We regularly write about the games we love at Engadget, and even have "best games" lists for each console. But buying a game for someone else is a different matter entirely to choosing one for yourself. Unless you know exactly what they want, where do you even begin?

Well, we'd begin by thinking about what your loved one’s into, outside of gaming. Could they do with something to help them chill out every night? Do they love a good story, something that moves them? Are they a board game freak? Maybe they're passionate about romancing Greek gods? OK, that last one's pretty unlikely, but we hope there's a little something for everyone here.

Hades

Super Giant Games

Why am I recommending a game that won a bunch of awards back in 2020? Because you can finally play it on everything. Over the summer, the game launched across both generations of Xbox and Playstation consoles, joining the PC and Switch versions.

Buy Hades on PS5 or Xbox Series X, and you’ll get a version that can reach 60 fps in 4K. Whichever platform you play on, expect a game filled with varied enemies, playthroughs that are never the same twice, and an ingenious Boon system that augments a strong selection of weapons with extra powers, effects and new moves.

You’ll soon decide your favorite godly ally (and weapon of the underworld), but making it to the end of Hades demands you build some affinity for most skills and techniques, as Boons are randomly granted each run. The game centers around dying, learning and doing it all over again. And again. And again. — Mat Smith, UK Bureau Chief

Hollow Knight

Team Cherry

If Silksong, the sequel to Hollow Knight, had arrived by now, I’d probably be recommending that. As it is, it’s still a great time to acquaint yourself with the original which came out — first on PC — back in 2017. Thanks to its Metroidvania playstyle (explore, earn new abilities, use abilities to explore even further) and its cute bug cartoon looks, it remains a classic. To explore the world of Hollow Knight, you’ll need half-decent reflexes to both explore dangerous environments and survive encounters with much bigger bugs. The story is lightly woven into your exploration, and while things can feel a little bleak — it’s a moody looking game — there’s plenty of funny little moments and characters to meet.

Depending on your console of choice, it’s also often discounted. Now might be the time to discover your new (but old) favorite game, and hone those skills in time for Silksong. — M.S.

Stardew Valley

Concerned Ape

No game has brought me quite as much joy and calm over the past year or so than Stardew Valley and, judging by the plethora of streams on Twitch for the title, I don’t think I’m alone. Farming sims were some of my favorite games to play as a kid (Harvest Moon: A Wonderful Life holds a special place in my heart) and Stardew Valley filled that void for me as an adult and gave me a pleasant, playful thing I could focus while the world was spinning out of control. Planning for fall days in advance so I can get as many gold-star pumpkins as possible brings me way more happiness than you’d think, as does collecting the ridiculous amount of cheese and eggs my happy cows and chickens produce. And the Sims lover in me also finds a ton of joy in actually building up my farm — sure, it’s not as elaborate as farms I’ve seen on Twitch or in Reddit threads, but it’s my own little slice of virtual heaven. — Valentina Palladino, Commerce Editor

Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart

Insomniac Games/PlayStation Studios

If your special someone is fortunate enough to own a PlayStation 5, they’re likely craving a game that makes the most of their new console — and few games do that better than Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart. The action-adventure from Insomniac not only looks beautiful, with exceptional detail and sharp 4K HDR visuals, but uses the PS5’s ultra-fast storage to offer gameplay that just wasn’t possible on previous-gen consoles. You can warp between worlds in an instant, with loading times almost a thing of the past.

And did I mention that it’s a very enjoyable game even without that instant-travel party trick? You’ll enjoy expanded mechanics that include plenty of blast-em-up action, a diverse set of environments and movement systems like wall-running. The story is compelling, too. The PS5 has few classics at this stage, but Rift Apart is definitely one of them. — Jon Fingas, Weekend Editor

Disco Elysium - The Final Cut

ZA/UMZA/UM

Disco Elysium is a video game for board game lovers, RPG diehards and fans of gritty detective stories alike, and since its release in October 2019, it’s solidified its place among the indie greats. The Final Cut is the definitive version of Disco Elysium, with full voice acting (that’s a lot of characters, trust), fresh art and animations, and expanded storylines. It came out in October for Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S and Switch, and it recently hit PC, PlayStation 4, PS5 and Stadia, so this is a fresh yet proven release for the holiday season. The Final Cut marks the first time the game has hit Switch, PlayStation or Xbox, so it’s especially exciting for players on these platforms. — Jessica Conditt, Senior Editor

Control Ultimate Edition

Remedy / 505

Control is another title with a solid reputation, and the Ultimate Edition finally unlocks the game on current-generation consoles, the Xbox Series X/S and the PS5. Control: Ultimate Edition is a third-person supernatural thriller set in a mysterious government building that’s been overrun by a horrific, murderous presence. It comes from Alan Wake studio Remedy Entertainment, and it features rapid-fire gunbattles, telekinetic abilities, and creepy creatures galore. Plus, Control: Ultimate Edition includes the base game and both of its expansions, The Foundation and AWE. — J.C.

The Artful Escape

Annapurna Interactive

Here’s one for the quirky artist, the hopeless dreamer or the serious musician in the family — The Artful Escape by Australian indie studio Beethoven & Dinosaur. It’s a gorgeous, psychedelic, interactive musical with astounding visuals, a fantastic original soundtrack, and a star-studded voice cast that includes Jason Schwartzman, Lena Heady and Mark Strong. The Artful Escape blends the sensibilities of Ziggy Stardust with the dialogue of Douglas Adams and turns it all into a rich, pleasant platformer overflowing with heart. Truly, anyone can love this game — as long as they’re playing on Steam or Xbox platforms. — J.C.

Deathloop

Deathloop

PlayStation 5 and PC players only for this one — everyone else is just going to be sad they can’t play it. Deathloop is the brand new, breakout hit from Dishonored house Arkane Studios, and it’s an innovative, retro-futuristic first-person shooter with killer time-bending mechanics. This is the game that’ll be on everyone’s lips during awards season, and it’s one that serious players won’t want to miss. — J.C.

Having somehow made it through a second year of global pandemic and political unrest, give the loved ones on your holiday shopping list the greatest gift of all: an alternative to doom-scrolling. In Engadget’s 2021 Media Gift Guide you’ll find a diverse selection of books — fiction and nonfiction alike — as well a host of streaming content suggestions that will keep their recipients entertained through the holidays and beyond. If you’ve got a book, show or movie that you think would make the perfect present, tell us all about it in the comments below!

Fiction

Black Sun by Rebecca Roanhorse

Will Lipman Photography for Engadget

NYT bestselling author, Rebecca Roanhorse — the literary force behind Star Wars: Resistance Reborn — has done it again. Her latest fantasy series, Between Earth and Sky, takes readers on an epic journey of trauma, healing, vengeance, and eventual redemption. The first book in the series, 2020’s Black Sun, weaves a masterfully engrossing — and markedly inclusive — tale that eschews the common Arthurian Legend retellings in favor of a unique fantasy world inspired by pre-Columbian America cultures. If you’ve got a fan of fantasy on your holiday shopping list, pick up Black Sun for them before the sequel, Fevered Star, drops next April.

Age of Madness trilogy by Joe Abercrombie

The ending of Game of Thrones was nothing short of a slap in the face to fans. I mean, really, all that and Bran wins? GTFOH. If you’ve got a fan of George “Double R” Martin on your holiday shopping list, do them a favor and turn them on to Joe Abercrombie’s Age of Madness trilogy. Set in a world in which the seeds of industrialization have just taken hold even as the age magic and mysticism stubbornly refuses to be uprooted, AoM tells a tale of mighty nations at war while the powerful elites who rule them vie for control over both their countries’ external fates and their courts’ internal politics. Packed with captivating characters, political intrigue, incredible reversals of fortune and stunning betrayals, Age of Madness is a grimdark masterpiece where everybody, for once, gets exactly what they deserve.

1414º by Paul Bradley Carr

Will Lipman Photography for Engadget

Whether we like it or not, this is Jeff Bezos’ world and the rest of us just live in it. Our current slate of 21st century techno-robber barons have achieved unfathomable wealth and unassailable power; but as Paul Bradley Carr’s latest novel, 1414º, illustrates, you can’t spend that money or wield that influence when you’re dead. If you’ve got a fan of high-tension whodunnits and techno-thrillers on your holiday shopping list, 1414º will be a surefire hit.

Fugitive Telemetry (The Murderbot Diaries) by Martha Wells

Will Lipman Photography for Engadget

Martha Wells can’t stop, won’t stop, dropping Murderbot hits. The reigning queen of hard sci-fi released Fugitive Telemetry — the sixth book in her Hugo, Nebula, Locus and Alex Award winning series — earlier this year and let me tell you from experience, it is a banger. Our self-aware SecUnit anti-hero is back in another standalone adventure, this time on the trail of a vicious murderer aboard Preservation (space) Station. If the sci-finatic on your holiday shopping lists enjoys space intrigue and robotic mysteries, you can’t go wrong with Fugitive Telemetry.

Undying Mercenaries series by B.V. Larson

The year is 2052 and Earth finds itself unwillingly annexed into a galactic empire it didn’t even know existed and is presented with a simple choice: provide our new alien overlords with a viable commercial product or face extermination. Thus, Earth’s mercenary legions are born. Armed with alien-made weaponry and a mysterious technology that allows soldiers to be reconstructed after being killed in battle — like reloading from a previous save point but far more gooey — Earth’s legions set out across the stars to fight the wars that the galaxy’s elder races are too self-important to fight themselves. Already 16 books deep, author B.V. Larson continues to lead the genre of military sci-fi from the front, so if you’ve got a fan of Starship Troopers, Aliens-style space marines, or Tom Cruise’s Edge of Tomorrow on your holiday shopping list, congrats! You can cross them off now.

Nonfiction

JGalione via Getty Images

Bright Galaxies, Dark Matter, and Beyond by Ashley Jean Yeager

Far from a household name, astronomer Vera Rubin’s pioneering research helped convince the scientific community of the possibility that dark matter — the mysterious materials that make up a vast majority of the universe but cannot be observed — actually exists. In Bright Galaxies, Dark Matter, and Beyond (not to be confused with Bright Galaxies, Dark Matter, a collection of Rubin’s own essays), author Ashley Jean Yeager takes readers on an inspiring biographical journey through the astronomer’s early year before examining the challenges she faced working in an often hostile, male-dominated field, and her eventual vindication and professional triumphs — looking at you Vera C. Rubin Observatory. If you’ve got a younger someone on your holiday shopping list who’s interested in pursuing STEM, this could well be the book that puts them on a path towards scientific greatness.

N-4 Down by Mark Piesing

During the Zeppelin’s heyday, airships weren't just a means of the well-to-do to slowly get to distant destinations in comfort and luxury, they also offered a new means of (albeit pokey) exploration. N-4 Down by Mark Piesing takes readers on a thrilling, nail-biting adventure of the largest arctic rescue operation in history as famed Norwegian explorer, Roald Amundsen, rushed to save the surviving crew of the airship Italia, which crashed during its attempt to land men at the North Pole in 1928. The history and aeronautical buffs on your holiday shopping list are going to absolutely love it.

Under a White Sky by Elizabeth Kolbert

For the last 10,000 years, humanity has had an unprecedented and largely destructive impact on the environment around us. But as climate change increasingly wreaks its own havoc on us in return, humanity must now work to reverse or at least mitigate the harm that we have caused. In Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Elizabeth Kolbert examines just what we can do to make things right with Mother Earth and avoid a catastrophic climate crisis.

The Quiet Zone by Stephen Kurczy

Will Lipman Photography for Engadget

Green Bank, West Virginia is, technologically speaking, stuck in the 1950s. And for good reason! This bucolic Appalachian town is home to the ultra-sensitive radio telescope at the Green Bank observatory, which necessitates that basically every device that can emit a radio signal — everything from iPads to microwaves — be heavily restricted. In The Quiet Zone, journalist and author Stephen Kurczy, embeds himself in Green Bank to give readers a firsthand look at what life could be like without our precious digital tech. The Quiet Zone is the perfect gift for the aspiring luddite on your holiday shopping list.

Streaming

thianchai sitthikongsak via Getty Images

Given the myriad COVID-induced supply chain challenges that retailers are girding for this upcoming holiday season, finding physical copies of these titles could prove to be a bit of a challenge. So, perhaps consider gifting the book worms on your holiday shopping list the Kindle Paperwhite and a subscription to Amazon Kindle Unlimited? Virtually every one of the books listed above are available on the digital service along with millions of others as well as magazines and periodicals.

But there’s only so much one can read during those long winter nights so why not curl up on the couch with a nice cup of hot cocoa and watch some sterling examples of our new Golden Age of Television? If you’ve got a Trekkie on your holiday shopping list, you really can’t go wrong with a subscription to Paramount+. The $5 - $10 a month service unlocks a plethora of Star Trek shows including the Emmy award-winning Picard and the hilarious Lower Decks.

For the cinephile on your list, assuming you can’t get your hands on the upcoming Criterion 4K collections, an HBO Max subscription works just as well. For $10 a month, you’ll give the gift of a massive movie selection as well as popular weekly news and interview series like Pause with Sam Jay and This Week Tonight with John Oliver, not to mention incredible documentaries like Street Gang: How We Got to Sesame Street.

Got someone with small children on your gift list? Throw them a bone with a Disney+ subscription. The service hosts nearly the entirety of Disney’s massive, decades-deep archives along with new family-friendly series and episodes arriving daily.

Yelp seems like it's been on the internet forever, but it still helps millions of people figure out where to eat. Now for the first time, the company is introducing a vertical home feed featuring images of dishes and more, designed to help people discover local restaurants. 

The feed will first and foremost feature "popular dishes and other trending photos from consumers, including food photos or interior and exterior shots of the restaurants," Yelp said. Much like Google and other types of news feeds, the content shown is based on your proximity to the business, the freshness of content and a dish's popularity. 

When you click on a restaurant's dish, you'll be directed to see more photos and reviews of that dish. Yelp uses machine learning to pick out those dishes based on reviews, then pairs them with photos and reviews of the dish. Clicking on other images, like the interior or exterior of a restaurant, will take you to the business page and show you more photos and info.

The other feature, Yelp Connect, is a paid feature for restaurant owners. It allows businesses to share updates with new and existing customers directly to home feed, helping their posts gain visibility (and Yelp more ad revenue, no doubt). Yelp said that it's initial testing showed it may lift a restaurant's consumer engagement up to 30 percent. 

The new experience is arriving today on iOS exclusively in 150 cities in 25 US states, Yelp said. There's no word yet on an Android release, but the company said to "stay tuned for additional updates." 

Netflix will roll out a new TikTok-inspired featured that specifically targets its younger viewers this week, according to Bloomberg. The streaming giant is reportedly launching "Kids Clip" on its iOS app, which will show short video clips from its library of children's programming to help young viewers find something to watch. Bloomberg says the feature builds upon Fast Laughs, the comedy feed it launched earlier this year. 

Unlike Fast Laughs, however, Kids Clips videos will be horizontal instead of vertical and will take over the entire screen. In addition, kids will only be able to view 10 to 20 clips at any one time. Netflix will add new clips every day based on the current shows and movies available on the platform, as well as future ones slated to arrive on the service. Both features are part of the company's efforts to combat decision fatigue, which ails many of its subscribers. Netflix also launched a shuffle play feature called Play Something back in October to help viewers find something to watch based on their viewing patterns without having to scroll endlessly through the app. 

Netflix still refers Kids Clips as a "test," Bloomberg said, and it won't be available to all its users just yet. For now, it's rolling out in select markets, including the US, Canada, Australia, Ireland and Latin American countries. 

Niantic Labs is offering everyone the chance to get their hands on the tech behind Pokémon Go and Pikmin Bloom so they can build their own augmented reality and "real-world metaverse" apps. Developers can start using the Niantic Lightship platform today. The company also announced a $20 investment fund to back developers that "share our vision for the real-world metaverse and contribute to the global ecosystem we are building."

Developers can use Ninatic's toolkit to create real-time 3D mesh maps so apps can understand the surfaces and topography of the world surrounding a device. Other APIs will help apps know the difference between different aspects of an environment, such as the ground, sky, water and buildings. The toolkit also enables developers to make apps that allow up to five players to take part in the same AR multiplayer session, keeping all of their content and interactions in sync.

The tools are mostly free. The multiplayer APIs will be available at no cost for the first six months no matter how many users an app has. After that, Niantic will charge a fee if the APIs are used in an app with more than 50,000 monthly active users.

Several notable brands have taken part in a private beta of the development kit, including Universal Pictures, PGA of America and Warner Music Group. Coachella has created an AR experience that its festival attendees will be able to check out next year. They'll be able to see a large version of Coachella's butterfly landing on the seven-story Spectra rainbow walkway tower.

Meanwhile, Shueisha is working with developer T&S to bring characters from One Piece and other manga into the real world with AR. That app will be available in 2022.

Niantic's vision of the metaverse is very much different from the virtual reality-centered future Facebook's parent company Meta has in mind. In a blog post in August, CEO John Hanke suggested that the "real-world metaverse" is about connecting the physical and digital worlds, rather than existing purely as a virtual experience. With that in mind, his company has been working on AR glasses with Qualcomm over the last couple of years.

Marvel's superheroes are about to get a bit bigger on your TV. Disney+ announced today that it's adding an expanded IMAX aspect ratio for 13 Marvel titles, including Shang-Chi and Black Panther, on November 12th (AKA "Disney+ Day"). The 1.90:1 IMAX aspect ratio will look up to 26 percent taller than the typical 2.35:1 widescreen format in Marvel films, so those annoying black bars will almost disappear while you're watching scenes shot in IMAX. (You'll still see some slight bars, though, as the IMAX format doesn't completely fill 16x9 widescreen TVs.)

Disney

Before this Disney+ partnership, IMAX and DTS brought the "IMAX Enhanced" home viewing format to a handful of TV streaming apps, like Sony's Bravia Core. IMAX-ified films will have a prominent label on their Disney+ screens, and you'll also be able to launch the standard widescreen version if you prefer. Physical Blu-ray collectors are already used to shifting IMAX aspect ratios in some films, most notably The Dark Knight, Tenet and Mission Impossible: Fallout, but streaming films have typically lost on this perk.

The expanded aspect ratio should give Marvel's action sequences more room to pop on your TV, and it's a feature Disney+ can lord over its streaming competitors. Technically, IMAX Enhanced isn't delivering the large film format's true aspect ratio, which is more square. But, as we saw with Zack Snyder's Justice League, that leads to enormous black bars on the sides of your TV. It's also worth noting that we won't see IMAX versions of The Avengers and Ant-Man, as those are the rare Marvel films that used the TV-filling 1.85:1 aspect ratio (a choice made to convey a better sense of height).

Looking ahead, IMAX Enhanced will also bring immersive DTS sound to Disney+, a competing option to the more ubiquitous Dolby Atmos format. Representatives from all of the companies involved tell us that IMAX Enhanced films will also support Dolby Vision, HDR10, 4K (naturally) and Dolby Atmos sound.

Here are all the IMAX Enhanced films arriving on Disney+ on November 12th:

• Ant-Man and the Wasp

• Avengers: Infinity War

• Avengers: Endgame

• Black Panther

• Black Widow

• Captain America: Civil War

• Captain Marvel

• Doctor Strange

• Guardians of the Galaxy 1 & 2

• Iron Man

• Thor Ragnarok

• Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings

Marvel's superheroes are about to get a bit bigger on your TV. Disney+ announced today that it's adding an expanded IMAX aspect ratio for 13 Marvel titles, including Shang-Chi and Black Panther, on November 12th (AKA "Disney+ Day"). The 1.90:1 IMAX aspect ratio will look up to 26 percent taller than the typical 2.35:1 widescreen format in Marvel films, so those annoying black bars will almost disappear while you're watching scenes shot in IMAX. (You'll still see some slight bars, though, as the IMAX format doesn't completely fill 16x9 widescreen TVs.)

Disney

Before this Disney+ partnership, IMAX and DTS brought the "IMAX Enhanced" home viewing format to a handful of TV streaming apps, like Sony's Bravia Core. IMAX-ified films will have a prominent label on their Disney+ screens, and you'll also be able to launch the standard widescreen version if you prefer. Physical Blu-ray collectors are already used to shifting IMAX aspect ratios in some films, most notably The Dark Knight, Tenet and Mission Impossible: Fallout, but streaming films have typically lost on this perk.

The expanded aspect ratio should give Marvel's action sequences more room to pop on your TV, and it's a feature Disney+ can lord over its streaming competitors. Technically, IMAX Enhanced isn't delivering the large film format's true aspect ratio, which is more square. But, as we saw with Zack Snyder's Justice League, that leads to enormous black bars on the sides of your TV. It's also worth noting that we won't see IMAX versions of The Avengers and Ant-Man, as those are the rare Marvel films that used the TV-filling 1.85:1 aspect ratio (a choice made to convey a better sense of height).

Looking ahead, IMAX Enhanced will also bring immersive DTS sound to Disney+, a competing option to the more ubiquitous Dolby Atmos format. Representatives from all of the companies involved tell us that IMAX Enhanced films will also support Dolby Vision, HDR10, 4K (naturally) and Dolby Atmos sound.

Here are all the IMAX Enhanced films arriving on Disney+ on November 12th:

• Ant-Man and the Wasp

• Avengers: Infinity War

• Avengers: Endgame

• Black Panther

• Black Widow

• Captain America: Civil War

• Captain Marvel

• Doctor Strange

• Guardians of the Galaxy 1 & 2

• Iron Man

• Thor Ragnarok

• Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings

Vi bounces her leg when she’s nervous. It’s something she does throughout the first four episodes of Arcane, the Netflix series based on League of Legends lore, and it’s a tiny yet charming habit. Vi’s leg shakes up and down with anxious anger as she argues with her friend from a squashed armchair in their makeshift lair; later, her knee bounces as she sits alone in a dark room, facing certain doom. It’s something that makes Vi feel real, like she has a history that she carries with her, as natural as her pink hair.

Even though Arcane is packed with incredible action and delicious animation, small details like these truly bring the world to life — only for Jinx to blow it all to smithereens.

Riot Games

Warning: Slight spoilers for the first four episodes of Arcane ahead.

Arcane begins with a quintessential story of class warfare, depicting violent clashes between the rich citizens of Piltover and the oppressed, criminal society of Zaun, where Vi, Jinx and their crew live. In the first three episodes, Vi and Jinx are kids: Vi is the leader of a small gang of teen outlaws, while Jinx — who actually goes by Powder at this time — is her little sister, a few years of heist experience and growth spurts behind the others. By the fourth episode, Vi and Jinx are older and on equal footing, even when they find themselves on opposite sides.

The sisters start out surrounded by their chosen family members, including their father figure, Vander, who acts as the unofficial mayor of Zaun. A former leader of the resistance, Vander runs a bar called The Last Drop and tries to keep the peace with the Enforcers, Piltover’s militarized security team. Meanwhile, scientists in Piltover are on the verge of harnessing synthetic magic, while the most vile forces in Zaun are creating monster soldiers by feeding people shimmering purple liquid. Altogether, it’s a recipe for war.

Arcane’s disparate worlds are vibrant, vast and alive, Piltover shining gold among the clouds and Zaun buried beneath the dirt, filled with toxic green light. The show itself feels less like anime and more like an almost-R-rated Disney film, with buttery-smooth character movements and elaborate environments, courtesy of Riot Games’ go-to animation studio, Fortiche Production. The entire thing looks as if it were the product of motion-capture technology, but it’s hand-animated in a mix of 2D and 3D.

The fights in Arcane are particularly gorgeous. Vi is a boxer, diving in with her fists raised, while Jinx has a bunch of semi-functional homemade grenades covered in crayon scribbles, allowing her to participate from afar — even though she wants to be with the big kids, in the center of the action. The largest battles tend to play out in slow-motion, with emotional electronic music thrumming through the scenes and close-up shots of vicious punches, heavy kicks and last-second dodges. In wider angles, every frame of these fights has desktop-wallpaper potential.

Riot Games

Arcane takes its time establishing characters and revealing how they’re all intertwined, and by the end of episode three, this work crashes into a massive fight scene and pays off in a powerful way. In League of Legends lore, Vi and Jinx are bitter rivals, but in Arcane, they start off as sisters with a deep, true love for one another. They support each other, save each other’s lives, and fall apart together. They feel inseparable. It takes something catastrophic to rip them apart, and Arcane shows us every horrific second. It’s heartbreaking.

It’s not all about Vi and Jinx, and there are plenty of other League of Legends characters with starring roles in Arcane, including Viktor, Jayce, Ekko, Caitlyn and Heimerdinger. As a fan of the game, I feel a happy spark whenever I recognize a face or name in Arcane, but it won’t detract from the experience if you don’t already know who these people are. This is an origin story, after all.

Episode four, which will hit Netflix along with two other episodes on November 13th, fast-forwards to a time when Jinx and Vi look more like their in-game character models, and it establishes the groundwork for a future confrontation — family reunion? — between the two. Jinx and Vi are both haunted by their pasts, and their evolution is captivating. The story spins out around them, tantalizing and tense.

Arcane might ruin me. The show quickly and effortlessly establishes connections with its characters, bolstered by an enchanting animation style and emotional, raw voice acting. It’s making me feel things, and I’m only four episodes in. The first batch of three Arcane episodes is on Netflix today, November 6th, while the second bunch will land on November 13th, and the final three will hit on November 20th.

Dune is a film filled with gorgeous vistas from alien planets; skyscraper-sized spaceships; and some of the most beautiful actors working today. It's a joy to watch, especially on the big screen. But there's also an undersung element that ties everything together: sound design. It practically breathes life to the film — so much so that it makes Dune's wing-flapping ornithopter ships seem surprisingly real. The key to that magic, according to sound designers Theo Green and Mark Mangini, was a focus on capturing and using organic sounds, rather than fantastical digital creations.

Working together with Dune's director, Denis Villeneuve, the pair aimed to make "a real-sounding science-fiction film with things we've clearly never seen and heard before," Mangini said in an interview with Engadget."[It was] almost as if you put out a microphone and captured sounds as if those things actually existed. Everything we did ... is an outgrowth of that overarching philosophy to design a soundtrack for two hours and forty minutes that felt organic, as if we were [making] a documentary film."

That philosophy was essential to crafting the Bene Gesserit voice, a seemingly supernatural ability that allows members of Dune's religious order to control others. Think of it like the Jedi mind trick (Star Wars owes an absolute ton to Dune, don't forget). But instead of a hypnotic wave of the hand, the sound of Dune's voice is like a simultaneous kick to the gut and punch to the face. If you were somehow dozing off while the film's hero, Paul Atreides (Timothee Chalamet), tests his budding Bene Gesserit powers, you'd be easily jolted awake.

To make that otherworldly voice a reality, Green credits three elements. There's the voice actor Jean Gilpin, who he says is “brilliant” at crafting witchy and ancestral voices. The sound designers also recorded Dune's actors saying their lines several different ways, which they played back through a subwoofer and recorded the final output. That's an age-old technique known as "worldizing," or the act of recording audio that's being played back through speakers in a physical space.

Warner Bros. and Legendary Pictures

The final component of the voice is the simplest: whenever a character starts to use that technique, the other sounds in the world fade away. In that early scene with Paul Atreides, we go from hearing the sounds of birds in the morning and a far-off thunderstorm to silence. That's an innately eerie effect that draws us into the interior world of the Bene Gesserit's powers: As Frank Herbert described it, they're calling on their ancestors and using advanced psychological techniques to manipulate others.

Green and Mangini went similarly old-school when designing the sound of Dune's ornithopter ships. They're the equivalent of helicopters in the film's universe, but they sound more like gigantic insects. To achieve that, Mangini says they combined the sounds of a large purring cat, a tent-strap flapping in high-velocity wind, and the fluttering wings of a large beetle. They weren't working from pre-existing sound libraries, either. Green had to bring a beetle into a quiet room and somehow get a decent recording.

Warner Bros.

All of that was just for the sounds of the ornithopters’ wings. To craft their propulsion system, the duo took recordings of beehives and modulated them to sound like RPMs revving up in a car's engine. The shifting of the ship's wings also came from an unlikely source: Mangini's Chevy Volt.

Once their work on Dune was over, the sound designers counted 3,200 new sounds that they developed for the film. Only three or four of them started out as electronic or synthetic sounds, Mangini says. That hearkens back to the way Villeneuve has approached visual effects in Dune and his earlier genre films: Go real whenever possible. For the sound designers, that push for authenticity also led to some inventive techniques. The gaping maw of Dune's enormous sandworms, for example, started out as the sound of Mangini half-swallowing a microphone.

Warner Bros.

Green likens the use of organic sounds as a way to avoid the "uncanny valley" that plagues some visual effects. Our eyes know when certain things look fake, and that takes us out of the reality of the film. "I think [the uncanny valley] is in sound," he said. "It's those tiny complexities and tiny nuances that you only get from an organically sourced thing that sells something as being real."

This week, Devindra and Engadget’s Jessica Conditt dive into Facebook’s big metaverse moves. Is it more than a name change? Is Meta a smart bet on where the future of computing is going? Also, Devindra and producer Ben chat about the Google Wave-like additions to Microsoft Office, and Samsung’s jeans for the Z Flip 3.

Listen below, or subscribe on your podcast app of choice. If you've got suggestions or topics you'd like covered on the show, be sure to email us or drop a note in the comments! And be sure to check out our other podcasts, the Morning After and Engadget News!

Subscribe!

• iTunes

• Spotify

• Pocket Casts

• Stitcher

• Google Podcasts

Topics

• Facebook / Meta’s big metaverse moment – 1:19

• Microsoft announces Loop collaboration tool at Ignite – 33:29

• In-browser video editing and audio recording for Office – 42:17

• Ford electrified its classic F-100 as a concept car – 46:02

• Samsung releases jeans with a pocket specifically for the Galaxy Z Flip 3 – 51:26

• Working on – 56:28

• Picks – 58:06

Video livestream

Credits
Hosts: Devindra Hardawar
Guest: Jessica Conditt
Producer: Ben Ellman
Livestream producers: Julio Barrientos,Luke Brooks
Graphics artists: Luke Brooks, Kyle Maack
Music: Dale North and Terrence O'Brien