The Resident Evil 4 remake is due out on March 24th, and today Capcom released a free trial for the game on PlayStation 4, PS5, Xbox Series X/S and Steam. It's dubbed Chainsaw Demo and it takes place early on in the game, as Leon is entering the Spanish village where las plagas has been spreading. There's no time limit on the demo, so have at it.

Capcom has seen plenty of success with its recent Resident Evil remakes. The studio released an updated version of RE2 in 2019, followed by a remade RE3 in 2020, both complete with overhauled mechanics and graphics. Resident Evil 4 originally came out on GameCube in 2005 and it represented a shift for the series, emphasizing action rather than puzzle-solving and atmosphere. Its over-the-shoulder perspective set the standard for action-horror games of the time, and its influence persists to this day (even in the RE2 and RE3 remakes).

The Resident Evil 4 remake is due out on March 24th for PS4, PS5, Xbox Series X/S and PC.

Eight years and 12 million sales later, Cities: Skylines is getting a sequel. Cities: Skylines II is due to come out in 2023 on PC, PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series consoles, from original developer Colossal Order and publisher Paradox Interactive. The new simulator will offer expanded toolsets and mechanics, and importantly for the series' existing community, it'll support advanced modding capabilities. Cities: Skylines II will allow players to grow small villages into bustling metropolises, and then implement detailed construction, transportation, industry and economic systems.

The original Cities: Skylines came out in 2015 and filled the void left by EA after its disappointing Sim City reboot. Colossal Order has consistently updated its city-builder since launch: In addition to purchasable assets, the sim has received a dozen mainline gameplay expansions that've fundamentally rebuilt its systems for industry, education, parks and airports. The Cities: Skylines of today looks completely different from the game that arrived in 2015.

Mods and community assets are a huge part of Cities: Skylines' success story. There are hundreds of thousands of free, user-created assets available for the game on Steam, and its most popular mods count over 2 million subscribers, improving essential mechanics like road-building and traffic management. A thriving YouTube community has grown around the game, with virtual (and real!) city planners offering tips and showcasing builds across hundreds of episodes. The game attracted more than 5.5 million new players in 2022 alone. 

Colossal Order says Cities: Skylines II has “fully-realized transport and economy systems, a wealth of construction and customization options, and advanced modding capabilities.” The original Cities: Skylines will celebrate its eighth birthday on March 10th and Colossal Order promises more information about the sequel over the coming months.

Somehow, Dead Space is one of the freshest games of 2023. The original hit literal store shelves in 2008 and the remake, which landed in January, doesn't change the game's fundamental mechanics. The remake is a downright treat to play; it's terrifying, fast-paced and expertly balanced. Dead Space's core loop is focused, and this only highlights how chaotic many AAA games are today.

Built-in limitations of the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 era were critical in helping developers narrow their focus and innovate, and this generation spawned a litany of iconic franchises, including Dead Space, Dark Souls, Dishonored, Red Dead Redemption, Portal, Alan Wake and Arkham. Meanwhile, developers in the ninth console generation are grappling with an abundance of technological possibility, founded on the power and fidelity provided by modern gaming hardware. This has resulted in a litany of chaotic blandness from many AAA studios in recent years. In a creative industry unlimited by its tools, the most powerful mechanic is restraint. 

Dive deeper into this conversation in the below video.

Hogwarts Legacy is the Harry Potter game I’ve been dreaming of since I was a teenager. I grew up alongside the Harry Potter novels and devoured them all, and I spent the time between book releases reading and writing fanfiction set in the Wizarding World. I would’ve traded my little emo soul for a sprawling role-playing game that allowed me to be a student at Hogwarts, and 16 years later, that exact wish has been fulfilled. (And now I know what happened to my soul.)

Hogwarts Legacy is alive with magic. It’s a massive and gorgeous open-world RPG that extends far beyond the walls of the wizarding school, with mysteries, danger and cute creatures packed into every corner. Casting spells quickly becomes second nature in this environment and when it comes to puzzles, my magical instincts are often correct and richly rewarded. Combat involves intricate spellwork and lightning-quick responses, and this combination consistently results in a seamless, satisfying flow. I feel powerful while playing Hogwarts Legacy. I feel like a witch — and that’s all I’ve ever really wanted.

Warner Bros. Games

I’m not done with Hogwarts Legacy, but we weren’t given much lead time for the review and I feel I’ve played enough to form lasting opinions about the game. I’m about 22 hours in on PlayStation 5 and I’m one skill away from completing my witch’s ability set. Her name is Chenault, she’s a Slytherin, and her wand is 13 inches with a dragon heartstring core. Her favorite spell is incendio.

Combat in Hogwarts Legacy plays out across a variety of environments and against multiple enemy types, and it’s consistently delicious. Players eventually step into battle with 16 spells ready to fire, a wheel full of potions and plants, a meter that generates extra-powerful magic moves, and some basic defenses — and all of these actions culminate in explosive, frictionless duels. Spells, healing potions and protego bubbles respond even at the last possible moment, and my witch’s moves chain together in a way that feels volatile and magical. There’s strategy and challenge in each new battleground, and I look forward to testing my abilities and various clothing upgrades every time.

Combat may be where the action lies, but customization and exploration are core aspects of the game. Hogwarts is packed with students to assist (or not) and the school is overflowing with secrets, each one unlockable with the proper combination of curiosity and spellwork. I’ve spent a significant amount of time simply running through the halls and across the grounds of the school, happy to explore while passively gathering XP and watching the mysteries unravel around me.

Flying only makes this process more enjoyable. Whether on a broomstick or the back of a thestral, flight in Hogwarts Legacy feels exactly how I wanted it to — smooth, swift and stylish, and always with gorgeous views.

As the map expands beyond Hogwarts, past the streets of Hogsmeade and the boundaries of the Forbidden Forest, players encounter sidequests, challenges, secrets, puzzles and obstacle courses at a persistent pace. The world is large, but purposeful and truly beautiful; it’s clearly the result of intentional design, rather than procedural generation. There’s always something to find, a fresh riddle to solve or skill to learn, and my Quests tab is constantly growing. What’s more, I’m actually stoked to complete the activities I encounter, whenever I want to grind or take a breather from the main storyline.

The list of things to do in Hogwarts Legacy feels never-ending. For instance, about 10 hours in, the game introduces interior design mechanics in the Room of Requirement, allowing players to decorate a cavernous space from the architectural touches, to the placement and color of individual tables, chairs, paintings, rugs and tchotchkes. It’s a useful room, too; this is where players keep their clothing-upgrade loom, potions tables, herbology boxes and captured beasts. I’ve spent far too much time tweaking the appearance of my own Room of Requirement — like, hours — but I’m in love with the results and I’ve enjoyed the process immensely.

Warner Bros. Games

I see potential for the glut of stuff in Hogwarts Legacy to become tedious, but this hasn’t happened in my playthrough yet. More than 20 hours in, and the magic is still alive for me.

Before actually playing the game, I was especially excited to brew potions because this was my favorite activity in Pottermore, the browser-based Hogwarts-student simulator that disintegrated into gibberish in the mid 2010s. In Pottermore, brewing potions involved reading recipes and physically manipulating ingredients at the proper moments, and I found the process to be incredibly peaceful. However, potion-making isn’t an overly complicated affair in Hogwarts Legacy. You simply get the ingredients and then leave them on the table for a while, just like growing plants. The mechanics fit the game — in a world this busy and vast, gathering ingredients is the challenge, not the minutiae of chopping, stirring, grinding, measuring and timing — but it’s a missed opportunity.

Even just writing that, I’m itching to spend some quality time at a potions bench doing all of these things. Maybe this would make for a solid piece of DLC down the line, Advanced Potion-Making? Just a thought, Avalanche.

Right, back to the actual game.

Warner Bros. Games

The main storylines in Hogwarts Legacy are generic fantasy platforms. Two main arcs collide: one pits players against goblin revolutionaries planning to destroy wizardkind, and the other is an extensive investigation of an ancient and powerful magic — the same magic that you, the main character, can uniquely wield. The latter arc will be painfully familiar to Harry Potter fans, as it involves a bunch of old farts repeatedly throwing a child into deadly situations while withholding crucial information and stroking their long white beards. I guess we know where Dumbledore got it from.

Personally, I don’t love the focus on the Goblin Rebellions. It’s functional as a basic fantasy premise, but it’s an obvious choice for a Harry Potter prequel and the game hasn’t yet demonstrated that it was a particularly thoughtful decision. The conceit so far is, “goblins are bad, wizardkind is good,” and there hasn’t been an intricate discussion about class, power and revolution within this framework, though these opportunities are prevalent. Regardless of how this storyline concludes, I would’ve appreciated a more nuanced approach or an original enemy.

There are valid questions about whether the depiction of goblins in Harry Potter is inherently antisemitic, or the result of centuries of European fiction that coded vampires, dwarves and other creatures with its authors’ antisemitism. What you need to know is that goblins in Hogwarts Legacy are not meaningfully different to those in the novels, so your stance on the issue is unlikely to shift with this presentation.

Warner Bros. Games

The conversation around goblins and antisemitism would likely be top of mind in reviews and tweets about the game, but the author of the Harry Potter novels has made it publicly known that she’s transphobic, and this has understandably dominated the discourse. It’s led some people to call for a boycott of Hogwarts Legacy, and a portion of these folks are rebuking anyone who reviews, streams or talks about playing it. This controversy has consumed any broader criticism about the game itself. I addressed my personal decision to review this game for Engadget in an editorial at the start of the week, which is available to read here.

For anyone concerned about encountering transphobic or bigoted content in Hogwarts Legacy: The author of the Harry Potter novels was not involved in the game’s writing or creation, and in fact, its world is more inclusive than the series has ever been. Crucially, the Hogwarts Legacy character builder allows for an array of gender, voice and appearance configurations, and lets players choose their own names. In fanfiction terms, it’s basically a Mary Sue machine. This is ideal for an interactive role-playing medium — the customization options allow players to project their own identities onto the main character, who is an extra-special, super-powered student sorcerer surrounded by basic magic users. It’s a familiar premise for fantasy RPG players.

What makes this game stand out among open-world RPGs is its density of activities, mysteries and awe-inspiring moments, and its expertly tuned combat mechanics. Hogwarts Legacy is thrumming with magic, and it expands not only the landscape around Hogwarts, but also the boundaries of representation in an incredibly popular fantasy universe. It’s the coolest work of Harry Potter fanfiction I’ve come across in years, and I’m excited to keep playing. Especially if there’s an Advanced Potion-Making DLC down the line.

Nintendo closed out today's Direct showcase with a new trailer for The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, showing off the game's traversal mechanics and dramatic cinematics. Link takes to the skies above Hyrule on a huge, four-engine drone and in the bucket of a small hot-air balloon, and he drives across the grass on a massive motorized chariot. In one shot, he slides down one rail of a cliffside metal track, Jet Set Radio style.

Tears of the Kingdom is scheduled to hit Switch on May 12th, 2023, and pre-orders are open right now. 

Tears of the Kingdom is the follow-up to Breath of the Wild, which was a wildly successful launch title for the Switch. Nintendo promises the new game will be as vertically expansive as its predecessor, taking Link to the mysterious islands floating above Hyrule.

After nearly a decade in development, Pikmin 4 is due to land on the Switch on July 21st, 2023. Nintendo shared a fresh gameplay trailer during today's Direct showcase, featuring a new Pikmin with ice abilities and a friendly dog who helps the little plant buddies on their cosmic adventures.

Apparently, Pikmin games just take a long time to develop, OK? Nintendo head Shigeru Miyamoto said in 2015 that Pikmin 4 was "very close to completion," but that clearly wasn't the case. It's now been 10 years since the release of Pikmin 3, which itself spent eight years in development. Of course, it ended up being an absolutely lovely experience on the Wii U. 

The Wii U. Wow, it really has been a long time since the last Pikmin game came out. That could explain the length of Pikmin 4's production timeline, too, as it entered development at the end of the Wii U's short lifecycle, yet long before the Switch entered the market.

Five days ago, a review code for Hogwarts Legacy landed in my inbox. I’ve been thinking about this moment for more than a year, ever since the backlash against the game started gaining traction online. The author of the Harry Potter novels is transphobic and she’s targeted transgender women in particular. For this reason, some people in the LGBT+ community, and allies beyond, have decided to boycott Hogwarts Legacy and admonish anyone who chooses to play or stream it themselves, sparking explosive arguments across social media, Twitch and YouTube. Those in favor of the boycott argue that playing the game benefits the author financially and indicates support for her beliefs. On the flipside, potential players point out that the author wasn’t involved in the creation of Hogwarts Legacy and her status as the world’s richest author won’t change regardless of the game’s success. Also, they really want to play it.

I fall into the second category. I’m currently about 15 hours into Hogwarts Legacy and I’m just barely scratching the surface; I’m having an incredible time. This feels like the RPG that Harry Potter fans have been waiting for, rich and alive and absolutely packed with magic.

It’s slightly frightening to write that down, knowing the condemnation I could receive. It’s an extra-light version of the dread I felt while publishing literally anything during Gamergate, but this time it’s more personal: The hate would be coming from people I actually care about.

I’ve been a video game journalist for the past 13 years, I’m a bisexual woman and I have a big ol’ Harry Potter tattoo next to an anti-TERF tattoo. I feel uniquely positioned to care about this particular topic, and to that end, I have a quick story to tell. It involves literary internet culture in the early 2000s, and I hope it illuminates factors that entwine the Wizarding World with the LGBT+ community, while demonstrating the vast divide that’s existed for decades between the fantasy and its creator.

As a pre-teen and throughout high school, I found solace in Harry Potter fanfiction, a bustling online ecosystem powered by Livejournal, FF.net, AO3 and other community-run sites. I cannot overstate how popular Harry Potter fanfiction was and still is, nor how queer it’s always been. Most stories in Harry Potter fanfiction center on LGBT+ characters, and for good reason – in the early aughts, media for and by gay people was ridiculously hard to come by, and then when you did find something, it was often campy, trashy, or both. It was a pre-streaming, pre-YouTube, pre-TikTok way of life. So we wrote our own stories as fanfiction. Long before the release of the final Harry Potter book, we infused the halls of Hogwarts with magically amplified, non-heterosexual and non-cisgender characters, and we wrote millions of words about them living full, fantastic lives. We made Dumbledore gay long before the canon did.

In those early days, an important part of the Harry Potter fanfiction process was critiquing the world and recognizing the limits of the author’s imagination. With each new book release, the forums would light up with praise and criticism, and our own stories would continue to evolve outside of the pages of the novels. These fics are more real to me than the source material; when I traverse the hallways of the Slytherin dungeons in Hogwarts Legacy, my mind accesses memories from my favorite fanfics – not the books – and I’m infused with warmth. The halls of Hogwarts are my safe space, still.

I recognize my circumstances are incredibly specific, but I also know mine isn’t a unique experience. Fantasy worlds offer an escape for queer and non-queer people alike, and coming-of-age fiction can be powerful, formulative stuff. This particular fantasy universe was a place of belonging for me, and I think its latest iteration, Hogwarts Legacy, could offer a similar slice of peace to young players today.

I understand the anger and protective energy from people who don’t want to play the game. It’s a terrifying time to be transgender: Ultra-conservative lawmakers are writing discrimination and blind hate into law, while neo-nazi rhetoric has found new life on mainstream social media platforms. Deadly violence against trans people, particularly Black transgender women, remains a pervasive epidemic in the United States. Among these real-world threats, we’re clashing over the virtues of playing or not playing Hogwarts Legacy. It’s been depressing to observe as this conversation sows division and sucks attention away from our shared goals, limiting our ability to celebrate new successes.

Harry Potter will outlive its author. She is not the future of the franchise. Avalanche, Portkey Games and Warner Bros. have been well aware of the pervasive disgust for the author’s ideology for years, and I believe it encouraged them to include more representation in the game than the series has ever seen. Hogwarts Legacy allows for various expressions of gender identity in the character creator and casually drops “they” pronouns in conversation; all around, the cast is diverse and Avalanche writes non-white characters better than the original author did. There’s still room for improvement, and that’s why the conversation needs to be ongoing: Positive progress is our shared goal.

As someone who searched desperately for an example of my own identity in the pages of Harry Potter novels, I deeply appreciate the evolution and inclusion in Hogwarts Legacy. This level of representation didn’t exist in AAA games 15 years ago, and it’s the result of all the progress made, through protest and education, since the books were published. Long before the in-fighting over a choice to play a video game.

If you don’t want to engage with Hogwarts Legacy, please, boycott the game – just don’t boycott the players. It’s us against the transphobic people in the world, not us against each other. Some of us will choose to play, some of us won’t. Even more will wonder why anyone even cares about this fictional kid and his heteronormative, whitewashed, multibillion-dollar franchise. These are all valid options. Playing Hogwarts Legacy doesn’t automatically make you transphobic. Boycotting it doesn’t automatically make you an ally – supporting our community members does.

We’ll have a full review of Hogwarts Legacy later in the week, once I’ve had enough time with this enormous game to fully form an opinion on it. Even if I catch hell for this perspective, I’ll be here, supporting local inclusion efforts, protesting discrimination, calling my lawmakers, loving my community and playing the gayest version of Hogwarts Legacy possible.

In the split second before a necromorph slides its arm blades into Isaac Clarke’s stomach, it looks like the massive monster is giving him a bloody, snarling, over-excited hug. This precise moment, frozen between horrific brutality and a comforting embrace, captures the essence of the Dead Space remake. As a fan of the 2008 game, playing the new Dead Space is a cozy experience, even amid all the terror, death and gore. Hell, because of these factors. The Dead Space remake is big, beautiful and better than the original, while maintaining the magic that made the first game an instant classic. Turns out, great game design is timeless.

Man, EA used to make some good games. Dead Space came out at the height of EA’s golden era, a year after the first Mass Effect and a month before Mirror’s Edge, and it defined the sci-fi horror genre in a way that persists today. Dead Space was the game that introduced HUD-less horror environments, incorporating health and ability meters into Isaac’s suit, rather than displaying static indicators over every scene. The remake uses the same immersion system, alongside a pop-up inventory that doesn’t interrupt gameplay. Stores and upgrade benches are scattered around the USG Ishimura, the main ship where the nightmare unfolds, powered by credits and nodes that players find while slicing their way through the monsters onboard.

In the remake, the Ishimura is a maze of twisting metal corridors and locked rooms, and it’s bursting with secrets. I found myself checking every corner for glowing boxes to stomp on or shiny bits of ammo and credits, and my exploration was often richly rewarded. Never too rich, though — asset management underscores the game’s tension, and Isaac is constantly at risk of running out of ammo, stasis energy, oxygen or health. He’s always vulnerable in some way. In an action-horror game, this feeling is paramount.

Isaac has his classic arsenal of improvised and scavenged weapons, including the plasma cutter, disc ripper and flamethrower, but with some modern updates. The secondary mechanism on the flamethrower, for instance, deploys a wall of fire rather than an explosive orb, and it’s an ultra-satisfying way to cut off encroaching hordes. Shooting the necromorphs’ long limbs will always be more powerful than a headshot; stomping on mutant corpses still releases goodies (and any lingering player frustration), and the stasis ability remains a critical tool in managing enemies, temporarily freezing them in place. Kinesis is incredibly useful as well, allowing Isaac to pick up and hurl objects at any time, with unlimited duration.

EA Motive

Isaac gains new weapons and abilities at a rapid pace, and these tools flow into each other smoothly during locked-room combat scenes. Players are able to approach fights in a variety of ways and swap strategies on the fly — though stasis, shoot, stomp is always a valid approach. Save and refill stations are positioned generously throughout the environments, while ammo and health drops tend to appear right when they’re needed. In general, it doesn’t feel like the game mechanics are working against you — that’s only the murderous mutant space monsters.

Aside from significant graphical improvements, the single biggest enhancement in the Dead Space remake is the addition of zero-gravity flight. This mechanic opens up the game in a way that feels authentic to the source material — as if this is what developers wanted to do back in 2008, but hardware limitations made it impossible. In the original, Isaac leapt from surface to surface in zero-gravity, but now he floats and soars freely through these scenes with boosters on the soles of his boots. While flying, he can shoot, freeze and fling objects at enemies in any direction. 

Boss fights and large-scale puzzles are dynamic in zero-G, and flying changes some sections of the game drastically. Isaac’s final fight against the Leviathan (a big tentacle blob) is now a fast-paced, no-oxygen, in-literal-space event with three turrets, requiring a combination of kinesis, mid-flight strafing and shooting skills. In the original Dead Space, this fight has Isaac firing on the tentacles from a gunner seat inside the Ishimura. There’s no denying, the remake does it better.

Dead Space is bloody and beautiful from start to finish on PlayStation 5. The game includes full voice acting, expanded narrative arcs, fresh mechanics, new puzzles and no loading screens (just a few suspiciously long tram rides that developers at Motive claim exist purely to increase the tension). 

Only a couple of sections in my playthrough came close to tedious. More than halfway through the game, I was grabbed by a giant tentacle and had the wrong weapon equipped to shoot its glowing weak point. It took half a dozen deaths for me to properly swap guns and land enough shots to end the sequence. This felt unfair and deflating after an entertaining and challenging boss fight. However, I'm happy to say this was my largest gripe with the remaster — despite minor hiccups like this one, Dead Space is a master class in action-horror game design. 

There’s a surprising amount of restraint to this remake: EA updated the right things in the right way, while avoiding the baggage of modern AAA games. You’ll find no procedural generation here, no open world, no way to communicate with other players, not even a HUD; just a limited set of skills and a spaceship filled with violent, half-dead, long-limbed monsters.

Playing the Dead Space remake feels like snuggling into a cozy sweater made out of bloody, infected flesh and razor-sharp bone fragments. It’s scary, yes, but in a way that makes you laugh after jumping in fright. It’s a lot like being spooked by a friend — or, maybe, getting hugged by a necromorph.

In November, millions of Taylor Swift fans logged on to Ticketmaster hoping to scoop up tickets to arguably the most-anticipated tour of 2023. When the time came, the site crashed, rendering verified users unable to purchase admission to the singer's first slate of shows in five years. In the immediate aftermath, Ticketmaster parent company Live Nation explained that while 1.5 million people had signed up as legit customers, over 14 million hit the site when tickets went on sale — many of which were bots. 

Live Nation president and CFO Joe Berchtold told the Senate Judiciary Comittee on Tuesday that the company "learned valuable lessons" from the Swift debacle. "In hindsight there are several things we could have done better – including staggering the sales over a longer period of time and doing a better job setting fan expectations for getting tickets," he said. 

Berchtold told Senators that Ticketmaster experienced three times more bot traffic that day than it ever had before, and that a cyberattack on the company's verified fan password servers exacerbated the problem. He explained that despite investing over $1 billion in ticketing systems since the Live Nation/Ticketmaster merger, mostly to combat fraud and scalping, the company has a massive bot problem that it can't get a handle on. 

"We also need to recognize how industrial scalpers breaking the law using bots and cyberattacks to try to unfairly gain tickets contributes to an awful consumer experience," Berchtold said. What he called "industrialized scalping" led to the Taylor Swift fiasco, he explained, but the executive wants Congress to act to prevent similar incidents from happening in the future. 

Berchtold called for Congress to expand the scope of the BOTS Act to "increase enforcement." Signed into law in 2016, the legislation makes it illegal to bypass a website's security or tech features as a means of purchasing tickets. It also makes it illegal to resell tickets obtained via those methods. Specifically, Berchtold called for banning the use of fraudulent URLs and stopping the resale of tickets before their general on-sale date. 

Tom Williams via Getty Images

The law leaves enforcement with the FTC and states, a topic Republican Senator Marsha Blackburn discussed with Berchtold in some of the most pointed questioning of the session. "You told me yesterday you block about 90 percent of the bot attacks that you get, and that's a failing grade," she said. "There ought to be people you can get some good advice from because our critical infrastructure in this country gets bot attacks every single day. They have figured it out, but you guys haven't?"

Blackburn admitted that the FTC has only taken action on the law once, and that the lack of widespread action was "unacceptable." She pledged to do something about the lack of enforcement through the dealings of the Senate Commerce Committee, where she is also a member. 

"The FTC has the authority, but you have a responsibility to consumers," she continued. "I agree they are not exercising it, but how many times have you called the FTC and said 'we need your help?'"

Berchtold explained that Live Nation had only contacted the FTC once about suspected bot activity — in late 2019 and early 2020. He said that was the only time they had necessary information to work with the commission in order to get a prosecution. "These are not bots that are trying to break into our system, they are trying to impersonate people... putting true fans at a disadvantage," Berchtold told Blackburn when asked why Live Nation has such a hard time recognizing bots.

In regards to the BOTS Act, Democratic Senator Richard Blumenthal told Berchtold there are already legal options available to the company to go after scalpers using bots to procure tickets.

"You have unlimited power to go to court," Blumenthal said. "Your approach seems to be that everyone else is responsible here — not us." 

Madison Karrh’s booth at Summer Game Fest 2022 was on the far right side of the demo area, hugging a wall at the front of the small industrial space in downtown Los Angeles. Her game, Birth, was one of the first projects you’d see after grabbing a swag bag, but it was easy to overlook in a sea of neon pixels and mainstream names like Street Fighter, Cuphead and Sonic. Birth is a thoughtful game of bones, puzzles, loneliness and decay, rendered in earth tones and captivating, hand-drawn vignettes. In a Day of the Devs cluster at Summer Game Fest, the Birth booth was a bubble of respite from the fast action showcased on surrounding screens.

“Showing Birth at conventions feels like putting my whole, raw, beating heart on a table in front of a bunch of strangers and asking if it is enough for them,” Karrh told me a few months after Summer Game Fest.

Engadget

Birth is, essentially, a game about death. It’s an introspective experience with an entire city block to explore and small surprises in every scene, and it invites people to play with their deepest insecurities. Physics and logic puzzles are hidden in cafes, apartments and bookstores, each one welcoming players to engage with thoughts of mortality and loneliness. Build your own companion out of scattered bones and organs, peel back bandages to remove foreign objects from human limbs, interact with skeleton creatures, let your mind wander while organizing eyeballs, poke at all manner of decaying animal carcasses.

Nothing about Birth is harsh; from color palette to gameplay, this is an experience built for slow afternoons and sleepless nights. Even in the middle of a busy game convention, it’s a soothing way to play with terrifying topics.

“As humans, we know that we will die,” Karrh said. “Yet there is so much joy and art and love that gets created regardless of this looming fact. Maybe even because of it. I think about the limitations of mortality every day, and I want my portrayal of death and decay and loneliness to be as soft and gentle and genuine as possible.”

Half a year after Summer Game Fest, I still can’t get Birth off my mind. The themes are heavy, but the game is not, and this balance is a testament to Karrh’s eye for design and visual appeal. When it comes out on February 17th, Birth will be her third release on Steam, and her largest project to date.

“Day-to-day loneliness can be an embarrassing thing to admit to feeling,” Karrh said. “I hope the tender art style and the silly physics of the game make it feel more like having a contemplative, clumsy conversation with a friend.”

Madison Karrh

After Summer Game Fest, Karrh took Birth to Cologne, Germany, for Gamescom, the largest video game convention of the year. There, it was one of 130 games in the Indie Arena, sandwiched between sprawling adventures, city builders, sci-fi combat and metal music. Thousands of people streamed past her booth, some stopping to play for a few minutes and others lingering for an hour. Karrh never rushed players through their time with Birth, even though it meant fewer people ultimately got their hands on it.

“I was just so honored and smitten with the fact that people chose to spend so much of their time with my game in a sea of other delicious games,” Karrh said. “Birth doesn't appeal to everyone, of course – I think the minimal, dark art style of my booth filtered out the humans who wouldn't be interested. It is a slow, intimate game and I didn't want anyone to feel rushed. People waited in line, people brought their friends back to show it to them. It felt like everyone was giving me a big giant hug.”

After Gamescom, Birth made its way to San Francisco for the Day of the Devs showcase in November. This was its fourth convention appearance of the year, adding a trip to London for WASD in April. Birth is a small game that’s been on a worldwide tour, and in the process it’s plucked Karrh out of her own isolated game-development hole. Even after Birth comes out – and even though it’s a single-player game that’ll likely be consumed by people sitting alone in dark rooms – this game represents true human connection for Karrh.

“I have lived most of my twenties in tiny studio apartments surrounded by other tiny studio apartments full of strangers,” she said. “As a solo game dev, I spend a lot of time sitting alone at my desk. It took me a very long time to accept that if I wanted to create as many games as I could, that I would need to spend a huge chunk of my life alone. I used to worry that I was wasting my life making games, and that I should be running around the city and kissing humans and falling in love. Fortunately, I have grown out of this insecurity and I think I have connected on a deep level with humans through making games.”

In the end, Birth is designed to be played solo, but it’s a game about the most universal shared experiences that humans have. In this sense, it’s impossible to truly play Birth alone.

“Loneliness is, oddly enough, a shared feeling,” Karrh said.