"Bethesda introduced the radio in Fallout 3, which we didn't have in the original Fallout games, and I thought that was really cool. But most of the stuff they did, and in New Vegas, was all off-the-shelf existing music," The Outer Worlds 2 creative director Leonard Boyarsky tells Inverse, "I understand why they had to do that, because it'd be ridiculous to think you would come up with 60 songs from scratch. So even back then, it was in the back of my brain that it'd be cool to hear what music from this place would have sounded like."
According to Shawn Layden, a live-service game "isn't really a game." The former PlayStation executive said in an interview that a live-service game is better described as a "repetitive action engagement device." Then what is a game? Speaking to The Ringer, Layden said a game needs three elements. "I need a story, I need a character, and I need a world," he said.
Over the course of its 26-year history, the Silent Hill series has built up a reputation for offering deep dives into the more psychological side of the survival horror genre and giving players complex stories and experiences that often resonate more deeply than those found in the genre's action-focused contemporaries. This complexity, however, doesn't mean the series is without formula.
There was once a time when having a full-blown computer in your pocket was still a fairly novel concept, and game developers, publishers, and console-makers were all too eager to find ways to work their existing products and franchises into mobile apps. Some of these were terrible, offering cheap imitations of their big siblings and often charging exorbitant prices for microtransactions, but there were also a whole bunch that took a different approach.
After shaking up the Pokémon formula with Pokémon Legends: Arceus, its successor, Legends: Z-A, pushes things even further - and it's a very welcome change of pace. With , Nintendo and Game Freak demonstrated how much more vibrant, weird, and exciting the monster catching series could become with a few key changes to the classic formula. Arceus' historical story and open-ish world made the Pokémon universe feel like a bigger, wilder place, just as the revamped battling and catching mechanics turned the familiar process of filling out your pokédex into a completely different kind of experience.
As one of the longest-running survival horror series, has had somewhat of an identity struggle over its many years. Some entries have been more action-focused, while others prioritized the dread and horror many come to the genre for. The last entry, Resident Evil Village, arguably leaned toward the action side of the equation. But the upcoming ninth entry, Requiem, aims to double down on the series' horror elements.
The best puzzle games are ones that force you to take a moment to consider your next move, the world around you, the rules that you're being forced to operate under, and, sometimes, all of the above. They're delicately balanced experiences, carefully threading the needle between being too easy and satisfying and avoiding being too difficult and frustrating. These are experiences that ask a lot of their players, anticipating a level
You play an unnamed traveller, the latest of many, sent to gather information about a devastating outbreak that transformed the citizens of a town called New Dawn into the sort of misshapen monsters that have become the staple of sci-fi-adjacent survival horror: contorted of limb, long of fang, and ample of slobber. As you explore the stark, often beautifully devastated aftermath of the outbreak, you search for places where you can travel back through time to when all hell was breaking loose,
When Neversoft released Spider-Man on the original PlayStation on August 30, 2000, the superhero video game landscape was bleak. Licensed games were churned out as quick cash-ins with clunky controls, uninspired level design, and a general sense that superheroes couldn't have a distinct feel in a medium where plumbers and hedgehogs could be heroes, too. But Neversoft, fresh off the runaway success of Tony Hawk's Pro Skater, had the pedigree, the technology, and the creative freedom to change that perception.
Speaking to VGC, Itsuno explained that he ultimately wasn't that surprised that the game wasn't universally beloved, because he designed it to not be. "I made the game not like a Nintendo one to be liked by all the people, but for a certain type of audience, so it's normal if some people outside that target audience don't like the game," Itsuno said. "However, people who enjoyed the game really loved it, appreciated the details and work. I'm very proud of it."
In Time Flies, you have exactly 76.4 seconds to live, at least if you're living in the United States. When the game begins, it asks you to select your country, and its average life expectancy turns into how many seconds you have until your fly avatar perishes.
In Luto, you play a character stuck in an emotional rut and a literal loop. Waking to a smashed bathroom mirror, protagonist Sam exits into an L-shaped hallway, passes some locked doors, heads down the stairs, and out the front door.
"I hate words," she tells me. "I'm so bad at expressing myself through words, and I want to get a lot better at it because I'm making TikToks right now, and I've realised I'm not good at figuring out what to say on the fly consistently. So I think a lot about communicating things in pictures or storyboards."
