Sometimes, a game trailer just catches your eye. Phantom Hellcat is the first title in an original hack-and-slash universe from Ironbird Creations, a new studio under Ghostrunner and Chernobylite publisher All in! Games. Phantom Hellcat is a perspective-shifting action game that blends fantasy and pop culture, starring a young woman named Jolene on a mission to save the world from an encroaching evil force. You know, classic action fare.
The interesting bit of Phantom Hellcat is its shifting perspective, which transitions from 2D platforming to 3D close-quarters battling. The game has a skill tree, upgradeable masks with varying abilities and secrets to find in each level. Developers at Ironbird drew inspiration from the Nier series, which is a fantastic starting point for this type of experience.
Phantom Hellcat is coming to PlayStation 4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S and PC at some point — there's no solid release date yet, but it's available to wishlist on Steam.
High on Life, the sci-fi shooter from Rick and Morty creator Justin Roiland, is scheduled to come out on Xbox and PC on December 13th. High on Life looks like a ridiculous mix of Galaxy Quest, Oddworld and Bugsnax, sending players on an interstellar journey to save their friends from globular, brightly colored aliens. Roiland's studio, Squanch Games, revealed High on Life this June, targeting a release in October. Today's news marks a delay of just two months. Considering some of the other, longer delays in gaming this year, a few months is basically right on schedule.
A main feature of High on Life is the array of talking, bug-eyed weapons at the player's disposal. The guns provide commentary and jokes as they shoot projectiles including bullets and their own spore-like babies. There's also a knife that cries out for blood and says "stab" as you sink its blade into enemies. It's all very wholesome, in a mature-cartoon-violence kind of way.
Alongside the new release date, Squanch dropped a new trailer for High on Life during Gamescom's Opening Night Live showcase, featuring a boss fight with the baddie 9-TORG. The footage shows off grappling and gun mechanics in a single room covered in green sludge, complete with near-constant comments from the weapons.
The Squanch crew announced the delay on Twitter hours before ONL went live, alongside an apology video with very Roiland vibes.
Under the Waves appears to be a heavy, emotional and poetic game about grief and isolation, which means it'll fit right in with the other titles under Quantic Dream's umbrella. Under the Waves is in development at independent French development house Parallel Studio, and it's being published by Quantic Dream, the company known for Heavy Rain, Beyond: Two Souls and Detroit: Become Human. It's due to hit Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, PlayStation 4, PS5 and PC in 2023.
As the name suggests, Under the Waves takes place far below the surface of the sea. The game stars Stan, a professional diver who finds himself dealing with grief, isolation and strange events in the crushing depths. Parallel Studio is using Quantic Dream's suite of motion-capture, animation and voice-recording tools to build Under the Waves.
Quantic Dream started ramping up its third-party publishing efforts in 2019, following an influx of cash from Chinese tech giant NetEase. In terms of first-party titles, Quantic Dream has been working on Star Wars: Eclipse for at least a year.
Starting in 2018, Quantic Dream was the subject of a media investigation regarding allegations of unchecked sexism, homophobia and hostility in the workplace, with reports stemming from multiple former employees. The studio faced a handful of lawsuits from these employees and it sued some of the involved publications; Quantic Dream lost some of those cases and won some.
Sony is leveling up its PlayStation 5 gamepads with the DualSense Edge. The Edge is all about customization, apparently — it features five customizable profiles, upgraded guts and a few extra input methods. There are two buttons below the analog sticks on the new controller, and in initial images all of the rubberized grips look extra grippy all around.
Feel free to think of the DualSense Edge as Sony's take on the Xbox Elite controller. There's no word on availability or pricing for the new gamepad.
The DualSense is a standout feature of the PlayStation 5, offering intense haptic feedback and trigger buttons with adjustable tension. This adds a layer of immersion to games from Deathloop to Stray to Astro's Playroom, and it's something that Xbox simply doesn't offer.
It's Gamescom time once again, and the big Opening Night Live showcase kicks off today at 2PM ET. It'll all be streamed on YouTube, Twitch and Twitter, and it's scheduled to last two whole hours. Video game king Geoff Keighley will host the show, just like he does with The Game Awards and Summer Game Fest, and he's already teased a handful of titles that'll make an appearance.
Today's show is set to include new footage and news about Hogwarts Legacy, The Callisto Protocol, Gotham Knights, High on Life, Borderlands, Sonic Frontiers and more games. Many of these titles are set to come out at the end of this year or early next, so expect plenty of gameplay hype.
Gamescom takes place in Cologne, Germany, and it runs from August 24th to 28th. The entire festival will include about 1,100 exhibitors from around the world, and the indie arena is particularly packed this year. We'll have all the news from ONL and the wider show this week, so stay tuned.
It’s been more than a month since PlayStation Plus Premium went live, cementing the video game industry’s shift toward cloud gaming and subscriptions. PlayStation’s game-streaming scheme is competing directly with Xbox Game Pass, the service that proved the concept by earning more than 25 million subscribers over the past five years, leveraging Microsoft’s massive cloud network.
As the two main console manufacturers and the owners of huge franchises, Sony and Microsoft set the stage for the rest of the video game marketplace, and the transition to streaming subscriptions is no different. Here we’ll break down what they’re each offering and take a look at the industry from the perspective of the cloud.
PlayStation Plus has three tiers: Essential, Extra and Premium. Essential costs $10 a month or $60 a year, and it’s basically the PlayStation Plus you’re used to, offering three games to download each month, access to online multiplayer features, cloud storage and discounts. PS Plus Extra costs $15 a month or $100 a year, and has everything in the Essential tier plus a library of up to 400 downloadable PS4 and PS5 games.
PS Plus Premium costs $18 a month or $120 a year, and adds up to 340 games from past PlayStation consoles. This is also the tier that unlocks cloud gaming, supporting more than 700 titles and adding the ability to stream or download games from older eras. This tier actually replaces PlayStation Now, Sony’s often-underwhelming cloud gaming service that launched on PS4. With PS Plus Premium, cloud gaming is available on PS4, PS5 and PC, but not on mobile devices.
Sony
That’s one difference between Sony and Microsoft’s approach, as Xbox titles are playable on mobile devices as well as consoles and PC. But the bigger distinction is the type of games that are available on each network. Sony doesn’t plan on adding big exclusive games like Forspoken or God of War Ragnarök to Plus on day one, meaning subscribers will have to buy these titles separately if they want to play right away. On the Xbox side of things, Game Pass Ultimate offers a streaming library of more than 300 titles, and it includes big first-party drops like Halo Infinite on release day. That’s significant, considering Xbox owns influential studios including Bethesda and id Software, and it’s in the process of acquiring Activision Blizzard. Xbox offering the next Doom or Elder Scrolls on day one is a bigger draw than Sony offering Stray, even if Stray is the most adorable game of the year.
Xbox has been the loudest proponent of cloud gaming in the console space, and with the support of a robust network from Microsoft and years of public testing, Game Pass has set the standard when it comes to subscription services. Game Pass has PC-only and console-only tiers providing access to a library of more than 300 downloadable games for $10 a month, while Game Pass Ultimate unlocks cloud play on PC, mobile and Xbox consoles for $15 a month. Assuming you pay for PS Plus Premium up-front, this puts the annual price of Game Pass Ultimate ahead of Premium by $60 – which is roughly what it’ll cost PlayStation subscribers to buy one of those first-party Sony games, so it all shakes out in the end.
Aaron Souppouris/Engadget
Xbox has been steadily building the foundation for an industry that isn’t limited by hardware, relying on cloud gaming rather than console generations, while Sony still seems married to the idea of hardware cycles and more traditional game sales. Despite being there first with PlayStation Now, when it comes to streaming, Sony is playing catch-up to Microsoft, but it still has plenty to offer in the form of classic games and new exclusives. Cloud play is here to stay and it’s possible that other services like Steam and the Epic Games Store will follow Xbox and PlayStation’s lead in the coming years. Nintendo is bringing up the rear in terms of online, cloud, and anything resembling 21st century technology, but it has an unrivaled back catalog and Switch Online unlocks a number of NES, SNES and N64 games.
This isn’t about any one service being better than the others. This is about adjusting to the new normal for video games, where your money won’t be spent on a $60 disc or a discrete download code, but will instead be spread among streaming services with individual purchases on the side. We’re used to this idea when it comes to TV and movies, and streaming technology is almost reliable enough to make it the standard in gaming.
These are the new calculations we'll be running each month: Do I value Game Pass Ultimate over Netflix? Or PS Plus Premium over Spotify? New subscription services pop up almost weekly; something's gotta give.
Outer Wilds is getting a PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S upgrade on September 15th, and it'll be free for anyone who already owns the game on PS4 or Xbox One. Outer Wilds is a brilliant open-world mystery about exploring strange planets and unlocking the secrets of an endless time loop that's consumed the solar system, and it first landed in 2019. It's the first console and PC game out of indie studio Mobius Digital, and it's picked up a handful of prestigious accolades since launch, including Best Game at the 2020 BAFTA Games Awards.
Outer Wilds: Echoes of the Eye, a big and beautiful bit of DLC for the game, landed in September 2021. The native PS5 and Xbox Series upgrade will hit 60fps. It's unclear whether Echoes of the Eye will be included.
The Switch version of Outer Wilds is set to come out after the new upgrade in September, and this is a delay from its original release window of this summer. Mobius Digital made all of these announcements during today's Annapurna Interactive showcase.
Rollerdrome is essentially the video game version of Rollerball, the fabulous 1975 sci-fi film starring James Caan. In Rollerball, monolithic corporations control society and the least powerful citizens are compelled to compete in lethal roller-skating competitions, in the name of entertainment and classism. (Yes, dystopian fiction existed far before The Hunger Games.) The movie is a slow burn of brutality, odd human rituals and shirts with huge collars, and it’s a brilliant time capsule whose themes remain relevant today.
Rollerdromebuilds a similarly rich, unsettling world through set pieces, costuming and audio cues, pulling a 1970s aesthetic firmly into the 21st century in the process. It takes place in 2030, in a world controlled by massive companies — the Matterhorn corporation is at the center of a new bloodsport called rollerdrome, where participants are challenged to shoot their way through enemies while completing ridiculous roller-skating tricks. Rollerdrome comes from Roll7, the studio behind the skateboarding series OlliOlli — it just has four more wheels and a lot more guns than those games.
I played a preview of Rollerdrome on Steam, using a controller as recommended. The entire game features bold, comic book-style visuals, with the main character wearing a red jumpsuit and striped white helmet, skates on their feet and a handful of firearms at their disposal. It’s a third-person, single-player shooter with environments ranging from abandoned malls to desert canyons, each one lined with ramps, walls, gaps and breakable windows, offering plenty of opportunities for tricks.
Roll7
Tricks are essential to Rollerdrome, and not just because they look and feel super cool. Completing tricks is how you refill ammo, so it’s critical to keep the moves coming. The game supports the classics, like ollies, grinding, flips and grabs, allowing you to spin every which way mid-air to change things up. Roll7’s expertise with fast-moving action is on full display here — it’s fun enough to simply skate along the ramps, building up speed and trying out new tricks, but this is just one aspect of gameplay.
While rolling and flipping through the maps, you have to dodge incoming shots from enemies, manage your health and ammo, and murder every character you see. Killing enemies leaves behind gems of health, there’s a lock-on option for all firearms, and you’re able to slow down time in bursts. All of these factors combine to turn each level into an action movie with a hand-drawn '70s filter: The main character flips in slow-motion high above the battlefield, shooting down a sniper before landing back in real time, dodging missiles and rolling at full speed into another jump. Dramatic scenes like this play out again and again, as the time-slowing ability refills rapidly and completing tricks quickly becomes second nature, in the name of collecting ammo.
Roll7
Enemies have a range of weapons, including sniper rifles, bats, handguns and rockets, while the main character gets firearms like dual-wielded pistols, a shotgun and a grenade launcher. There are tokens hovering around the maps indicating trick challenges, but otherwise each environment is an open, dangerous playground. It’s possible to skate off the edge of platforms and mountainsides, and this results in a time penalty, but it doesn’t stop the round. For the completionists of the world, there are specific time- and skill-based challenges in each level, each one raising your overall score at the end.
Once you start moving in Rollerdrome, there’s no need to continually press forward to accelerate, freeing up the mechanics for turning, dropping, flipping and shooting. Dodging is one of the coolest parts of the game, especially when multiple enemies have you in their sights — incoming fire is displayed by a blue line that turns white when the shot goes off, and timing a dodge perfectly results in a satisfying sound effect and the opportunity for a temporary damage boost. It’s a thrill to dodge, dodge, dodge and then leap into the air, slow down time and take out the people shooting at you, refilling ammo and collecting health in the process. And all the while, an original synth-forward soundtrack keeps the energy high.
There are multiple things to keep track of at any given time in Rollerdrome, but the abundance of stimuli never feels overwhelming. Dying in Rollerdrome isn’t the result of poor design; it’s simply a sign that you dropped focus for a second, forgot to dodge or collect health or do a trick for more ammo. It’s a sign that you should strap on those skates again and give it another go.
Rollerdrome feels endlessly replayable, especially with online leaderboards and a challenge mode for an all-encompassing test of skill. Plus, behind the smooth mechanics and retrofuturistic filter lies a dystopian mystery with themes that (unfortunately) feel right at home in 1970 or 2030.
Rollerdrome is due to hit PlayStation 4, PS5 and Steam on August 16th.
As Dusk Falls is an ambitious narrative adventure game that fails to execute its grandest ideas, hemorrhaging tension along the way. It attempts to tell a mature, action-packed tale about family and loss, but repeated missteps in logic and emotion strip the story of its power. From the mechanics to the branching narrative itself, As Dusk Falls sets clear goals and then fails to meet them, resulting in a choppy southwestern soap opera peppered with sluggish quick-time events.
It feels like this game was purpose-built for me to review it. I’m an Arizona native and the high-desert regions where most of As Dusk Falls takes place are home for me; I grew up hiking the mountain trails just outside of Flagstaff, camping among the creosote bushes and pine trees, and partying on the edges of the valley, surrounded by saguaros and dust. I know how the landscape shifts along the I-17 from Phoenix to the Grand Canyon, the mountains swallowing up flat dry land and spewing out smooth red rocks and craggy black cliffs.
I love my hometown and I was excited to see it portrayed in a video game, especially from a new UK studio headed up by Caroline Marchal, the lead designer of Heavy Rain and Beyond: Two Souls. As far as the setting goes, As Dusk Falls gets it mostly right. I’m not going to be too precious about the details here — the landscape shifts from northern to southern desert in an unrealistic way and all the exit signs are European — because the environment does its job of grounding the characters in an isolated town.
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What’s actually jarring is the dialect in As Dusk Falls, which leans heavily on stereotypically rural words like “ma” for mom, “pa” for dad and “pappy” for grandpa. These terms aren’t the norm in Arizona, even in small desert towns, and they come across as a cheap attempt to infuse the characters with generic “backwoods” traits.
I’d be able to forget the cliche turns of phrase if they weren’t symptomatic of the game as a whole. As Dusk Falls attempts to tell a realistic story that deals with mature subjects like death, suicide and generational trauma, but it places a Hollywood filter over all of its scenes, complete with small-town caricatures, blubbering deathbed monologues and sociopathic responses to murder. As Dusk Falls fails to let its dramatic moments breathe, choking the tension out of the game as a whole.
As Dusk Falls begins in 1998 and features a wide cast of characters, though the main story focuses on two families — one from small-town Arizona and the other passing through on a drive from Sacramento to St. Louis. The local family consists of three brothers on the brink of adulthood, plus ma and pa. The traveling family consists of a dad and mom in their early 30s, their daughter who’s about 10 and her grandpa. For the bulk of the game, you play as the youngest local and the father of the traveling family.
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These families’ paths cross at a motel in the middle of the desert, where the brothers end up in a standoff with the sheriff’s department, holding everyone in the lobby hostage at gunpoint. As the standoff unfolds, players control the dad of the traveling family, deciding what to say and do in response to the brothers’ orders. The game swaps between past and present for both families, showing how they ended up in such a desperate situation, and players’ choices dictate how the story unfolds.
Though the narrative extends past the motel, there are numerous examples of lost tension in the hostage scenes alone. Details will vary depending on the choices each player makes, but in my time with the game, two significant characters ended up shot and killed inside the motel, in front of all the hostages. These characters had strong, loving ties to the remaining group members, yet their deaths were barely acknowledged. Instead, characters that should have been consumed by grief — or, like, any emotion — were soon having conversations about their travel plans and career moves, with barely a word for the dearly departed.
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In As Dusk Falls, it feels like the second a character dies, they’ve served their purpose; the moment anyone steps off-screen, they’re forgotten. This is a pitfall of interactive storytelling — even hits like Until Dawn have awkward pauses or nonsensical dialogue when the writers haven’t properly accounted for all of the player’s decisions. Still, as a game that relies on narrative-driven progression, these anomalies should’ve been addressed. It’s also worth noting that As Dusk Falls can be played with friends online and locally, though I’ve only tried single-player.
The motel is a mess of dramatic but illogical events: The dad exits the hostage situation multiple times and always ends up running back to his captors, throwing out a line like, “but my family’s in there” as explanation. Characters disappear and suddenly reappear when it’s time for a big story beat — and this includes the entire sheriff’s squad. A woman is allowed to walk into the motel in the middle of an active, already-lethal standoff. And don’t get me started on the dad’s two-way pager, which doesn’t have a keyboard but somehow still functions like a modern text app.
As Dusk Falls expands beyond ‘90s Arizona, traveling across the country and 14 years into the future. Most drama in the game feels forced and unearned, and what remains plays out like a soap opera, subsisting on surface-level emotion and oddly timed monologues.
It doesn’t help that the actual mechanics in As Dusk Falls are troublesome. The game runs on dialogue trees and quick-time events, but on my Xbox Series S there’s a significant input delay that can’t be fixed with sensitivity or accessibility settings. There’s a lag of roughly one second, making it difficult to control the cursor when choosing among dialogue and action options as the timer ticks down, and also turning each QTE into a guessing game. In a word, As Dusk Falls is frustrating. My advice is to use the D-pad whenever you can and turn off any mashing sequences in the accessibility options.
The game’s visual style is unique, playing out in stuttering, storyboard-style animations with rotoscoped characters, and I actually enjoy this approach. It conveys a sense of dreamlike realism to the entire experience, and had it been backed up by a different story, it could’ve been captivating.
Unfortunately, the best parts of As Dusk Falls are relegated to the final chapters, when there are fewer characters to track and deeper interpersonal relationships to explore. The game starts to take off when Zoe, the daughter, becomes the main character 14 years after the hostage situation, and players are able to dive deeper into her relationships with her family members and actually process some of the events she witnessed at the motel as a child. This is where drama truly lives, in the aftermath of a major event — not in the event itself.
As Dusk Falls fails to understand this premise, instead relying on action-movie cliches to tell a hollow story with too many moving parts. Tension in the game builds too swiftly and snaps repeatedly, leaving multiple characters’ storylines dangling in the breeze, and sucking the life out of moments that are meant to be emotional. There are some good ideas here, including the rotoscoped visuals and willingness to tackle mature topics, but ultimately, As Dusk Falls feels more like a rough draft than a finished product.
As Dusk Falls is available now on Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S and PC.
The map function on Instagram got a lot more useful today, in a Google-inspired kind of way. The new Instagram map supports searches and filters, allowing users to look up restaurants, attractions and other hot spots directly in the app, rather than simply viewing where a photo was posted. The updated map also features posts, stories and guides tagged by users, offering a glimpse into the local scene wherever you search.
The map supports hashtag searches and offers the ability to explore by tapping tagged locations in the feed or Stories. You can also type the name of an establishment, city or neighborhood directly into the Explore page and see results on the map. The new map allows users to save their searches in a collection and share locations with other Instagrammers, as well.
Using location stickers on posts and Stories will add that content to the search results on the new map, as long as your profile is public. Visually, the map features Instagram icons where the attractions are, allowing searchers to tap and see Stories or visit the profile pages of businesses they find interesting.
This is yet another step in Instagram's plan to become a one-stop shop for social networking, commerce, traveling and, like, life in general. For instance, earlier in July, Instagram rolled out the ability to buy things directly in chat. Moves like these make it easier for users to simply stay on Instagram, rather than opening up Google Maps or Venmo and taking their ad-supported eyeballs elsewhere.
