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Video game horses tend to play a fairly uncomplicated role, at least in mainstream titles. Like semi-sentient meat bicycles, they often exist as little more than a way to make the player travel faster, jump farther or occasionally defy the laws of physics. With the exception of Red Dead Redemption 2, an outlier beloved for its equine verisimilitude and breadth of riding-related activities, horses in video games are generally emotionless props, notorious for janky animations and unnatural anatomy.

That’s fine for most players’ needs, but for those who are drawn to certain games in part because they have horses, there's a lot to be desired. Especially since the alternatives — dedicated horse games — haven’t proven to be much better. The genre is plagued with shoddy graphics, unoriginal storylines and drawn-out, repetitive caretaking tasks like hoof-picking. While horse games of the aughts, like the Barbie Horse Adventures series, sparked a lasting interest in the niche for a lot of young gamers, we’ve yet to really see what their maturation can look like for the now-adults still chasing that high.

The biggest actual horse game today, the decade-old MMORPG Star Stable Online, is distinctly tween-girl-coded. Suffice it to say, there’s a hole in the market as big as a Clydesdale. But some extremely passionate developers are trying to change that.

Alice Ruppert, who runs The Mane Quest — the go-to blog for all things relating to horse games — has cultivated a community of “horse-interested gamers and game-interested equestrians” over the last five years by churning out news, reviews, analyses and wishful editorials covering the latest developments in the genre. As a lifelong equestrian who also has a professional background in game design, she’s become an authoritative voice at the intersection of these two worlds.

The way Ruppert sees it, dedicated horse games have long been stuck in place. Budgets for new titles over the years were kept tiny based on the assumption that these games would only land with a very small niche of gamers, namely young girls. Limited resources resulted in the creation of subpar games, with “basic mistakes of game design and usability,” causing those games to be poorly received. Bad sales and negative reviews ensured future projects wouldn’t be given bigger budgets, and the cycle repeats.

There’s been a shift more recently, she says, “as the game development space is getting democratized and more people start trying to make games.” That has introduced a host of new issues, like “very amateur teams launching really big projects… and not being able to deliver,” Ruppert said, but she thinks that's “a better problem to have than just nobody making any games at all.”

After Ruppert panned Aesir Interactive’s Windstorm: Start of a Great Friendship (Ostwind in its original German, based on a movie), the studio got in touch and later brought her on as a consultant and eventually creative producer for its 2022 title, Horse Tales: Emerald Valley Ranch. The game is far from perfect, Ruppert admits, but despite joining the project at a pretty late stage, she says she was able to make some contributions toward creating an experience that could be appreciated by people who actually know and love horses.

Aesir Interactive

That included helping to correct funky details that might not have registered to a non-equestrian but would stick out like a sore thumb to anyone in that world — like a bizarre transition when changing a horse’s leading leg in a canter. “Whenever I spotted something that was wrong, I was like, okay no, we need to fix this because the horse game crowd is going to care,” she says.

Horse Tales: Emerald Valley Ranch is an open world adventure game where players can explore on horseback, tame wild horses, breed and train horses, and maintain their own ranch. It takes a realistic approach to breeding and genetics, and the horses each have unique personality traits. The team crowdsourced horse names, too, so the game’s automatic name generator spits out the names of community members’ real horses.

Still, the game drew some harsh criticism after its release, and the reviews overall have been mixed, with common complaints of game-crashing bugs and a world that feels empty. (The team released a final patch for the game in April devoted entirely to bug fixes.) It has its fans, though, and if there’s one thing players seem to agree on, it’s that the horses and the riding mechanics look great.

Aesir also announced last month that it’s releasing a remastered version of Windstorm: Start of a Great Friendship. The revamped game includes improvements like “replacing those horse animations that I’ve been complaining about for the past five years,” wrote Ruppert — who has separated from the studio — in a blog post. It’s slated for release in June.

As more and more efforts from the horse games community pop up, “The really promising developments are going to come when either those amateur projects learn and grow into something better, or when more experienced indie devs start picking [them] up,” Ruppert says.

One such example she points to is The Ranch of Rivershine, a horse game developed and published by Canadian studio Cozy Bee Games that’s currently in Early Access. The studio, founded by developer Éloïse Laroche, focuses on cozy games (think Stardew Valley and Animal Crossing), as the name would suggest, and already had a handful of highly rated titles under its belt before putting out The Ranch of Rivershine. That includes Capybara Spa and the baking sim Lemon Cake.

While it may not be “the horse game to end all horse games,” Ruppert says, “I do think it does a lot of things really well.” The Ranch of Rivershine takes a format Cozy Bee Games has shown it excels in, and applied horses. It isn’t groundbreaking — players are tasked with building up their own ranch, where they can breed, take care of and train horses — but it doesn’t necessarily need to be. There are trail rides, cross country competitions, villagers to interact with, auctions and lots of pretty horses. Unlike many of its peers, The Ranch of Rivershine has mostly positive reviews.

Rockstar Games

To this day, Red Dead Redemption 2 stands widely accepted as the best horse game out there despite it not technically being a horse game. Red Dead Online has drawn hordes of equestrian-minded players over the last few years for organized in-game meetups, trail rides, horse shows and other horse-centered activities. The horses themselves, though they’re not without flaws, are far more lifelike than others heretofore have achieved. And the game places importance on actually bonding with them.

It’s so good, it’s become a pain point for projects that have emerged in its wake. AAA games like Red Dead Redemption 2 set a bar that is “almost impossible for an indie game studio to reach, which puts a lot of pressure on creators,” says Jonna Östergren, a 3D animator working with the Hungary-based developer Mindev Games on Unbridled: That Horse Game. Nevertheless, they’re aiming high.

Engadget caught up with the Mindev team recently over a Discord group chat. “I have loved horses for as long as I can remember,” Östergren says, they’ve “been a big part of my life.” So have video games, and in 2017, she started learning how to make them using tools like Unity and Blender. Östergren by chance connected with Jasmin Blazeuski, the founder of Mindev, years later while working on her own horse game that had hit a dead end. “I had big aspirations but I was alone and I was trying to learn all the things, from coding to animation. It was a lot,” Östergren said.

After talking with Blazeuski, “I offered to help them make some 3D models if they needed it. One thing led to another and I became a much bigger part of the team than I had first imagined.”

Unbridled’s creators envision the game as one that allows the player a lot of freedom. “You decide how you want to play and manage your stables,” Blazeuski said. “If you want to make money over competitions, breeding horses or farming — it is all up to you.” They’re striving for realism, in terms of the horses’ physical appearances but beyond that, too. “I have never had a horse game with a simple yet so cute detail such as horses looking outside the stable. Casual, real things horses do, we want them all in the game.”

The emotional elements are crucial. Even in games where horses are the main subject, they often “lack personality and liveliness,” Östergren said. “They are not really their own being with their own mind… That is something that I would love to change in our game. Not making the horse a nuisance that never does what you want it to do, but to make it so that your horse feels alive in the world that you are in as your character.”

The team, also including 3D artist and longtime equestrian, Sara Wermuth, points to childhood games like Horse Illustrated: Championship Season, Riding Champion: Legacy of Rosemond Hill, Pippa Funnell: Ranch Rescue, My Horse Friends, and Pony Girl (1 and 2) as sources of inspiration. Only Unbridled’s programmer, Amon Ahmad, comes from outside the world of horses and horse games, and had to watch “a lot of gameplays from different horse games” to get up to speed.

Between the old and new games, “I noticed that nothing has actually ever changed, apart from the graphics or the style,” Ahmad said. “New functions, new gameplays, new ideas in general are missing.” The team aims to avoid those trappings with Unbridled, which is being built meticulously using the Unreal Engine.

Mindev Games

Horse games have a tendency toward tedious and repetitive tasks or mini-games, which can be detrimental “no matter how much detail and love was put into it,” Östergren said. They don’t want to go down that road. And Unbridled will have unique systems for dressage and jumping to give players a challenge, without predetermined points that will guarantee a well-executed jump, according to Ahmad. Instead, players will have to train their horses and develop a feel for the timing.

But making a game of this scope that is fun, engaging and realistic can be a slow process, not to mention an expensive one. The team’s recent Kickstarter campaign failed to reach its funding goal, and it’s relying on avenues like Patreon for financial support to see the project through. An update posted in February noted that half of the team has picked up part-time jobs to bring in additional income.

The animation alone is a huge undertaking. The complexity of horses’ bone structure, all the bending points, plus “getting the gaits right and all those little details of movement is very difficult [to do] by hand,” Blazeuski said. But, “we will take our time to perfect everything.”

Unbridled: That Horse Game has been in a closed beta since November, allowing the developers to get direct feedback from the community, but the team estimates it’ll be a few years yet before the full release.

Astride, another horse game being developed by a small team with big ambitions, is setting itself apart with its focus on Nordic horse breeds, like the Norwegian Fjord Horse and the Norwegian Dole, as well as gaited breeds like the Icelandic Horse. The studio behind it, Raidho Games, was formed in 2021 after Maja Nygjelten (CEO and concept artist) and Mathilde Kvernland (Community Manager and 3D artist) decided to get serious about their idea to create the horse game they’d always been in search of.

Raidho Games

They put word out on a Norwegian Facebook group for gamers and ultimately expanded the team to five people, including fellow equestrian Tirna Kristine Mellum, who joined as a 3D artist and Project Manager. Using their combined experience with horses in real life to guide the process, Mellum said, “We are hoping to have a horse game where the horses feel like horses.”

“We know what to look for in references” to provide their animator, Marius Mobæk Strømmevold, so the horses’ gaits and other movements look true to life, Nygjelten said. “I think that's very important, to [not] take a random animation from YouTube” but instead provide him with references that they’re confident show the proper result.

The main focus of the game at launch, which is somewhat scaled down from the original vision, will be on breeding horses in the fictional Scandinavian town of Eldheim and training them to compete. “Most [horse games] have show jumping as the first feature, including us… [but] I think we will stand out a lot with the breeding and everything,” Nygjelten says. “We have very realistic horse genetics,” according to Mellum, and that will initially be what the game leans into most.

The early gameplay is centered around the stable and interactions in the Eldheim community rather than grand adventures. It’s being designed to be an online multiplayer game, so players will also be able to meet up with friends. Down the line, the plan is to implement more complex storylines and quests to keep building out the experience.

The project has had some successful funding efforts, including a Kickstarter campaign in spring 2022, but it’s also suffered delays. An Early Access version of the game was released behind schedule last June to very mixed reviews. But, the team emphasizes, it’s still a work in progress.

“Astride still has some years left of development,” says Nygjelten, “The game will continue to grow every single day, and it will probably be very different in a year.”

It might be a good time to finally upgrade your iPhone if you’ve been hanging onto an older model — according to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, Apple will be offering a little more than usual for some trade-ins starting next week in the US and Canada. The company itself hasn’t said anything about the promotion, but according to Gurman, it’ll be offered in-store to customers who’ll be using the credit toward any model in the iPhone 15 lineup. This will reportedly be in effect starting this Monday and last until June 3.

Apple lists trade-in values on its website for all iPhone models going back to the iPhone 7. Something that old currently goes for something in the ballpark of $50, while a more recent model like the year-and-a-half-old iPhone 14 Pro Max has an estimated trade-in value of up to $630. Of course, the online estimates aren’t always what you end up getting, but it gives you an idea. Since Apple hasn’t said anything about a temporary value boost, it’s unclear by how much these numbers may go up.

A full trailer just dropped for the upcoming animated show based on the popular game Dead Cells, and it looks like the creators have made a few unexpected choices. For one, the Beheaded can apparently talk. 

Dead Cells: Immortalis is being produced by Bobbypills, the studio behind the game’s animated trailers, and the French streaming service, Animation Digital Network. Along with the trailer, the series now has a release date: June 19. It’ll come out in French first, with English subtitles, before getting an English-language release later this year, according to Dead Cells developer Motion Twin.

The trailer shows a different animation style than we saw in the teaser that came out last year when the series was first announced. As hinted back then, the main character — who the show introduces now as “The Chosen One” — takes on the purple-flame-headed Bobby design. He’s accompanied by a character named Laurie Esposito, Guardian of the Truth. There’s an overall silliness to the trailer, too, so while it looks like there will be plenty of action, don’t expect the show to take itself too seriously.

Several models of Beats headphones and earbuds are deeply discounted right now in a deal from Amazon, including the noise-canceling Studio Buds, which are nearly half off. The limited time deal also includes the option for two years of AppleCare+ coverage. The Beats Studio Buds with AppleCare+, which would normally cost $180, are only $100 right now. If you don’t want AppleCare+, you can get them for even cheaper, at a record-low $80 compared to the usual price of $150. The deal applies to five colors: Black, Moon Gray, Red, Sunset Pink and White.

The Beats Studio Buds are a good option for anyone looking for true-wireless, noise-canceling earbuds that perform well but won’t break the bank. They offer fast pairing for both iOS and Android devices, and will work with both operating systems’ Find My networks so you can track them down if ever misplaced. They also support Spatial Audio for tracks that come in that format. The Beats Studio Buds get about eight hours of battery life without active noise-cancellation enabled, and around five hours with it turned on.

If you’re looking for earbuds to use while you’re working out, the Beats Fit Pro, also on sale, may be a better option. These are among our top picks for true-wireless earbuds. The Beats Fit Pro earbuds (without AppleCare+) have dropped down to $160 in the current sale. This model is normally priced at $200, and comes in a slew of colors. The Fit Pro buds have a wingtip to help keep them securely in place while you’re exercising, and come with features like active noise-cancellation and adaptive EQ.

Also on sale right now are the wireless Powerbeats Pro earbuds, which hook onto the ear, and over-the-ear headphones including the Studio Pro, Solo3 and Solo4. These also come with the option to add AppleCare+.

Follow @EngadgetDeals on Twitter and subscribe to the Engadget Deals newsletter for the latest tech deals and buying advice.

The following article discusses spoilers for the first season of X-Men ‘97.

I was excited about the return of the ‘90s Saturday morning cartoon version of the X-Men. Still, I wasn’t sure Marvel, under the auspices of Disney, could deliver on the flavor of the original while also making a modern show that older fans, now adults in their 30s and 40s, could enjoy. And X-Men '97 is a total play on our nostalgia, which makes it even odder that it delivers. And is better than the original in pretty much every way.

And of all the Marvel baubles that needed some affection, the X-Men arguably needed it most. The ten-episode run managed to cram in so many plotlines, cameos, comic sagas, villains, plot twists and even deaths that, at times, it was hard to process everything — but I utterly loved how relentless it all was. X-Men ‘97 goes hard, especially if you’re already an obsessive fan.

When Marvel first launched an all-you-can-read comic book app, I went in hard on the X-Men back catalog, especially stories by Chris Claremont and Grant Morrison, two of my favorite writers. X-Men ’97 mines a lot of my favorite characters and stories. Magneto is put on trial, and begins a (brief?) redemption arc, Jean Grey turns out to be a clone, and the cartoon crammed a roughly-year-long comic arc, Inferno, into a single episode. Other arcs either included wholesale, or with some riffs, include Lifedeath, Fatal Attractions, Motendo, Operation: Zero Tolerance and more.

The highlight of this first season (a second is already underway) has to be the crushing episode 5, where the mutant nation of Genosha is devastated by a high-powered sentinel mothership… thing. Just before the attack destroys mutant adults, mutant children and eventually even an X-man, Cable, the time-traveling son of Scott Summers and Jean’s clone. (See: Inferno, mentioned above) reappears to stop the attack. But he fails again and his mother dies.

Magneto is left helpless as mutants are slaughtered and he’s forced to relive the genocide he suffered as a child. Eventually, Gambit sacrifices himself and lights up the entire robot with his mutant ability. This is after Rogue reignites a romance with Magento, changes her mind, and decides to be with Gambit. As I said, each episode is a lot.

I may be alone in this, but I still prefer the older series’ animation style and look. A cartoon can look a little scrappy, in my opinion —or maybe I’m just 39 and also not a Disney executive. The majority of the action scenes are great, too. Cyclops is finally not done dirty and gets to thrive in fights. There are some great combination attacks comparable to the iconic fastball special.

Sometimes, the show can feel a bit too “anime” (And I love anime, don’t at me!), where the ridiculous scale of the fight removed a lot of my interest in it. Cool, Bastian has metal wings in the final episode. Yes, yes, very cool. But didn’t one of his super sentinel underlings wipe the floor with the X-Men mid-series? And did we need the Phoenix to reappear (again!) so that Jean can save her 50-something son from the future? Probably not.

But, it’s the X-Men. It wouldn’t be the X-Men without this kind of nonsense.

I also adored the attention to detail. How Storm changed back to her original comic-book attire, Rogue transitioned to her green and white look, Magneto wore the same black-and-white costume while on trial, just like the original comic book. X-Men '97 doesn’t miss the chance to sprinkle in other Marvel characters, too. Captain America pops up a few times, we spot an out-of-costume Spider-Man, with Mary Jane Watson, watching the fall of Asteroid M. The Silver Samurai, who got his own episode in the original series, stares on as Tokyo loses power due to Magneto’s attack on the whole of Earth.

In other episodes, an aged Polaris, Rachel Grey and more mutants briefly appear in a vision of the future. The series is bursting at the seams with references, easter eggs and surprises. Did you know that Bastian is briefly, obliquely, on-screen during the horrific attack on Genosha, long before he’s revealed as the X-Men’s primary antagonist? Well, he is. It’s a show that’s ripe for debate and discussion in an era of Reddit, Discord and YouTube reactions.

Marvel Studios President Kevin Feige stipulated that both the cast and the music had to return for the project to happen. I’m glad it did and I’m glad the theme song still slaps.

Delta, an emulator that can play Nintendo games, had to change its logo after Adobe threatened legal action. You'd think it would face trouble from Nintendo, seeing as it has been going after emulators these days, but no. It's Adobe who's going after the developer, which told TechCrunch that it first received an email from the company's lawyer on May 7. Adobe warned Delta that their logos are too similar, with its app icon infringing on the well-known Adobe "A," and asked it to change its logo so it wouldn't violate the company's rights. Delta reportedly received an email from Apple, as well, telling the developer that Adobe asked it to take down the emulator app.

Delta

If you'll recall, Apple started allowing retro game emulators on the App Store, as long as they don't offer pirated games for download. Delta was one of the first to be approved for listing and was at the top of Apple's charts for a while, which is probably why it caught Adobe's attention. At the time of writing, it sits at number six in the ranking for apps in Entertainment with 17,100 ratings. 

The developer told both Adobe and Apple that its logo was a stylized version of the Greek letter "delta," and not the uppercase letter A. Regardless, it debuted a new logo, which looks someone took a sword to its old one to cut it in half. It's a temporary solution, though — the developer said it's releasing the "final" version of its new logo when Delta 1.6 comes out.

Springtime means it’s keynote season in the tech world, and in 2024, that means “time to show off your AI bona fides.” Google and OpenAI have already revealed big new upgrades to Gemini and ChatGPT this month, and now it’s time for Microsoft Build. The tech giant’s annual developer conference kicks off with a keynote slated for Tuesday, May 21 at 12 PM ET/9 AM PT, and you can watch the entire event live on YouTube (which is also embedded below) and at Microsoft's site (registration required). What about that Microsoft Surface event you may have heard about? Well, that’s actually happening a day earlier: Monday, May 20 at TK PM ET/TK AM PT. Confused? Don’t worry, here’s the tl;dr version of what to expect, summarized from our more in-depth What to expect from Microsoft Build 2024: The Surface event, Windows 11 and AI.

New Microsoft Surface products expected: Monday, May 20

One day before the official Build keynote, Microsoft is hosting a more intimate event for journalists at which it plans to reveal its "AI vision across hardware and software." That event won’t be livestreamed, but Engadget will have full coverage as it unfolds.

The rumor mill strongly suggests that we’ll see new consumer-targeted Surface PCs. And unlike the enterprise-centric models like the Surface Pro 10 and Surface Laptop 6 introduced back in March, these new models may be powered by updated Qualcomm Snapdragon chips – Arm chips that run cooler and offer far better battery life than their Intel and AMD equivalents, but often at the expense of reduced app compatibility and processing speeds.

Microsoft Build keynote: Tuesday, May 21

The thought is that Microsoft is following the template that its fellow tech giants have demonstrated this season: get the hardware announcements out of the way first, clearing the runway for an all-AI showcase at the developer conference. That’s what happened with Apple and Google in recent weeks, as they respectively revealed new iPads weeks before the WWDC event in June, and a new Pixel 8a phone in the days leading up to Google I/O.

What’s that mean for Tuesday? Last year’s Build announcements give you the general flavor: Microsoft’s Copilot AI (possibly with more impressive OpenAI-powered smarts) integrated into even more of Microsoft’s DNA, likely both at the device level (Windows) all the way up to the company’s massive cloud infrastructure.

While much of Tuesday’s news will be through the prism of Microsoft’s developer community, we’re looking forward to giving you the big picture on what it all means for end users – and how it dovetails with the hardware announcements we expect to hit on Monday. Stay tuned.

The following contains spoilers for “Boom.”

It should be a given any new series needs time to find its footing, even when it’s a revival of an already-running hit. The first three episodes of “new” Doctor Who have been fun, but not without their own idiosyncrasies that made them hard to love. Now it’s time for Steven Moffat, the series’ greatest 21st century writer, to show what this new season can do. There’s the usual degree of showboating and cleverness, but it’s hard to deny the man’s genius when he pens the first genuine classic of the Disney+ era. Bloody hell.

“Boom” thrusts the Doctor and Ruby into the smallest corner of a war, and lets it play out in microcosm. This is an angry story about how money, power and cruelty make people inhuman, and is the sort of episode Doctor Who excels at. This story makes no bones about the pointlessness of war and why money is the engine that keeps it going. Its framing may be modern — there’s one too many uses of the word “algorithm” here — but its central thesis is timeless.

Bad Wolf / BBC Studios

In a wasteland battlefield on Kastarian 3, two militarized Anglican clerics are walking back to base. Carson (Majid Mahdizadeh-Valoujerdy) is leading his friend, John Francis Vater (Joe Anderson) who has been blinded in the fighting, an injury that’ll take four weeks to recover from. In the distance, they spot an ambulance but seem afraid of it and look to go the long way around it. Carson loses his footing and slips into a small crater, activating a land mine that instantly obliterates him. The disturbance summons the ambulance, a tank-tracked device with a large screen with an apparently friendly avatar (Susan Twist) which injects its tendrils into Vater, identifying his injury. It decides that four weeks is an unacceptable amount of time for recovery and terminates him instead. His scream is heard by the Doctor, who sprints out of the TARDIS to help but winds up putting one foot on the exact same mine that killed Carson.

Ruby arrives to find the Doctor frozen in place, asking her to describe what he’s standing on: A Villengard mine. It’s an anti-personnel explosive made by a notorious weapons manufacturer that Moffat has referenced several times before. The Doctor asks Ruby to find something heavy for him to hold, so that he can shift his weight and put his foot down without triggering the mine. What she finds is Vater’s compacted remains bolted to an AI canister containing a simulacrum of Vater. The Doctor asks Ruby to throw it to him, but she instead opts to walk within the blast range and hand it over. It affirms the dynamic that as Gatwa’s Doctor has vacated the role of big-chested hero, Ruby has stepped in to fill the void.

The mine is, however, unsure if the Doctor is a viable target, and so remains frozen on the edge of activation. Villengard’s weapons are notoriously vicious and the company has created a warfare algorithm to limit the number of bodies in the battle zone at one time, while also dragging wars on profitably and indefinitely. It gives the company license to slay the wounded rather than spending the cash to cure them.

Bad Wolf / BBC Studios

Before he died, Vater was speaking to his daughter Splice (Caoilnn Springall), who was brought along to the war as there was no-one else to look after her. While her father was on patrol, she had been left in the care of Mundy (Varada Sethu), a lower-ranking soldier in the army. But she slips her minder to reach the last GPS-tagged location of her father. She arrives, triggering the hologram attached to Vater’s remains that delivers his valediction to his daughter.

Soon after, Mundy tracks down her wayward ward and is able to explain the rest of the plot to the TARDIS crew. The Anglicans have been fighting a war for six months against an enemy that’s never seen or heard. Mundy and the Doctor spar on the nature of religion and how faith — in more than just a higher power — helps create willing material for the meat grinder of war. Mundy’s skeptical about the Doctor and Ruby but is quickly convinced when she scans the Doctor to see he’s not just going to explode on the mine. As a complex space-time event, the mine’s activation won’t just kill him but destroy half of the planet. It gets worse: The mine is going to time out and go off anyway after its stuttering activation.

Having detected the fracas, an ambulance arrives and jams its menacing tendrils into the Doctor. Ruby, again refusing to allow anyone else control the narrative, grabs Mundy’s rifle and tries to create a distraction to no effect. Mundy tells Ruby to shoot her using the rife’s lowest setting which would draw the ambulance without being fatal. But, as Ruby takes aim, Canterbury (Bhav Joshi) arrives just in time to misappraise the scene and shoot Ruby to defend his fellow soldier. Ruby, on the edge of death, generates more snow but is fading fast

The Doctor has worked out the problem, which is that there’s no enemy on the planet at all — it’s barren. Villengard's algorithm is sending soldiers out to die with the traps they themselves bought and probably placed. The only solution is to surrender but that’s not something Mundy is willing, or empowered, to do, so the Doctor needs to find proof to show to the senior cleric. He uses the AI of Vater, appealing to his duty as a father and whatever humanity is left inside to search through the military database to find evidence there is no enemy at all.

More ambulances arrive in an attempt to overwhelm the people in the crater, looming down on them all. As Mundy and Canterbury speak, the latter is suddenly minced for reasons that boil down to… we’re in the final few minutes of the episode. In the chaos, it looks as if all is lost, but as the Villengard AI projects a hologram, it’s quickly taken over by Vater, whose love for his daughter has hopefully triggered some sort of feedback loop, ending the war and disabling the mine. As the war is ended, Ruby is resurrected by the ambulance and the four survivors are able to enjoy the beautiful view in the skies over Kastarian 3.

There’s even time for the Doctor to mention a “grumpy old man” who told him once that “what will survive of us is love.” That’s a reference to notoriously acerbic poet Philip Larkin’s work An Arundel Tomb, referencing a long-decayed sculpture of two people lying in state. The Doctor mentions Splice may have a bright future ahead of her, and gets ready to head off to their next adventure.

Bad Wolf / BBC Studios

There’s no good place to address this later, so I’ll add that Varada Sethu has also been cast as a new companion for Doctor Who’s second season. Initial rumors suggested she was replacing Millie Gibson but the BBC said last month the trio would travel together. It’s not uncommon for an actor to play a minor role in one episode and then return as a member of the core cast. Peter Capaldi, Karen Gillan, Freema Agyeman and Colin Baker all played one-off roles before joining as a Doctor or as a companion. I have no idea if Mundy will return, or if Sethu will play a new character, but I’m not sure Mundy was a compelling enough character to warrant a revisit.

Bad Wolf / BBC Studios

“Boom” is a masterclass in perpetually-building tension in a way that Doctor Who has rarely attempted. I wouldn’t want to experience this level of stress every single week, but it’s a wonderful change from the status quo. The one thing that doesn’t quite work with the episode is the uneven pacing. For all the effort put into building the tension, the ending just seems to happen.

I feel like Moffat was straining against the running time, since the last few minutes are just dashed off without as much attention as I’d have liked. Interestingly, the other times Moffat has written stories that are this bleak, like “The Empty Child / The Doctor Dances” and “World Enough and Time / The Doctor Falls,” they were both two-parters. I’m not sure “Boom” needed 90 minutes, but an extra 10 or so might have helped things breathe.

Despite being rooted to one spot for most of the story, Gatwa’s Doctor still commands every frame he occupies. There’s enough chemistry between him and Millie Gibson that the pair’s interactions are entirely believable. The rest of the cast, however, don’t really get as much time to shine, given the limited focus and the stock roles they play in the narrative.

It’s entirely in keeping with Moffat’s style that he’d come back to a show, now equipped with a Disney-sized budget, only to make an episode set in one location. As a writer, he’s always enjoyed tying one hand behind his back and then allowing those restrictions to force him to be better. It was his Swiss watch plotting, smart storylines and snappy dialog that has always ensured his episodes are events. History has also silenced his critics: Last year, Doctor Who Magazine polled readers to rank every episode of the show made. Staggeringly, of the top 10, Moffat was credited with five, knocking Robert Holmes, the show’s greatest writer, off his perch.

And, as I said at the top, “Boom” stands proud as the first bona fide classic of the Disney+ era.

Susan Twist Corner

This week, Susan Twist played the avatar of the sinister Villengard ambulances that roamed the battlefield. Several times, the Doctor appealed to Vater’s AI homunculus on the fact that they are, or were, both fathers. If it isn’t clear, I think the show really wants the audience to know that the Doctor is a father with a child, whereabouts unknown. The hacky premise would be that it’s Susan who has taken the mantle of “The One Who Waits,” or that she’s somehow Ruby. Yeugh.

We may have a good look at Motorola’s next foldable phones. Separate leaks from 91Mobiles (via 9to5Google) and longtime device-leaking insider Evan Blass show the entry-level Moto Razr 50 and high-end Razr 50 Ultra (likely branded as the 2024 Razr and Razr+ in the US) in various colors from all sorts of angles.

Leaks point to the high-end Razr+ (2024) — aka Razr 50 Ultra — running on a Snapdragon 8s Gen 3 chip with 12GB of RAM and 256GB storage. It’s expected to have a 6.9-inch OLED display at 2,640 x 1,080 resolution on the inside and a 3.6-inch cover display on the outside. A 50MP wide-angle camera paired with a 50MP telephoto lens, a 32MP front sensor and a 4,000mAh battery round out the (alleged) specs.

Leaked images of the flagship model show dark blue, dark green, peach and pink color options.

Meanwhile, the entry-level Razr (2024) — likely branded as the Razr 50 outside the US — will supposedly run on a MediaTek Dimensity 7300 processor, a departure from the Snapdragon 7 Gen 1 found in its 2023 equivalent. Another apparent change from its predecessor is its reported 3.63-inch cover display, quite a step up from the piddly 1.5-inch outward-facing screen on last year’s budget model.

The leaks show no sign of the snazzy wood option Motorola included in the Edge 50 phone series unveiled last month. Old-school smartphone buffs will remember that as a throwback to the Moto X from way back in 2013, when the company was under Google ownership. (It’s been under Lenovo’s umbrella since 2014.)

You can check out a gallery of the leaked images below, courtesy of Blass and 91Mobiles.

According to a pair of content creators, the wait for a new Valve game is almost over: A third-person hero shooter called Deadlock is in closed alpha and an announcement seems imminent.

The game has apparently been in the works since 2018, with IceFrog, a developer synonymous with the original DotA mod, in charge. It’s reportedly what became of the Neon Prime project that has been rumored for a couple of years. Tyler McVicker, a veteran Valve reporter, and the content creator Gabe Follower, have this week both independently confirmed the game is in an advanced state of development.

“In terms of scope,” McVicker says, “this is meant to be Valve's next major competitive game. The next Counter-Strike. The next Dota.” He describes it as Valve’s attempt to bring the company’s various game communities together, with precise gunplay and the laning objectives of a MOBA. McVicker describes it as looking “like Valorant, Overwatch, Dota 2 and Team Fortress 2 had a baby.”

The new title is apparently based in a “fantasy setting mixed with steampunk,” a marked shift from prior reports on the project that described Neon Prime as sci-fi inspired. Gabe Follower posted four screenshots on X which show something a little more subdued than the Overwatch and Valorant comparisons might imply.

The images show six vs. six gameplay across four lanes — suggesting a mix of solo lanes and two vs. two action across the map. It also shows ‘transit lines’ that can get players back to lane faster, like League of Legends’ hex gates. McVicker says these transit lines are inspired by BioShock: Infinite’s Sky-Hook system.

Outside of Counter-Strike 2 and Half-Life: Alyx, it’s been a hell of a long time since Valve released an all-new, big-scope title, and it’s been even longer since the company launched an all-new IP. McVicker says Deadlock is currently in a closed alpha, with “hundreds” of people playing. Of course, this is Valve, so it’s never too late for the project to be killed. But with June traditionally being a big month for video game news, it's not impossible we'll hear something official soon.