Ooni is holding a Black Friday sale, offering all-time-low deals on its highly-rated outdoor pizza makers. The company’s Fyra 12 wood pellet pizza oven is 30 percent off, dropping it to $244 from its standard $349. If that’s out of your holiday budget, Ooni also has the Pizza Steel 13, a flat surface that upgrades your indoor-baked pizzas, on sale for $70.

The Ooni Frya 12 wood pellet pizza oven is one of Engadget’s top picks for the best pizza ovens. It uses “sustainably sourced hardwood pellets” to reach 950 degrees Fahrenheit in 15 minutes and can cook stone-baked pizzas in as little as 60 seconds. It uses a gravity-fed hopper that replenishes the pellet tray automatically, allowing you to focus less on the oven’s needs and more on your pie’s.

The outdoor oven fits 12-inch personal pizzas inside, allowing everyone at your gathering to customize their pies. It weighs only 22 lbs and has a relatively small footprint, ideal for easy transportation and tabletop pie-baking. It could be a popular supply for outdoor parties, tailgating, camping and other open-air activities that would benefit from more pizza.

Ooni

Meanwhile, the deceptively simple-looking Pizza Steel 13 accessory slides into your conventional oven to enhance your homemade pies. The stainless steel surface heats quickly and retains the warmth, helping your indoor pizzas come out more like those made in dedicated pizza stoves. The Pizza Steel 13 is on sale for $70 (typically $100).

Ooni’s Black Friday sale runs from now through November 28.

Your Black Friday Shopping Guide: See all of Yahoo’s Black Friday coverage, here. Follow Engadget for Black Friday tech deals. Learn about Black Friday trends on In The Know. Hear from Autoblog’s experts on the best Black Friday deals for your car, garage, and home, and find Black Friday sales to shop on AOL, handpicked just for you.

Alan Wake II is a fantastic game. It tells a twisted, serpentine story of paranormal murder, shifting realities and demonic possession, with two brooding investigators at its core. Developers at Remedy Entertainment are masters of mood and Alan Wake II is their latest showpiece, highlighting the studio’s eye for psychedelic terror and complex mysteries. This game is packed with monsters, ghosts, cults, Old Gods, rock operas and mind-bending perspective swaps. And on top of all that, its character models and set pieces are absolutely gorgeous. Even though it just came out at the end of October, it’s no surprise that Alan Wake II is nominated in multiple categories at The Game Awards, including Game of the Year.

There’s a lot more than clue-gathering going on in Alan Wake II. The game regularly mixes full-motion video with CGI in a way that doesn’t feel silly or contrived; set in a universe of broken realities, the visual styles bleed into each other like alternate timelines fighting for dominance, fitting both the narrative and mechanical storytelling on display. 

Remedy Entertainment

There are two playable characters, Saga Anderson and Alan Wake, and they’re each able to escape inside their own mind to solve the mysteries at hand. Saga, the stoic FBI agent, has a Mind Place where she can connect pieces of evidence with red string on a large, wood-paneled wall, and she can also profile people of interest, using her intuition to speak with their subconscious selves and uncover their secrets. Alan, the author who’s been lost in purgatory for 13 years, has a Writer’s Room with a plot board that literally alters reality when he adds new ideas to it. Players are able to switch between Saga and Alan throughout the game, as they attempt to crack the same case from opposite sides of the underworld.

Both of their environments have been infiltrated by shadow people, the standard enemies in this universe. The black silhouettes, glitching around the edges and hissing Alan Wake’s name, are affected by light — many of them fade away under the beam of a flashlight, but some of them transform into corporeal enemies and immediately attack, requiring multiple gunshots or one strong explosion to take them out. Saga and Alan can find temporary solace under lampposts and other well-lit areas, but these tend to flicker out in the heat of combat.

Which brings us to my issue with Alan Wake II, a game I very much enjoyed and highly recommend. Because I can still hear the furious typing from people who won’t read a negative word about something they love — please remember, it’s possible to enjoy something and also discuss what it could’ve done better. In the case of Alan Wake II, this means removing the guns.

There’s a delicious undercurrent of tension running beneath Alan Wake II, propelled by dark corridors, gruesome rituals and a creeping wave of personal loss. This sense of unease builds throughout the story and bursts through the screen in jump-scare vignettes as the characters’ situations become more desperate. Mystery is the heart of Alan Wake II’s horror. Unfortunately, the slow-burning narrative tension is routinely interrupted by gunplay, replacing it with a different, harsher kind of anxiety that feels out of place in this survival horror experience.

Again and again, I’d be exploring a new area, mentally putting the clues together as the story unspooled, when suddenly — time for a gunfight. The tone would immediately shift from dark, inquisitive terror to pew pew pew, replacing my train of thought with standard action-game things like landing headshots and dodging. After the scuffle, it would take a long moment for me to find the rhythm again, remind myself what I was looking for, what was at stake, what reality I was in. The tension and terror would start to build again, and then — another gunfight.

Remedy Entertainment

There’s nothing wrong with the combat in Alan Wake II, but it isn’t revolutionary and it doesn’t serve the game’s narrative. It’s an unnecessary interruption. Alan Wake II has intense detective work, horrific setpieces, paranormal drama, reality-shifting mechanics, secrets uncovered with light, two versions of a Sherlock-style mind palace, small puzzles, grand mysteries, murderous demons and plenty of action without guns at all.

Light is the shadow people’s weakness, and Saga and Alan both carry flashlights for most of the game. Turning on the high beam stuns the shadow enemies and sometimes opens weak points in their chests. Light hurts the ghosts, but it doesn’t kill them. To kill the ghosts you need bullets. I find this concept silly enough, but there are also scenes where the ghosts have guns, which is downright hilarious. On top of that, some of the shadow people are true bullet sponges, eating eight to twelve shots before going down. This sucks in general, but it’s especially egregious in a horror game, as it replaces feelings of dread with frustration and bullet math. Tediously shooting a ghost eight times instead of one doesn’t make an encounter any scarier.

With light as a weapon, Alan Wake II doesn’t need guns. Activating the high beam already uses precious battery power, and both Saga and Alan have to find batteries hidden around their environments, keeping resource-management fears alive. There are scenes where a flashlight and weapon combination actually works well — mainly, the flashlight and flare gun offer a swift one-two punch for standard enemies, preserving the panic of an attack while offering twitchy combat moments that don’t interrupt the overall vibe. Here, the gun is secondary, while the light does most of the work. In terms of game logic, this makes way more sense than a ghosts-and-guns approach.

Remedy Entertainment

Remedy is calling Alan Wake II the studio’s “first foray into the survival horror genre,” which makes its reliance on guns and even more perplexing. Regardless of whether Alan Wake II is more of an action horror or survival horror game, I’m most concerned with how it serves horror. In this regard, the gunplay just gets in the way.

I turned on story mode about two-thirds through my playtime, and I didn’t feel cheated out of any tension or terror; the enemies were still scary, and the game’s puzzles remained challenging. Remedy does weird stuff really well, and Alan Wake II is grotesque, mind-melting and darkly soapy, like The X-Files or Twin Peaks, with a touch of Outlast and Resident Evil 4. I just wonder what game we would’ve gotten if the developers didn’t design around basic third-person shooter tropes (feel free to save those for Control, Remedy — guns make sense in that game).

You know how every big-studio action movie nowadays feels like a modified version of Iron Man? The Marvel Cinematic Universe set the modern standard for big-budget action flicks, and it seems like many other movies now attempt to imitate its tongue-in-cheek tone, the epic scale of each battle, its predictable narrative flow and climax, the green-screen action scenes, its cliffhangers and after-credits scenes. A similar phenomenon is occurring with big-budget mainstream games, where there seems to be a formula that developers attempt to emulate, and this includes gunplay with hordes of bullet-absorbing enemies.

It feels like Alan Wake II fell victim to this unnecessary constraint, with negative consequences for the game’s sense of storytelling and terror. I get it — guns, ammo and inventory management are a familiar, accepted mechanic in video games as a whole, which makes firearm combat an easy element to include in mainstream titles. I just don’t think Alan Wake II needed it to be successful.

Bluesky has just crossed 2 million users a year after the service's first ever post was created. While that's nowhere near the numbers Threads has already reached, it's still a big accomplishment for the X rival that only opened the app to users in February and still requires an invite for access. Bluesky hit 1 million users merely a couple of months ago, in September, which could mean that the platform has been sending out more invites recently. In its post announcing the milestone, the Bluesky team has also revealed that it's launching a public web interface around the end of November. 

The interface will allow anybody, even those without an account, to view posts on the platform. Its launch could make more potential users aware about the service's existence, and Bluesky believes making its posts more accessible "will be especially useful for real-time commentary and breaking news." In the long run, it could make the service one of people's go-to social networks for news in the same way X users rely on the website to read about current events. 

And for those waiting for Bluesky to become a more open platform like Mastodon, the team says federation is "timelined for early next year if development continues as planned." To become a federated or a decentralized and distributed social network, the team is currently developing the AT Protocol, which will give users the power to migrate both their identities and their content from one personal data server to another. "This is one of the core features of Bluesky that makes it 'billionaire-proof,' — you’ll always have the freedom to choose (and to exit) instead of being held to the whims of private companies or black box algorithms," the announcement post reads. 

Next year, Amazon will let you add a whole ass car to your shopping cart. The company announced today that it will launch vehicle sales in the US next year. The first cars available to purchase will be from Hyundai, as part of an Amazon partnership with the company, but more brands will presumably be added.

Buying a car on Amazon doesn’t seem to be super different from buying pretty much anything else on the website. According to an Amazon blog post, you’ll be able to search for vehicles in your area based on model, trim, color, and features. Once you’ve selected a car, you can choose to pick it up or have it delivered to a local dealership, and then check out using the same standard payment or financing options you normally use on the site. Do Prime members get free shipping? I sure hope so.

Hyundai is also building in Alexa into its cars starting in 2025 as part of its partnership with Amazon. This will let you ask Alexa to not only do the usual Alexa things like playing music and setting timers, but also ask for directions, traffic updates and weather reports, and control the car’s media player and navigation system.

If there’s a book lover on your holiday list, consider yourself lucky. There’s a huge range of gifts you can give them — and you don’t even need to know what’s next up on their to-be-read list. I’m a former bookseller with an abiding fiction habit who now tests book-related (and other) tech. Andrew Tarantola is Engadget’s resident book expert who produces our Hitting the Books column. He’s compiled the ten books he recommends for 2023 and I’ve included ereaders, accessories and subscriptions that I think the reader in your life will appreciate. Here are the best gift ideas for book lovers this year.

Kobo Clara 2E

Kindle Paperwhite Signature Edition

Twelve South HoverBar Duo

Sony WH-CH720N

Nimble Champ portable charger

Glocusent Tri-Head Book Light

Audible subscription

Libro.fm subscription

Storygraph Plus

Blood in the Machine

Elon Musk

Extremely Online

The Teachers

Monsters, Aliens, and Holes in the Ground

American Prometheus

Starter Villain

The Far Reaches Collection

Optimal Illusions

Mother Brain

YouTube has announced new experimental AI services, including a feature called Dream Track in YouTube Shorts. It creates up to 30-second soundtracks using AI-generation versions of artists' voices. Though musicians have mostly pushed back on AI (and their voices being used for training models without permission or compensation), YouTube got nine big names from the music industry to participate, including John Legend, Troye Sivan, CharliXCX and T-Pain. The company hoped to announce the feature at its Made on YouTube event in September but has been in negotiation with recording companies over rights and payments.

Users can access Dream Track by typing an idea into the creation prompt and choosing from one of the participating artists. It uses Google DeepMind's Lyria — a new, powerful music generation model designed specifically for creating high-quality vocals and instrumentals while giving the user more control over the final product. Any content Lyria produces will also have a SynthID watermark, denoting it as such. 

Charlie Puth and T-Pain created sample Dream Tracks, which YouTube has shared as inspiration. However, many of the artists involved expressed their apprehension about AI but hoped that collaborative work could create positive, non-exploitative opportunities. "When I was first approached by YouTube I was cautious and still am, AI is going to transform the world and the music industry in ways we do not yet fully understand," singer CharliXCX said. "This experiment will offer a small insight into the creative opportunities that could be possible and I'm interested to see what comes out of it." 

Music AI Tools are also coming to YouTube, in collaboration with its Music AI Incubator. These tools can create guitar riffs from a hummed melody or turn a pop track into a reggaeton anthem. Producer and songwriter, Louis Bell, created a sample video to showcase it. 

YouTube is walking a tightrope as it navigates the careful balance of introducing AI tools and protecting against misuse. The video platform recently announced new policies for labeling videos made using AI and letting public figures, such as musicians, report deepfakes. 

Dream Track is currently only available to a select group of creators and artists, whereas participants of the Music AI Incubator should be able to test the tools out later this year. 

Tags are a key way to seek out content on social media, but so far they've been missing on Meta's fledgling Threads platform. That's changing soon, however, as the feature is now in testing on Threads in Australia "with more countries coming soon," Mark Zuckerberg wrote in a new thread.

You create a tag in the usual way by placing a hash before a word, which then displays in blue text without the hash — much as mentions work in Facebook. To seek out topics, type a hash plus a keyword into the search field to see a list of relevant posts, as one does on Instagram. So far, it's limited to a single tag per post, likely to discourage hashtag spamming — though that may change, as Meta said the feature is still a work in progress.

Despite still not being in Europe, Threads has shown consistent growth and now counts nearly 100 million monthly active users, Zuckerberg wrote last month. The app recently gained a few key features like the ability to delete your threads profile without killing your Instagram account and avoid automatically sharing Threads posts with Facebook and Instagram. It also added pinned posts, and Instagram boss Adam Mosseri hinted that DMs may (or may not) be done via Instagram's inbox. 

A set of features rolling out to Google Photos today will make it much easier to declutter your photo library, the company announced in a blog post. Google Photos will now automatically identify similar photos that you took in rapid succession – helpful for those times when you clicked 50 shots of that gorgeous sunset to get the one perfect frame you will never look at again – and group them in a single “stack” to clean up your library.

The service will select a top pick that best represents the moment, but you can manually choose an image you want too. If you prefer to have multiple sunsets littering your library, you can turn off stacking.

Google

Photos will also automatically organize your pictures, separating IDs, receipts, and tickets into different albums, a feature that seems like it should have been there ages ago given how good Google Photos is at recognizing what’s in your images. You can also add an event to your calendar directly from a screenshot or a photo of a ticket, which seems really useful.

Unsurprisingly, Google says that all these features are powered by AI, something that the company has lately been cramming into all its products in general. Google Photos, however, has always been powered by AI. For years, the service sucked up all your photos and stored them in exchange for training its machine learning algorithms on them to be able to recognize their contents. That’s why you can search Google Photos for pictures of dogs or the beach, for instance, so easily (Google stopped providing free storage for Photos a couple of years ago).

Earlier this year, Google added another AI-powered feature to Photos that creates personalized scrapbook montages. Google’s algorithms sort your photos into relevant categories and create titles that you can modify if you want. Google also lets people use AI to easily make edits, such as removing unwanted people or objects from photos.

After a series of delays, Hogwarts Legacy is now available for the Nintendo Switch console. The wizardly game was released in February for PS5, Xbox Series X/S and PC, with the PS4 and Xbox One versions following in May. The Switch version was also expected during the first half of the year. However, it was pushed to July and finally, November 14.

Hogwarts Legacy developers said the Switch version was delayed to create the “best possible experience” for players. The Switch's aging hardware may have also contributed to the delay as this isn't the first setback we've seen for third-party publishers bringing their games to the console.

As for gameplay, Hogwarts Legacy is, as you’re probably aware, based on the Harry Potter series. The game is a prequel, set over a hundred years before Harry and the gang entered the school of witchcraft and wizardry. Once the game starts, players can choose and customize their characters, including which Hogwarts House to join. After that, players will learn to cast spells, brew potions and master different magical abilities. Hogwarts Legacy is currently available for $60 in the Nintendo Store. There's also a deluxe edition with a Dark Arts Pack, featuring a Dark Arts cosmetic set and a new battle arena. The Hogwarts Legacy: Digital Deluxe Edition will cost $70.

Since its release, Hogwarts Legacy has sold millions of copies — making it one of the best-selling games of 2023 so far. But despite its obvious popularity across platforms, Hogwarts Legacy did not snag a single nomination for this year's Games Awards.

Nintendo just held one of its Indie World showcase events, the first since April, and debuted a number of trailers for forthcoming Switch titles developed by small studios. There were plenty of nifty indies teased for the future or even surprise-released today, but let’s get one thing out of the way first. There was no new trailer for Hollow Knight: Silksong, nor was there any availability information, so the waiting game continues.

Just because Hollow Knight’s sequel continues to be vaporware doesn’t mean that the event didn’t see some big metroidvania news. There’s a new Shantae game, and it has taken even longer than Silksong to release. Shantae Advance: Risky Revolution was a title that started development over 20 years ago and was originally intended for the Game Boy Advance. The hook here seems to be multiple layers that Shantae can move between to find secrets. It will be released sometime next year.

Next, there’s Moonstone Island, a game that’s been eating up the Steam charts lately. This is an absolutely stellar game in the “cozy” genre that’s basically a combination between Pokémon and Stardew Valley. There are creatures to collect, turn-based battles, farming, romance and plenty of mystery. The world is huge and I’ve yet to uncover it all even after months of playing. The Switch version is due to arrive in spring of next year.

Another big Steam hit from earlier this year is making its way to the Switch in 2024. Core Keeper is a nifty mining-themed roguelike that I’ve had a lot of fun these past several months. The gameplay loop is addictive, with base-building, upgrades aplenty and huge bosses. There’s also a fairly robust multiplayer component.

The gorgeous tactical RPG Howl surprise-launched today. Set in medieval times, Howl has you trying to fend off a plague that turns folks into feral beasts. You’ll participate in turn-based battles as you search for a cure. The graphics and art style sure are strong with this one. There’s a demo for those curious and the full release costs $15.

Another gorgeous title, A Highland Song, releases on December 5. This sidescrolling adventure looks to share some DNA with games such as Limbo and promises an adaptive narrative that changes along with player choice. There’s also a soundtrack populated exclusively by Scottish folk bands.

Of course, that’s just scratching the surface of the trailers shown at Indie World. The Nintendo Switch is getting a refresh of one of the most iconic indie games of all time, Braid. Additionally, there’s the turn-based mouse sim Backpack Hero, the drawing-based puzzler Passpartout 2: The Lost Artist and many more, all releasing today or in the near future.