The hardest part about finding games like Hollow Knight is knowing where to start. The overwhelming success of Team Cherry's award-winning 2017 game--and anticipation of its long-awaited sequel, Silksong--prompted a flood of similar games all looking to capture the magic of combining soulslike combat with deep exploration. Some are more inventive than others, building on Hollow Knight's foundations to push that style of game forward in new or unexpected ways. Others take a specific aspect, such as grueling boss fights, and run with it. We've combed through the lot and picked out 15 of the best games like Hollow Knight to get you started in this impressively varied sub-genre.If you're not as excited about combat and want puzzles and exploration instead, head over to our list of the best metroidvania games. Nine Sols Platforms: PC, Xbox Series X|S, PlayStation 5Release Date: May 29, 2024Developer: Red Candle GamesIf Hollow Knight is the Dark Souls of metroidvanias, then Nine Sols is the genre's Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice. Parrying is at the core of almost everything you do in Nine Sols, from dealing with standard enemies to wearing down some of its relentless bosses. Among games like Hollow Knight, it's also one of the most thematically and visually distinct. Developer Red Candle Games call Nine Sols a "Taopunk," a blend of sci-fi punk with traditional Taoist architecture and symbolism. Most protagonists in games like these are blank slates, but Nine Sols adds a personal touch by making the personality of its hero, Yi, an important part of the story. Yi starts out seeking revenge, and ends up on a journey to save the world and himself, becoming a reluctant hero in the process. See at Humble Animal Well Platforms: PC, Nintendo Switch, Xbox Series X|S, PlayStation 5Release Date: May 9, 2024Developer: Billy Basso, Shared Memory LLCAnimal Well is a puzzle, or more accurately, a lot of puzzles. There's a bit of combat and some platforming, but mostly, it's about trying to unravel dozens of mysteries big and small as you delve ever further into a maze that wouldn't be out of place in Lewis Carrol's Wonderland stories. Explaining too much about what's going on would spoil what makes Animal Well special, but the most interesting and even subversive parts of it is that you have almost nothing to guide you and can make discoveries in any order. That freedom creates a sense of discovery and wonder that's often absent from the procedural methods inherent in these kinds of games.Read our Animal Well review. See at Steam Ultros Platforms: PC, PlayStation 5Release Date: February 13, 2024Developer: HadoqueOf all the games like Hollow Knight, Ultros takes the most organic approach to metroidvanias, and we mean that literally. You, an intergalactic explorer, arrive on a psychedelic space colony called The Sarcophagus and find it teeming with exotic life and mysterious spiritual energies. You use the life force and remains of enemies to nourish your mind and unlock new abilities, and there's a scoring system that ranks how efficiently you defeat your foes. That determines the quality of the loot they drop, so if you want to unlock and improve your skills, you have to plan each encounter carefully. Ultros is also absolutely beautiful, a dream-like blend of esoteric architecture and wild ecosystems with closer ties to the Sarcophagus' secrets than Ultros initially suggests. Read our Ultros review. See at Fanatical Blasphemous 2 Platforms: PlayStation 5, PC, Xbox Series X|S, Nintendo SwitchRelease Date: August 24, 2023Developer: The Game KitchenBlasphemous 2's big addition over its predecessor--apart from even more ghoulish and gory moments--is the inclusion of more platforming. The first Blasphemous is a bit one-note, which is great if you're just here for the combat, but not so much if you want, well, anything else. Blasphemous 2 throws in some challenging and smartly-designed platforming as well, bringing it closer to the likes of Hollow Knight. Better still, developer The Game Kitchen was more ambitious with its environment design as well, with more complex layouts, better backgrounds and lighting, and even colors that aren't brown, grey, and blood.Read our Blasphemous 2 review. See at Fanatical Elden Ring Platforms: PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, PCRelease Date: February 25, 2022Developer: FromSoftwareOkay, so Elden Ring doesn't have the exploration style of Hollow Knight, but it does have the kind of grueling combat that inspired Team Cherry's spectacular boss fights, and lots of it. It's FromSoftware's first open-world game, one that follows a lone, nameless warrior in their bid to bring salvation to a shattered land--or make its ruin everlasting. Mostly, though, it's a giant playground for dozens of exceptionally well-designed and challenging bosses to stomp (you) around in, with enemies ranging from fire-spewing land dragons to the spirits of an ancient civilization and a gigantic, greatsword-wielding prince on his favorite little horsey. Read our Elden Ring review. See at Fanatical Cuphead Platforms: PlayStation 4, Xbox One, PCRelease Date: September 29, 2017Developer: Studio MDHRIf you really like boss fights and are less bothered about exploration and all the other Hollow Knight-y bits, Cuphead is definitely worth checking out. Don't let Studio MDHR's retro cartoon style give you the wrong impression, either. Cuphead's cutesy bosses demand careful planning, precise execution, and a lot of patience. The battles aren't the only thing Cuphead has going for it, though. Studio MDHR's exquisite animation, the soundtrack, even period-specific cartoon-style sound effects--the entire game is a spectacle in the best way. Read our Cuphead review. See at Fanatical Castlevania Advance Collection Platforms: Xbox Series X|S, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 5, PCRelease Date: September 23, 2021Developer: KonamiAny of the Castlevania bundles are strong picks, but the Castlevania Advance Collection should be your go-to choice for the kind of classic action that Hollow Knight builds on. The collection includes Circle of the Moon--low on our list of the best Castlevania games only on account of it not really doing anything that Symphony of the Night didn't--the excellent Harmony of Dissonance, and the even better Aria of Sorrow. Sorrow is the standout inclusion, one that radically shook up the Castlevania formula by removing the Belmonts from the equation, telling an entirely new story set in the distant (at the time) future, and giving the protagonist, Soma, an ability that absorbed enemy souls for use in combat. It helps that Sorrow, as well as Harmony, have an excellent selection of bosses and some fantastically moody settings, too. See at Humble Ori and the Blind Forest Platforms: PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, PCRelease Date: March 11, 2015Developer: Moon StudiosOri and the Blind Forest starts like the end of a Disney movie. A cute little creature finds a family in the middle of a dream-like forest, and that family gets taken away from them. Your job is to figure out why and find a way to save the woods. Ori takes Hollow Knight's demanding platforming even further with some segments that wouldn't feel out of place in something like Celeste, but the real stand-out feature is the map. In addition to being a well-designed metroidvania world, it's absolutely gorgeous and a delight to explore. Blind Forest is a modern classic, and its sequel, Ori and the Will of the Wisps manages to improve it even further.Read our Ori and the Blind Forest review and Ori and the Will of the Wisps review. See at Fanatical Ender Magnolia: Bloom in the Mist Platforms: PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, PC, Nintendo SwitchRelease Date: March 25, 2024Developer: AdiglobeIn the onslaught of games like Hollow Knight that released following Team Cherry's success, developer Adiglobe decided to shake up the formula first with Ender Lilies and then with the more refined Ender Magnolia. You've got your standard elements, such as gigantic bosses that force you to learn their patterns and a puzzle-like map that unfolds as you gain more powers. Those powers, however, are the spirits of fallen friends who also aid you in combat. You find several, but can only recruit a handful at a time, which adds a layer of strategy to exploration and combat. There's also a strong sense of emotional attachment, since you and your ghostly allies have history and connection of a kind that's often missing in these games when you just play as an outside observer. See at Steam Metroid Dread Platforms: Nintendo SwitchRelease Date: October 8, 2021Developer: Nintendo EADAny Metroid game is going to have something of that Hollow Knight feel, since the sci-fi series is a big part of where the genre and Hollow Knight in particular came from. However, the easiest to get your hands on without having to pay for a subscription is Metroid Dread. It's the culmination of the 2D Metroid saga that started in 1986, but you can get by just fine if this is your first. Dread follows bounty hunter Samus Aran as she searches for evidence of a deadly parasite, only to find herself hunted by rogue robots--sometimes. The stealth segments that have you hiding from your metal hunters only take place in specific areas. The rest of Metroid Dread takes you across sprawling subterranean research labs, sunken testing stations, and extravagant dwellings, featuring the series' biggest map ever, stuffed with secrets and formidable bosses. If you really enjoy those bosses, Dread has a boss rush mode you can test yourself against as well.Read our Metroid Dread review. See at Amazon Lone Fungus Platforms: PCRelease Date: September 21, 2021Developer: Basti GamesThese types of games tend to lean more toward the edgy, dark, and broody side of things, which makes Lone Fungus a gem in the genre. You're the last mushroom on Earth, exploring a vast network of tunnels and temples in search of treasure and using magic skills that change form depending on how you swing your sword. A ball of energy is damaging to one enemy, for example, but you can smack it and shatter it into several projectiles to clear out lots of foes at once. Best of all, though, Lone Fungus has a robust Assist Mode that lets people of all skill levels enjoy the game and just makes it more relaxed in general, with features such as extra platforms, no costs for spells, slower platforms, and invincibility so your little fungus won't die. See at Humble Dead Cells Platforms: PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, PCRelease Date: May 10, 2027Developer: Motion TwinDead Cells throws roguelite randomness into the metroidvania mix and ratchets up the challenge as well. You're a spirit determined to figure out why you died, and in the absence of a tangible vessel for your ethereal self, you pilot shambling corpses in a bid to make it through streets, swamps, dungeons, and horrors untold. These corpses aren't the sturdiest, so when you fail, they fall apart and you start again. Eventually, you can unlock permanent upgrades, but with no checkpoints at any stage of the journey, you'll have to rely on your skill with weapons and knowledge of enemy behavior to make it through. If you enjoy Dead Cells, you can pick up DLC packs that add new locations, weapons, and enemies, and there's even a Castlevania-themed expansion as well. Read our Dead Cells review. See at Fanatical Monster Sanctuary Platforms: Nintendo Switch, Xbox Series One, PCRelease Date: August 28, 2019Developer: DeveloperIf you like a bit of Pokemon with your Hollow Knight, Monster Sanctuary might be for you. You play as a fledgling monster tamer out to explore the vast world with just a single critter by your side. You'll find and tame more, training them into the best versions of themselves and using their abilities not just to deal with threats in the sanctuary, but to explore its secrets and hidden areas as well. Monster Sanctuary is lighter and breezier than some games on this list, but if something more intense is to your liking, there's a robust PvP element where you can challenge other players and their monster teams too. See at Fanatical Salt and Sanctuary Platforms: PC, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Nintendo SwitchRelease Date: March 15, 2016Developer: Ska StudiosUpgrades and customization are usually rather limited in games like Hollow Knight, which makes Salt and Sanctuary, with its more in-depth RPG components, something special. You play as a sailor, washed up on some evil-looking, godforsaken island and foolish enough to go exploring the mysterious labyrinth underneath. What you find is a parade of nightmares and some spectacular, bone-crunchingly hard 2D boss fights that are among the best Soulslike challenges out there. Read our Salt and Sanctuary review. See at Humble Bō: Path of the Teal Lotus Platforms: PC, Xbox Series X|S, PlayStation 5, Nintendo SwitchRelease Date: July 17, 2024Developer: Squid Shock StudiosMovement is often a means to an end in video games--a double jump that propels you higher, for example, or a dash that lets you avoid dangerous terrain. In Bō: Path of the Teal Lotus, it's no exaggeration to say movement is everything. Bouncing, flying, gliding, moving with magical speed, and navigating the hand-drawn world is just as important as battling the myths and monsters inspired by Japanese folklore. Path of the Teal Lotus is one of the most elegant platformers around, and it even has a reset system where you can pause or rewind a failed jump to try again, perfect for learning some of the more difficult segments. Read our Path of the Teal Lotus review. See at Fanatical

The Stan Lee Story $78.57 (was $100) | Releases July 1 Preorder at Amazon It's not unfair to say that the late Stan Lee was not only one of Marvel Comics' most important creators, but also one of the most recognizable ambassadors for the entire comic book industry. If you're interested in his life story, then you'll want to check out the upcoming book, The Stan Lee Story. The chronicles his work, starting from his early days in 1940 at Timely Comics, his work in Hollywood, and his impact on other comic creators. The Stan Lee Story launches soon on July 1 for $100, but if you act fast, you can grab is at a discount for just $78.47 at Amazon. The Stan Lee Story $78.57 (was $100) | Releases July 1 Published by Taschen and overseen by legendary comics writer Roy Thomas, this 576-page deluxe book features a foreword written by Lee. It includes never-before-seen art and photographs sourced straight from Lee's family archives, a novel-length essay, an epilogue by Thomas, and an appendix covering all of the comics Lee worked on across multiple decades. Preorder at Amazon While this deal on The Stan Lee Story is a great opportunity to learn more about one of the medium's legendary figures, there are plenty of other books available that explore Marvel's history. One notable release is the Origins of Marvel Comics, which was first published in 1974 and was reissued in a deluxe edition last year. Written by Lee, Origins of Marvel Comics highlights the comic book characters that helped turn Marvel into a dominant force, as well as the talented creators who brought them to life. There's also Marvel Comics: The Untold Story, which chronicles the publishing company's early years through the accounts of the people who worked there.Another great pick is Jack Kirby: The Epic Life of the King of Comics, which recounts Kirby's life and prolific career as one of Marvel's most recognizable illustrators. Unlike the prose books we've mentioned, this is a graphic novel written by Eisner Award-winning author Tom Scioli.Continue Reading at GameSpot

By TREVOR HOGG Images courtesy of Prime Video. For those seeking an alternative to the MCU, Prime Video has two offerings of the live-action and animated variety that take the superhero genre into R-rated territory where the hands of the god-like figures get dirty, bloodied and severed. “The Boys is about the intersection of celebrity and politics using superheroes,” states Stephan Fleet, VFX Supervisor on The Boys. “Sometimes I see the news and I don’t even know we can write to catch up to it! But we try. Invincible is an intense look at an alternate DC Universe that has more grit to the superhero side of it all. On one hand, I was jealous watching Season 1 of Invincible because in animation you can do things that you can’t do in real life on a budget.” Season 4 does not tone down the blood, gore and body count. Fleet notes, “The writers almost have this dialogue with us. Sometimes, they’ll write in the script, ‘And Fleet will come up with a cool visual effect for how to kill this person.’ Or, ‘Chhiu, our fight coordinator, will make an awesome fight.’ It is a frequent topic of conversation. We’re constantly trying to be inventive and create new ways to kill people!” When Splinter (Rob Benedict) splits in two, the cloning effect was inspired by cellular mitosis. “The writers almost have this dialogue with us. Sometimes, they’ll write in the script, ‘And Fleet will come up with a cool visual effect for how to kill this person.’ Or, ‘Chhiu, our fight coordinator, will make an awesome fight.’ It is a frequent topic of conversation. We’re constantly trying to be inventive and create new ways to kill people!” —Stephan Fleet, VFX Supervisor A total of 1,600 visual effects shots were created for the eight episodes by ILM, Pixomondo, MPC Toronto, Spin VFX, DNEG, Untold Studios, Luma Pictures and Rocket Science VFX. Previs was a critical part of the process. “We have John Griffith [Previs Director], who owns a small company called CNCPT out of Texas, and he does wonderful Unreal Engine level previs,” Fleet remarks. “On set, we have a cartoon of what is going to be done, and you’ll be amazed, specifically for action and heavy visual effects stuff, how close those shots are to the previs when we finish.” Founding Director of Federal Bureau of Superhuman Affairs, Victoria Neuman, literally gets ripped in half by two tendrils coming out of Compound V-enhanced Billy Butcher, the leader of superhero resistance group The Boys. “The word that we like to use on this show is ‘grounded,’ and I like to say ‘grounded’ with an asterisk in this day and age because we’re grounded until we get to killing people in the craziest ways. In this case, having someone floating in the air and being ripped in half by two tendrils was all CG.” Multiple plates were shot to enable Simon Pegg to phase through the actor laying in a hospital bed. Testing can get rather elaborate. “For that end scene with Butcher’s tendrils, the room was two stories, and we were able to put the camera up high along with a bunch of blood cannons,” Fleet recalls. “When the body rips in half and explodes, there is a practical component. We rained down a bunch of real blood and guts right in front of Huey. It’s a known joke that we like to douse Jack Quaid with blood as much as possible! In this case, the special effects team led by Hudson Kenny needed to test it the day before, and I said, “I’ll be the guinea pig for the test.’ They covered the whole place with plastic like it was a Dexter kill room because you don’t want to destroy the set. I’m standing there in a white hazmat suit with goggles on, covered from head to toe in plastic and waiting as they’re tweaking all of these things. It sounds like World War II going on. They’re on walkie talkies to each other, and then all of a sudden, it’s ‘Five, four, three, two, one…’  And I get exploded with blood. I wanted to see what it was like, and it’s intense.” “On set, we have a cartoon of what is going to be done, and you’ll be amazed, specifically for action and heavy visual effects stuff, how close those shots are to the previs when we finish.” —Stephan Fleet, VFX Supervisor The Deep has a love affair with an octopus called Ambrosius, voiced by Tilda Swinton. “It’s implied bestiality!” Fleet laughs. “I would call it more of a romance. What was fun from my perspective is that I knew what the look was going to be [from Season 3], so then it’s about putting in the details and the animation. One of the instincts that you always have when you’re making a sea creature that talks to a human [is] you tend to want to give it human gestures and eyebrows. Erik Kripke [Creator, Executive Producer, Showrunner, Director, Writer] said, ‘No. We have to find things that an octopus could do that conveys the same emotion.’ That’s when ideas came in, such as putting a little The Deep toy inside the water tank. When Ambrosius is trying to have an intimate moment or connect with him, she can wrap a tentacle around that. My favorite experience doing Ambrosius was when The Deep is reading poetry to her on a bed. CG creatures touching humans is one of the more complicated things to do and make look real. Ambrosius’ tentacles reach for his arm, and it becomes an intimate moment. More than touching the skin, displacing the bedsheet as Ambrosius moved ended up becoming a lot of CG, and we had to go back and forth a few times to get that looking right; that turned out to be tricky.” A building is replaced by a massive crowd attending a rally being held by Homelander. In a twisted form of sexual foreplay, Sister Sage has The Deep perform a transorbital lobotomy on her. “Thank you, Amazon for selling lobotomy tools as novelty items!” Fleet chuckles. “We filmed it with a lobotomy tool on set. There is a lot of safety involved in doing something like that. Obviously, you don’t want to put any performer in any situation where they come close to putting anything real near their eye. We created this half lobotomy tool and did this complicated split screen with the lobotomy tool on a teeter totter. The Deep was [acting in a certain way] in one shot and Sister Sage reacted in the other shot. To marry the two ended up being a lot of CG work. Then there are these close-ups which are full CG. I always keep a dummy head that is painted gray that I use all of the time for reference. In macrophotography I filmed this lobotomy tool going right into the eye area. I did that because the tool is chrome, so it’s reflective and has ridges. It has an interesting reflective property. I was able to see how and what part of the human eye reflects onto the tool. A lot of that shot became about realistic reflections and lighting on the tool. Then heavy CG for displacing the eye and pushing the lobotomy tool into it. That was one of the more complicated sequences that we had to achieve.” In order to create an intimate moment between Ambrosius and The Deep, a toy version of the superhero was placed inside of the water tank that she could wrap a tentacle around. “The word that we like to use on this show is ‘grounded,’ and I like to say ‘grounded’ with an asterisk in this day and age because we’re grounded until we get to killing people in the craziest ways. In this case, having someone floating in the air and being ripped in half by two tendrils was all CG.” —Stephan Fleet, VFX Supervisor Sheep and chickens embark on a violent rampage courtesy of Compound V with the latter piercing the chest of a bodyguard belonging to Victoria Neuman. “Weirdly, that was one of our more traditional shots,’ Fleet states. “What is fun about that one is I asked for real chickens as reference. The chicken flying through his chest is real. It’s our chicken wrangler in green suit gently tossing a chicken. We blended two real plates together with some CG in the middle.” A connection was made with a sci-fi classic. “The sheep kill this bull, and we shot it is in this narrow corridor of fencing. When they run, I always equated it as the Trench Run in Star Wars and looked at the sheep as TIE fighters or X-wings coming at them.” The scene was one of the scarier moments for the visual effects team. Fleet explains, “When I read the script, I thought this could be the moment where we jump the shark. For the shots where the sheep are still and scream to the camera, Untold Studios did a bunch of R&D and came up with baboon teeth. I tried to keep anything real as much as possible, but, obviously, when sheep are flying, they have to be CG. I call it the Battlestar Galactica theory, where I like to shake the camera, overshoot shots and make it sloppy when they’re in the air so you can add motion blur. Comedy also helps sell visual effects.” The sheep injected with Compound V develop the ability to fly and were shot in an imperfect manner to help ground the scenes. Once injected with Compound V, Hugh Campbell Sr. (Simon Pegg) develops the ability to phase through objects, including human beings. “We called it the Bro-nut because his name in the script is Wall Street Bro,” Fleet notes. “That was a complicated motion control shot, repeating the move over and over again. We had to shoot multiple plates of Simon Pegg and the guy in the bed. Special effects and prosthetics created a dummy guy with a hole in his chest with practical blood dripping down. It was meshing it together and getting the timing right in post. On top of that, there was the CG blood immediately around Simon Pegg.” The phasing effect had to avoid appearing as a dissolve. “I had this idea of doing high-frequency vibration on the X axis loosely based on how The Flash vibrates through walls. You want everything to have a loose motivation that then helps trigger the visuals. We tried not to overcomplicate that because, ultimately, you want something like that to be quick. If you spend too much time on phasing, it can look cheesy. In our case, it was a lot of false walls. Simon Pegg is running into a greenscreen hole which we plug in with a wall or coming out of one. I went off the actor’s action, and we added a light opacity mix with some X-axis shake.” Providing a different twist to the fights was the replacement of spurting blood with photoreal rubber duckies during a drug-induced hallucination. Homelander (Anthony Starr) breaks a mirror which emphasizes his multiple personality disorder. “The original plan was that special effects was going to pre-break a mirror, and we were going to shoot Anthony Starr moving his head doing all of the performances in the different parts of the mirror,” Fleet reveals. “This was all based on a photo that my ex-brother-in-law sent me. He was walking down a street in Glendale, California, came across a broken mirror that someone had thrown out, and took a photo of himself where he had five heads in the mirror. We get there on the day, and I’m realizing that this is really complicated. Anthony has to do these five different performances, and we have to deal with infinite mirrors. At the last minute, I said, ‘We have to do this on a clean mirror.’ We did it on a clear mirror and gave Anthony different eyelines. The mirror break was all done in post, and we were able to cheat his head slightly and art-direct where the break crosses his chin. Editorial was able to do split screens for the timing of the dialogue.” “For the shots where the sheep are still and scream to the camera, Untold Studios did a bunch of R&D and came up with baboon teeth. I tried to keep anything real as much as possible, but, obviously, when sheep are flying, they have to be CG. I call it the Battlestar Galactica theory, where I like to shake the camera, overshoot shots and make it sloppy when they’re in the air so you can add motion blur. Comedy also helps sell visual effects.” —Stephan Fleet, VFX Supervisor Initially, the plan was to use a practical mirror, but creating a digital version proved to be the more effective solution. A different spin on the bloodbath occurs during a fight when a drugged Frenchie (Tomer Capone) hallucinates as Kimiko Miyashiro (Karen Fukuhara) goes on a killing spree. “We went back and forth with a lot of different concepts for what this hallucination would be,” Fleet remarks. “When we filmed it, we landed on Frenchie having a synesthesia moment where he’s seeing a lot of abstract colors flying in the air. We started getting into that in post and it wasn’t working. We went back to the rubber duckies, which goes back to the story of him in the bathtub. What’s in the bathtub? Rubber duckies, bubbles and water. There was a lot of physics and logic required to figure out how these rubber duckies could float out of someone’s neck. We decided on bubbles when Kimiko hits people’s heads. At one point, we had water when she got shot, but it wasn’t working, so we killed it. We probably did about 100 different versions. We got really detailed with our rubber duckie modeling because we didn’t want it to look cartoony. That took a long time.” Ambrosius, voiced by Tilda Swinton, gets a lot more screentime in Season 4. When Splinter (Rob Benedict) splits in two was achieved heavily in CG. “Erik threw out the words ‘cellular mitosis’ early on as something he wanted to use,” Fleet states. “We shot Rob Benedict on a greenscreen doing all of the different performances for the clones that pop out. It was a crazy amount of CG work with Houdini and particle and skin effects. We previs’d the sequence so we had specific actions. One clone comes out to the right and the other pulls backwards.” What tends to go unnoticed by many is Splinter’s clones setting up for a press conference being held by Firecracker (Valorie Curry). “It’s funny how no one brings up the 22-hour motion control shot that we had to do with Splinter on the stage, which was the most complicated shot!” Fleet observes. “We have this sweeping long shot that brings you into the room and follows Splinter as he carries a container to the stage and hands it off to a clone, and then you reveal five more of them interweaving each other and interacting with all of these objects. It’s like a minute-long dance. First off, you have to choreograph it. We previs’d it, but then you need to get people to do it. We hired dancers and put different colored armbands on them. The camera is like another performer, and a metronome is going, which enables you to find a pace. That took about eight hours of rehearsal. Then Rob has to watch each one of their performances and mimic it to the beat. When he is handing off a box of cables, it’s to a double who is going to have to be erased and be him on the other side. They have to be almost perfect in their timing and lineup in order to take it over in visual effects and make it work.”

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If we don’t lock them down, it will be too late. The official trailer and key art have been revealed for Alien: Earth, which hits FX and Hulu August 12. In the upcoming series, when the mysterious deep space research vessel USCSS Maginot crash-lands on Earth, Wendy and a ragtag group of tactical soldiers make a fateful discovery that puts them face-to-face with the planet’s greatest threat. The series stars Sydney Chandler as Wendy; Timothy Olyphant as Kirsh; Alex Lawther as Hermit; Samuel Blenkin as Boy Kavalier; Babou Ceesay as Morrow;  Adrian Edmondson as Atom Eins; David Rysdahl as Arthur Sylvia; Essie Davis as Dame Sylvia; Lily Newmark as Nibs; Erana James as Curly; Adarsh Gourav as Slightly; Jonathan Ajayi as Smee; Kit Young as Tootles; Diêm Camille as Siberian; Moe Bar-El as Rashidi; and Sandra Yi Sencindiver as Yutani. Noah Hawley is creator and executive producer. Ridley Scott, David W. Zucker, Joseph Iberti, Dana Gonzales, and Clayton Krueger also executive produce. FX Productions produces. VFX are created by Clear Angle Studios, Fin Design & Effects, MPC, Pixomondo, The Third Floor, Untold Studios, and Zoic Studios, with Jonathan Rothbart acting as visual effects supervisor. Check out the official trailer now: Source: FX Journalist, antique shop owner, aspiring gemologist—L'Wren brings a diverse perspective to animation, where every frame reflects her varied passions.

Tutankhamun’s Iconic Gold Death Mask Is Getting a New Home Near the Pyramids of Giza Soon, the elaborately decorated artifact will be transferred to the brand new Grand Egyptian Museum, joining more than 5,000 other items from the boy king’s tomb Tutankhamun's gold funerary mask has been on display at the Egyptian Museum for nearly a century. Mostafa Elshemy / Anadolu Agency / Getty Images For nearly a century, visitors have flocked to the Egyptian Museum on Cairo’s Tahrir Square to admire Tutankhamun’s funerary mask, the intricately decorated artifact designed to cover the mummified pharaoh’s face. Starting this summer, they’ll be able to see the mask in its new home, the $1 billion Grand Egyptian Museum located in nearby Giza. Officials will soon transfer the mask to the massive new venue, where it will join more than 5,000 artifacts from the boy king’s tomb. “Only 26 objects from the Tutankhamun collection, including the golden mask and two coffins, remain here [at the Egyptian Museum] in Tahrir,” says Ali Abdel Halim, director of the Egyptian Museum, to the Agence France-Presse (AFP). “All are set to be moved soon.” Halim didn’t say when the death mask will be transferred, but the new Grand Egyptian Museum is scheduled to fully open to the public in early July after years of delays. Some portions of the Grand Egyptian Museum have been open since November 2023, with an additional 12 exhibit halls opening last October. All told, the museum complex spans more than 5 million square feet and houses more than 100,000 artifacts, which makes it the largest museum in the world focused on a single civilization. “We spent all this money to build the greatest museum in the world,” said Zahi Hawass, an Egyptologist who has twice served as Egypt's tourism and antiquities minister, to NBC News’ Keir Simmons, Charlene Gubash and Mithil Aggarwal in October. “You will see the objects for the first time in an incredible way.” The Untold Secrets of King Tut's Tomb Watch on Tutankhamun's mask has been housed at the Egyptian Museum in Cairo since 1934, 12 years after British archaeologist Howard Carter discovered the pharaoh’s tomb. However, the 123-year-old Beaux Arts venue is small and starting to show its age, so officials decided to relocate Tutankhamun's treasures to the enormous, high-tech Grand Egyptian Museum. At the new facility, the Tutankhamun artifacts will have their own dedicated, climate-controlled wing—one that’s large enough to display all of them together for the first time. Last month, officials carefully transferred 163 Tutankhamun treasures to the new museum, according to an announcement from the Egyptian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities. That delivery included the pharaoh’s elaborately decorated ceremonial chair, various pieces of jewelry and the canopic chest that held the jars containing Tutankhamun’s organs, reports Artnet’s Sarah Cascone. The Egyptian Museum in Cairo, meanwhile, is not closing. Though it has lost Tutankhamun’s treasures and more than 20 mummies, it still has roughly 170,000 artifacts in its collection, per the AFP. Curators say they plan to replace the Tutankhamun artifacts with a new exhibition, though they haven’t shared many details. Get the latest stories in your inbox every weekday.

Cyberpunk 2077's sequel is now in pre-production, and it's got a new name that's unlikely to surprise anyone – here's all we know, including the latest sales figures for Witcher 3Tech12:03, 29 May 2025More Cyberpunk is comingCyberpunk 2077's redemption arc from buggy mess to incredible RPG is well documented, but with CD Projekt working on a sequel, it appears things are progressing nicely.With suggestions that a sequel could introduce a second city to explore, and the original coming to Switch 2, we're getting pretty jazzed about being reunited with the series.‌The next game in the franchise had been dubbed Project Orion as a codename, but it's now got a fresh new title that's not entirely surprising to anyone–Cyberpunk 2.‌The name has been updated as the studio has confirmed the project has left the conceptual phase and moved into pre-production.Phantom Liberty is a fantastic expansionIt's still years away, with the news being revealed as part of the CD Projekt's investor update.‌"Several weeks ago the CD PROJEKT RED team responsible for the next big game set in the Cyberpunk universe completed the project’s conceptual phase," the company explains."As a result, Cyberpunk 2 – previously known under the codename Project Orion – has progressed to preproduction."‌There's more good news for the series, too, as the developer confirmed the Phantom Liberty expansion for Cyberpunk 2077 has sold more than 10 million copies."This result fills us with great satisfaction," Michael Nowakowski, Joint CEO explained, "especially given that a new addition is about to join our Cyberpunk portfolio – on 5 June the game’s Ultimate Edition will be coming to the new Nintendo Switch 2 console."Positive reactions from gamers and media representatives who have had the opportunity to play the game at a series of global Nintendo events fill us with optimism. It’s worth noting that for the first time ever one of our games will become a launch title for a brand new platform."‌The Witcher 3 has sold more than 60 million copies(Image: Steam)The studio also looked back at The Witcher 3, which celebrated its ten-year anniversary earlier this month."Without a doubt, the third part of Geralt’s adventures marks a pivotal point in our history," Adam Badowski, Joint CEO revealed.‌"The game earned hundreds of awards and solidified our studio’s standing, but more importantly, it brought untold hours of adventures and emotions to millions of gamers the world over."I am proud to announce that since its release The Witcher 3 has sold over 60 million copies, securing a place among the bestselling video games in all history, and motivating us to carry on with intensive work on the next trilogy set in this universe."The studio debuted a trailer for The Witcher 4 at The Game Awards in December of last year, starring Ciri as a new protagonist.Article continues belowFor the latest breaking news and stories from across the globe from the Daily Star, sign up for our newsletters.‌‌‌

How did the development of Game of Thrones: Kingsroad begin? Considering the Game of Thrones series concluded almost six years ago, what was the driving force behind starting the game?The development of Game of Thrones: Kingsroad wasn't just about leveraging a popular IP. We were well aware that quite some time had passed since the Game of Thrones series ended, But what really stood out to us was the lingering curiosity, a sense that many fans were still eager to explore the world of Westeros.That's where we began. We asked ourselves: What if the player belonged to a noble house that existed within Westeros? Instead of simply following the show's familiar storylines, our goal was to give players a chance to experience the world as seen in Season 4 but through a fresh perspective. We wanted to fill in the gaps left by the original story and allow players to craft their own stories within that space.At its core, Game of Thrones: Kingsroad is a game designed to expand the world of Westeros, to let players explore places, characters, and consequences that weren't fully explored in the show. It's our way of offering a new kind of immersion for fans who still love this universe and want to be part of it in their own way.What kind of world can players expect in Kingsroad? What are the core gameplay mechanics, and how do the solo and multiplayer experiences work together?Game of Thrones: Kingsroad is a story-driven action adventure RPG set in Westeros after the events of Season 4 of the Game of Thrones series. Players take on the role of the heir to a fallen house, navigating a world of politics, war, and survival.As they journey across Westeros through familiar locations like Castle Black, Winterfell, Highgarden, and Oldtown, they'll encounter both iconic characters from the show and entirely new faces and events. At its core, the game combines action-based combat, narrative-driven quests, and open-world exploration. We've integrated a variety of activities, like puzzles, dynamic encounters, and bounty hunting, to keep the experience immersive and varied without feeling repetitive.One of the key features of Game of Thrones: Kingsroad is how organically single-player and multiplayer are connected. While progressing through the story and developing your character, you can also take on large-scale encounters, like the Altar of Memories, or field bosses, such as Drogon, alongside other players. Each mode is self-contained but still influences the other, so whether you play solo or with others, it truly feels like you're living and surviving in Westeros.From a technical perspective, what was the experience of using Unreal Engine to develop Kingsroad? What were the biggest optimization challenges for mobile, and how did you address the technical demands of delivering a cross-play experience? What's it like using Unreal Engine for mobile development?Unreal Engine 5 provided us with a powerful toolset for achieving high-quality visuals, features like Lumen allowed us to create richer, more immersive environments. However, supporting multiple platforms, especially mobile, came with its own set of technical challenges. We built a structure where core logic is handled on the server side, which made it easier to ensure cross-platform connectivity. At the same time, we put significant effort into maintaining a consistent visual and gameplay experience on mobile devices that's comparable to PC.Optimization, in particular, was a major focus for the team to support seamless cross-play. We disabled some of UE5's heavier features and used the mobile renderer while also implementing LOD adjustments, simplified materials, mobile-specific environment settings, and texture atlasing for UI assets. These efforts helped us stabilize memory usage and maintain smooth frame rates across devices. Initially, Unreal Engine felt a bit heavy for mobile use, but we came to realize that with the right tuning and its flexible feature set, it can deliver impressive quality on both PC and mobile platforms.Given that Kingsroad features an original storyline, how does it expand the Game of Thrones world, and does it align with or diverge from the events of the books and the series? Game of Thrones: Kingsroad is set in the world of Game of Thrones, but at its core, it tells a completely original story. The narrative begins after Season 4, following the end of major wars, as the great houses begin to regroup and rebuild.This setting gave us room to explore untold regions and events that weren't covered in the show, allowing us to expand the lore while staying true to the established universe. Our goal as a development team was to create a new and immersive experience from the perspective of "someone else" living within Westeros without disrupting the flow of the original storyline.For example, players step into the role of the last heir of a fallen minor house, House Tyre, and travel across regions like the North, the Reach, and the Stormlands. Along the way, they'll interact with familiar factions such as the Night's Watch, wildlings, and maesters.These touches give fans something that feels both familiar and refreshingly new. In terms of narrative structure, we conducted extensive research to ensure our story wouldn't conflict with major canonical events. Instead, we designed an independent storyline that can be influenced by but doesn't alter the core narrative of the original. In that sense, Game of Thrones: Kingsroad serves as an expanded piece of content that respects the show’s foundations while offering a "possible story" that could exist just beyond its borders.What does the future look like for Kingsroad after launch? Will there be any gap between the Early Access players and the new ones, and how will Early Access players be rewarded for their support?Our main post-launch plans include regular updates that expand the story through new chapters and regions, along with the addition of new content, such as raids.While there may be some differences in progression between Early Access players and new players, Game of Thrones: Kingsroad is primarily a single-player experience where players can follow the story at their own pace. This means that the gameplay remains fully accessible and enjoyable regardless of when a player joins. As a token of appreciation, those who participated in Early Access will receive additional rewards such as exclusive costumes and emblems.Game of Thrones: Kingsroad is now officially available on both PC and mobile, so learn more about the game and download it here.Hyun-il Jang, Executive Producer at Netmarble NeoInterview conducted by Amber Rutherford

We made it, everybody. We’ve reached the end of HBO’s The Last of Us. Wait, sorry, I’m getting word in my earpiece that…we’re only halfway done with it because this show’s going for four seasons. At this point, I’m mostly feeling deflated. Last week’s episode was such a catastrophic bummer that it cemented for me that the show fundamentally misunderstands The Last of Us Part II, the game this season and those that are still yet to come are adapting. But you know how your mother would tell you not to play ball in the house because you might accidentally break the priceless vase on display in the living room? Well, if you’ve already broken the vase, you might as well keep playing ball, so we’ll probably be doing this song and dance into 2029. For now, we’re on the season two finale, which essentially wraps up Ellie’s side of this condensed revenge story and reveals the premise of season three. Most game fans probably assumed this was where the season would end and, if nothing else, it’s still a bold cliffhanger to leave off on.Suggested ReadingNintendo Switch 2 Price Is Set at $450 for Now, But Could Go Higher Share SubtitlesOffEnglishSuggested ReadingNintendo Switch 2 Price Is Set at $450 for Now, But Could Go Higher Share SubtitlesOffEnglishNintendo Switch 2 Price Is Set at $450 for Now, But Could Go HigherGuilty as chargedAfter last week’s flashback-heavy episode, we open on Jesse (Young Mazino) tending to wounds the Seraphites have inflicted on Dina (Isabela Merced), which means we get a real heinous scene of him doing some amateur surgeon’s work to remove the arrow she took to the knee. He douses it in alcohol and offers her a sip to dull the pain, but she staunchly refuses without explaining why. They made Jesse an asshole in this show, but he’s still a smart guy. The gears start turning in his head about why she might turn down a swig right now. Nevertheless, he takes that motherfucker out with no anesthetic, booze, or supportive bedside girlfriend to help Dina through it.Speaking of the absent girlfriend, Ellie (Bella Ramsey) finally returns to their theater base of operations. Now that she’s back, all her concern is on Dina, but Jesse is still wondering where the hell she’s been this whole time. Dina is resting backstage, and even though we only see these details for a few minutes, I once again want to shout out the set designers who recreated this little safe haven, which is covered in old show posters and graffiti from bands and artists that performed there before the cordyceps took over. I’m sure Joel would have loved to have seen it.Dina stirs awake and Ellie checks her wound. Jesse’s effort to wrap the injury leaves a lot to be desired, but it should heal in time. Ellie asks if the baby’s alright, and Dina says it’s okay.“How do you know?” Ellie asks.“I just do,” Dina replies.The one who is not okay in the room is Ellie, who is bleeding through the back of her shirt. Dina helps her undress and starts to clean the scratches on her back. As she does, she asks what happened while they were separated. Ellie says she found Nora (Tati Gabrielle), and she knew where Abby (Kaitlyn Dever) was, but only said two words: “Whale” and “Wheel.” Ellie says she doesn’t know what it meant. It could have been nonsense. She was infected, and it was already starting to affect her cognitive state.“I made her talk,” Ellie whispers. “I thought it would be harder to do, but it wasn’t. It was easy. I just kept hurting her.”Image: HBODina asks if Ellie killed her, but she says she just “left her,” meaning that somewhere in this timeline, Nora is wandering the depths of a Seattle hospital with broken legs and an infected mind. I thought the show couldn’t possibly concoct a worse fate for her than what happens in the game, but they found a way. It takes commitment to put down a character like showrunners Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann have done for Nora across both video games and television. Personally, I think when you already know that people are wary of the way you treat one of the few Black women in your franchise as if she doesn’t deserve the same dignity as everyone else, maybe you should do better by her when given a second chance, rather than worse. But that’s just me. I’m not the one being paid a bunch of money to butcher this story on HBO Max every Sunday at 9 p.m. Eastern. So what do I know?Maybe this is just part of the contrived sadism the show has attached to Ellie. She thinks violence is easy and it comes naturally to her, so I guess she would beat a woman nearly to death until the fungal infection made her lose her mind. Meanwhile the game version is so traumatized by what she’s done in this moment, she’s practically speechless by the time she reaches the theater. God, I knew this shit was going to happen. Mazin has repeatedly insisted that Ellie is an inherently violent individual, something he’s communicated both in interviews and by having Catherine O’Hara’s Gail, the therapist who tells you what the story is about, say that she’s always been a sadist, probably. Now, when we get to moments like the post-Nora debrief which used to convey that Ellie is Not Cut Out For This Shit, the framing instead becomes “Ellie likes violence and feels bad about how much she likes violence.”Before The Last of Us Part II came out, a lot of Naughty Dog’s promotion for the game was kind of vague and even deceptive in an effort to keep its biggest twists under wraps, and some of the messaging it used to talk about the game’s themes have irrevocably set a precedent for how the game’s story is talked about years later. When the game was first revealed in 2016, the studio said the story would be “about hate,” which paints a much more destructive and myopic picture of Ellie’s journey than the one driven by love and grief she actually experiences through the course of the game.One of the most annoying things about being a Last of Us fan is that its creators love to talk about the series in ways that erase its emotional complexity, making it sound more cynical and underhanded when the actual story it’s telling is anything but. I can’t count how many times I’ve heard people reductively parroting notions that The Last of Us Part II is just about “hate” and “guilting the player” for taking part in horrifying actions when they literally have no choice but to do so, rather than cracking the text open and dissecting that nuance. Mazin’s openly-expressed belief that Ellie is an intrinsically bloodthirsty person similarly bleeds into how a lot of the public perceives her as a character, seeing her as a violent ruffian rather than a grieving daughter who was only ever taught to express her pain by inflicting it on those who made her feel it in the first place. Discussing these games as a fan means having to fight against these notions, but they’re born from a game built on subtext, and thus willingly opens itself to those interpretations.Its willingness to dwell in ambiguity only makes it a more fascinating text to unpack, or it would, if we lived in a world where discussing video games wasn’t a volatile experience in which you constantly run the risk of being targeted for performative online dunks, or running up against rabid console tribalism. Now, the Last of Us show has decided to lean into the most boring interpretation of what this story is about without an ounce of subtlety, nuance, or even sympathy for Ellie’s plight. She is a sadist who does terrible things not simply because she’s grieving her father figure, but because this is just who she is. Mazin has deemed it so, and here we are, and this vision of her will no doubt weave itself into the fabric of how we talk about Ellie Williams, even in the game.This story only has any thematic weight if Ellie’s violent outbursts are rooted in pain, not pleasure. Yeah, what we’re seeing in the show is her acting from a mix of those things but, in the game at least, the most affecting moments of Ellie’s Seattle revenge tour happen when she has to confront how she is not built for acts of violent excess in the same way Joel was. She never has been. Back in Part I, she was sick to her stomach when she committed her first kill to save Joel, and the entire point of Part II was that we see her cut off parts of herself to do what she feels she must, only to find that she’s unable to recognize herself when it’s all over. In the show, she is instead mesmerized by carnage, only to decide she doesn’t like that she feels that way, actually. But all this self-reflection is fleeting, because she’s only killed one person on her list, and there’s a lot more work to do. How many Joels is Nora’s life worth to Ellie? One-fifth?While Ellie is wrestling with these feelings, Dina is about to see things with more clarity than ever. At first, she says that Nora may have deserved this fate worse than death, to which Ellie says “Maybe she didn’t,” before telling her girlfriend everything. She tearfully recounts Joel’s massacre of the Fireflies at the base in Salt Lake City, how the group was going to use her immunity to create a cure, and how Joel killed Abby’s father to save her. Dina puts it all together and asks Ellie if she knew who Abby’s group was. She says she didn’t, but she did know what Joel did. Dina sits with that for a moment, then flatly says the group needs to go home.So I guess this is how the show gets Dina, who’s been pretty revenge-hungry thus far, back onto the track she’s on in the games. Without spoiling scenes in the late game for the uninitiated, some major points of conflict at the end of Part II require her to be less on-board with Ellie’s vendetta, so the fact that she’s been egging her girlfriend on to track down Abby was an odd choice. I wasn’t sure how the show would handle it down the line, but it seems the way HBO’s show has course-corrected was by having her condemn Joel’s actions. Dina had her own relationship with the old man in the show, so I imagine that in a later season she’ll interrogate how she feels about him in light of this new information, but having her more or less get off the ride when she learns what Joel has done sets up a contrast between her and Ellie that I’m curious to see how the show handles.The shame of it, though, is that this is just one more thing that undermines one of the core foundations of the source material, and I have to get at least one more jab in on this topic before we end the season. In The Last of Us Part II, when you look at what is actually expressed in dialogue, you see that characters are often lacking important information about each other. This lack of communication is an important part of its storytelling, but the show is instead having characters tell everyone everything. In Part II, Joel and Ellie don’t know who Abby’s father was. It’s strongly implied that no one other than Joel, Ellie, and Tommy knew about what happened in Salt Lake City, not even Dina. The more the show bridges these gaps of communication, the more senseless this entire tit-for-tat feels. To be clear, it was senseless in the game, but it was in a tragic, “these people are so blinded by their emotions that they can’t fathom another path forward” sort of way. This time around, everyone knows exactly what’s happening and chooses to partake in violence anyway. We don’t have any mystery or lack of communication to fall back on as a we struggle to understand why the characters keep making these self-destructive decisions. Everyone is just knowingly the worst version of themselves this time around, and I guess Mazin thinks that’s the point, which is the kind of boring interpretation that makes the show such an inferior version of this story.Family mattersWe now begin our third day in Seattle. Ellie and Jesse are packing up to get going in the theater lobby. The plan is to find Tommy (Gabriel Luna) somewhere in the city and then head back to Jackson. However, Jesse is a lot less talkative this morning. Dina limps into the lobby, and after a brief scolding for being on her feet, she gives Ellie a bracelet for good luck.“I’m not sure it’s been working for you,” Ellie jokes.“I’m alive,” Dina replies.Jesse is clearly uncomfortable watching his ex (or are they technically still together now? I’m not sure) give Ellie a prized possession, and says he can go alone if Dina wants Ellie to stay. Ellie says they’ll be safer together. Jesse relents and says they should be back by sundown. The tension is radiating off him, but the pair leaves Dina in the safety of the theater.Image: HBOEllie and Jesse awkwardly walk through the remains of Seattle. She finally breaks the silence by asking how he found Ellie and Dina’s theater base. He recounts his two days of tracking, giving a shoutout to the horse Shimmer who’s still vibing in the record store the girls left her at, but he’s clearly pissed. Ellie assumes it’s because he and Tommy had to cross state lines to come find them, but no, there’s something else on his mind. Why do Ellie and Dina look at each other differently? Why did Dina turn down a free drink for the first time in her life? He’s putting it all together. Dina and Ellie are no longer just gals being pals, and his (now ex?) girlfriend is pregnant.“None of this has to change things between us,” Ellie says.“Everything changing doesn’t have to change things?” Jesse asks. “Well, how about this for something new: I’m gonna be a father, which means I can’t die. But because of you, we’re stuck in a warzone. So how about we skip the apologies and just go find Tommy so I can get us and my kid the fuck out of Seattle?”Wow, okay. Judgey, much? I mean, you’re right, Jesse. This is a no good, very bad situation, and Ellie has put your kid in danger and won’t even tell you she was torturing a woman last night. But god, I miss kindhearted Jesse. I miss Ellie’s golden retriever best friend who, when finding out Dina was pregnant, firmly but gently told Ellie it was time to get the fuck out of Seattle. Now that the show has created a messy cheating love triangle out of these three, I’m once again reflecting on how The Last of Us Part II could have very easily made this storyline a dramatic, angry one, and instead it was one of the brighter spots in a dark tale. Meanwhile, in the show, the whole thing feels like it’s regressed to a rote and predictable earlier draft of the story that’s much less refreshing and compelling than the one we already know. Justice for Jesse. This is character assassination of the goodest boy in all of Jackson. Well, actually, that’s Abby’s job. Sorry, sorry. That’s actually not for another 35 minutes.As the two move further into the city, they see more art praising the Seraphite prophet on the buildings, but she looks notably different than in images we’ve seen previously. This art depicts a Black woman, whereas others have typically portrayed the prophet as white. Ellie wonders aloud if there’s “more than one of her.” Jesse says it’s possible, but ushers her forward as rain starts pouring down. I’m curious what the show might be doing here, as this is a divergence from Part II. Could the Seraphites be a kind of polytheistic group in the show that follows multiple prophets? Could they believe the Prophet was reincarnated into a different woman at some point? All we can do is theorize, but we haven’t seen much of the Seraphites this season so we don’t have much to go on. Which is by design, and feels pretty in-line with Part II, which didn’t tell you much about the group during Ellie’s three days in Seattle. We’ll pick this thread back up next season, I’m sure.The pair takes shelter but before they can catch their breath, they hear the popping sound of gunfire nearby as a W.L.F. squad corners a lone Seraphite. Ellie and Jesse watch in horror as the wolves strip and drag him away. Just as Ellie nearly gets out from cover to intervene, Jesse pulls her back. Once the coast is clear, Ellie walks away in a huff. As Jesse follows, he points out that they were outnumbered and would have lost that fight.“He was a fucking kid!” Ellie shouts.“Ellie, these people [are] shooting each other, lynching each other, ripping each other’s guts out,” Jesse says. “Even the kids? I’m not dying out here. Not for any of them. This is not our war.”Who the fuck is this man? I touched on it in episode five, but what is with this show putting all of Ellie’s unlikable traits on other characters so she keeps getting to be the hero? Jesse turns from a selfless guardian into a selfish asshole who will watch a kid get tortured to save himself while Ellie is suddenly very concerned about a war that, in the game, she seemed largely indifferent to. It’s as if The Last of Us’ second season is so concerned with us liking Ellie and feeling like we can root for her that it’s lost sight of anything else.So Jesse gets to be the belligerent asshole and Dina gets to be the revenge-driven one in the relationship. Ellie? She’s just bee-bopping through spouting cool space facts, and so when she tortures Nora, it feels like tonal whiplash. I don’t recognize Jesse. Most of the time, I don’t recognize Ellie. But really, the more I watch this show, the more I hardly recognize anyone, and I don’t have any faith in the series to figure these characters and their relationships out, even if it’s going to go on for two more seasons.Will the circle be unbroken?We shift away from the Jackson crew to check in on Isaac (Jeffrey Wright), who we haven’t seen in a few episodes. Sergeant Park (Hettienne Park) updates the W.L.F. boss that the incoming storm will get worse as the day goes on, but even so, the group is still preparing some kind of operation. She also lets him know the rank and file is a little nervous about whatever’s going on, but Isaac’s only concerned about one person: Abby. From the sound of it, she and most of her crew have all disappeared over the past few days. We’ve seen what happened to Nora, Manny is still around, but Owen and Mel are gone without a trace. Again, Isaac isn’t concerned with them. He’s nervous that they’re going into whatever operation they’re planning without Abby. Park is clearly exhausted by this lane of thinking and asks why he cares so much about the girl.Image: HBOShe starts off asking why one “great” soldier is so important when they have an army, and then gets into a weird aside where she exasperatedly asks Isaac if he’s harboring feelings for the girl when he’s at least 30 years her senior. I don’t know if this line is supposed to be a joke, but it’s not funny, even though Isaac laughs at it. She acknowledges it’s an out-of-pocket question, but says he “wouldn’t be the first old man” to make decisions based on such inappropriate impulses. As much as it’s a stupid thing for Park to say, it’s also a stupid thing for the writers room to nonchalantly whip out in a humorous fashion given The Last of Us’ history of old men preying on young women with the character of David. Why write this non-joke into your script if you don’t want viewers to possibly view his fixation on Abby as potentially untoward? Isaac’s following speech focuses on the preservation of his militia, in a very similar way to how David’s preoccupation with Ellie in season one was born from the cannibal’s warped views on longevity, and if you’re not trying to make this direct connection, why even gesture at it? Yeah, I don’t imagine anyone considered the optics of this obviously flippant, throwaway line, but Christ, if you’re that desperate for a joke or moment to cut the tension, this was the best you could come up with? Amateur shit.Isaac sits Park down and tells her why he cares so much about one soldier. He says there’s a very strong chance that the W.L.F. leadership will be dead by tomorrow morning. If that happens, who can lead the militia in their stead? He wanted it to be Abby. It was “supposed” to be her.“Well she’s fucked off, Isaac,” Park says as she leaves. “So maybe it wasn’t.”We go back to the Jackson crew as Ellie and Jesse reach the rendezvous point in a bookstore, and Tommy isn’t here. The place is in bad shape like most places are in this city, but Ellie gravitates to the children’s books section. She picks up an old Sesame Street book, the Grover classic The Monster at the End of This Book, and picks it up for the bun in the oven as Jesse says she picked a good one. As the quiet creeps in on the two, Ellie tries to break the silence by clarifying what happened, but Jesse says they have enough problems for the moment, so he wants to bury the issue.He says he loves Dina, but not in the same way Ellie does. He remembers a group that passed through Jackson, and how there was a girl he fell hard for. She asked him to leave with her to Mexico, but he declined because he’d found purpose and community in Jackson, and he was taught to put others first. People look to him to become the “next Maria” and lead the town, and he couldn’t abandon them for a girl he’d known for two weeks, even if she made him feel things he’d never felt before.Ellie immediately sees through this story. It’s not about him pointing out how he’s felt love and knows that he and Dina aren’t the real deal; it’s about how she’s putting her own needs and wants ahead of everyone else’s.“Okay, got it,” Ellie says. “So you’re Saint Jesse of Wyoming, and everyone else is a fucking asshole.”“You can make fun of me all you want,” Jesse responds. “But let me ask you this, Ellie: If I go with that girl to Mexico, who saves your ass in Seattle?”Before she can reply, they hear W.L.F. radio chatter about a sniper taking out a squad and assume it’s gotta be Tommy. The two head out to higher ground to get a better look, and Ellie sees a Ferris wheel in the distance. She finally puts Nora’s final words together: Abby is in the aquarium at the edge of the city. Immediately, her focus shifts away from Tommy as she starts trying to figure out how to reach Abby’s apparent hiding spot. Jesse is confused and says that Tommy’s got the W.L.F. pinned down in the opposite direction. Ellie starts coming up with justifications for her plan. They don’t know if that’s actually Tommy. If it is him, he’s got the group pinned down. Either way, he would want her to go after Abby to avenge Joel. Ellie doesn’t understand why Jesse is so against this. He voted to go after Abby’s crew back in Jackson, right?Image: HBONo, actually. He didn’t. He believed this vendetta was selfish and “wasn’t in the best interest of the community.” That sets Ellie off.“Fuck the community!” she screams. “All you do is talk about the fucking community, you hypocrite. You think you’re good and I’m bad? You let a kid die today, Jesse. Because why? He wasn’t in your community? Let me tell you about my community. My community was beaten to death in front of me while I was forced to fucking watch. So don’t look at me like you’re better than me, or like you’d do anything differently if you were in my shoes, because you’re not, and you wouldn’t.”Jesse takes a beat, then tells Ellie he hopes she makes it to the aquarium as he leaves. While this scene does exemplify the show’s typicalal “no subtext allowed” approach to writing that I find so irksome, the storyline of Ellie feeling ostracized by the people of Jackson while constantly being told that she must make compromises for them even as they are incapable of extending the same to her is one of the few embellishments The Last of Us makes that resonates with me. It’s easy to write off Ellie’s revenge tour as a selfish crusade that puts everyone else in harm’s way, but when she’s also one of the few out queer people in a town that mostly coddles bigotry and she’s being constantly belittled and kept from doing things she wants to do like working on the patrol team, why would she feel any kinship to this community? Now, when she’s so close to her goal that she can almost taste it, Jesse wants her to consider the people of Jackson? Why should she do that? They’re hundreds of miles away, and the only people who came to save her and Dina were the ones who already cared about her. Ellie’s disillusionment with her neighbors is one of the few additions to the story that The Last of Us manages to pull off.Ellie reaches the harbor from which she can use a boat to reach the aquarium and finds several Wolves meeting up on vessels heading somewhere off the coast. Isaac is here leading the charge, but it’s unclear where they’re going or what they’re doing. Game fans have the advantage of knowing what’s going on, but the W.L.F. storyline feels underbaked in this season, which is one of the real issues with the show dividing the game’s storyline into multiple seasons. During this section of the game, you get a sense that there’s an untold story happening in the background, and you can learn more about it through notes you can find in the environment and ambient dialogue from enemies. The show doesn’t have those same storytelling tools, so I wouldn’t be surprised if newcomers felt a little disoriented every time we hopped over to Isaac.Once the W.L.F. forces make their way wherever they’re going, Ellie finds one of the spare boats and starts to make her way to the aquarium. The storm is hitting hard, though, and the tide is not on her side. A giant tidal wave knocks her out of the boat and into the sea. (Good thing you learned how to swim, queen.) As she washes up onto the shore, Ellie hears Seraphites whistling as a group of them descends upon her. She’s too weak to get onto her feet and run, so the cultists grab her and carry her to a noose hanging from a tree in the woods. She screams that she’s not a Wolf and that she’s not from here, but they don’t listen. As they wrap the noose around her neck and start to hoist her upward, a horn sounds off in the distance. The lead Scar says to leave her, their village is in danger, so I guess that’s what the W.L.F. operation is targeting? This concludes our latest little exposition detour, as Ellie gets right back into the boat to the aquarium.Image: HBOShe manages to reach the building and finds a broken window through which to enter. Inside, she finds several makeshift beds. Whatever Abby’s doing here, she’s not alone. As Ellie makes her way deeper into the aquarium, she finds a ton of medical supplies, including bloody bandages and surgical equipment. Was Abby injured? Is that why she’s been missing in action as the W.L.F. undergoes a huge, all-hands-on-deck mission? Who’s to say?Quick sidenote: When Ellie infiltrates the aquarium in the game, she’s attacked by a guard dog named Alice. The W.L.F. used trained canines in their war against the Seraphites, but that element has been notably absent from the show. Between this and sparing Shimmer from her explosive fate, The Last of Us has been toning down the animal murder.Ellie keeps walking through the desolate aquarium and eventually finds fresh footsteps. She follows them and soon finds their source: Abby’s friends Owen (Spencer Lord) and Mel (Ariela Barer). The two are arguing about something, though it’s not clear what. Owen wants to go somewhere behind enemy lines, even in the midst of the battle Isaac has just initiated. He says he doesn’t have a choice because “it’s Abby.” Mel says he does have a choice and so does she, and the Abby of it all is why she’s not going along with whatever the plan is. Owen says he’ll do it on his own, and if Mel’s still here when they get back, she can “keep going with [them].” Either way, Owen’s leaving. Mel let’s out a hearty “fuck you, Owen” before realizing that Ellie is there. Sure seems like there’s a whole other story that’s been going on while we’ve been hanging out with Ellie, huh? I wonder if we’ll ever get any further insight into whatever this is. Perhaps in a season entirely dedicated to the other side of what’s going on in Seattle? Maybe in a couple years it might premiere on HBO Max (or whatever it’s called by then)? That would be something!Ellie holds the two at gunpoint and tells them to put their hands up. When she asks where Abby is, Owen realizes who she is and points out that he was the one who kept her alive. Ellie isn’t swayed by this, so he says they don’t know where Abby went. But, of course, they were just talking about her, so Ellie knows that’s not true. She spots a map on the table and decides to pull out an old Joel Miller standard: She tells Mel to bring her the map and point to where Abby is, saying that next she’s going to ask Owen the same question, and the answers had better match. Owen looks at Mel and says that Ellie will kill them either way, so there’s no reason to comply. Ellie says she won’t because she’s “not like” them. When she crosses state lines to torture and kill someone who killed somebody important to her, it’s very different than when they do it, of course.Owen stops Mel from grabbing the map by saying he’ll do it. He slowly turns to the table, but instead of picking up the map, he grabs a handgun stowed under it. Ellie is quick with her trigger finger and shoots him right in the throat. The bullet goes straight through him, and hits Mel in the neck as well. She falls onto her back and, instead of cursing Ellie, she asks for her help. Not to save her life, but someone else’s. She opens her jacket to reveal her pregnant belly, and asks if Ellie has a knife to cut the baby out of her before she dies. Ellie is in shock and doesn’t know what to do. Mel tells her she just needs to make one incision. That isn’t enough direction, and Ellie panics. She doesn’t know how deep or which direction to cut. As Mel starts to become delirious, she repeats “love transfers” and then asks Ellie if the baby is out. But she hasn’t even made one cut. Mel finally drifts off, and Ellie realizes it’s too late. She sits there until, eventually, Tommy and Jesse find her. Tommy attempts to comfort her, but she’s in shock and doesn’t speak. Finally they leave and head back to the theater.Naughty Dog / Cinematic GamingWhy can’t this show stop giving the audience outs to not turn against its leads? The death of Mel, specifically, feels like the show bending over backward to teach Ellie a lesson without laying blame at her feet. Mel’s death here is an accident. She’s an innocent bystander who dies because Owen and Ellie made choices, and she was, quite literally, caught in the crossfire. In Part II, by contrast, Mel “shot first.” Well, she tried to stab Ellie, but that doesn’t have the same ring to it. Ellie reacts in self-defense and stabs her right back, but she did it fully knowing she was about to send Mel to an early grave. The gut punch Ellie feels upon learning that she’s pregnant is a moment of dramatic irony, because the game’s shifting perspectives had already revealed her pregnancy to the player way back in the opening hours. So when you’re slamming the square button to fight back, you know that Mel isn’t the only one about to reach her untimely end. Here, she doesn’t even get that moment of agency to fight to protect herself. She’s just collateral damage. It’s a small but important distinction. At this point in the show, Mel’s only real trait is a clear distaste for Abby’s violence, and now, when she finally shows up again, she’s just an unintended victim of Owen pulling a gun on Ellie. Sure, season three will fill in those gaps, but the end result will be the same. Mel died not because she was fighting back, but because she was an inch too far to the left.Then there’s the matter of her pregnancy. Again, in the game players already knew about this by the time Ellie reached the aquarium, while the show kept it secret until the end. It’s hard not to see this last-minute reveal as a knife being twisted for shock value, but that’s only half the problem. My friend Eric Van Allen (co-host of the Axe of the Blood God podcast) would often joke with his college friends about how Michael Caine’s characters in Christopher Nolan films so often show up just to tell you, the viewer, in very literal terms what the story is about. Throughout most of this season, Gail has been this character, the one burdened with the heavy task of diegetic literary analysis, but Mel’s delirious “love transfers” line may be even sillier than anything Gail spouts; homegirl is bleeding out and telling Ellie that pain is not the only thing we inherit from our parents? Just one week after Joel tearfully told Ellie that he hopes she does better when she has a kid than he or his abusive cop father did?Perhaps in a show that hadn’t already spent two seasons using literalism as a writing crutch, Mel speaking her final hopes for her unborn child might have landed for me. But I think I’m just too jaded towards it now for even what should have been a genuine expression to feel like anything other than a heavy-handed, patronizing declaration of what lessons I’m supposed to take away from the story. I don’t think characters overtly communicating their beliefs and feelings about a situation is an inherently poor way of writing dialogue. In fact, some of my favorite works have managed to execute this well thanks to strong acting and stories that lent themselves well to this style of writing. The Last of Us, a series that often relishes in grounded dialogue that forced you to read between the lines and unearth that meaning yourself, the Last of Us show’s inability to let nearly any emotion, belief, or theme go unspoken feels so contrived and tiresome that even someone expressing something thematically resonate feels like being told what to feel. Mel uses her last words to tell me the themes of the story. Just in case I forgot. Thank you, Last of Us show, I don’t know how I would have ever understood your thematic richness if you didn’t make your characters tell me about it, even in their death gasps.The group makes it back to the theater and Ellie is still in shock, so much so that she doesn’t even look at Dina as she enters the building. Some time passes, and Tommy and Jesse are mapping out their route home on the stage. The storm is still pretty rough, so they’ll stay overnight and hope the sun is out when they wake up. Ellie finally joins the group, and Tommy reassures her that Mel and Owen played their part in Joel’s death, and they made the choices that brought them to that fateful end. Ellie can only fixate on what she didn’t get to do.“But Abby gets to live,” she says.“Yeah,” Tommy responds. “Are you able to make your peace with that?”“I guess I’ll have to,” she says, defeated.She looks to Jesse, who won’t even look up at her. Tommy realizes they might have something to talk about and walks to the lobby to pack. After some awkward silence, Ellie thanks Jesse for coming back for her, even though he had no reason to after the way they clashed.“Maybe I didn’t want to,” he says. “Maybe Tommy made me.”“Did he?” Ellie asks.After a second of contemplation, Jesse drops the act and says, “No.”“Because you’re a good person,” Ellie responds.“Yeah,” Jesse agrees. “But also the thought did occur, that if I were out there somewhere, lost and in trouble, you’d set the world on fire to save me.”Ellie says she would, and the two finally see one another, even if just for a moment. Jesse acknowledges that Ellie’s vendetta isn’t entirely selfish, and that when it comes to defending the people she cares about, dead or alive, you won’t find someone more loyal in all of Jackson. It’s good that they finally had this moment of connection after all this drama. But damn, I miss Ellie and Jesse being bros, and I miss her giving him shit for being a sap in these final moments. But most of all, I miss that dopey good ol’ boy with a heart of gold saying his friends “can’t get out of their own damn way.”All that understanding is short-lived, as the two hear some ruckus in the lobby, grab their guns, and book it to the entrance. The second Jesse opens the door, bam. A gunshot rings out in the lobby, and he is on the floor. We don’t even see that it was Abby who fired it until after we get a gnarly shot of him with his face blown open. He’s gone. It was instant. The Last of Us Part II tends to draw out death. It’s either long and torturous like it was for Joel or Nora, or it’s short like Owen’s and Mel’s, but in any case, the game typically lingers on the fallout for a bit. Jesse’s death, by contrast, happens so fast that you can’t even process it before you have to deal with the situation at hand. The show follows suit, and it’s recreated practically shot for shot. But that’s hardly the most disorienting (complimentary) thing that happens in these final minutes.“Stand up,” Abby growls forcefully from the other side of the desk Ellie has taken cover behind.She repeats herself: “Stand. Up. Hands in the air or I shoot this one, too.”Ellie can see Tommy on the ground with a pistol aimed right at his head. He tells Ellie to just run, but she tosses her gun where Abby can see it and crawls out from cover. Abby recognizes her immediately. Ellie asks her to let Tommy go, to which Abby replies that he killed her friends. Ellie says no, she did.“I was looking for you,” Ellie says. “I didn’t mean to hurt them. I know why you killed Joel. He did what he did to save me, I’m the one that you want. Just let him go.”Naughty Dog / VGS - Video Game SophistryHm. Okay. We’re almost at the end. I gotta get another little quibble in before the curtains close. I mean, come on, we’ve been through seven episodes of me complaining together. You can’t take one last gripe? This line from Ellie is slightly altered to account for the fact that she knows more about Abby in the show than in the game, and it means we miss one of the most important subtle interactions in all of the story. As I mentioned earlier, Ellie doesn’t know anything about Abby’s father in Part II. She assumes that Abby killed Joel because he took away any chance of the Fireflies developing a cure, so she cites that in this high-stakes moment. The original line is almost identical to the one in the show, but instead, Ellie says “there’s no cure because of me” and suggests that killing her would be the extension of Abby’s presumed vendetta. Then, we get some incredible, subtle acting from Abby actor Laura Bailey, who hears what Ellie’s saying, has a brief moment of angry disbelief on her face, and then scoffs under her breath before picking right back up where she left off. In just a few seconds, you see Abby realize that, after everything, these fuckers have no idea how much pain she’s been through over the past five years. But they’re not worth the breath it would take to explain herself. They don’t deserve to know the man her father was and what he meant to her. All that matters right now is that Ellie pays for what she’s done.Abby still views herself as the righteous one here, as she points out that she let Ellie live when she did not have to do that. It turns out that Ellie wasn’t deserving of her mercy, that she squandered it by killing her friends. Part of me has wondered if all the exposition-heavy dialogue in this show, such as Dever’s villain monologue in episode two before she murdered the shit out of Joel, was written to give its actors more words to say in front of a camera. When you’ve got big names like Kaitlyn Dever, Catherine O’Hara, and Pedro Pascal in your cast, you don’t want them to not talk, right? But all these elongated exchanges have also robbed actors like Dever of those subtle moments. Hell, she led an entire film with next to no dialogue in 2023’s No One Will Save You, and was great in it, so she has the chops to pull off that kind of acting. Communicating something through body language and expression is just as powerful as a poetic piece of dialogue (or in this show’s case, the most literal, unpoetic dialogue a person can fathom), but this show rarely, if ever, understands that.Image: HBOAnyway, Abby says that Ellie wasted the chance she was given when the ex-Fireflies spared her, and points her gun right at Ellie. We hear a bullet fire and Ellie shouts before a hard cut to black. But wait. That’s the season finale? You expect us to wait for two years, probably, to find out what happened? Well, about that. You will probably have to wait even longer.We do have one more scene this season, however: a flashback. We see Abby lying down on a comfy couch with an unfinished book resting on her stomach. She’s in a deep sleep before Manny (Danny Ramirez) loudly enters the room and wakes her up. He says Isaac wants to see them, and she stirs awake. She gets up and walks out of this cozy living space and into a giant football stadium. The entire field has been repurposed for agriculture, manufacturing, and housing. Abby takes a second to look at the whole operation before heading to Isaac’s, but the camera lingers over the field as bold white text flashes on the screen: Seattle, Day One.Alright, TV newbies, welcome to the second divisive twist of The Last of Us Part II. In the game, the player goes through Ellie’s three days in Seattle, killing Abby’s friends and mostly ignoring the war between the W.L.F. and the Seraphites. Meanwhile, Abby has been kind of an enigma the whole time. Every time Ellie finds a new lead, Abby has already come and gone. When Abby finally shows up at the theater for another round of vengeance, it’s clear that a lot of the story happening in this game has happened off-screen. That’s because you’re about to see an entirely different perspective on the last three days, and you’re going to play as Abby when you do it.As you can imagine, this shit drove some players nuts at the time, and you’ll still find angry people online complaining about it to this day. For all my problems with this season, I have to commend the show for actually going for it. HBO has taken the coward’s route in adapting this story for so long, it’s almost surprising that it’s ending here and, from the sound of it, season three will be entirely about Abby and what she’s been doing these past three days. It’s very likely we won’t see Ellie again until next season’s finale after we’ve followed Dever’s character for several episodes. Despite some ham-fisted attempts by the show to build sympathy for Abby early on, it seems like swaths of TV newbies still demand blood. Will viewers complain for an entire season as Dever takes on the lead role? I’d like to think they won’t. I hope that new audiences are more open to her than the worst people you’ve ever met were when the game launched.Despite all the golf club swings I’ve taken at this show, I’m looking forward to examining it further as HBO rolls out the next two seasons. The Last of Us Part II is one of my favorite games of all time, but I genuinely fucking hated The Last of Us’ second season. I don’t expect my feelings to improve in season three. At this point, the rot of Mazin’s poor creative decisions runs too deep for the show to be salvaged and reach the highs of the games. But if nothing else, it’s been a rewarding ride. Thank you for joining me on this seven-week journey. I think I’m due for a replay of The Last of Us Part II to wash off this stink. This shit was ass, HBO. I’ll see you in the ring again next time.