’s first artificial life-science experiment – which is exactly what Plaything is about.Less cutesy than it looked … Creatures. Photograph: CyberLife TechnologiesCreatures creator Steve Grand bears similarities to the Plaything (and Bandersnatch) coder Colin Ritman. He was a programmer who got tired of conventional games and wanted to try something extremely new. He went on to write a book about Creatures and its development, Creation: Life and How to Make It, and later became an internationally renowned roboticist, famously developing a robot orangutan. Surely the most Black Mirror career trajectory ever. In 2011, he started work on a spiritual follow-up to Creatures named Grandroids, which like Thronglets was about developing a race of intelligent AI aliens – Grand launched a Kickstarter for it in 2016. The project has yet to surface although Grand has a new website for it under the name Phantasia. All very intriguing.This is one of the things I love about Black Mirror, and indeed the use of technology and video games in conventional drama: this is an arcane world full of eccentric people no one outside the industry has heard of, yet the toys they make have massive ramifications. Personally, I wanted to see a lot more of the PC Zone as imagined by the programme, but I understand that the sinister Thronglets were the real focus. Maybe one day there will be a full Silicon Valley-style drama series about the games industry in the 1990s – it was a hell of a time. For now, it’s interesting to see the world both Brooker and I inhabited being used as the venue for dystopian fiction – even if they really did get it completely wrong about those windows.

My first day with Blue Prince, I told myself I’d just have a little taste before turning to my usual evening K-drama. Before I knew it the sun had long since set and my lounge was lit only by my Steam Deck and a game that had fast become my new obsession. It is the sort of game that feels as though it were made just for you – and the elements that make it truly special are best discovered without forewarning, so forgive any vagueness in what follows.In a similar style to What Remains of Edith Finch or Gone Home, Blue Prince has you exploring your character’s atmospherically uninhabited family home. But as in Outer Wilds, your exploration is limited: you are frequently forced to start afresh with little more than the snippets of knowledge you’ve gained. Each expedition is further complicated by Rogue-like randomisation: the house’s shapeshifting floor plan is a five-by-nine grid to be filled anew each day with tiles drafted by you, a feature that some players may recognise from the board game Betrayal at House on the Hill. But in this case there’s a random choice of three options whenever you open a door.It’s always worth trying a room you haven’t seen before. Photograph: Raw FuryDifferent rooms serve different functions. Some provide resources such as keys, money, energy or gems (required to draft more interesting rooms), and these are occasionally locked behind relatively simple standalone puzzles. Others deplete your stocks, like the gymnasium that wearies you each time you enter. A few, such as the boiler room or utility closet, offer special features that affect the rest of the house, occasionally even beyond just that day. On every in-game day, you enter the house, draft rooms, and explore until you run out of energy or openable doors. Rinse and repeat.The point? Ostensibly, to fulfil the stipulation laid out in a deceased great uncle’s will to find an elusive 46th room and thereby inherit the estate. But like a parfait dessert, this game is deliciously layered. At first the sprawling house can feel sparse, with its lifeless rooms and the game’s calming cel-shaded art style and succinct sound design and music. You’ll focus on the draft, learning as you go that the further you get from the entrance, the more likely you are to draw rarer rooms; that most rooms can only be drafted once per run; and that it’s always worth trying a room you haven’t seen before even if it doesn’t seem useful in the moment.Before too long, you’ll start to find objects that hint at future discoveries: car keys when you’ve yet to see a car (or even considered venturing outside); notes written by different hands; larger puzzles you have no idea how or why to solve. You’ll scribble down hints and set goals for future runs, or – as I did – take copious screenshots of the letters, photographs and other artefacts found throughout. As the rooms become more familiar, you’ll notice more details and wonder if they’re background art, environmental storytelling, or clues.In another game such repetition could feel tedious, but Blue Prince sets a gently rewarding pace, the randomisation nudging you to try new things and make new discoveries each day. Thoughtful design details smooth your way: most locked doors only require any generic key, the more convoluted puzzles remain solved even when the house resets, the use of discrete energy units consumed when you enter a room – rather than a ticking clock – means you can always take your time. I never felt in danger of not being able to solve a problem, and multiple puzzles ended up having easier solutions than I initially suspected.And then there’s the fact that Blue Prince has the best titular homophone in video games (sorry Fortnite). It’s a game about the blueprints of the Mount Holly Estate, and naturally a magical mansion like this has a story; it’s this, the family behind it, and the fantastical wider world in which they live, that will draw you to the 46th room and far, far beyond.skip past newsletter promotionSign up to Pushing ButtonsFree weekly newsletterKeza MacDonald's weekly look at the world of gamingPrivacy Notice: Newsletters may contain info about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. For more information see our Privacy Policy. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.after newsletter promotion

In the early 00s, offbeat sports games were king. From the slam-dunking shenanigans of NBA Street to Mario Strikers’ show-stopping absurdity, once serious competitions were reimagined as wonderfully silly grudge matches. Yet as the live service era arrived, sport sims became less about pulse-pumping plays, and more about collecting increasingly expensive virtual trading cards.Enter Rematch, a refreshingly action-packed reimagining of the beautiful game. Channelling the scrappy thrills of Powerleague five-a-side, Rematch sidelines Fifa’s team-focused tactics to put you in the studded boots of a single player. With controls like a third-person action game, developer Sloclap channels its martial arts-heavy experience with previous titles Sifu and Absolver into creating weighty, skill-driven football. It’s wonderfully agile, fast and furious stuff. Passes are delivered manually, shots are curled in the heat of the moment, and goalies come sprinting down the halfway line like an Oliver Kahn possessed. Gratuitous slide tackles and bicycle kicks are the order of the day, and as my teammates and I score our respective half-line screamers, I can’t stop grinning.“Fifa is a football simulation and Rematch is a football player simulation,” says creative director, Pierre Tarno. “In gaming this kind of pass to volley kick action simply does not exist any more. So, we thought: ‘Let’s make it happen!’”Reflex-testing … Rematch. Photograph: SloclapWhere Sifu had you knocking seven shades of chi out of a slew of martial arts masters, Rematch channels similarly reflex-testing gameplay into a kickabout. Thanks to the high level of player control, matches get surprisingly sweaty surprisingly quickly. Without 10 other controllable players to consider, Rematch is a game of constant movement. Sprinting costs precious stamina, and holding the “run” button constantly à la Fifa is a swift way to fumble your shot. Thankfully, you’ve got a trick hidden under your knee pads. A tap of the bumper lets off a sudden, swift burst of speed. Tied to a separate meter, this emergency boost is great for chasing down the striker in your box or for ditching that defender snapping at your heels. Soon you’re balancing midfield and defensive play on the fly and charging into goalmouth scrambles in authentically scrappy fashion.Sporting an art style that’s part Breath of the Wild, part French impressionism, anime-esque speed lines follow your player as you sprint across each lusciously rendered pitch. Scoring a goal warps the virtual environment around you, the stage’s backdrop transforming Smash Bros-style, to match the leading team’s home stadium, as the ball hits the back of the net in an explosion of colour.According to Tarno, Rematch’s visuals were an attempt to recreate the look of soft dreamy paintings inside immersive 3D stadiums. Yet despite its endearingly cartoony look, there’s a welcome lack of screen-filling super moves and gravity defying feats. “We once had wall-running built into the game,” he says, “but it was a little too far from the credible football fantasy that we were aiming for.”A game of constant movement … Rematch. Photograph: SloclapThis is a world that’s bright in aesthetic and outlook. Set in 2065, instead of taking place inside video games’ usual grimdark dystopia, Sloclap offers a refreshingly optimistic view of the future, the environments focused on renewable energies and natural landscapes. One stadium is encased in a dam that generates hydraulic power, another sees your match unfolding nestled under a hillside with spinning wind turbines.“We wanted to dream up a world in which mankind has made the right choices, in which cooperation and resilience are shared values, on and off the pitch,” says Tarno. “It’s really about the joy of playing with friends.”Once the controls finally click, I am fully invested in my ramshackle team. Just like Sloclap’s previous output, Rematch is about mastery, a game where your avatar starts off at the height of their powers – it’s just up to you to figure out how best to wield them. It helps that in Rematch’s world, offsides, fouls and – mercifully – VAR are a thing of the past, with futuristic footie letting nothing slow the action. “I think players who aren’t fans of football will be surprised that they can still enjoy a football game, because it’s intense and dynamic,” says Tarno.As Rematch is online-only, a ball call system lets players raise their hand as they shout and request the ball, with players also able to track the position of the ball – and their teammates – on an FPS-style minimap. There’s more than a touch of Overwatch to Rematch’s futuristic footie. The squad-led approach and precise manual aiming mean it feels just as satisfying to set up a goal as it does to score one. Rematch also shares a sense of arcade kinship with Rocket League – yet where Psyonix’s unstoppable hit sees players launching their Hot Wheels-esque vehicles into comically large footballs, Rematch delivers a more plausible approximation of the game.Rematch is filled with fun player customisation, allowing you to design everything from home and away kits to picking your avatar’s piercings. In keeping with its more inclusive vision of the future, there’s a vitiligo selector and even options for customisable prostheses for your player. Rematch will be a paid release, and I’m told that around half of cosmetic items will be unlockable through play, with additional items sold via in-game currency.Regardless of price point, Tarno is acutely aware that only one thing truly matters. “There’s no secret formula to game development,” he says. “The only way to make a commercial success is to make a very good game. It’s truer in games than any other entertainment industry … gamers are a very discerning audience. They are often very analytical, very precise in their assessment of mechanics and what works and what doesn’t … If the game is not good enough, it simply won’t succeed.”This month’s open beta will be crucial to fine-tuning Rematch. So far at least, it’s been a promising first half. I came into my demo expecting Mario Strikers-esque throwaway fun, and left with sweat-drenched hands. Sloclap’s mission is to bring a sense of fun back into virtual football, and based on what I’ve seen bandied about this colourful pitch so far, Rematch has the depth to make it to the big leagues.

This week I took my son, Zac, to see the new Minecraft movie, which is hardly a remarkable statement in the highly video game-branded world of 21st-century cinema – except that what followed was not typical at all. At least, not yet.As you may have seen from a number of bewildered news reports over the last few days, A Minecraft Movie has quickly engendered a community of, let’s say, highly engaged and enthusiastic fans. Spurred on by TikTok meme posts, vast portions of the film’s audience are now yelling out key lines of dialogue as they happen and singing along to the songs. In one key moment where a rare character from the game – the zombie chicken jockey – is introduced, they go absolutely crazy, throwing drinks and popcorn around, and in some US cinemas, getting escorted from the screening by police.The reaction was a little more muted in our tiny independent cinema in Frome, but still, there were rows of teenagers who had clearly seen all the TikTok posts telling them which lines to shout along to, and went to throw stuff, and they were extremely excited to be doing so, a few surreptitiously filming their mates’ reactions so they could add to the social media carnage. It was boisterous enough for the cinema to post on Facebook the next day about antisocial behaviour and the illegality of recording during a film.There is much to unpack here about the exclusionary nature of internet culture, cinema etiquette and the migration of online communities into physical spaces. Most of the audience reactions were fine – it’s an intentionally daft movie made for fans, and it is thrilling to celebrate fandom in a crowded space with likeminded peers. The film itself constantly rewards those who are immersed in its fiction – we enjoyed spotting the many Easter eggs (“oh look, it’s Herobrine!”) as well as little cameos from Minecraft YouTubers and even the game’s developers. There are also genuinely funny moments of slapstick and irony, hinging on committed performances from Jack Black and Jason Momoa.Flying as high as cinema popcorn … A Minecraft Movie. Photograph: Warner Bros/APBut for Zac, who is 19 and autistic, and for a lot of the smaller children in the auditorium, there were times when the atmosphere was confusing and a little intimidating. There have been comparisons to the wild reactions in screenings of Marvel movies such as Avengers: Endgame and Spider-Man: No Way Home, but those responses were largely prompted by in-film events. We all understood why people cheered when Captain America successfully caught Thor’s hammer, since the moment was painstakingly built into the lore of the series.With A Minecraft Movie, the prompts to audience reaction are largely from memes, that branch of internet comedy that is by its nature arcane: the joke is that you are seen to get the joke by other people who also get the joke. Out of context, a meme is a private gag you’re not in on. Perhaps the closest analogy is the culture around The Rocky Horror Picture Show and its legendary fan screenings in fleapit cinemas, complete with water pistols and drag attire. But those events were opt-in – everyone knew what they were getting. I’m not sure the same could be said for all of the parents leaving my screening picking popcorn out of their hair.But look, we really enjoyed watching the film. When Zac was young and struggling to communicate, Minecraft was a cherished outlet for him, allowing him to be creative and to make friends. He still plays to this day; it is his comfort blanket and it changed our lives – not least because I ended up writing a novel, A Boy Made of Blocks, inspired by our experiences within the game. Just hearing that baleful piano music in the cinema, sharing those jokes, seeing something that has had a profound positive effect on my family depicted on a huge screen among other fans, was an emotional experience.Of course, teenagers are supposed to be confusing and intimidating – that’s their job. We can’t just pivot from handwringing over the anxious generation to “let’s ban them from the cinemas because they’re naughty”. Also, in these difficult times for the movie industry, film-makers need to find ways to engage with teen audiences who are going out less, whether that’s due to the expense, social anxiety or the all-encompassing nature of digital culture. A Minecraft Movie is that most perfect unicorn of the entertainment business: a review-retardant, multimillion-dollar blockbuster that’s reaching the most unreachable generation in modern history. A lot of studios are now going to be busy working out how they can capture this meme-soaked magic in a bottle.Perhaps cinema owners will get wise and organise dedicated autism-friendly screenings, or at the opposite end of the scale, embrace the chaos and do special fan nights. They just need to be prepared to pay the cleaning staff a little extra.What to playLike an old war comic … Commandos: Origins. Photograph: Kalypso MediaA few hundred years ago (well, 1998), my favourite example in the then-crowded real-time strategy genre was Commandos: Behind Enemy Lines, a rip-roaring world war two tactical adventure where you directed a group of variously skilled soldiers through covert missions against German strongholds. Commandos: Origins is a reimagining of the series, modernising the original’s intricately detailed isometric landscapes and retaining its focus on stealth and sabotage. It’s like being in your own interactive version of old war comics such as Warlord and Battle Action, and I am fully prepared to lose hours of my life repeatedly attempting to get the sniper into the guard tower without being spotted by the patrolling Nazis.Available on: PC, PS5, Xbox Estimated playtime: skip past newsletter promotionSign up to Pushing ButtonsFree weekly newsletterKeza MacDonald's weekly look at the world of gamingPrivacy Notice: Newsletters may contain info about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. For more information see our Privacy Policy. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.after newsletter promotionWhat to readThe Nintendo Switch 2 is still keeping some specs under wraps. Photograph: Richard Drew/AP Polygon has some interesting follow-on from the recent Nintendo Switch 2 announcement: the console’s much-heralded group chat feature won’t be free. Instead, owners will have to pay a monthly fee to talk to pals while playing. Elsewhere, Eurogamer’s Digital Foundry team has produced a typically excellent deep dive into the console’s tech specs, which we still know very little about. The use ofAI in game development continues to be controversial and this Aftermath feature talking to game makers who are having to work with artificial intelligence is eye-opening and important. What to clickQuestion BlockNot losing the plot … Dragon Ball FighterZ. Photograph: Namco BandaiThis week’s question comes from StevenMane on Bluesky, who asked:“Fighting games tend to have some of the deepest stories. However, there’s a stigma that fighting games are only about pushing buttons and being hyper-competitive. What could developers and players do to break this stigma?”I think this comes from the disconnect between the action of fighting games and their narrative content: usually, all the story happens in cutscenes and pre-fight taunts, so players can feel disconnected from the lore. A few fighting game designers have started to draw the narrative more into the interactivity, using specific locations, costumes and moves to express the story. I think Injustice and Blazblue do a good job of this, while Namco’s anime-based fighters Dragon Ball and Naruto really cram the ongoing plotlines into the fights. Maybe fighting game devs could look at breaking up bouts to let story sequences in, so players are more heavily invested in the story and understand the stakes. As for players, I’ve always found fighting game communities to be extremely welcoming – that’s all they really need to do.If you’ve got a question for Question Block – or anything else to say about the newsletter – hit reply or email us on pushingbuttons@theguardian.com.

In a video game year dominated by dark, bloody fantasy adventures – and continued job losses and studio closures – it was a cute robot that stole the night at the 2025 Bafta video game awards. Sony’s family-friendly platformer Astro Bot won in five categories at yesterday evening’s ceremony, including best game and game design.The rest of the awards were evenly spread across a range of Triple A and independent titles. Oil rig thriller Still Wakes the Deep was the next biggest winner with three awards: new intellectual property, performer in a leading role and performer in a supporting role. Clearly actors looking for Bafta-winning roles need look no further than the North Sea. The only other multiple winner was online shooter Helldivers 2, which won in multiplayer and music. The night’s most nominated title, Senua’s Saga: Hellblade II, was victorious in just the one category: technical achievement.Still from Still Wakes the Deep. Photograph: Secret ModeElsewhere, the British game award was taken by perhaps the most British game ever made, the Yorkshire-based adventure Thank Goodness You’re Here. Smash-hit card puzzler Balatro may have won only a single award – debut game – but it was surely also victorious in the non-existent best acceptance speech of the night category, thanks to actor Ben Starr’s appearance in full jester make-up and three-pronged hat.There were a couple of surprise triumphs. Hardcore role-playing adventure Metaphor: ReFantazio won in the highly competitive narrative category, while sumptuous side-scrolling platformer Neva claimed artistic achievement and Vampire Survivors swooped in for Evolving game. The game beyond entertainment award went to Tales of Kenzera: Zau, a magical adventure inspired by the death of creative lead Abubakar Salim’s father and based on Bantu mythologies.Finally, the Bafta fellowship was awarded to legendary soundtrack composer Yoko Shimomura, who has scored games such as Street Fighter II, Kingdom Hearts and Final Fantasy XV. “Music has always been there with me, when things were sad or when I was filled with anger, shifting my mood from negative to positive,” she said in her acceptance speech. “I’ve sometimes felt I have no talent for music, when I’ve been unable to write or play in the way I wanted. But now I am working in my dream job, writing music for the games I love.”The full list of Bafta games awards winnersAnimation Astro BotArtistic achievement NevaAudio achievement Astro BotBest game Astro BotBritish game Thank Goodness You’re HereDebut game BalatroEvolving game Vampire SurvivorsFamily Astro BotGame beyond entertainment Tales of Kenzera: Zauskip past newsletter promotionSign up to Pushing ButtonsFree weekly newsletterKeza MacDonald's weekly look at the world of gamingPrivacy Notice: Newsletters may contain info about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. For more information see our Privacy Policy. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.after newsletter promotionGame design Astro BotMultiplayer Helldivers 2Music Helldivers 2Narrative Metaphor: ReFantazioNew intellectual property Still Wakes the DeepPerformer in a leading role Alec Newman, Caz McLeary in Still Wakes the DeepPerformer in a supporting role Karen Dunbar, Finlay in Still Wakes the DeepTechnical achievement Senua’s Saga: Hellblade IIBafta fellowship Yoko Shimomura

Soaring development costs; protracted production cycles; cautious C-suites looking to deliver reliable returns for shareholders: for many reasons, there is a dearth of original programming in big-budget video games. Already this year we have seen the arrival of the seventh mainline Civilization game, the 14th entry in the Assassins Creed franchise, and, most brain-melting of all, the 27th Monster Hunter title. But look: heres a magical-realist tale set in a moody, hurricane-ravaged imagining of the American deep south, whose title, crucially, bears no numerical suffix.South of Midnight makes a brilliantly atmospheric first impression. Winds bludgeon flimsy abodes; rain lashes down on tin roofs; the world is rendered with the macabre and crooked details of a Tim Burton film. Within minutes, a house that of high-school athlete Hazel and her mother, a social worker is carried away along a roiling flooded river. Playing as Hazel, you give chase, bounding with a lanky teenage gait across various platforms until the storm abates. In its wake lie miles of stagnant, fetid swamps. At one grisly point, you explore a farm stacked with the carcasses of pigs who did not survive the typhoon.As a protagonist, Hazel more than holds her own against this vivid and unusual (for video games, at least) world. With mere flicks of her wrists, connected to which are metaphysical scythe-like blades, Hazel rips through reality itself. For this spunky, determined young woman is a Weaver, adept at magically dispelling unsavoury spirits lurking amid the weeping willows and glinting glass bottle trees of her southern home. As a Weaver, she is able to see an enormous cosmic grand tapestry where myth, reality, time and space collide; peering into the past, she learns of ancestors who helped free slaves and of tragic child deaths.Vivid and unusual South of Midnight. Photograph: Xbox Game StudiosSprinting with energy, South of Midnight lays out its imaginative stall: action-packed chapters whisk the player from sweltering bayous to chilly mountains that feel as if they are edging towards Appalachia. The atmosphere is thick at times, laying it on a little too thick: your friendly guide to this folkloric romp is a gigantic catfish who speaks with a distinct Creole drawl about, among other things, the classic southern dish grits.But in the actual playing, South of Midnight is simply thin. With its mostly linear mix of 3D platforming and melee combat, the game evokes PlayStation 2-era titles. Yet neither element has much personality. The brawling looks stylish, ending with brutal finishing moves in which Hazel unravels her wraith-like enemies very fabric of being. Really, it lacks the depth and expressive possibilities of titles such as God of War. Platforming feels floaty until you are vaulting from one conspicuously painted white ledge to another: then it just feels prescriptive and clunky.What great lengths the team of visual artists, sound designers, and scriptwriters at Microsoft-owned studio, Compulsion Games, went to in creating this rugged, earthy place, only to have it undone by gameplay of often mind-numbing smoothness. At various points, you must flee from a nebulous, mist-like entity. But these sequences are so straightforward as to lack any dramatic tension. They repeat many times throughout the games approximately 12-hour duration, only increasing a little in difficulty each time.Other loops grate as the hours stack up: clear this area of oozing corrupted matter (a visual manifestation of the lands pain and trauma); watch another lightly animated flashback. This lovingly illustrated depiction of the south is rich and arresting yet the game is rote.What youre left with is a game whose best ideas are all optics. The fairytale southern style plays out like a modern, YA take on Toni Morrisons fiction while summoning some of the whimsical, damaged beauty of 2012s Beasts of the Southern Wild. The soundtrack is a rambunctious collage of howling blues, twanging folk and lilting jazz. Compulsion Games bottled much southern magic during the making of this seemingly risky gambit for Microsoft, yet failed to take risks where it really mattered: this unique setting deserved more.

How do you follow a game as complete and extensive as Mario Kart 8 Deluxe? Nintendo is banking on the answer being: go bigger. Double the number of racers to 24. Increase the number of characters (60 in total). More weapons. And, most eye-catchingly, more exploration.Thats not a term youd associate with the closed circuit, three-lap formula that the series has perfected over the last three decades, but in Mario Kart World, the flagship launch title for the forthcoming Switch 2, Nintendo is tearing down the tyre barriers and offering players a Forza Horizon style open world. Its not exactly a total reinvention of the wheel, but its as big a change to the format as any since the series began. Given physical copies of Mario Kart World will retail at 75 though, is it enough?I got a chance to spend time playing the new game and my immediate impression was that its what youd expect from a next-gen Mario Kart title. Its familiar, incredibly polished, plays flawlessly no matter what carnage ensues and it looks awesome. As I hurtled through the courses, the temptation was to slow down and take in all the small, quirky details.Internet-famous the Moo Moo Meadows cow. Photograph: NintendoPresumably there will be an opportunity to do just that in the free roaming element of the game. I didnt get much of a chance to explore this it was essentially the lobby while we waited for 24 players to join. What I did get to experience were two modes. The first was Grand Prix. This is your traditional Mario Kart affair: start, three laps, finish. The slight tweak here is that rather than having closed circuit courses, these are sprints across the world map: youll be in Boos cinema one moment, a prehistoric jungle the next. I opted to play as the cow from Moo Moo Meadows, the internet-famous breakout star of the recent Nintendo Direct, driving a tractor called Big Horn.As a seasoned Mario Kart player (to put it mildly), I found that it plays exactly as youd expect. Muscle memory takes over: you skid (though its less agile than in MK8D, presumably to account for wider tracks); you throw shells at opponents; you scream in frustration when you get struck by lightning just as you were about to use a boost. The level design is beautiful and each track seems packed with alternate routes and little secrets. I cant escape the feeling that the wider roads may mean the game loses some of its claustrophobic carnage, and that the emphasis will be on weapons rather than driving skill in this iteration of the series, but I can live with that. Regardless, I win my first race I want that on record and a glorious crown is bestowed upon my cow.In my time with the game, I also had one race in Knockout Tour mode, Nintendos battle-royale-style take on the series. As you progress along the course youll encounter checkpoints on the horizon; when you cross these, the bottom four racers are blocked from continuing and drop out. This continues until the final stretch of track where the remaining four race to the podium. Not realising I would be racing 23 other journalists in the room with me, I opted for the comedy choice of racing as Wiggler in a pink cruiser, which, from a kart configuration standpoint, is a terrible choice. Had I realised the stakes I would have gone Wario/monster bike, but its my own fault for assuming it was a race that didnt matter. They all matter.Knockout Tour mode is exhilarating. If, like me, you believe youve achieved God-like status at MK8D and can run through each course in your sleep, if youre used to cruising in first place without so much as a single banana to your name, then prepare yourself. In knockout mode you can drop from first to 24th in an instant.skip past newsletter promotionSign up to Pushing ButtonsFree weekly newsletterKeza MacDonald's weekly look at the world of gamingPrivacy Notice: Newsletters may contain info about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. For more information see our Privacy Policy. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.after newsletter promotionThe solution is to embrace the carnage. Weapons feel more significant (I lost count of how many golden mushrooms, bullet bills and star powers I went through), skidding and handling less so, given the greater width of each track. Amid all the frenzied chaos, I had no idea how long the race lasted I think somewhere between three minutes and three hours. Seeing the checkpoints and knowing I was only one horribly timed red shell away from dropping out prompted heart palpitations; clearing the checkpoints brought relief. It was a rush. I finished fifth, failing to qualify for the final section. This mark of shame aside, my initial impressions of knockout mode are that its an exciting reinvention of the format and there is a strong chance its about to become my entire personality.

If youre not familiar with Minecraft as a game then this film, notionally a big screen version of same, wont necessarily solve that. Minecraft, even more than most computer games, is what you make of it, an experience generated by the player. So in a way, the idea of making a film set in the Minecraft world is counterintuitive, because it can never replicate what is good about Minecraft, it can only tell you what is good about Minecraft. In addition to that, this comedy-fantasy takes aspects of the Minecraft world and uses them as building blocks in a rollicking adventure suitable for almost all ages, giving Jack Black and Jason Momoa carte blanche to wild out and be deeply silly. Your affection for and/or tolerance of this latter prospect will dictate to a large extent your enjoyment of this film.Black plays Steve, a crafter who in the game was the original default player, although that doesnt especially matter here. Momoa is Garrett The Garbage Man Garrison, a washed-up video game champ with an aesthetic stuck permanently and delightfully in the 1980s: pink leather fringed jacket and luscious locks flowing down past his prodigious shoulders like the first snowmelt off a mountain range. As this is kinda-sorta an ensemble film, we also have Henry (Sebastian Hansen), Natalie (Emma Myers) and Dawn (Danielle Brooks) rounding out the good guys squad. Its not the fault of any of the three latter actors, but its hard for them to make an impression alongside Black and Momoa going full-throttle and it would become an exhausting experience if they tried. That does mean their storylines feel like downtime, a chance to relax and catch your breath, rather than providing the emotional core that the writers presumably intended.Used more sparingly, but also firing on all cylinders is a hilarious and when is she not? Jennifer Coolidge, whose teacher character is exactly the kind of breathy over-sharer that Coolidge has made her speciality. She immediately tells Henry, a child in her care, that she stuck it out in a dead marriage for 20 years for the sake of the dogs. Coolidge is, quite simply, a genius at this, and can do this stuff in her sleep, without the slightest suggestion of effort.Black is a very different type of performer; you can see effort in every swivel-eyed tic and line delivery, but thats the whole point: its funny (mostly) to see someone commit that wholeheartedly to the bit. Its a shame the film as a whole doesnt work quite as well as its standout performances, with a tendency to ping pong along from scrape to scrape with little sense that it would matter much if you rearranged the various monster attacks or obstacles to be overcome in a different order. A little more craft on the storytelling side could have elevated this to something special a la Dungeons and Dragons from 2023, but its an enjoyable if hectic experience nonetheless.

By any estimation, Minecraft is impossibly successful. The bestselling video game ever, as of last December it had 204 million monthly active players. Since it was first released in 2011, it has generated over $3bn (2.3bn) in revenue. Whats more, its players have always been eager to demonstrate their fandom outside the boundaries of the game itself. In 2021, YouTube calculated that videos related to the game tutorials, walk-throughs, homages, parodies had collectively been viewed 1tn times. In short, it is a phenomenon.The Guardians journalism is independent. We will earn a commission if you buy something through an affiliate link.Learn more.Such is the strength of feeling, almost all of it positive, about Minecraft that it was only a matter of time before someone tried to turn it into a film. After all, you have a historically popular product and a highly engaged fanbase: what could possibly go wrong? Turns out, quite a lot. Last September, the first trailer for the film titled A Minecraft Movie was released, and the reaction was instant and violent. Minecraft fans devastated by awful live-action trailer read one headline the following day. Some called it a crime against humanity; others a soulless neon abomination. In less than 24 hours, the website GamingBible had called it a curse on my eyes and pure nightmare fuel. Within three days of its release, the trailer had been downvoted more than 1m times.If youre familiar with Minecraft, you can probably understand why. Minecraft is a game with a highly distinctive look; everything is made of square blocks, and theres a muted palette. The trailer, however, is insanely garish. Everything looks like it is made of Haribo and, worse, the blocks have slightly rounded edges. Worse still, there are humans in it. Heightened, ironic-looking humans. Jason Momoa is in it, in an unflattering blond wig and hot-pink leather jacket. In other words, it looks like a film made by people who dont understand Minecraft.This is Jumanji but with a Minecraft skin, was the first reaction of Argentinian YouTuber ElVitt0ri0 on seeing the teaser. Minecraft offers an infinite number of narrative possibilities. And yet they decided to go with the we go to another universe and learn about it storyline? What is this? Space Jam 3?ElVitt0ri0s response was to create A Movie About Minecraft (That Doesnt Exist), a version of what the film should have been. The trailer was created with the open-source animation software Blender that was used to make Flow, which won best animated feature at this years Oscars; its a fully animated trailer that retains the look of the original game and features characters recognisable to players. Underneath the video is the comment: This is everything the Minecraft movie should have been, the game elements, the history, the community its so perfect.And ElVitt0ri0 is not alone. Dozens, maybe even hundreds, of fan-made Minecraft trailers have sprung up online since the official teaser went live, each trying to find their own way to undo the damage it caused. Vicky Fernandes, who runs the channel Gloomy Animations, made one entitled Minecraft Movie Trailer But Its Actually Good. Her video is explicitly a fix rather than a reimagining; a shot-for-shot remake where everything is animated in a more immediately recognisable Minecraft style. And it is good; so good that the comments beneath the video are full of relieved now-thats-what-I-expected sentiment.For a certain type of fan, the Minecraft look is gospel. Photograph: MojangI think the movie should have been animated, not live action, Fernandes says over email. Mixing CGI cube-looking characters with real humans looks very weird. The CGI characters also look oddly realistic while keeping the cube proportions, making it look creepy. Overall, the film does not have an appealing art style.What ElVitt0ri0 and Fernandes have in common is that they are Minecraft fans first and foremost. Fernandes first started playing the game in 2014, when she was eight years old, and began making fan videos four years later. ElVitt0ri0 started playing at age 11, and quickly got swept up in its peripheral YouTube content. One thing fans have proved again and again is that Minecraft can function as an amazing platform to tell a story, ElVitt0ri0 says. Not just through animation either you can look at whole series and movies that were made in-game.Both YouTubers lament that this sense of history and appreciation seems to have been lost in the official movie. But perhaps that is to be expected, since Warner Bros has been trying to get a Minecraft movie off the ground for over a decade now. In 2014, when the studio first announced a film, it hired Shawn Levy to direct it. But that fell through, so Rob McElhenney stepped in to replace him. When he too stepped away shortly afterwards, Peter Sollett best known for 2008s Nick & Norahs Infinite Playlist briefly took his place. It was only in 2022 that the film found all of its pieces, with Napoleon Dynamites Jared Hess stepping in to direct a script from Masterminds writers Chris Bowman and Hubbel Palmer.In truth, Hess had his work cut out for him. Minecraft is a game without a traditional narrative. A sandbox game, where players are plunged into a procedurally generated landscape and are free to do whatever they like. If they want to extract raw materials from their surroundings to craft tools, they can. If they want to start fights with hostile creatures, they can. If they want to spend four days using the game to build a giant chicken (as my 10-year-old did this week), then thats up to them.A corpo-vomited product? The Minecraft film. Photograph: Courtesy Warner Bros Pictures/APThe film nods to this with its title its A Minecraft Movie, not The Minecraft Movie, because it would be reductive to be so definitive and, yet, Hess does appear to have taken the easy path, padding the bones of a Jumanji-style offering with blockier skin. Worse still, Hess has a distinctive visual style (he is essentially the Wes Anderson of ironic haircuts) that doesnt intuitively mesh with the Minecraft look.And for a certain type of fan, that look is not only gospel, but in part fan led. For instance, Element Animation, a YouTube outfit that made its name with lushly animated, absurd Minecraft spoofs were so successful that they ended up being hired by game developer Mojang to make official Minecraft videos. Minecraft is now ultimately a feedback loop between the game and the people who play it, and the movie needed to reflect that.However, the story goes that Hess basically stumbled into making the film when another project he was working on for Legendary fell through, they asked him to pitch for Minecraft and perhaps this lack of familiarity shows. After all, Phil Lord and Chris Miller went out of their way to reassure people that theyd played with Lego all of their lives before making 2014s rigorously faithful The Lego Movie. Aaron Horvath and Michael Jelenic went as far as saying that Super Mario Bros was their main source of entertainment as children when they were announced as directors for 2023s Super Mario Bros Movie.This is the level of familiarity that fans have come to expect, and things have a habit of going wrong whenever directors try to impose themselves too forcefully on a beloved property. The first live-action Mario movie fell apart when it replaced Bowser (a gigantic muscular turtle) with Dennis Hopper in a shiny blazer. Paramount was forced to spend $5m redesigning Sonic the Hedgehog after his appearance in a movie trailer, all tiny eyes and human teeth, horrified viewers. But Minecraft is still a relatively new game. People like Fernandes and ElVitt0ri0, who have been playing the game for long enough to truly understand it, are still only in their early 20s. Maybe one day theyll make a perfectly faithful Minecraft movie that satisfies the fans, but it wont be for years.But, again, this is A Minecraft Movie, not The Minecraft Movie. Warner Bros may have done enough to prevent this one from completely flopping there is wall-to-wall promotion, both in-game and in the real world, plus a second trailer that seems slightly more faithful to the source material. But hardcore devotees may still feel that its time to put the fans in charge of any future big-screen offerings. An Element Animation Minecraft film is exactly what my children want to see, but perhaps the reins will be passed to someone else with an innate understanding of the game. As ElVitt0ri0 says, a film based on something as beloved as Minecraft should be an actual piece of love towards the fans by fans, not just some corpo-vomited product by a big company.

After Nintendos intriguing hour-long live stream on Wednesday, we now know a lot more about its follow-up to the phenomenally successful Switch. But how does the Switch 2 play? After the online presentation, I got to spend about four hours road-testing the new console at a press event in the Grand Palais, Paris, the box-white exhibition hall adorned in Nintendo red and lined with rows of high-end TV screens and Switch 2 consoles. There was also a 90-minute roundtable with three of the masterminds behind the console: Tetsuya Sasaki (hardware design lead), Kouichi Kawamoto (producer) and Takuhiro Dohta (director). Heres what I learned.The gamesSmooth ride Mario Kart World for the Nintendo Switch 2. Photograph: NintendoMario Kart WorldThe headline feature here (playable cow aside) is Knockout Tour mode, which replaces the traditional three-lap circuits with hefty sprints across a sprawling world map. There are 24 racers, double that of its predecessor, Mario Kart 8 Deluxe. As you progress, large checkpoints emerge on the horizon and at each of these the bottom four racers drop out. This continues until the final stretch, when the final four duke it out for first place. Think Mario Kart does battle royale. Its intense. Its exciting. It runs incredibly smoothly and will reinvigorate even the most hardened dare I say jaded Mario Kart player.Elsewhere there is a more traditional Mario Kart experience where everyone gets to finish the race. Youre still sprinting across some configuration of a world map one moment youre driving through Boos cinema, the next youre hurtling through a Toad-branded manufacturing plant. Tweaks from the previous game include: a few new weapons, skidding feels less agile, the tracks feel less claustrophobic and theyve styled Waluigi like Steven Van Zandt.Super Mario Party JamboreeQuirky Super Mario Party Jamboree. Photograph: NintendoMario Party is Nintendos party game franchise board games, mini games, screwing each other over, players taking it far too seriously you get the drill. This series has always allowed Nintendo to showcase the quirkier aspects of its hardware, and the camera works well in the mini games I played. I enjoyed the goomba-catching mini game (named Goombalancing Act): you stand in front of the console and camera, then marvel as youre projected on to the TV, now with a red pedestal on your head; as goombas begin falling from the sky you bob and weave to catch, stack and balance. The player with the most goombas at the end wins.Elsewhere, theres a squatting/standing decision based game (I can already see the camera being incorporated into the next Ring Fit/Wii Fit title) and a game that rewards those who move and shout the most, making use of the inbuilt microphone (this one might quickly grow old). Its all very reminiscent of PlayStations EyeToy. The mouse functionality gets a run-out too tagging Bob-ombs with spray scans is the standout (you literally shake the Joy-Con like a canister when you run out of spray).At the roundtable were told that Nintendo developed the microphone to remove unwanted external noise, but the sound of clapping will still get picked up, to allow the full emotion of the experience to come through. Nintendo is clearly trying to keep the spirit of local multiplayer gaming alive at a time where people are more isolated and less inclined to leave their homes. Theres an option to have your friends appear via camera at the bottom of your screen too. Being able to look people in the eye as you stab them in the back at a digital board game thats what makes life worth living.Drag x DriveDrag x Drive is Nintendos combination of Rocket League and wheelchair basketball. You hold the Joy-Con in mouse mode, one in each hand, and then manouvre as though youre operating a wheelchair. Theres a tutorial which takes some getting used to and at times it makes your arm ache a bit, but thankfully the game itself is less taxing and much more about smaller motions and precision. If you dont have a table in front of you to use the mouse then its designed to work on your lap. I gave this a try, but quickly became conscious of the fact that I was a 35-year-old man furiously rubbing his legs under a table.And the rest There have been concerns that the more iterative approach to the new Switch marks a new age for Nintendo, one where its less weird. Well, look no further than Nintendo Switch 2 Welcome Tour. Picture the Switch 2 on its side, then enlarge it to the size of the airport, then turn buttons into kiosks with digital receptionists that you can explore: essentially its a playable guide to your console through the medium of mini games, explainers, tutorials and quizzes. It is more fun that it sounds just.In Donkey Kong Bananza you run around and destroy a lot of rocks. Maybe it was just the early levels I played, but it feels as if it skews toward a beginner audience. It looks amazing though. Then theres Metroid Prime 4. The opening sequence was playable here and all Ill say is it looks and feels exactly like Metroid Prime Remastered (complimentary) but slightly more vibrant, cinematic and busy, with mouse functionality for those who play their shooters that way.The hardwareAn iterative hop Nintendo Switch 2. Photograph: NintendoThe Switch 2 is more of an iterative hop than a grand redesign. The focus is on pragmatic changes that improve quality of life. Its a wider model than its predecessor, and though it feels sturdier it doesnt feel that much heavier in handheld mode. The bigger screen pops, as youd expect; and it all looks very sleek and less like a toy. It all feels like marginal gains, but together adds up to a much slicker, more modern device.The Joy-Con feels more durable, weightier than their predecessors and more comfortable to hold, with bigger buttons that are less awkward to press (the shoulder buttons in particular). I wasnt able to test out the magnetic attach/detach aspect, but I was able to detach the thin case that goes over the edges once theyre no longer docked in the system what a relief to no longer be messing about with those cheap black sliders. As for the dreaded Joy-Con drift, we were told during the roundtable that the new models have been designed from the ground up to account for bigger and smoother movements.The pro controller feels exactly as it did before, albeit with joysticks that feel slightly more durable and comfortable. I have minor concerns about accidentally hitting the new buttons at the base of the controller in the heat of karting battle accidentally firing off a premature red shell maybe but Im sure Ill get used to it. In the developer roundtable it was also confirmed that Joy-Con and pro controllers from the previous generation would be compatible with the Switch 2 (though presumably with some obvious restrictions on functionality).A note on the performance of the Switch 2: in my four hours playtime I remember seeing one loading screen. That was for Cyberpunk and it lasted maybe five to 10 seconds. I only had a few minutes to play, so immediately began shooting Night City cops to start a riot and my brief impressions are that the hardware coped pretty well with the ensuing carnage. Likewise for Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. I immediately loaded the save marked Korok Forest and sprinted under the Deku Tree, witnessing the forest for the first time without a single frame dropping.The verdictWhether or not Nintendo can convince diehard fans like me isnt the question here. Nintendo has often struggled with following up its triumphs in the home console market, lurching from runaway success to squandered opportunities. When the original Switch came out in March 2017, it was off the back of the dismal performance of the Wii U, a device that sold 13.5m units in its lifetime. Its job was to move devotees on from a failing system and convince casual gamers to come back. Nintendo has a different job this time around: it now has to convince perhaps the largest install base in its history (150m units sold and counting) to make the switch (Im sorry) to its reasonably similar new model. Its a big ask for Nintendo, and in this climate of home console uncertainty, for the entire industry.

It is a game about love and identity, but it also has forklift truck races. It is a game about bloody revenge, but while youre waiting to retaliate, you can buy lottery tickets and visit the arcade. When Bafta recently asked gamers to vote on the most influential game of all time, Im not sure even the most ardent Sega fans would have gambled on the success of an idiosyncratic Dreamcast adventure from 1999. Yet the results, released on Thursday morning, show Shenmue at No 1, with perhaps more predictable contenders Doom and Super Mario Bros coming in second and third respectively.How has this happened, especially considering the game was considered a financial failure at the time of its release, falling short of recouping its then staggering development costs (a reported $70m, which would now get you about a third of Horizon Forbidden West or Star Wars Outlaws)? Well, nostalgia is a funny thing and so is the concept of cultural influence. When it was released more than two decades ago, Shenmue was an oddity: an open-world role-playing adventure that followed martial arts student Ryo Hazuki as he sought revenge for the murder of his father. But while there were fights and puzzles galore, there was also a lot of other stuff. The game used an internal clock to switch between day and night, and to cycle through seasons. Often, the people Ryo needed to speak to (or beat up) were only available at certain times, so he had to kill time by wandering the streets of mid-1980s Yokosuka. You could go to shops, play old Sega arcade games, you could visit the hotdog stand. The world was filled with eccentric characters and strange mini-games including the aforementioned forklift races.What players also enjoyed were its systemic and narrative oddities. Designer Yu Suzuki, who spent the 1980s making some of the greatest arcade games of all time, including OutRun, After Burner and Hang-On, was a stickler for authenticity and simulation he understood that Ryos life would be boring and mundane at times so thats what the player got. He also loved to experiment with gameplay conventions, which in Shenmue led to the adoption of quick time events, highly choreographed action scenes in which the player dictates the action by following specific button prompts. It was, lets say, controversial at the time, but it was interesting. Even the games rather wooden voice acting and clipped dialogue enraptured players. To this day, the thought of Ryo wandering the docks asking Do you know where I can find some sailors? is comedy gold to those in the know.It was the first time that an epic, immersive role-playing adventure also drew in elements of life simulations and dating games, to expand the interactive repertoire for players. Later titles such as Grand Theft Auto III, would expand on the idea, but we can perhaps say that the concept of living, explorable worlds came from Shenmue and flavoured everything that has followed, from Assassins Creed to Skyrim.Shenmue did end up getting a sequel and, much later, a third title to close the trilogy. I was at the video game event E3 in 2015 when Yu came on to the stage during Sonys press conference and announced that Shenmue III was in development. It was pandemonium. Sure, you could say that Super Mario Bros has been more influential because it popularised the platformer and also the concept of a video game mascot character; you could say it was Doom because it made the first-person shooter the most important genre in PC gaming. But I like the fact that Shenmue has won, and not only because I love Sega and edited a Dreamcast magazine at the time. Its because it shows that gamers still enjoy strange, exotic games, and if thats the case, strange, exotic games will continue to be made. We certainly see that in the success of Shenmues illegitimate children: the Yakuza and Like a Dragon games, where action, dating and silly games still combine to hilarious effect.I like to think that there will always be players willing to just stop fighting for a second, head down to the docks and hunt for sailors.Bafta most influential video game of all time list in full1. Shenmue (1999)2. Doom (1993)3. Super Mario Bros (1985)4. Half-Life (1998)5. The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time (1998)6. Minecraft (2011)7. Kingdom Come: Deliverance II (2025)8. Super Mario 64 (1996)9. Half-Life 2 (2004)10. The Sims (2000)11. Tetris (1984)12. Tomb Raider (1996)13. Pong (1972)14. Metal Gear Solid (1998)15. World of Warcraft (2004)16. Baldurs Gate III (2023)17. Final Fantasy VII (1997)18. Dark Souls (2011)19. Grand Theft Auto III (2001)20. Skyrim (2011)21. Grand Theft Auto (1997)

Parents can now block their children from communicating with specific friends or playing certain games on Roblox, an online gaming platform popular with children.The changes form part of a suite of safety updates intended to give parents more control over their childs experience on the platform.From Wednesday, parents and caregivers who identify themselves with an ID or credit card will have access to three new tools. The friend management tool means they can block anyone on their childs friends list, preventing their child from exchanging direct messages with that account, and report people they believe are violating Roblox policies.They can also review and change the content maturity level for their childs account, determining which games their child can access, and obtain detailed screen-time insights.Under the Online Safety Act, which came into force this year, tech companies must tackle harmful content on their platforms or face fines of up to 18m or 10% of global revenue.There have been reports of bullying and grooming on Roblox and fears that children are being exposed to explicit or harmful content on the site, which is the most popular platform in the UK among gamers aged eight to 12.Robloxs chief safety officer, Matt Kaufman, said safety was at the companys core and its mission was to be the safest and most civil online platform in the world.The US-based company is one of the worlds largest games platforms, with more monthly users than Nintendo Switch and Sony PlayStation combined. In 2024, the site averaged more than 80 million players a day, and roughly 40% of those were under 13.Roblox introduced 40 safety updates last year, including preventing users under 13 from sending direct messages. Roblox has also updated its voice safety technology, which uses a machine-learning model to moderate chat between players more accurately than human moderators.Andy Burrows, the chief executive of the Molly Rose Foundation, said he welcomed the safety improvements but that Roblox still needs to get to grips with substantial problems with harmful and age-inappropriate content.He added: Extensive research has shown Roblox is awash with age-inappropriate games and communities, including depression rooms that can compound misery and offer no support to vulnerable children.skip past newsletter promotionSign up to Pushing ButtonsFree weekly newsletterKeza MacDonald's weekly look at the world of gamingPrivacy Notice: Newsletters may contain info about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. For more information see our Privacy Policy. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.after newsletter promotionThis content raises fundamental questions about Robloxs broader commitment to safety and shows it cannot just rely on parental controls but must take decisive action to make the platform safe for its young users.Last month, Robloxs co-founder and chief executive, David Baszucki, said the platform was vigilant in protecting its users and that tens of millions of people had amazing experiences on the site.He added: My first message would be: if youre not comfortable, dont let your kids be on Roblox. That sounds a little counterintuitive, but I would always trust parents to make their own decisions.

Sixty minutes thats how long Nintendo took on Wednesday afternoon to remind us that no other video game manufacturer creates joy like this one. It was the Nintendo livestream weve been waiting for: a deep dive into the new console after so much speculation. Sure, the Switch 2 is the companys first real hardware sequel an updated and spruced-up version of its predecessor rather than a radical new piece of kit. But the updates are the intriguing part.Naturally, were getting a larger (7.9-inch, to be precise) screen that displays in full HD at 1080p; but were also getting re-thought Joy-Con controllers that now click to the console via strong magnets rather than those fiddly sliders we all put on the wrong way. The buttons are larger, too, so adults will be able to play Mario Kart with some semblance of skill. But the main new feature for the controllers is a new rollerball that enables each one to operate as a mouse. This will allow for new point-and-click features and some interesting control options. I like that they showed this off with a wheelchair basketball game, where you slide the controllers a long a surface to mimic pushing the wheels.The Nintendo Switch 2.The new Mario Kart game, Mario Kart World, looks rather nice. Perhaps taking inspiration from the likes of Forza Horizon and Test Drive Unlimited, it offers an open world to drive around, and, as well as circuit races, there will be endurance competitions where you drive from one side of the map to the other. According to the trailer shown during the livestream, 24 drivers can take part in each race, the most in the history of the series. Theres even a free-roam mode that lets you explore wherever you like, and take scenic drives with friends.With friends was definitely the theme of the stream. A new C button on the Joy-Con opens up the GameChat facility, which lets you start a group discussion with friends and family who also own Switch 2 consoles; it even has a video chat option if you also buy the Switch 2 camera. Like a sort of candy-coloured version of Zoom, your pals appear along the bottom of the screen as you play a game and you can all chat, even if youre playing different things. Several of the trailers shown during the presentation suggested that video footage of your friends would even be incorporated into the game itself. This is where Nintendo always does best: finding new ways for you to embarrass yourself and/or confuse and delight elderly relatives.Donkey Kong: Bananza on the Switch 2. Photograph: NintendoWas this a knockout victory for Nintendo? Well, there were a lot of game announcements, but we didnt get a big new 3D Mario adventure although those do sometimes come a little while after launch. Also, fans are already tutting about game prices. While the machine is launching at an acceptable 395.99 (or 429.99 bundled with Mario Kart World), it looks like Mario Kart World will retail for 75. Its a lot, but then Mario Kart 8 lasted for the entire lifespan of the Switch and most owners got hundreds of hours of entertainment out of it.The pre-order process, which opens on 8 April, is going to be interesting. Scalpers turned the launches of the Xbox Series X and PS5 into an ugly and expensive drama, with Sonys machine turning up for sale at $2,000 at one point thanks to limited availability.Nintendo is good at joy, and this looks like a truly lovely machine. But in an economic climate far from joyful, fans (and their parents) will be watching pre-order and sales figures very closely over the next few long weeks.What to playTough cerebral challenges Rosewater. Photograph: Grundislav GamesIve been a sucker for western adventure games ever since I played Accolades classic Law of the West for the Commodore 64, so its lovely to see a newcomer in town. Rosewater is a steam punk-infused point-and-click puzzler following would-be journalist Harley Leger, who arrives in the titular frontier town for a job at the local newspaper but instead gets embroiled in a treasure hunt.Created by Grundislav Games, its a spiritual successor to the studios 2018 title Lamplight City, but you can come to this one fresh. Its filled with interesting characters and tough cerebral challenges, and the crisp pixel art is a rootin, tootin treat. Im sorry.Available on: PC, Mac Estimated playtime: What to readThe Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild was originally intended for the Wii U. Photograph: NintendoPerhaps timed to coincide with the Nintendo Switch 2 news, Polygon has a piece about playing Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild on the Wii U, which was the intended platform for the earlier machine before it ended up on the Switch. A lot of people have forgotten it did actually get a Wii-U release, though, and it was OK? An interesting read, though.The new industry site Games Business has an interview with Alain Tascan, the head of Netflix games. He sees Wii-style family TV games as the future for the platform: For party games, I believe we can give instant fun, using the phone as a very innovative controller. On every phone you have a gyroscope, you have a microphone, you have a speaker, you have a touchscreen if you give that to creative people, what do they do? Whether youre alone, or with two people, or 20 people, why not? Can we do something really engaging? Um, yes you can as Sony showed several years ago with its PlayLink technology for PlayStation 4. Sadly, that initiative was undersupported, despite having some brilliant games. Maybe Netflix will hang in there a little longer.As a fan of weird mid-1990s horror games, I was very pleased to see Christian Donlan writing for Eurogamer about Harlan Ellisons twisted terror adventure, I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream. The narrative, about the last survivors of a computer-initiated nuclear war being tortured by their AI-overlords, couldnt be more timely.skip past newsletter promotionSign up to Pushing ButtonsFree weekly newsletterKeza MacDonald's weekly look at the world of gamingPrivacy Notice: Newsletters may contain info about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. For more information see our Privacy Policy. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.after newsletter promotionWhat to clickQuestion BlockThe Tearoom Photograph: Robert YangThis week I went on Bluesky to ask for questions and this concise inquiry game back from Rainer Sigl:Wheres the games counterculture? Does it exist?My equally concise answer is: Its complicated. It depends on how we interpret the term.My copy of the Concise Oxford English Dictionary defines counterculture as: A way of life opposed to that usually considered normal. That could almost embrace the entire independent game development community, but we can get more specific.Perhaps the hyper-challenging games of Bennett Foddy are countercultural because they are deliberately not intuitive to control. Or perhaps the Flatgame scene, in which developers create deliberately simple games with limited interactivity, is countercultural because it challenges the ideas that video games need cutting-edge visuals and a strong challenge component.Maybe Robert Yangs games such as The Tearoom and Hurt Me Plenty are counter-cultural because they challenge the heteronormative orthodoxy of the mainstream industry. As ever with this subject, I defer to the developer and writer Anna Anthropy, whose brilliant book Rise of the Videogame Zinesters makes a compelling and detailed case for the existence of a global video game counterculture, existing happily for years on the periphery.If youve got a question for Question Block or anything else to say about the newsletter hit reply or email us on pushingbuttons@theguardian.com.

After months of intense speculation and cryptic teaser videos, Nintendo has finally unveiled the successor to its Switch console. The Nintendo Switch 2 will launch on 5 June at a retail price of 395.99 for the basic package and 429.99 bundled with Mario Kart World.As expected, the screen is now larger, measuring 7.9 inches and offers double the pixels of the previous display, in 1080p resolution. It also supports up to 120 frames per second for smooth animation, as well as high dynamic range lighting for better colour contrast, while the console remains the same thickness as its predecessor. The dock allows connection to a TV with up to 4K resolution supported.The redesigned Joy-Con 2 controllers now connect to the console magnetically. The SL and SR buttons are larger to make it more comfortable to use the Joy-Cons as indepedent controllers. Each one can also be used as a mouse, with a rollerball for precise movement. This feature was illustrated with a wheelchair basketball game, Drag X Drive, in which the two Joy-Cons are used to push and steer the wheels.The announcement live stream began with a trailer for launch title Mario Kart World, a new entry in the karting series featuring stunningly detailed circuits and an open world map. Races take place in different regions around the planet, while players are free to go off-road while racing.Nintendo Switch 2. Photograph: NintendoAlso announced was Legend of Zelda Hyrule Warriors: Age of Imprisonment, a prequel to Tears of the Kingdom coming this winter. Aerial racer Kirby Air Riders and a new Donkey Kong adventure, Donkey Kong Bananza, were also revealed, the latter arriving on 17 July.Several third-party titles were introduced throughout the hour-long stream. These included a new title from Dark Souls creator, From Software The DuskBloods a dark adventure filled with spectral warriors and ferocious dinosaurs; its out in 2026. Expected for launch or shortly after are Elden Ring Tarnished Edition, Hades II, Split Fiction, EA Sports FC, Madden NFL, Street Fighter 6 and Hitman World of Assassination. Hitman developer Io Interactive also revealed the development of a new James Bond game for the console.Other technical details were also discussed. Switch 2s built-in speakers have been improved, with 3D audio supported. The new stand offers more sturdy support with a variety of viewing angles. Nintendos online network, Nintendo Switch Online, will offer a range of new downloadable retro games from GameCube and other systems, including Legend of Zelda Wind Waker and Soulcalibur II. A reproduction GameCube controller will be available to purchase alongside the Switch 2 launch.Like its predecessor, Switch 2 is a hybrid system, allowing users to play games on its built-in screen or on a TV, and users will be able to alternate between the two. The machine also offers full backwards compatibility with most original Switch games. Switch 2 updated games will also offer upgraded visuals. Launching soon after the console, the party game Super Mario Jamboree: Nintendo Switch 2 edition offers mouse controls, audio recognition, camera support and better rumble effects. Legend of Zelda Breath of The Wild: Nintendo Switch 2 edition features higher resolution visuals and new gameplay features, including an in-game smartphone-style map app. Metroid Prime 4: Beyond, Pokmon Legends and Kirby and the Forgotten Land will also get Switch 2 editions. Owners of the original titles will be able to purchase upgrade packs.skip past newsletter promotionSign up to Pushing ButtonsFree weekly newsletterKeza MacDonald's weekly look at the world of gamingPrivacy Notice: Newsletters may contain info about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. For more information see our Privacy Policy. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.after newsletter promotionUsed as a mouse a Switch 2 controller. Photograph: NintendoNintendo is going big on the social features of its new console. The right Joy-Con has a new C button, which gives access to GameChat and an in-game communication feature which lets users chat to friends while playing. The mic in the console recognises your voice, filtering out ambient sounds for clear comms. Players can share their game screens with others in the chat even if everyone is playing different games. A Nintendo Switch 2 camera, available from launch, connects to the console allowing video chat while playing. A new GameShare feature will allow users to share a single game with up to three other players who can take part using their own Switch 2 machines.The original Switch was launched in March 2017 and went on to become the companys most successful home console, selling more than 150m units including its later Switch Lite and Switch OLED editions. While Switch 2 remains technically behind the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X, Nintendo has long competed on innovation and game quality rather than specifications. With a broader games lineup than the original machine, more advanced visuals and a more intuitive design for its Joy-Con controllers, this was a strong introduction.Youll have to wait just a little bit longer for launch, said Switch 2 design director Takuhiro Dohta at the close of the live stream. For avid Nintendo fans that will feel like an eternity.

I do not replay games. Dont see the point. I dont reread books either, and I rarely rewatch movies or TV shows. Theres too much new, bigger and better stuff coming out every day, and too little time to consume it. However, I made an exception with Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Because the original was so special.It came along towards the end of my ZX Spectrum playing days. I was at university and was previously only interested in a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle if it came in a tall glass and was at happy hour prices in the Mandela Bar. But the game hooked me one summer back home and became the hardest video game that I ever completed. And thats what worried me when I started the rerelease on the PS4 that comes as part of the TMNT Cowabunga Collection. (Playstation Plus Essentials March)It was the first time Id thrown a controller at a wall since I stopped playing FifaI worried that my gaming brain had got lazy playing modern games, where you are spoiled by power-ups vomiting up all over the place and collision detection so forgiving it could be a priest, and as a result that this golden gaming memory would be tarnished.I was right!The collision detection is at Manic Miner/Mega Man levels of unforgiving, but through trial and error I rediscovered things that make the game easier. The level structures are soft so you can kill an enemy from above or below platforms and even through walls, which brings into play the Turtles different weapon ranges. I remember also that you can hot swap the Turtles. This means using Donatello with his long pole for everything, switching to Michelangelo with his nunchucks then Leonardo with his swords when Donatellos energy gets low and finally using Raphael with his puny twin sai as a last resort. Sai are tiny metal daggers that resemble whatever cutlery it was that Elon Musk balanced on his fingers at Mar-a-Lago. Only more useless. To kill an enemy with Raphael in this game you have to get close enough to smell what toppings they had on their pizza.Indecipherable Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Cowabunga Collection. Photograph: KonamiI hate-played this for two hours, death after death it was the first time Id thrown a controller at a wall since I stopped playing Fifa.Night one ends, as it did for so many of us back in the day, with that bloody underwater level where you have to defuse bombs under a dam within a time limit so unforgiving it reminds me of A-level exams. You cannot get through that level without hitting multiple radioactive weeds. I cant believe I completed it back in the day, and worry it may have been one of those 90s things I imagined, like that time I said hi to Sarah Michelle Gellar at Comic-Con and was sure she smiled back at me.Horrible clunky gameplay like this serves no purpose in 2025.Or does it?I persevered on day two. I remembered the way to get through that damned dam level is to crash through every enemy and hot swap the turtles when the energy gets low. (And by remembered I mean searched Reddit.)Most importantly I discovered that there is a flipping rewind button in this rerelease! You can go back 30 seconds every time you fail a pixel perfect jump! I wish I read gaming manuals, but I am a man in his 50s. I no more read instructions than I ask for directions when I am lost.skip past newsletter promotionSign up to Pushing ButtonsFree weekly newsletterKeza MacDonald's weekly look at the world of gamingPrivacy Notice: Newsletters may contain info about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. For more information see our Privacy Policy. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.after newsletter promotionI completed the level and was treated to the sweetest sentence ever written in video games history. April saying: Its OK the dam is safe lets go home.Buoyed by this I beat the next couple of levels over the next couple of days. Its hard, even with the rewind button, but I recalibrate my whole gaming attitude. I cant charge through levels like you can with games today, for this was the era when you literally had to inch forward, then wait, see what enemies appear, learn their patterns, then move. You have to slow down your whole way of playing. And that isnt a bad thing. In 2025, life moves at 10bn miles an hour. I wake up three times a night checking who is about to invade who.With my heart and mind reopened I re-notice the greatness of this game. The scroll and boomerang weapons are immense, I would put them up there with the BFG from Doom, the Golden Gun from Goldeneye and the Holy Hand Grenade in Worms in terms of sheer fun.I even learn to love the indecipherable nature of the blocky graphics. The Mutant Toad looked recognisable, as were Shredder and his Foot Soldiers. So were the Cheeky Space Monkeys, until I discovered they were actually Giant Fleas. Mostly the enemies are like an 8-bit Rorschach test, their identity the results of projections from my subconsciousness. So that might be a feral butterfly I am trying to kill, but it may also be my feelings of male inadequacy.I am so glad I didnt give up on this game. Because we never did as kids. You had one game a month. You played it. You kept at it. We are gaming dilettantes now, flitting from one subscription service to another, sometimes not even getting past the list of games to actually play one.I am still only halfway through. But I will soldier on through every hard-earned inch. And it will be utterly cowabunga.

What if the Chornobyl disaster happened in the UK? is the question Atomfall asks. The answer, according to developer Rebellion, is that it would be considerably more picturesque and feature loads of pasties. Aping the nuclear catastrophe fiction of series such as Fallout and Stalker, Atomfall offers a mildly diverting scientific whodunit. But it struggles to muster the same clear identity of the games that inspired it.Using the 1957 Windscale fire as its launchpad, Atomfall thrusts you into a postwar Britain where that accident was dramatically worse, prompting the government to send in the army before walling off a large portion of the Lake District, sealing everybody inside. Your character, an archetypal video game amnesiac, awakes inside the exclusion zone several years later. To escape, they must unravel the mystery behind what caused the disaster, who is responsible and how to fix it.This mystery, and how it unfolds, are by far the most interesting parts of Atomfall. The story reframes conventional quests as leads, where points of interest are revealed by collecting documents such as letters and military reports, and speaking to the surviving locals in the zone. At the heart of the enigma is a vast underground research facility, which you must reactivate by unlocking its entrances and locating atomic batteries to power its various sectors, ultimately unlocking the heart of Windscale and the dark secret kept inside.Wicker Man-esque Atomfall. Photograph: RebellionIts a tale that offers plenty of intrigue. The characters that assist you on your journey, including soldiers, scientists and a publican, have their own motivations for doing so, which youll only uncover by cross-referencing them with other players in Atomfalls unspoken game of zones. These will often relate to diversions youll find along the way, such as infiltrating a castle occupied by Wicker Man-style druids to retrieve a special medicine and solving a quintessentially British murder in a church.Unpicking these threads is fun, and the tale benefits from a tighter focus and better pacing than most open-world adventures. Unfortunately, the accompanying game mechanics feel as if they turn up more from obligation than enthusiasm. Combat lets you choose between guns that are serviceable but unremarkable, and melee fighting that will make you appreciate every rusty firearm you collect. There is a rudimentary crafting system youll mostly use to make bandages and the occasional molotov cocktail. A stealth system exists in theory, but perhaps fittingly I never saw it function in any meaningful fashion. Enemies can spot you from half the map away and seem telepathically connected to nearby allies, which makes sneaking around awkward and unrewarding.It probably doesnt help that its always a bright sunny day in Atomfalls exclusion zone, which would be unusual for any part of the UK, let alone the Lake District. On the whole, it could make better use of its Cumbrian setting. Although Atomfalls four maps are lavish and fun to explore, including craggy valleys filled with shells of dry-stone buildings, and the most meticulously recreated English village since Everybodys Gone to the Rapture, the world is not especially atmospheric.Moreover, the enemy factions, druids and crazed marauders clad in cricket gear, feel like vague attempts to anglicise the kooky gangs of Fallout. Where are the feral ramblers, the roving bands of literati fighting over whether Wordsworth or Coleridge was the better poet? Why are pasties so abundant, while Kendal mint cake and Grasmere gingerbread are absent? This may seem flippant, but given we have recently seen such a brilliant lampoon of northern life in Thank Goodness Youre Here!, Atomfalls own depiction of the north, and indeed Britain in general, feels superficial and haphazard, a jumbled assemblage of cultural touchstones.To use another example, one of Atomfalls key inspirations is Stalker, a series whose strength lies in how it is so specifically, uncompromisingly Ukrainian. Stalker and its sequels are completely unafraid to be weird, bold, challenging and bleak, to wholly envelop the player in its nations radioactive trauma. The UK simply doesnt share that trauma in the same way, so Rebellions what if scenario can only ever be a shadow of Chornobyl.

It is now more or less impossible to put a precise figure on the number of video games released each year. According to data published by the digital store Steam, almost 19,000 titles were released in 2024 and thats just on one platform. Hundreds more arrived on consoles and smartphones. In some ways this is the positive sign of a vibrant industry, but how on earth does a new project get noticed? When Triple A titles with multimillion dollar marketing budgets are finding it hard to gain attention (disappointing sales have been reported for Dragon Age: The Veilguard, the Final Fantasy VII remakes and EA Sports FC), what chance is there for a small team to break out?And yet it does happen. Last years surprise hit Balatro has shifted more than 5m copies. Complex medieval strategy title Manor Lords sold 1m copies during its launch weekend. But what awaits a small developer after they achieve success? And what does success even mean in a continuously evolving industry?James Carbutt and Will Todd of Coal Supper are still trying to make sense of it. Their acerbic satire Thank Goodness Youre Here!, in which players slap their way through bizarre quotidian scenarios in the fictional humble northern town of Barnsworth, is now an award-winning game. Its just not registered as a success in my head at all, says Carbutt. The numbers are going up on screen, and there have been YouTube playthroughs and some erotic fan art. Beyond that, it wont register.I cant imagine making any more games. I dont know where I would go from hereAfter spending three years working on the project, the pair now find themselves in the confusing glare of the spotlight, fielding questions about whats next. Its horrible, Carbutt jokes. But I dont think we feel any sort of second-album syndrome. The space it gives you to be a bit introspective about what you want to do next is the interesting quirk of a successful indie game.Veteran indie developer Gabe Cuzzillo (Ape Out, Baby Steps) offered them sage wisdom. He spoke about how you should focus not just on making something good because how do you quantify that, its amorphous? says Todd. Instead we should look at what it is we want to explore and judge success intrinsically, based on whether we explored that thing. The pressure of speed to market doesnt apply to us, because its never going to be possible to crank something out in six months to chase success anyway. Its more like, in the wake of this being received well, whats the next thing we want to explore? Thats something were interrogating at the moment.Australian developer Grace Bruxner has also redefined success after leaving behind a trilogy of Frog Detective games: bite-size adventures co-developed with Thomas Bowker that quickly became cult indie hits.Has it impacted peoples lives in a positive way? Frog Detective. Photograph: WormclubSuccess in games has always been a bit of a lie, a bit of an illusion, she says, pointing to typical markers such as cultural impact, player numbers and financial gain. My measure of success is: did I make something Im proud of, and has it impacted my life and other peoples lives in a positive way? And yes, it did, so thumbs up.Bruxner began working on the series during her final year at university as an experiment, to see whether she could produce a commercial game. After a relatively breezy first outing, the second Frog Detective game demanded that Bruxner and Bowker lock in, and spend most of their time on the project. By the third instalment, the hard work had paid off, though the pressure had begun to take its toll. Throw in the pandemic, as well as mental and physical health issues, and Bruxner was ready to take a break. I wasnt grinding super hard, but I also wasnt having a great time, she says. It just was really nice to make that choice to stop.skip past newsletter promotionSign up to Pushing ButtonsFree weekly newsletterKeza MacDonald's weekly look at the world of gamingPrivacy Notice: Newsletters may contain info about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. For more information see our Privacy Policy. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.after newsletter promotionIm looking forward to making art again, instead of feeling like I have to show up to a job I never applied toBruxner still has game ideas swirling in the back of her head, but she wanted to escape the endless production cycle that has swallowed up many of her peers, regardless of mounting exhaustion or burnout. Its not universal advice, she says, but if youre a solo dev or a really small team, I dont think theres any shame in leaving it there. Unless you love making games. Im not sure I love making games. I was quite young when we released the first Frog Detective, so it was like, This is my entire identity for life. I dont know how to be a separate person from that.Three years after the series swan song, she is on indefinite hiatus, exploring alternative creative paths such as pottery. I cant imagine making games, because of the expectations on me as a creator, she explains. I dont even know where I would go from here.Bruxner has been surprised by her ability to sustain herself on the modest amount of money provided by Frog Detective. If your game continues to have a tail, and you can budget properly and live within your means, it is possible to have a passive income that isnt tied to being a horrible landlord, she explains. Even so, she knows how taboo it can be to talk plainly about money, especially in creative circles like the indie game scene. I have the free time to chill and decide what I want to do, but I assume at some point Ill probably need to have a career again. My biggest question is will this money last forever? Probably not, and then what happens when it runs out? I dont know.Opportunities are limited Consume Me. Photograph: HexecutableIt may seem as though more indies than ever have broken into the spotlight in recent years. But enduring games industry turbulence has made finding financial support for follow-ups and debuts more complicated. The elephant in the room is everything thats happened over the past couple of years, with mass layoffs, studio closures and evaporating funding opportunities, explains AP Thomson, a developer of the forthcoming indie Consume Me with fellow NYU Game Center graduate Jenny Jiao Hsia. Before that, there was a pretty major change around the mid-2010s when indie publishers and funders started rising in prominence. Everything weve heard suggests that the same opportunities no longer exist or are incredibly limited.Consume Me, the duos coming-of-age scheduling RPG doesnt have a release date but has already been nominated for five gongs at the Independent Games Festival awards. As such, Jiao Hsia and Thomson are already under pressure to decide their next endeavour. Multiple people have told us we should be moving forward once it launches, says Thomson.Even with growing expectations, the pair arent keen to get ahead of themselves. Everything weve heard suggests that now is really not a great time to be pitching, so were going to focus our energy on the launch and then read the temperature of the room after that, Thomson adds.Im looking forward to finding enjoyment in making art again, instead of feeling like I have to show up to a job I never applied to, explains Jiao Hsia. The idea of making art for fun, without worrying about making money off it, is something I cant wait to do.

There is a lot of attention on young men and toxic masculinity at the moment. Its about time. The devastating Netflix drama Adolescence, about a 13-year-old boy accused of murdering a girl after being radicalised by the online manosphere, has drawn attention to the problem through the sheer force of its brilliant writing and a blistering lead performance from teenager Owen Cooper. Recently, former England football manager Gareth Southgate gave a speech about the state of boyhood in the UK, specifically about how young men, lacking moral mentors, are turning to gambling and video gaming, thereby disconnecting from society and immersing themselves in predominantly male online communities where misogyny and racism are often rife. There has been some kickback in the gaming press to the idea that games have provided a less-than-ideal environment for boys, but even those of us who have played and enjoyed games all our lives need to face up to the fact that gaming forums, message boards, streaming platforms and social media groups are awash with disturbing hate speech and violent rhetoric.Honestly, we have known this for a while. The 2014 harassment campaign GamerGate, which claimed to be about a lack of objectivity in games journalism, but was really a reaction to increasing inclusivity and progressive thinking in game development, was a testing ground for the radicalisation of young white men by alt-right influencers and news outlets such as Breitbart. Many of the apparatus of online rightwing extremism, including mass harassment and doxing of victims, originated in that rancid cauldron, where female and LGBTQI+ game developers, and game-makers of colour, were made to fear for their lives.The last thing we need from politicians and lifestyle gurus is a blanket statement that boys need to stop playing gamesIt didnt end there toxic fandom has continued to dog the games industry. Developers of games who have sought to diversify their characters and narratives, or have simply delayed the launch of much-anticipated titles, have faced mass online abuse and death threats. A friend of mine, once the media-visible executive producer of a major game series, was forced to accept a police escort for him and his family for several days after fans of the game disagreed with several new features of the latest instalment. More recently, its been reported that members of the team working on Assassins Creed Shadows were told by the company not to mention their role in the production on social media in case they were targeted and harassed. Shadows received a huge online backlash when it was revealed that one of the two lead characters would be a black samurai. Trump didnt come up with the idea of ludicrously misrepresenting the concept of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) to appease right-leaning voters toxic game communities have been doing this for years.The worry, in the current maelstrom, is that the nuance of the problem will be lost. Even while condemning gaming communities that worship influencers such as Andrew Tate and Sneako, that belittle women and share incel and red pill philosophies, it is important to recognise the hugely positive roles that online communities can play in the lives of teenagers. As the father of an autistic teen, I have seen my son flourishing through contact with other players in games such as Minecraft and Warframe. The last thing we need from politicians and attention-seeking lifestyle gurus is a blanket philosophy that boys need to stop playing games or that all games are unhealthy this isnt about screen time, its not about getting boys to touch grass once in a while. We have to understand that our children are digital natives, as at home online as they are in any physical space for many, there is no clear delineation. And honestly, if youre shaking your head at how sad that is while spending hours a day perusing Facebook, Instagram or TikTok, then I dont know what to say to you.What can be done? Of course, the games industry has a responsibility just like social media companies do to monitor its communities and make them safe. Robust online moderation and the use of AI to monitor in-game chat for key slurs and subjects, are a vital part of combating the problem. But in the long term, the problem of abusive, antisocial young men wont go away until we get to the source. Many young men in 2025 lack a sense of direction, identity and purpose. Traditional careers are disappearing; social changes are challenging historical masculine roles; mental health services are hard to access; city centres are dying. Whatever the truth of the matter, whatever we want to say about privilege, the world feels openly hostile to them. And into this vortex, come online influencers who will harness, direct and ultimately monetise that sense of hopelessness and rage, pointing it at easily identifiable targets women, immigrants, libtards, beta males, and yes, the makers of progressive video games.I have spent my whole career defending video games as a medium from those who seek to demonise the entire culture, but you simply cannot approach this subject without recognising that the games community traditionally dominated by young men interested in violent power fantasies is part of it. Young people often come to games to escape, to become virtual superheroes, but their vulnerability and lack of experience makes them targets and victims. Its going to take more than one brilliant TV drama to get society to address this pressing problem, but when it does, the games industry is going to have to be a big part of the difficult conversations to come.

Did you know that soundtrack concerts are among the most popular for touring orchestras? A full third of the Royal Philharmonic Orchestras first-time audience members are coming to the concert hall via their favourite series and movies and video games. It is a huge cultural growth area, and one that may have gone unrecognised by the general public.It is impossible to ignore video game music now, says Tommy Pearson, founder and artistic director of the inaugural London Soundtrack festival. The sheer creativity and artistry in games is incredible, and its been fascinating to see so many composers blossom in the genre.As one of the lead architects behind the festival, Pearson was eager to make space for video games as part of the celebration not just as an add-on to TV and film soundtracks, but as an equal in the art form. When I was first thinking about what we would do at the festival, including games music was a no-brainer. It absolutely has to be there alongside film and TV music. It has a very dedicated audience of fans and the music is as good as anything being written in any genre.Tommy Pearson, artistic director of London Soundtrack festival. Photograph: London Soundtrack FestivalRunning from 19 to 26 March, the festival will consist of live performances, panel discussions, screenings, Q&As and masterclasses. One of the key events, State of the Art, will include performances of video game music by the Royal Philharmonic Concert Orchestra, masterclasses from Stephen Barton and Gordy Haab composers who recently collected Grammy and Ivor Novello awards for their work on Star Wars Jedi: Survivor.Why is 2025 the perfect time for the first Soundtrack festival in London? Were seeing millions of streams of game soundtracks, daily, says Barton. Theres a huge amount of social media content on Instagram and TikTok that ties into it, not to mention the world of Twitch where a streamers playlist is a huge part of their identity. The record industry is just about catching on to this.I see the streaming numbers climbing in real time, but beyond the data, you can sense it everywhere, adds Haab. Game music isnt confined to consoles any more its woven into peoples every day lives. My nieces and nephews, for example, have game soundtracks on rotation purely for enjoyment. At gaming events, fans know these themes note-for-note, singing them back with the same devotion youd see at a concert. Even in broader entertainment circles award shows, industry mixers video game scores are part of the conversation now. Theyre treated with the same respect as film music, standing on their own as a legitimate art form. And if the surging demand for soundtrack releases tells us anything, its that people arent just listening: theyre seeking it out.Fans know these themes note-for-note Death Stranding. Photograph: Kojima ProductionsComposers Ludvig Forssell (Death Stranding), Harry Gregson-Williams (Metal Gear Solid), Stephanie Economou (Assassins Creed Valhalla: Dawn of Ragnark), and Borislav Slavov (Baldurs Gate 3) will all be part of a panel discussing games music in the day, before joining the performances in the evening.Youd be hard-pressed to find someone who cant sing a tune from Super Mario Bros or Final Fantasy or Halo or The Legend of Zelda, says Economou. Video game music is prevalent because video games are prevalent. The industry itself is more profitable than the film, television and music industry combined. So when people think that its suddenly surging in popularity, all I can think is: no, its just finally getting more recognition and celebration in more public spheres. I applaud the London Soundtrack festival for highlighting the art form and Im thrilled to be part of the festival in its inaugural year.The London Soundtrack festival is a great opportunity to celebrate the differences and diversities in music for media, adds Forssell. Video games may still be the new kid on the block, in some senses, but they are definitely here to stay; and I hope that we as composers will always be able to have our own different approaches to music in general, be it pop, rock or music for film, TV, video games and beyond.Pearson and the team of composers he has assembled see the event as a celebration of the state of video game music. These are all brilliant, hugely respected composers producing terrific and exciting scores that live in the game and in the concert hall very successfully, Pearson says.Will non-gaming audiences ever accept video game music as much as TV or film?There will always be a bit of snobbery about media music, Pearson says, But its nowhere near as much as it used to be. And who cares what people think anyway?

I have played many Assassins Creed games over the years, but Ive rarely loved them. Ubisofts historical fiction is perennially almost-great. A lot of players would say it reached its peak in the late 2000s, with the trio of renaissance Italy games beginning with Assassins Creed 2, and their charismatic hero, Ezio Auditore. Since then, the series has become bloated, offering hundreds of hours of repetitive open-world exploration and assassination in ancient Greece, Egypt and even Viking Britain. Odyssey (the Greek one) was the last I played seriously; I found the setting exquisite, the gameplay somewhat irritating and the scale completely overwhelming.The Assassins Creed games are extraordinary works of historical fiction, fastidiously recreating lost periods of history and letting you walk around in them. Theyre the closest thing to time travel. I play them for the virtual tourism, and find myself vaguely disappointed that 80% of what you do in these painstakingly realised worlds boils down to parkouring around killing people.Assassins Creed Shadows was released this week after a couple of last-minute delays, and I was surprised to find that it makes running around and killing people more fun and interesting than it has been in many years. This is partly down to the setting: 16th-century Japan, the era of warlord Oda Nobunaga, of samurai and shinobi and endless complex, fascinating conflicts. Japan was changing fast, having reluctantly opened up contact with the rest of the world. Shadows two protagonists are at the centre of all this change and tumult: Yasuke, a slave turned samurai under Nobunaga, and Naoe, a peasant shinobi building her own resistance movement as her home is torn apart.Two protagonists, two playstyles: Naoe is fast and quiet, and makes playing stealthily a viable and enjoyable way to experience the game for the first time in ages. Yasuke is strong and skilled, and can cut through enemies when a situation suddenly explodes into conflict. This adds variety and choice to the gameplay. Both characters are genuinely interesting, and I care about their stories. Yasuke appeared right at the beginning of the game and then was absent for about 12 hours; when he showed up again, I was beginning to get bored by Naoes quest for revenge, and having someone new with whom to explore this extraordinary setting kept me interested.And truly: what a setting. Ive been playing Shadows on a PS5 Pro and it is the most beautiful video game I have ever seen. You know how you just get used to how gorgeous modern games look after a few hours, and forget to admire the scenery? That hasnt happened to me yet after 15 hours with Shadows. The light, the architecture, the natural beauty of Japans mountains, the way you can see the roofs of shrines poking out from the treetops, the delicate beauty of Kyotos winding streets It helps that the seasons change every few hours, letting you quite literally see your surroundings in a new light. I cannot begin to imagine the hours of human effort that have gone into creating this environment. The detail is exceptional.Naoe in Assassins Creed Shadows. Photograph: UbisoftOne example of this is in the multilingual script. You can play the whole thing with English voice-acting, or you can play in period-appropriate Japanese and Portuguese with subtitles, which the games calls immersive mode. With the provisos that I am by no means an expert in Japanese history and that my own Japanese is extremely rusty, playing like this was astonishingly good. Every conversation feels like a series of delicate and dangerous manoeuvres; much is left unsaid, implied by tone and careful choice of words. You can choose Naoe or Yasukes responses at times, and saying the wrong thing sometimes results in an infinitesimal change in your interlocutors expression just enough to let you know that youve screwed up. It is, for a game about a ninja on an assassination revenge quest, surprisingly subtle.If you watched FXs exceptional TV adaptation of Shgun, youll probably be thinking that a lot of what I describe sounds familiar. And though Shadows isntThere are still some things about Assassins Creed that belong in the bin. The Animus is one of the all-time great video game framing devices. All Assassins Creed games take place inside a machine that lets you relive the memories of your ancestors, but with all the useful info and overlays of a video game. But thats all it needs to be: a framing device. We can surely get rid of the modern-day subplots about the Animus and whos controlling it. Dont interrupt my fun adventures in historical Japan by making me hunt down glitches and anomalies in the machine. And over the series 18-year history, it has acquired altogether too many systems. Its fiddly and unfocused there are too many menus for collecting and upgrading equipment, too many different skill trees for your characters abilities.Shadows may be sometimes confusing and overwhelming, but for the first time in a while, I was willing to forgive all that if I got to see more of Japan. If, like me, youve skipped the last few Assassins Creed games, you might be pleased to find that this is as streamlined and enjoyable as the series has been for a long time.What to playIntelligent and funny Expelled! Photograph: InkleIf you do not have the 30 to 50 hours required for Assassins Creed Shadows right now, heres a much more manageable treat: Expelled! Made by one of my favourite studios, Inkle, it is the story of a working-class scholarship girl trying to avoid getting kicked out of a posh English boarding school in the 1920s. Its full of intelligent and funny digs at the British class system and its poisonous social norms. As you get to know more about the teachers and students at this school on each playthrough, you soon learn that if you want to beat em, you kind of have to join em.Available on: iPhone/iPad, Switch, PC, Mac Estimated playtime: What to readMiddle Earth: Shadow of Mordor by Monolith, which has been shuttered by Warner Bros. Photograph: Monolith ProductionsOur writer Rick Lane put together an obituary of sorts for Monolith Games, the developer that Warner Bros closed last month after 30 years.The Game Developers Conference is in San Francisco this week. A billboard in the citys Union Square takes aim at corporate mismanagement of game studios: Has a Harrison fired you lately? it reads, evidently referring to ex-Sony/Microsoft/EA/Google Stadia executive Phil Harrison.FuturLab has announced Powerwash Simulator 2, a sequel to one of the most surprising gaming hits of the decade. This time you can hose down gunk in split-screen as well as online co-op. I look forward to cleaning virtual things alongside my eldest son on the couch while my partner complains that we do not have similar enthusiasm for cleaning the actual things in our house.Actor Seth Rogen shared an amusing anecdote about the making of Superbad last week: apparently Sony was so appalled by Jonah Hills character that they forbid him from touching a PlayStation.skip past newsletter promotionSign up to Pushing ButtonsFree weekly newsletterKeza MacDonald's weekly look at the world of gamingPrivacy Notice: Newsletters may contain info about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. For more information see our Privacy Policy. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.after newsletter promotionWhat to clickQuestion BlockA combat-free option Assassins Creed: Origins Discovery Tour. Photograph: UbisoftA timely question today from reader Rick:During the pandemic, I played a lot of peaceful/passive games, largely avoiding games with conflict or too much stressful action. But I love a good open world and decided to start on Assassins Creed Origins. When I got to the menu, I noticed an educational/discovery option: combat-free walkthroughs of the historical places and people that were heavily researched and included in the game. It was amazing. Does Shadows have this mode? And can you recommend any other games that employ these passive, but immersive educational modes?Assassins Creeds Discovery Tour mode is brilliant as you said in your email, Valhalla and Odyssey also gave players the option to walk around in their worlds and learn cool facts about the time period depicted. Ubisoft made a fuss about this feature back when it was first created, offering it to schools as an educational tool, but not a lot of people talk about it. I love this mode I had a big interest in ancient Egypt when I was a kid, and I would have eaten this up. Theres no Discovery Tour mode in Shadows at launch, but Ive asked Ubisoft whether one is forthcoming. Ill report back when I get a response.In the meantime, here are a couple of other games with similar pacifist modes, though neither is educational: in GTA Online, you can turn on passive mode to simply enjoy and explore Los Santos without getting grief from other players; and in strategy game Humankind you can turn off war and just build your civilisation. Does anyone know of any more?If youve got a question for Question Block or anything else to say about the newsletter hit reply or email us on pushingbuttons@theguardian.com.

An investigation by the UK advertising watchdog has found a number of shocking ads in mobile gaming apps that depict women as sexual objects, use pornographic tropes, and feature non-consensual sexual scenarios involving violent and coercive control.The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) used avatars, which mimic the browsing behaviour of different gender and age groups, to monitor ads served when mobile games are open and identify breaches of the UK code.While most of the thousands of promotions served to the avatars complied with UK rules, the watchdog identified and banned eight that featured shocking content that portrayed women in a harmful way.Two ads promoting an artificial intelligence chatbot app, Linky: Chat With Characters AI, began with a woman dressed in a manga T-shirt, a short skirt and large bunny ears dancing in a bedroom with text reading: Tell me which bf [boyfriend] I should break up with.The ad moved on to animated content featuring text conversations with three manga-style young men. They were variously described as obsessively possessive, aggressively jealous, a kidnapper and a killer. Further text described yanking the woman into the car, swiftly knocking her out, with the woman asking: What if I enjoy this?The ASA said the ad was suggestive and implied scenarios involving violent and coercive control and a lack of consent.An ad for an interactive romance story game called My Fantasy featured an animation of a woman being approached by another woman and being pushed on to a desk. Options appeared asking what she should do enjoy it, push her away, please continue and stop it.The ASA said the animations were strongly suggestive and implied the sexual encounters were not consensual.The ASA also identified three ads for Love Sparks: Dating Sim, which were shown to its female child and adult male avatars. One ad showed an animated woman lying on her back with her legs spread, with the options kiss her and take it slow.The second ad featured sexually suggestive depictions of Kate your naughty step sister wearing a bra, and an animated image of Lally, 18.The third ad featured an animated clothed woman with her bottom pulsating with the options next girl and slap, as well as text reading punish me please.The ASA said that in the ads the women were shown as stereotypical sexual objects using tropes from pornography.The watchdog banned the eight ads and issued a warning to those behind them. It said that although they were rare examples out of the 5,923 adverts served to its digital avatars, the harmful or degrading portrayals of women in ads are completely unacceptable and we take a zero-tolerance approach to this kind of content.The ASA also published findings of a study that found that almost half of UK consumers were concerned about the depiction and objectification of women and girls in ads.The survey of 6,500 people, conducted by YouGov, found that 45% of people were concerned about ads that include idealised body images of women. It found 44% were concerned about the objectification of women and girls.Last month, the ASA banned an advert from the high street retailer Next for featuring an unhealthily thin model in digitally altered clothing.The survey marks the latest initiative in this area by the ASA since it introduced tougher rules regarding the depiction of men and women in ads in 2019.The new rules were developed after a consultation process partly prompted by the outcry over adverts in 2015 for the slimming product Protein World, which promised to make women beach body ready.

Japan, 1581: Iga province is burning down around you. You watch on, injured and helpless as the Oda Nobunaga - the warlord responsible for numerous civil wars and the eventual unification of the country - smirks from a nearby hill. You draw your katana, the blade shining in the flickering light of the flames. This is Assassins Creed: Shadows part exciting ninja game, part history lesson. Its an odd combination but it comes together in a sprawling historical-fiction adventure full of discovery and deception.The tumultuous period that saw the unification of Japan and the fall of Nobunaga in the late 1500s is an ideal setting in which to play around as a sneaky shinobi and a brave samurai. The series science-fictiony framing device is that you, the player, are diving into your ancestors memories to hunt down a mysterious artefact by taking down a group of menacing masked samurai, one at a time. But mostly the game leaves you alone to enjoy feudal Japan.In this fraught time period, there is a sense of constant danger, each conversation like careful steps on a knifes edge. The story is complete fiction of course, but it does weave around actual historical events and figures, and the developers at Ubisoft have clearly gone to great pains to make the settings feel authentic, both landscapes and the people who inhabit them. Youll automatically remove your shoes when entering a building, and famous temples appear as they would have looked then, rather than as the tourist destinations they are now.The world truly is gorgeous, with several provinces to explore in all seasons and weathers, and period-accurate cities including Kyoto and Osaka. Giant temples rise up over busy towns full of stalls and workshops, while mossy shrines are scattered along winding paths through the countryside. Youll see Japan in all colours, too, from the gentle pinks of springs sakura blooms, to the fiery-coloured leaves blanketing the hills in autumn, to the inky darkness of a winters night. Its easy to be distracted by the view mid-mission when youre surrounded by ancient red torii gates, or notice a random puppet performance in the street. Ubisofts Japan feels alive. It also feels totally overwhelming, at times.As much fun as it is to roam the countryside on horseback, scouting out new villages and historic sites, theres just so much of it that its easy to feel lost. There are plenty of missions and side quests that will guide you around the map, but theres a lot of repetition in those tasks. To kill a high-level samurai you will need some help; the person who can help you wants a favour, which involves finding another person who wants you to kill a different samurai, and so on. Over the games long run time, this starts to grate.Important feature: you can pet all the cats (and dogs) in Japan if you want. Photograph: UbisoftThe dual protagonists do help to alleviate the feeling that youre stuck in a repetitive loop. For the first 10 to 15 hours of the game, youll step into the sandals of shinobi Fujibayashi Naoe, a young woman seeking revenge after her home was destroyed, and help her to rebuild her life and set up a network of spies and rebels from a secret mountain base. Then theres Yasuke, a principled black samurai based on the real historical figure of the same name, who appears briefly in the games introduction, then disappears until Naoe gets close to Nobunaga.Naoe is light on her feet, capable of scaling walls and temples with ease, while also melting into shadows to creep around enemies. Her stealthy approach makes for some fun sneaky moments, such as stabbing through paper shoji screen-doors for a surprise attack. That tip-toe approach comes at a cost, though, when shes faced with a brawl. Enemy strikes hit her hard and shell quickly get overpowered in a fight. Yasuke, on the other hand, is brutally strong, and capable of running straight through those screen doors and shrugging off sword strikes like theyre a tickly irritant. He can still assassinate foes like Naoe can, but he does it head-on rather than in the shadows. In a series that has traditionally prioritised stealth, it feels extremely liberating when you bust through a castles gate and face everyone head on. Both characters are viable options to play through most of the game and you can swap between them (mostly) at will.Few other games have done such a good job with this setting Assassins Creed: Shadows. Photograph: UbisoftUnfortunately, no matter whom you play as, youll have to put up with a few niggles in a fight. While dodges and parries feel amazing when you can pull them off in one-on-one scraps, youll often find yourself surrounded as more opponents are alerted to your presence, which makes it really tricky to see where hits are coming from. When youre creeping around castle rooftops and taking your time picking enemies off, springing backwards into the shadows afterwards before scoping out your next kill, everything feels as it should. But the instant you get into a fight on the ground it starts to feel messy and frustrating.While I did find myself getting annoyed running back and forth between quest givers, I still cant stop thinking about Shadows. Excellent performances and emotionally resonant moments, such as Naoes painful recovery after she loses everything she holds dear, mean youll feel every bit of sorrow and anger alongside the games heroes. Events are often troubling, as power struggles between lords often come at a huge cost to locals, and you see the unwelcome effects of your actions on your allies.Few other games have done such a good job with this setting, as you run through lush bamboo forests before scaling ancient castle walls and sneaking inside to steal treasures. These moments of brilliance more than compensate for its weaker points.Assassins Creed: Shadows is released on 20 March; 59.99

Late last month, Warner Bros announced it was closing three of its game development studios in a strategic change of direction: WB Games San Diego, Player First Studios, and Monolith Productions. At a time when the games industry is racked with layoffs and studio closures, the barrage of dispiriting headlines can be numbing. But the shutdown of Monolith cut through the noise, sparking fresh shock and outrage at the industrys slash and burn approach to cost cutting. There are numerous reasons for this, but among them was a pervading belief that Monolith would be around forever. I dont think I ever really considered the possibility that it would shut down one day, says Garrett Price, one of Monoliths seven founding members.True to its name, Monolith was a singular presence. Founded in 1994, it was a prolific developer whose games displayed visual flair, mechanical inventiveness and a knack for synthesising pop-cultural themes. Most excitingly, you could never really predict what the studio would do next. While it primarily produced first-person shooters, there were forays into platformers, dungeon crawlers and open-world games. And even the core FPS titles differed wildly in theme and style, inspired by everything from 60s spy films to Japanese horror.Went toe-to-toe with Quake Blood. Photograph: Monolith Productions/GOGMonolith didnt really have a true identity, and we honestly didnt really care, Price explains. We pretty much just made whatever we wanted to make We didnt spend a lot of time trying to figure out what genre would sell the best or what theme would be the most accessible to the mass market. We just tried to make what we thought was cool.Monolith emerged from the edutainment software company Edmark, where several of the companys founders were previously employed. On my interview day, I remember this bald chap walking past me on the stairs wearing a Wolfenstein 3D T-shirt. I figured this would be a great place to work, says Toby Gladwell, Monolith co-founder and software engineer. He recalls that his co-founders were emboldened by the recent release of Doom, the demonic first-person shooter that catapulted its creators, id Software, to rockstar status and transformed perceptions of the PC as a gaming platform. We realised quickly that this was our calling. We simply had to make the best games of all time.However, Monoliths initial project bore little resemblance to id Softwares classic. Claw was a 2D, Mario-style platformer about a pirate cat. It was meant to be Monoliths debut title, but in a quirk of fate, the company acquired another developer in late 1996 Q Studios which was deep into production on a Doom-like first-person shooter called Blood. Monolith opted to prioritise Bloods completion over Claw a decision that would have huge ramifications.Released in March 1997, Blood puts players in the role of Caleb, a gunslinging servant to the demon Tchernobog who is is betrayed and murdered by his fiendish master. Those early games, especially Blood and Claw, have a very hand-crafted feel to them and were very much DIY endeavours, Price says. A 2.5D shooter released as games were pivoting hard into full 3D rendering, Blood was in some ways behind the times. But its gritty visual style, creative weapons such as flare guns and voodoo dolls, and innovative addition of alternate fire modes for weapons, helped it stand toe-to-toe with more technologically advanced games such as Quake.Anime-inspired Shogo: Mobile Armour Division. Photograph: Monolith ProductionsThe success of Blood sent Monolith into a frenzy of FPS development. Between 1998 and 2003, it designed seven new games in the genre including Blood 2; the anime-inspired shooter Shogo: Mobile Armour Division, which alternated between on-foot combat and city-flattening battles inside Gundam-style mechs; and two licensed tie-in games, Aliens Versus Predator 2, and Tron 2.0.Our studio culture was born from a deep-seated conviction that we could accomplish anything we put our minds to, Gladwell says. We talked games, we played games together, both competitively and to analyse. There werent significant boundaries, given that we were all new to building a company other than a strong desire to build games that would stand alongside the giants of the time.The lack of boundaries also applied to the practical side of game design. This was still a fledgling industry when we got started. The more specific roles you see today, such as world builder or environment artist were far more nebulous. Everyone pitched in. This helped give us a broader spread of opinion and feedback, because everyone was contributing to design, Gladwell says. Much of my own time at Monolith was spent in the energy vortex between design, art, audio and engineering.A gloriously colourful pastiche of 60s espionage fiction The Operative: No One Lives Forever. Photograph: Monolith ProductionsThe brightest star of Monoliths early years, The Operative: No One Lives Forever, or NOLF as it is affectionately known, saw players don the orange catsuit of Cate Archer in a gloriously colourful pastiche of 60s espionage fiction. Its wide-ranging adventure transported players to Morocco, Germany, the tropics and even into space, with each level introducing new ideas, weapons and gadgets. Released in 2000, It was also one of the only shooters of its time with a female protagonist and her portrayal holds up surprisingly well for a game that owes a significant debt to Austin Powers.Monoliths vintage year, however, came in 2005, during which it released three games. Alongside The Matrix Online, a massively multiplayer adaptation of the 1999 sci-fi action movie, Monolith released a second game partly inspired by the same film: Fear. The culmination of Monoliths mastery of the FPS, Fear combines the espionage themes of NOLF, the stylised ultraviolence of Blood and the Japanese borrowings of Shogo though this time it looked to J-horror films, particularly Ringu, for inspiration. It bound these elements together with dynamic slow-motion combat and state-of-the-art enemy AI design, pitching the player against an army of clones that could seemingly work together tactically to outfox the player. The result is one of the best first-person shooters ever made.Fear is arguably Monoliths best game. Yet despite its title, it isnt the scariest. One month after Fear launched, Monolith released Condemned: Criminal Origins. A dark and gritty detective thriller inspired by films such as Se7en and The Silence of the Lambs, Condemned likewise blended horror and battles against eerily human enemies. But the foes you face in Condemned are crazed vagrants who attack the player with steel pipes and wooden planks, these tooth-and-nail duels interspersed with grisly crime-scene investigations.Arguably Monoliths finest Alma from Fear. Photograph: Sierra GamesBy far Monoliths most unsettling game, Condemneds atmosphere of dread is thicker and more convincing than anything in Fear. A level set in a mannequin-filled department store has become infamous for its paranoia-inducing qualities. Their studio had a real talent for permanently altering your imagination by turning everyday locations into memorable levels, says Cameron Martin, senior producer at New Blood Interactive, publisher of retro shooters including Dusk, partly inspired by Monoliths work. After playing their games, youll never look at empty office buildings or crusty subway stations the same way again.Fear and Condemned would be the last truly original games the studio would make. By 2005, Monolith had been acquired by Warner Bros, and after providing Fear and Condemned with decent if lesser sequels, Monolith became a servant of Warner Bros media licences.Yet even in this role, Monoliths inventive, capricious personality shines through, as in 2012s bizarre multiplayer shooter Gotham City Imposters, where players assumed the roles of random Gotham citizens pretending to be Batman and the Joker. The highlight of the studios latter years, however, was Middle-Earth: Shadow of Mordor. An open-world game in the Assassins Creed mould, Shadow of Mordor featured the remarkable Nemesis AI system, which reorganised Saurons faceless army of orcs into a scheming political hierarchy, filled with recognisable personalities players would repeatedly encounter in tit-for-tat blood feuds.Highlight of Monoliths later years Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor. Photograph: Monolith ProductionsNemesis was a potentially genre-defining concept, an idea dozens of other games would borrow from and riff on. But we will never know what its influence could have been. Warner Bros patented the system in 2021, and the only game to feature it since is Monoliths final release, Middle-Earth: Shadow of War. Monolith was working on a Wonder Woman game that would also have featured the system, but this project was cancelled alongside Monoliths closure.When a game studio closes, it can be difficult to gauge what is lost. Drive, perhaps, is what ultimately defines Monoliths legacy. Between its foundation in 1994 and Shadow of Wars publication in 2017, Monolith created 23 games, one for every year of its existence up to that point. Which makes it more shocking that Monolith closed with nothing to show for its last eight years of existence.That such a dependable studio failed to release another game in almost a decade should raise serious questions about modern industry practices and how studios are increasingly subject to the whims of executives, investors, and venture capitalists. The demand that every release be bigger and better looking, appealing to the widest audience, and poised to serve players for years, is transforming the industry into a zero-sum game a game that some studios arent allowed to finish, let alone win or lose.

More than four years after its announcement and after two last-minute delays, the latest title in Ubisofts historical fiction series Assassins Creed will finally be released on Thursday. Set in Japan in 1579, a time of intense civil war dominated by the feudal lord Oda Nobunaga, it follows two characters navigating their way through the bloody chaos: a female shinobi named Fujibayashi Naoe, and Yasuke, an African slave turned samurai. Japan has been the series most-requested setting for years, Ubisoft says."I've been on [this] franchise for 16 years and I think every time we start a new game, Japan comes up and we ask, is this the time? says executive producer Marc-Alexis Cot. We've never pushed beyond the conception phase with Japan until this one."The game comes at a crucial time for Ubisoft after the disappointing performance of last years titles Star Wars Outlaws, Skull and Bones and Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown, and the expensive closure of live service shooter XDefiant. There has also been a furore over the games Black and female protagonists, with the usual rightwing YouTubers criticising them as woke and historically inaccurate, despite the fact that female warriors fought throughout the feudal period, and that Yasuke, the games Black samurai, is a historical figure.It is something the team is keen to address. In-house historians were some of the first people to get staffed on the production team, says creative director Jonathan Dumont. A huge data bank is continually fed. As we get a sense of the era, the research effort then requires the help of specialists from around the world, including Japan, to narrow down details or understand finer cultural points.The game features advancements in lighting on landscapes. Photograph: UbisoftThere were also field trips to the games key locations of Kyoto and Osaka, which revealed elements the team hadnt thought of. Cote recalls travelling to Japan to show local colleagues some technological breakthroughs the development team had made with lighting on landscapes. But they all shook their heads and said it wasnt working. I was like, Why?! he says. And they just replied: Thats not how light falls on the mountains in Japan. So when our art director was there I asked him specifically to go look at the mountains. He went, took reference photos, and now weve captured it.The team also had to render individual characters socks, because they are always depicted removing their footwear when entering a building. The expectations have been this high throughout. Its been a challenge.Like all the previous Assassins Creed titles before it, Shadows uses authentic locations and historical figures to seat the games time-hopping narrative. Takeda, Fukuchiyama and Himeji castles are all replicated along with the villages, ports and rural landscapes of Central Japan. But as ever, this is first and foremost a game about sneaking over rooftops and skilfully taking down enemies. In a demo we played just before release, the lead characters are assaulting Himeji castle, and you can choose to play either as Naoe, skulking in the shadows using smoke bombs and silent attacks to escape detection, or Yasuke, running in with his sword and lopping off limbs. While Ubisoft has put immense effort into capturing the Azuchi-Momoyama period and the nature of the Iga peasant class (the possible origin of the modern ninja archetype), what matters equally is how good it feels to leap off a rooftop and decapitate a passing enemy.Incredibly bloody combat. Photograph: UbisoftIn many ways, it seems the game draws as much from modern cultural depictions of the period and its warriors as from history. Japanese storytelling has been very influential to the development of the game and to all occidental arts in general, says Dumont. Kagemusha from Kurosawa, 13 Assassins, Zatoichi, Sekigahara, The Tale of Genji or Musashi from Eiji Yoshikawa, to name the more obvious, have [all] helped shape our vision for the game. Even Studio Ghibli movies such as My Neighbour Totoro have helped us understand the countryside and vegetation.Its certainly an interesting time for Shadows to release. Multiple high-profile failures of recent live service games have left players yearning for the era of big single-player adventures, with decent sales reported for Obsidians recent RPG Avowed. Meanwhile, the huge success of FX/Hulus Shgun series has brought feudal Japan back into the cultural spotlight, and its story of stranded English navigator John Blackthorne becoming a high ranking samurai somewhat reflects that of Yasuke.The game does look beautiful, with intricate environments, a dramatic weather system and incredibly bloody combat. Ubisoft has survived a difficult period; a lot now rests on its most treasured possession.

When Jan Scott Wilkinson, frontman of the band formerly known as British Sea Power, was first asked to work on a video game soundtrack, he was sceptical. We didnt know much about the game, but our manager Dave seemed to think there was something interesting about this Robert guy who had been pleasantly hounding him, he says. That was Estonian novelist Robert Kurvitz, part of a team who had just started work on an esoteric video game about an alcoholic cop trying to solve a murder in an impoverished region of a war-torn country. The game was Disco Elysium, now regarded as one of the all-time great cerebral role-playing games: released in 2019, it sat atop PC Gamers top 100 list for four years in a row.Kurvitz is a Sea Power superfan. Pick a random scene from the game and therell be something a bit of dialogue, a location, a theme that has some sort of Sea Power reference in it. Wilkinson tells me that Kurvitz was captivating and full of a bubbling passion and that he knew an unsettling number of strange details about our music. Kurvitz had already embedded some of those very obscure Sea Power references in the world of Disco Elysium before they had even met. Whether the band liked it or not, they were already enmeshed in this eccentric Estonians world.[Disco Elysium] seemed both separate, and also sympathetic to, the bands identity, Wilkinson reflects. It was a strange, fucked up, sci-fi existence parallel to the one we were inhabiting Kurvitz seemed to mythologise the mundane.Mythologising the mundane Disco Elysium. Photograph: ZA/UMThe game is about the perennial pull between fascism and communism; police violence; the importance of community in the face of state oppression; alcoholism; homosexuality; the politics of poverty; and a tiny, pixel-sized hole in reality. It suited Sea Power down to the ground. The band, after all, had been writing music about the slow, perilous collapse of the planet as ice shelves slid into the ocean. There had been sombre, reflective, tracks about obscure bodies of water in Orkney. Theyd waxed lyrical about the virtues of being an EU citizen (pre-Brexit, naturally). The band have always embraced the miserable alongside the beautiful. Wilkinson is particularly complimentary of the games strange sense of humour, something he thinks resonated with the band and their fans.The initial meeting between took place in Birmingham. Birmingham is a strange place. Its own world. Very strong in character, reflects Wilkinson. Maybe [Kurvitz] had been to Alan Moore for a magical blessing? [To meet us] in the spiritual home of heavy metal and Tolkiens inspiration for the Shire it seems oddly fitting, I suppose, now that I look back. I had never thought about that until now.Sea Power, new to the world of video games, took direction from Kurvitz, caught in the tidal pool of his vision for most of the project. Wilkinson tells me that Kurvitz had a plan, and a fastidious knowledge of our albums and rare EPs and B-sides. As such, many of the songs in the game come from pre-existing Sea Power tracks, reworked, remixed, and re-recorded to coalesce with the watercolour weariness that defines Disco Elysiums fading world.The games thought cabinet cover art for Disco Elysiums soundtrack. Illustration: ZA/UMThinking about it, some of the tracks we used on the game continued their existence into our following album, Wilkinson says. So working on the game not only drew from our past but influenced our future, too.Disco Elysiums songs are stripped down, exposing the core melodies, and a little bit less dense than what youd hear on a standard Sea Power album. There are fewer vocal melodies and longer, dreamier sequences. Any explicit narrative is stripped away, and youre left with a soundscape, a Turner painting as a song. Generally, songs needed distilling down to a fundamental mood fitting the scene, doing away with anything which was in competition with that mood and usually adding a little dreamy liminal menace, Wilkinson says.There is so much dialogue, and the visuals do so much, so the music really just needed to reach into the subconscious and open the gates of the mind, allowing the brain to absorb the words and images and help them become totally immersive. And that was enjoyable, artistically, to do I love creating atmospheres and sonic textures as much as writing choruses or words. Maybe more, sometimes.Sea Power have also worked on film soundtracks, rescoring a 1934 Irish fictional documentary called Man of Aran an experience that helped Wilkinson know what to expect from creating a game soundtrack, even if there were some key differences.Games are a little more easygoing with regards to timing, he says. With film, its often important to hit cues and you know exactly when different moods need to change direction. It can be more mathematical. The game needed more general mood textures to sit behind scenes, and blend into and enhance the feeling of various parts of the world. I would definitely work on more games. I love games like Disco Elysium, although they are a very rare thing.This spring, Sea Power are embarking on a mini tour named Soundtracks Live. The set will feature various Disco Elysium songs, work from the Man of Aran soundtrack, and various tracks from another documentary feature film, From the Sea to the Land Beyond. Wilkinson is excited about the prospect of performing these tracks live especially for an audience of Disco Elysium fans.The game needed general mood textures to sit behind scenes Disco Elysium. Photograph: ZA/UMWe have had a noticeable growth in listeners since [the game was released], he says. They seem like a cool and thoughtful bunch, these Disco Elysium players. They are appreciated. The odd drunken detective has been sighted along the crash barrier at gigs.The relationship between Disco Elysium and Sea Power has been symbiotic; they have given new life to each other. Sea Power have seen a swell in listeners as a result of the game, and existing Sea Power fans discovered a new love for video games as a result of the collaboration. And the relationship is still evolving.On our first meeting, [Kurvitz] did tell me that he had worked very hard on re-ordering the track list to our album Valhalla Dancehall, smiles Wilkinson. Hmm, Valhalla Dancehall, Disco Elysium could there be a link of some kind? The band are now considering this revised track list for the albums anniversary reissue. He is very talented and intelligent. So are all the games core creators. I dont think many people notice all the little nods to the world of Sea Power through the game. It was strange when it became such a huge hit around the world, and we were proud to be a part of its story.And, of course, he nods, we got a Bafta out of it, too, which would have been unlikely to happen to us otherwise.

Its easy to feel a bit beset by doom these days. The other week, I watched the heinous AI-generated Trump Gaza video and was so appalled that I impulse-bought a kayaking guide book. It felt like the only sane response was to take to the water and paddle away.Video games are a reliable antidote to existential doom, but layoffs, corporate homogenisation and AI slop are all encroaching on my safe haven, making it more difficult to get a brief reprieve from whats happening in the outside world. Thank God, then, for the Bafta games awards nominations, which reliably remind me that video games are pretty great, actually.The 2025 picks were announced last week (right after my newsletter deadline, as longtime readers will know is now tradition). In my opinion, Baftas event is the classiest and least commercial of the gaming awards shows, and its judging panels, with a mix of video game industry professionals and specialists from Baftas membership and beyond, usually come out with the broadest range of picks. I always see a lot of what I personally love about video games in these nominations: their sheer creative variation and vivacity. (Disclosure: over the years Ive been involved with these judging panels in various capacities, but not in 2025.)The eligibility period runs from November 2023 to November 2024, so there are no nominations for the superb Indiana Jones and the Great Circle. (I feel so sorry for great games that come out in December.) One of my favourites I played made the cut: A Highland Song, a magical-realist game about running through the Scottish mountains, is up for best British game, alongside another Scottish-set game called Still Wakes the Deep, a cosmic horror thriller set on a North Sea oil rig. Yorkshire-ish comedy Thank Goodness Youre Here! is also up for this award, as are Lego Horizon Adventures, Paper Trail and Hellblade II.Hellblade II is actually the most-nominated game overall, appearing in 11 categories. Still Wakes the Deep, meanwhile, appeared in eight, and Thank Goodness Youre Here in seven. If I may be allowed some very mild patriotism, Britains games industry should be very proud of its output last year, which was overall a horrid one for those working in the business of play.Personal fave Neva, a game about a warrior and her wolf, is nominated for an artistic achievement award. Photograph: nevaDelightfully, Thank Goodness Youre Here! made it into the best game category with Astro Bot, Black Myth: Wukong, Balatro, Helldivers 2, and Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom, a game that I liked less, apparently, than almost everyone else. There are a bunch of big games here in various categories, but what I like about the Baftas is that indie games arent relegated to their own specific category: they appear everywhere, resulting in an enjoyably unpredictable slate. The stop-motion submarine puppet adventure game Harold Halibut and the warrior-and-wolf environmentalist action game Neva (a personal fave) are up for the artistic achievement award, next to big titles including Astro Bot and Wukong.The ambiguously named games beyond entertainment category is always my favourite to peruse, partly because of the nebulous definition: these are all games with some kind of message or intended wider meaning. We have Kind Words, in which you send nice messages to strangers or send your worries out into the world. Theres Botany Manor, about exploring the home of a Victorian botanist. Tales of Kenzera: Zau was informed by its directors grief after the death of his father. Tetris Forever is a fascinating interactive documentary about the block-arranging game, and an insight into a wild period of video game history. Hellblade is in there, too, presumably because of its portrayal of living with psychosis. And then theres Vampire Therapist, in which you are a cowboy talking the immortal undead through their emotional baggage. I had never heard of this game, and will be downloading it forthwith.Last years awards were so comprehensively dominated by Baldurs Gate 3 that the show lacked its usual propensity for surprises, but a lot of the categories this year are much tighter. The show is on 8 April at 7pm BST, hosted once again by comedian Phil Wang, and pretty much everything on this list of nominations would be a worthy winner. That said: if the gloriously clever and maximalist role-playing game Metaphor: ReFantazio doesnt win best narrative, Ill be fumin.What to playWanderstop. Photograph: Ivy Road/AnnapurnaWanderstop is game is about a formerly fearsome warrior forced to slow the heck down and run a whimsical tea shop in a fantasy forest, and she is not happy about it. Its also a game about burnout. Co-written by Davey Wreden (The Stanley Parable, The Beginners Guide) and Karla Zimonja (Gone Home), it will speak to anyone who has ever overinvested in their work and found the meaning suddenly stripped from their life when they can no longer work like they used to. (No idea what youre talking about.)Available on: PS5, Xbox, PCEstimated playtime: 10 hoursWhat to readA landmark for explorable 3D game worlds The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, from 1998. Photograph: NintendoInspired by a Bafta survey, I asked a bunch of interesting and distinguished people for their most influential video game of all time. No two people picked the same game. Most of their selections were so brilliantly esoteric that I felt distinctly boring for picking something relatively predictable.Sony has been experimenting with AI-powered game characters: an AI version of Aloy from Horizon was leaked to the Verge, talking to the player in a synthesised voice. Important reminder: Horizon is a story about how greedy technocrats destroyed the earth with the help of AI.Theres a new official trailer for The Last of Us season two, with Pedro Pascal and Bella Ramsay returning as heroes Joel and Ellie. Those of us who have played the game will know there is, uh, plenty the trailer doesnt show And speaking of trailers, theres a 10-minute (yes, 10) trailer for Death Stranding 2, which will be released on 26 June. Being a Hideo Kojima game, it looks equal parts creative, confusing and utterly bonkers.skip past newsletter promotionSign up to Pushing ButtonsFree weekly newsletterKeza MacDonald's weekly look at the world of gamingPrivacy Notice: Newsletters may contain info about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. For more information see our Privacy Policy. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.after newsletter promotionWhat to clickQuestion BlockTrigger warning for vegetarians Monster Hunter: World. Photograph: CapcomReader Robin provides this weeks question:Heres a question I cant get out of my head: how can you play Monster Hunter!? Im not squeamish at all but I could barely get through a training session, which involved hurting a harmless creature trapped in an arena I was disgusted and my son was horrified. Then some innocent creature lay dying and I was pulling silly faces and taking photos of the poor thing as it breathed its last. And if Monster Hunter didnt do it for you, what has prompted you to walk away from a game?This is such a valid question! I was vegetarian for 12 years and yet throughout, I happily cut down majestic creatures in Monster Hunter and felt proud of my achievements. I am so fascinated by this dichotomy that I wrote a whole article about it when Monster Hunter: World came out in 2018. Forgive me for quoting myself, but heres what I wrote:One of the functions of fantasy violence, whether in Monster Hunter or Game of Thrones, is to prompt reflection on the role that violence plays in the real world and in human nature. Monster Hunter might involve killing, but it also restores humans to the hierarchy of the natural world Perhaps spending hours of my leisure time pretending to be a hunter-gatherer-warrior is an outlet for the slavering carnivore within.I am not vegetarian any more, but I fully acknowledge the dissonance between respecting and admiring these incredible virtual creatures and then killing them to make fancy helmets. The latest game does a lot of cognitive somersaulting in its story to try to make out that killing these dangerous beasts is noble because we do it to protect people and the ecosystem. But on a base level, were doing it because its fun, and that is pretty gross on one level. On another: its fantasy. With absolutely no judgment towards fans of first-person shooters, I am personally more comfortable with killing virtual dragons than killing virtual people.On to the second part of your question: one moment in Grand Theft Auto V made me so uncomfortable that I had to fetch my partner to play through the scene for me. A scene in the story that involves a hillbilly psycho capturing and torturing a guy who is Middle Eastern. You have no choice but to actively participate, and it made me feel nauseated. Its obviously intended to be satirical commentary on the US governments immediate recourse to torture after 9/11, but it massively missed the mark for me.If youve got a question for Question Block or anything else to say about the newsletter hit reply or email us on pushingbuttons@theguardian.com.