Day of the Devs is awesome. It’s a showcase that pops up a few times a year to promote promising, in-progress indie games, irrespective of publisher, genre, budget, visual style or release window. It’s curated by the folks at Double Fine and iam8bit, and they’ve been hosting Day of the Devs live events and digital showcases for the past 11 years.

The latest Day of the Devs celebration wrapped up on December 6, the day before The Game Awards, and it featured 20 marvelous and strange independent projects. The virtual show included a few world premieres and release date announcements, but mostly, it was a celebration of creativity and innovation in indie games. This is particularly relevant right now: The Game Awards reignited the debate around the definition of “indie” in November, when its jury voted Dave the Diver into the Best Independent Game category — even though the title is made by Nexon, one of the largest studios in South Korea.

Indie is more than a label; it identifies teams that are operating outside of the AAA system, without a safety net, and it helps players determine where to spend their money. We published nearly 2,000 words on the topic of defining indie games, so read that if you want more juice. But right now, efforts like Day of the Devs feel extra necessary.

Day of the Devs: The Game Awards Edition 2023 offered a non-stop flow of indie goodness, so watch the whole show if you’re into cool stuff like that. We’ve broken out the news and highlights here:

New games

Kind words 2 (lofi city pop)

Kind Words (lo fi chill beats to write to) came out at both the perfect and most upsetting time — it landed in September 2019, a few months before the pandemic shut down everyday life across the globe. Kind Words is a game about listening to smooth lo-fi beats and writing real letters to real people, and during quarantine, it served as an outlet for thousands of players seeking interpersonal connection, warmth and encouragement.

Kind Words 2 (lofi city pop) is an expanded sequel coming from the original team, Popcannibal. Writing nice letters to strangers is still a core gameplay mechanic, but players are no longer confined to their bedrooms. There’s a whole city to explore, with coffee shops for writing poetry, mountaintops for making wishes on stars, and public spaces filled with people to talk to. The sequel also introduces a social media system with no quantitative feedback — no likes, no popularity metrics, just good vibes.

The Steam page for Kind Words 2 is live now. It's coming in 2024.

Loose Leaf

The studio behind Boyfriend Dungeon is back with something completely different, but potentially just as sexy. Loose Leaf is a tea-drinking, tarot-reading, witchy experience with a serene 3D art style, and Kitfox Games is advertising it as the most in-depth tea-brewing simulator ever created. It looks like an incredibly detailed version of the potion-making minigame from Pottermore, with a side of social interaction in the form of tarot readings.

Loose Leaf is a game about patience, friendships and the magic therein. There’s no release date at the moment, but it has a Steam page.

The Mermaid’s Tongue

SFB Games, the team that brought us Snipperclips and Tangle Tower, has a new project called The Mermaid’s Tongue. It’s part of the Tangle Tower universe and stars Grimoire and Sally, the two detectives from that series. The Mermaid’s Tongue is a murder mystery game about the death of a submarine captain, and players have to interrogate bystanders, investigate their surroundings and solve environmental puzzles.

The Mermaid’s Tongue is heading to Steam and Xbox in 2024, and a Steam demo is out now.

Nirvana Noir

Genesis Noir is one of the most visually striking games of the past few years, and its sequel, Nirvana Noir, looks just as stunning. Nirvana Noir is Feral Cat Den’s follow-up to Genesis, and it offers a jazzy, psychedelic twist on the series. The main character, No Man, is caught in a cosmic conspiracy and players will use dialogue-based detective work to understand the surrounding characters, read between the lines and hunt for clues.

There’s no release date for Nirvana Noir at the moment, but it's coming to Steam, the Epic Games Store and Xbox. It'll be published by Fellow Traveller.

Release dates

Flock

Flock looks like a charming, cozy game about soaring around fantastical environments and collecting flying friends, with singleplayer and multiplayer settings. It comes from Hollow Ponds and Richard Hogg, one of the creators of Hohokum, and it is incredibly cute. Aside from befriending birds, the game includes a creature guide for identifying new beasts and there’s a wool-collecting mechanic tied to the sheep roaming the lands below. Flock didn’t have a release window until today: It’s due out in spring 2024 on Steam, PlayStation and Xbox, published by Annapurna Interactive.

Annapurna Interactive

Open Roads

Open Roads has been on the indie radar for a while now, and it finally has a release date: February 22, 2024. Open Roads follows a mother and her 16-year-old daughter on a road trip that reveals hard truths about their family and ultimately tests their bond. It looks like an emotional, moving story, and it stars actors Keri Russel and Kaitlyn Dever.

Open Roads comes from The Open Roads Team, a group of developers that split off from indie studio Fullbright. It’s published by Annapurna Interactive and it's heading to PC, PlayStation, Xbox and Switch. It'll be on Game Pass at launch.

Annapurna Interactive

These look especially dope

Cryptmaster

Cryptmaster looks like Inscyrption mixed with hell’s cel-shader, and I’m personally very into it. Cryptmaster blends word puzzles with action sequences; players build their arsenals by solving letter-guessing games with text or voice, unlocking the resulting attack skills. It comes from Paul Hart and Lee Williams, published by Akupara Games, and it’s due to hit Steam in 2024.

Akupara Games

Drag Her!

This one’s for the royalty in everyone. Drag Her! is a fighting game featuring real-life superstar drag queens and kings from RuPaul’s Drag Race, Boulet Brothers’ Dragula and beyond, and it looks like a camp ol’ time. Drag Her! stars Alaska, Asia O’Hara, BenDeLaCreme, Kim Chi, Landon Cider and Laganja Estranja, with voice acting by each performer and unique attacks based on their personalities.

Drag Her! comes from Fighting Chance Games and it’s slated for release in early 2025.

Holstin

Holstin brings horror to a small Polish town in the 1990s, with beautifully dark pixel-art scenes that swap between isometric and first-person perspectives. The developers at Sonka grew up in this world of post-communism religious influence, and they used their experiences to build a game dripping in psychological and supernatural horror. Holstein is an eerie game that values investigation and sharpshooting in equal measure, set in a rare locale.

There’s no release date for Holstin, but it’s coming to PC, Xbox, PlayStation and Switch eventually. A demo showing off its first-person combat system recently went live on Steam, and another demo is coming in 2024.

Home Safety Hotline

As a true ’90s kid, this one is weirdly comforting. Home Safety Hotline is a text-based horror game that plays out on a Windows 96 desktop, complete with pixelated icons and sad gray pop-up windows. Players log on to work at a call center, where they help their clients get rid of spooky, paranormal creatures and occurrences invading their homes.

Home Safety Hotline is heading to PC in early 2024 (a slight delay from its original release date).

Night Signal Entertainment

Militsioner

Militsioner is essentially 1984, the video game: It features a cop as an all-seeing colossus, sitting watch over a quiet town, alert and eager to throw you in jail. Players have to escape without attracting the attention of the giant policeman, learning when to sneak and how to talk their way out of capture, and exploring empty buildings and solving spatial puzzles along the way.

Militsioner comes from Tallboys and doesn’t have a release date, but its Steam page is live.

Tallboys

If you're still craving more, check out the full Day of the Devs: The Game Awards 2023 show here.

After a slow month in the world of video game marketing, things are starting to pick up. The past week has given us a first look at the new Fallout TV show, a few release dates and a trailer for a little game called Grand Theft Auto VI — and the Game Awards are still to come. What good timing for us to launch a weekly video game show to dig into the news.

This week’s stories

The Game Awards

The Game Awards

The Game Awards will go live on Thursday, December 7, at 7:30PM ET. Expect a few hours of game announcements, new trailers, awkward interviews and musical performances, including one by the fictional band from Alan Wake 2.

Amazon MGM Studios

Fallout, but on TV!

Amazon dropped the first trailer for its live-action Fallout series — and, man, it sure does look like Fallout. The show is set in Los Angeles 200 years after the nuclear apocalypse, and it stars Yellowjackets actor Ella Purnell, plus Walton Goggins, Aaron Moten and Kyle MacLachlan. It’s heading to Prime Video on April 12, 2024.

GTA VI is coming in 2025

The biggest news item this week, pre-The Game Awards, was the first official trailer for Grand Theft Auto VI. As of writing it's already reached 105 million views on YouTube — a pace usually reserved for only the finest K-Pop videos. GTA VI is set in Vice City, it’s coming out in 2025 and I'm sure we’ll hear a lot more about it before then.

Nexon

What is an indie game?

The meat of this week’s episode focuses on the longstanding debate about what “indie” actually means. One of the titles nominated for Best Independent Game at the Game Awards, Dave the Diver, was commissioned and bankrolled by Nexon, one of the largest video game studios in South Korea. It’s not indie, and its inclusion in this category highlights how little consensus there still is around the definition.

This is kinda my area of expertise — it’s my 13th year as a video game journalist and indie games have always been a core feature of my reporting. I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about what I mean when I say “indie,” so I sat down and formalized this thought process. There are three questions that can help define a game in an indie gray area: Is the team on the mainstream system’s payroll? Is the game or team owned by a platform holder? Do the artists have creative control? I dug into these questions this week, and discuss how having a publisher isn’t related to the indie label at all.

But when all else fails in the indie debate, there’s one ultimate question to ask: Can this team exist without my support? This is why the distinction matters: The indie label helps to identify the artists that would not exist without game sales, crowdfunding or word-of-mouth support from players. It exists to determine the teams that are truly living and dying on game sales, and it helps players decide where to spend their money. If Dave the Diver didn’t sell well, its team would likely have the chance to try again. If, say, Pizza Tower didn’t sell well, its studio could have folded.

I think this is an important conversation, so give that story a read and let us know in the comments if you think my questions help or just make things more confusing. It’s probably a little bit of both.

Now playing

I’ve been thoroughly enjoying The Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood on Steam Deck — it’s the latest game from Deconstructeam, the indie studio that made The Red Strings Club and Gods Will Be Watching. The Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood is a game about building tarot decks, manipulating elections, betraying a coven of witches and seducing everyone; it’s sexy and well-written, and I highly recommend it. Another game I’m looking forward to is A Highland Song from indie studio Inkle; it just came out this week and I’m excited to dive in.

Let us know in the comments what you’re playing! Also, we still don’t know what to call this weekly video game news show, so leave us some name suggestions, too. Thanks!

The Game Awards got it wrong this year. One of the titles nominated for Best Independent Game, Dave the Diver, was produced by Nexon, one of the largest video game studios in South Korea. No matter how hard you squint, it is not indie. Dave the Diver is an excellent pixel-art game about deep-sea fishing and restaurant management, but it was commissioned and bankrolled by Nexon subsidiary Mintrocket, with billions of dollars and decades of experience at its back.

When The Game Awards nominees were announced on November 13, fans were quick to point out the error, and the recurring debate over what “indie” means was reignited. Taehwan Kim, Nexon’s overseer of Mintrocket, weighed in on November 14, saying Dave the Diver “may look like an indie, but it's not necessarily the case.” The official tweet listing the nominees for Best Independent Game now carries a reader-generated context tag reading, “Dave the Diver is not an indie game. Mintrocket, the game's developer, is a subsidiary of Korea's biggest game company Nexon. They are not independent in any sense of the word.”

Nexon

A discussion around the definition of “indie” bubbled up throughout November, but it raised more questions than it answered. One common conclusion was that the media outlets who voted Dave the Diver into the independent category were fooled by its pixel art, a style that’s associated with indie games. During a live Q&A on Twitch on November 26, The Game Awards organizer Geoff Keighley argued that “independent” was a broad term with an unknowable definition, before essentially saying Dave the Diver’s inclusion in the indie category was the jury’s fault.

Specifically, Keighley said the following: “It’s independent in spirit and [it’s] a small game with a, I don’t know what the budget is, but it's probably a relatively small-budget game. But it is from a larger entity, whereas there are other games on that list that are from much smaller studios. Even like Dredge I think is published by Team17, so is that independent or not because you have a publisher? It’s a really complicated thing to figure out and come up with strict rules around it, so kinda we let people use their best judgment. And you can agree or disagree with the choices, but the fact that Dave the Diver was on that list meant that, out of all the independent games the jury looked at, or what they thought were independent games, that was one of the top five they looked at this year.”

The jury comprises 120 media outlets (Engadget has traditionally been one of these, but we did not participate in voting this year and look what happened), so Keighley is chalking the mistake up to mass hysteria and moving on. Meanwhile, there’s still little consensus on what constitutes an indie game, at The Game Awards or elsewhere.

Nexon

I’ve reported on video games for 13 years and indies are a central theme of my coverage. I ran The Joystiq Indie Pitch back in the day, and I’ve made a concerted effort to write about smaller games from creators working outside of the mainstream machine, because these are the experiences that speak to me personally. The indie scene is the source of the industry’s magic. This isn’t just a debate about language — “indie” is a distinction that identifies which games and teams need outside support to survive and expand on their innovations. Understanding the label can help players make decisions about where to spend their money, the lifeblood of any game-development studio.

All that to say, the debate over the definition of “indie” is not new, but it is constantly changing, and it’s something I’ve spent a lot of time contemplating. So, I’m here to offer guidance on the question of what makes an indie game or studio indie. It is a weirdly complicated topic and my approach is one of many, but the loose framework I use could help resolve some common, recurring arguments. 

Basically — it’s all about the system, man.

I’m joking, but also I’m not. Generally, when I’m trying to decide whether something is actually indie, I rotate through three questions:

1. Is the team on the mainstream system’s payroll?

2. Is the game or team owned by a platform holder?

3. Do the artists have creative control?

The first question is about identifying where a studio’s money is coming from and what kind of support a game has outside of sales. If a team is wholly owned by another company of any size, it is not indie. We’re not talking about publishing deals; this opening question is about acquisitions or subsidiaries of bigger studios. Dave the Diver is a prime example here — it’s developed by Mintrocket, a subsidiary of Nexon that was created just to develop more contained, experimental games for the publisher. Dave the Diver is definitely not indie, and we’re only on question one.

The second query feeds into the first, and it’s helpful in making fine distinctions about games that exist in gray areas. What about something like Cyberpunk 2077? It’s a big-budget game built by CD Projekt RED (CDPR) — a studio that, at first glance, seems like it could be indie. However, there are two factors that take it out of the running for me. First, CD Projekt, the umbrella organization that supports CDPR’s game-making, is a publicly traded company with shareholders and a board to answer to. Second, CD Projekt is the owner of GOG, a distribution hub that allows the studio to sell its own games and DLC outside of Steam and the Epic Games Store. This ability to sell directly to players at massive scale takes CD Projekt out of the indie realm. Generally, companies with the most influence and money are console makers and platform holders like Valve, Xbox, PlayStation, Epic Games, Ubisoft, EA, and, yes, CD Projekt. They are the AAA system, and anything they own is not indie.

Nexon

Lastly, on to publishers. Sorry, Keighley, but securing a publisher has very little to do with whether a game is indie nowadays. We’re blessed in 2023 to have a thriving indie industry constantly pushing against the AAA complex with different goals, more diverse voices and a broader sense of innovation — and publishing is a big part of this system. Today, indie-focused publishers (of which there are many) tend to include clauses that protect a developer’s creative vision, preventing the larger company from interfering with artistic decisions and keeping the game indie to the core. Once upon a time, it might’ve made sense to only consider self-published games indie, but that era is long gone.

The indie scene has evolved massively since the early 2010s, when games like Braid, Super Meat Boy and Fez were carving out the market’s modern form. Back then, self-publishing was all the rage for independent developers because it was often their only option, and as a result there were more distinct lines between AAA, AA and indie games. Devolver Digital found its first breakout hit as an indie publisher with Hotline Miami in 2012, and that’s around the time the floodgates opened. In 2014, as the industry’s largest companies started funding and publishing programs for them, the number of indie games skyrocketed across platforms including Steam (remember Greenlight?), the App Store, Xbox, PlayStation and Ouya (RIP).

Today, indie games come standard on every console. There are multiple indie-focused publishers, including Devolver, Annapurna Interactive, Panic, Raw Fury, Team17 and Netflix, and most of them offer complete creative freedom as a main selling point. Meanwhile, platform holders like Sony and Xbox are hungry to sign distribution deals with developers of all sizes in an effort to score exclusives and pad their streaming libraries. It’s the most stable (and crowded) the indie scene has ever been. Having a publisher has no bearing on whether a game is indie.

Being owned by a publisher, however, changes everything (see question one). This is more of a concern than ever, as platform holders like Microsoft, Sony and Epic Games have recently been buying studios they like, no matter their size. Hell, even Devolver has dipped its toes in the acquisition pond recently — which, yeah, means those teams are no longer indie.

Nexon

The “indie” label is transitory. Certain studios can be indie but an individual game may not be, and plenty of small companies flow between states as they age and take advantage of growth opportunities. Bungie, for example, started out as an independent outfit, then it was absorbed by the AAA complex under Xbox, and then it broke free and was briefly indie again, before Sony pulled it back into the mainstream system’s cold embrace.

So, yeah, that's my way of determining if a game or studio is indie. By all means, take my triplet of questions and have fun trying to break the logic — it probably won't take long. There is no perfect structure here and there are plenty of outliers within my own framework. Alan Wake II, according to my questions, would be considered an indie game — but its developer, Remedy Entertainment, is a publicly traded company, which brings shareholders and a board of directors. This pushes the studio and the game into The System for me, but honestly, I’m still unsure about those labels as I type this. That’s OK — when all else fails, look inside your game-loving soul and ask, can this team exist without my support? (Alan Wake II, for what it’s worth, is a delicious and unique experience that’s worth playing, regardless of your feelings on Remedy's shareholders).

Does Mintrocket need my support to keep Dave the Diver and its creative team going? Probably not, and definitely not in the same way as Larian Studios, the independent developer and publisher of Baldur’s Gate 3. Baldur’s Gate 3 is an excellent, expansive 3D adventure from an indie studio and it’s up for Game of the Year at The Game Awards, but it was snubbed in the Best Independent Game category. Meanwhile, Dave the Diver, a cute title backed by billions of dollars, is up for the indie award, but not Game of the Year. It seems like The Game Awards jury made the classic mistake of seeing pixel art and immediately calling it indie. That’s an unforced error, but it reveals one point where we can all agree:

Indie is not an aesthetic.

I legitimately feel bad for anyone who bought a Steam Deck right before Valve’s surprise reveal of the new and improved OLED model. The announcement came out of nowhere and the Steam Deck OLED is a better version of the LCD original, at roughly the same price point. So, I understand why the r/SteamDeck forum was immediately flooded with new owners lamenting their life choices. To these people, and to anyone with the debut hardware, I want to make it perfectly clear: The Steam Deck LCD is one of the best handheld PCs on the market.

Valve still thinks it’s pretty good, too. The company is continuing to sell the 256GB LCD version of the Steam Deck at a reduced price of $399, with two OLED models above it. This is the review for people eyeing Valve’s entry-level handheld, and for any original Steam Deck owners who could use a little reassurance these days. (It’s OK, buddy.)

My review of the Steam Deck in February 2022 started with a delirious metaphor: “The Steam Deck is what happens when the Vita and the Wii U get drunk on Linux and make a big baby together.” Nearly two years later, I stand by this sentiment completely. The Steam Deck is portable and it supports multiple input methods, much like the Vita, but it’s so bulky that it never leaves my house, just like ye olde Wii U. It also natively runs Steam, which is a massive boon for players who value ease-of-use.

The 256GB Steam Deck is powerful enough to run most Steam games, even AAA titles like Elden Ring, Armored Core VI and Cyberpunk 2077. It has a custom 7nm AMD APU, 16GB of fast RAM, a 40Whr battery, and a 7-inch, 800p LCD with a max refresh rate of 60Hz. The handheld offers a peak brightness of 400 nits, which is about the same as the Switch OLED.

The Steam Deck LCD performs like a champ. Visually striking games like The Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood, Dave the Diver and Rollerdrome look and play beautifully on the display. It has its limitations: blacks aren’t quite as black as they could be, and dark backgrounds stand out from the bezels with a gray tinge. The Steam Deck LCD’s constrained color gamut is perceptible, but it isn’t tragic, and it's not even a consideration in the heat of a good game.

Alongside standard dual-analog inputs, the 256GB Steam Deck has a touchscreen, two haptic pads on either side of the display and four back-panel buttons that have a nice, bassy click. I tend to play indie games, generally ranging in size from 200MB to 80GB, and I currently have 22 titles installed on my Deck, with 9GB of room to breathe. Storage space hasn’t been a major issue.

Heat, on the other hand, has been an issue. The Steam Deck LCD generates enough heat to make my palms clammy after about 30 minutes, and it feels like a lot of warmth collects in the grips. The whole thing gets slightly toasty while running games, but it’s never become unbearably hot or overheated on me. The fan persistently blows warm air from the top of the machine, but not in an obnoxious way.

Battery life on the Steam Deck LCD isn’t stellar, but this also isn’t a huge issue for a device that stays in my home. Valve says the Steam Deck LCD can last up to eight hours on a single charge but, in practice, the longest run I’ve achieved is four and a half hours. Lowering brightness and refresh rate can of course help, but honestly, I’ve never had a battery emergency with the Steam Deck LCD — it’s always at home, close to a charging cable, safe and warm (probably thanks to the thermals).

Engadget

I’ve used various adjectives to describe the Steam Deck, including monstrous, massive, hefty, beefy and beastly. All of these words remain accurate, and I may even introduce some new ones today. The Steam Deck LCD is 11.7 inches long, 4.6 inches tall, 1.9 inches thick, and it weighs 1.5 pounds. For comparison, the Switch Lite and Vita each weigh about half a pound, and the Wii U gamepad weighs slightly more than 1 pound. My hands are smaller than average (but I’m not, like, toddler-sized), and the Steam Deck looks and feels freakish when I hold it. My palms get crampy after just 10 minutes of play, and even mid-game I find myself regularly searching for more comfortable ways to hold it. This is also true for the OLED model, which uses the same chassis and is essentially the same weight.

To counteract the Steam Deck’s heft, I’ve developed a strange habit. I have an assortment of stuffed animals (I like claw machines, sue me), and a few of them are perfect props for the Steam Deck, allowing me to rest the device on my lap without straining my neck. The stuffed roast chicken is particularly useful in this regard, and it’s rarely far from the Steam Deck.

There’s another, non-stuffed solution for Steam Deck neck and sweaty, crampy palms — the Docking Station. Put simply, it’s brilliant and I love it. With the Docking Station and recent software updates, Valve is leaning into the at-home nature of the Steam Deck, allowing players to connect the device to external displays, like gaming monitors and TVs. On external screens, the Steam Deck LCD supports HDR and VRR, even though the device’s display can’t sustain these features. I’ve mainly used the Docking Station in the living room, turning my Deck into a revamped Steam Machine, and every game I’ve booted up looks lovely on the larger screen. In docked mode, there’s no difference between the OLED and LCD Steam Decks — they have the same performance targets and they can both handle external HDR and VRR.

Bluetooth is hit-or-miss on the Steam Deck LCD. In my recent testing, I was able to easily pair an 8bitdo Ultimate Controller and my old Galaxy Buds Plus with the handheld, but I still haven’t been able to get my new Galaxy Buds2 Pro to connect. This has been an issue with the Steam Deck LCD since day one, so while it’s not surprising any longer, it’s still frustrating at times.

The biggest difference between the Steam Deck at launch and today is Steam itself. There are four labels for games signifying how well they’ll perform on the handheld: Verified, Playable, Unsupported and Unknown. When the device first landed, only about 10 percent of my Steam library was Verified to run on Deck, and it was hard to tell what that meant, anyway. Nowadays, 30 percent of my library is Verified, and 74 percent of it is Verified or Playable. Verified titles work seamlessly on the Steam Deck, and Playable games aren’t far off — they often have small optimization requirements that don’t interrupt the actual gameplay, like needing to use the on-screen keyboard. According to a quick Steam search, there are currently 11,229 Verified or Playable Steam Deck games. That’s a larger library than any console that’s been released to date.

Valve

Today, most mainstream games are Verified or Playable on Steam Deck at launch (RIP Starfield and Star Wars Jedi: Survivor). Generally, if a new game supports gamepad input, it tends to translate well to the handheld. Having a robust, built-in game store is huge for people who just want to pick up a portable PC and start playing, and it’s an edge that the Steam Deck specifically has over the rest of the handheld market.

The handheld PC segment has exploded over the past two years and there’s now a constant stream of new devices rolling out from the likes of Ayaneo, Lenovo, Ayn and ASUS. The Steam Deck has traditionally been cheaper than the others, with the $399 model offering unbeatable value. In the Steam Deck’s initial rollout, Valve offered just 64GB of storage at that price point, making the current deal even sweeter. While competitors are closer than ever on price — and at the high-end, ahead on performance — a handheld like the Steam Deck LCD still typically costs around $600.

Its clearest contender is, of course, the Steam Deck OLED. I’m not trying to undo all the work I’ve done here, but if you have the extra cash, go ahead and grab the OLED version. The Steam Deck OLED comes in two flavors: 512GB for $549 and 1TB for $649. These are fantastic price points, especially considering the new model features a 7.4-inch OLED display with native HDR, faster frame rates, pure blacks and a peak brightness of 1,000 nits. The new model has improved Bluetooth and Wi-Fi, better thermals and weight distribution, a longer battery life, and cute orange accents. The OLED version is the same size as the LCD edition, and it doesn’t offer upgrades in terms of actual processing power, but it is simply better inside and out. Just remember: This does not mean the LCD model is trash.

Compared with the wider handheld sector, the Steam Deck LCD offers a fantastic return on investment. It’s easy to use out of the box, it offers a variety of input methods and it’s cheaper than anything comparable in its category. The main drawbacks are its size and battery life — but if it’s not too big for you, and if you plan to play at home most often, it’s an excellent bit of hardware.

Two years on, and I’m still using my Steam Deck LCD in the same way, as an in-home portable device. My Steam Deck travels from the living room, to the office, to the bedroom, and back again throughout the week, just like it did when I first got my tiny hands on it. The main differences are that, nowadays, its library is much larger and I always have a suitably sized stuffed animal in tow.

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.

The first thing to know about the Steam Deck OLED is that it’s not the Steam Deck 2. The Steam Deck OLED is a mid-cycle refresh from Valve, similar to the Switch OLED upgrade, but there’s a lot more going on internally here. Its screen is better, its battery life is better, its thumbsticks are better, the haptics are better, and its chip and thermals are better. One thing that hasn’t changed is its form factor — this is still one of the biggest babies on the handheld block.

The new Steam Deck’s main upgrade is its OLED screen, which replaces the original LCD and, crucially, has native support for HDR and faster frame rates. The OLED also has smaller bezels, making the display larger at 7.4 inches, compared with the original 7-inch screen.

The HDR OLED display looks fantastic. It features a wider P3 color gamut, pure blacks and a peak brightness of 1,000 nits, compared with the original max of 400 nits. In action, this means the screen’s bezels meld with the black of any game, creating a more polished frame for retro aspect ratios and providing room for higher-contrast colors. The screen on the new model doesn’t support variable refresh rates (VRR), but it now tops out at 90Hz, while the original could only hit 60Hz. The updated display is smooth, crisp and bright, like a perfect lemon tart. (Even then, I do not recommend licking the screen.)

One of the downsides of the first Steam Deck was its short battery life, which maxed out at eight hours, and that was only under ideal conditions. Valve says the new Steam Deck battery will last 30 to 50 percent longer, depending on how you’re playing, and it’ll charge faster — the company claims it will go from 20 percent to 80 percent in 45 minutes.

The Steam Deck OLED has a die-shrunk version of the custom AMD APU found in the original Steam Deck — same CPU and GPU, just more efficient. This is the process Sony takes advantage of to build the PS4 Slim and PS5 Slim, but instead of collapsing the Steam Deck around smaller hardware, Valve chose to add a bigger battery and larger fan to its existing chassis. For developers, this means the device has the same performance targets as the original and there’s no need to create games specifically for the new hardware. In the end, the Steam Deck OLED weighs about 30 grams less than the original model, or the equivalent of five quarters.

Engadget

Which leads us to the bad news for my tiny hand gang. The Steam Deck OLED is the same monstrous size as the original — 11.7 inches long, 4.5 inches tall and nearly 2 inches thick. The thumbsticks on the new model are actually 1mm taller than the first version. This was one of my main complaints about the Steam Deck when I first reviewed it: I have smaller-than-average hands, and the Steam Deck looks and feels absolutely ridiculous when I’m holding it. It’s just massive, no matter how long my manicure gets. However, the OLED model feels more balanced than the original. It’s less top-heavy, and it does technically weigh less. These small adjustments have made a noticeable difference during my playtime, and the Steam Deck OLED feels slightly more manageable as a handheld — or maybe I’m just too distracted by all of its bright, pretty colors to care about the cramping in my palms.

The thumbsticks on the new handheld have an improved texture that shouldn’t turn gray after a few months’ use, and they feel perfectly serviceable so far. The OLED touchscreen responds immediately to input, and the haptic feedback on the built-in trackpads feels even more precise, populating in reactive pin-pricks under the textured plastic.

I spent a few cozy nights on my couch swapping between the LCD and OLED Steam Decks, and honestly, after I’m done with this review, I’ll probably retire my original model. The Steam Deck OLED is sharper and more responsive; indie games, AAA games and plain old Steam menus look so much better on the new hardware.

Engadget

Hades is my most-played game on the original Steam Deck, so I used that to test out Valve’s battery life claims. Though it doesn’t support HDR, a game like Hades pops on the OLED, and its animations look more fluid than on the LCD version. The OLED lasted four hours and 23 minutes before dying. With the same settings (800p with a 60 fps cap and similar brightness) the original model died after two hours and 42 minutes. That’s a 62 percent improvement, surpassing Valve’s own estimates, though batteries degrade and I’ve had my LCD Steam Deck since the device’s launch in early 2022. In a stress test that involved playing Elden Ring with everything maxed out, the OLED battery lasted two hours and 20 minutes, about 40 percent longer than the original.

Playing the Steam Decks back-to-back highlighted another significant quality-of-life improvement: heat management. My palms have gotten toasty playing the OLED model, but they haven’t broken a sweat like they often do with the original. The new fan may be larger, but it’s not any louder, and it clearly works a treat.

The Steam Deck OLED has a new Wi-Fi 6E module and improved antennas that should enable faster downloads for anyone with a compatible router. I don’t have a 6E router or multi-gigabit Wi-Fi, but with a regular Wi-Fi 6 router, the top download speed I saw on the new Steam Deck was 562mbps, which was about 10 percent faster than the old Steam Deck, and 10 percent slower than the speeds I get on my MacBook Pro. The Steam Deck OLED uses Bluetooth 5.3 and adds a dedicated antenna, which should improve functionality when using Wi-Fi and Bluetooth at the same time.

Engadget

Even with improvements to the battery, thermals and weight distribution, the Steam Deck OLED is still more of a Wii U than a Vita. It’s a beast of a handheld, and it makes the most sense as a portable console to use around the house, rather than a truly travel-ready device. The new model even comes with an extra-long, 2.5m charging cable, designed specifically with couch-based players in mind. I didn’t test out the docking station with the new Steam Deck, but Valve recently released a SteamOS update that lets players take advantage of HDR and VRR on external displays, which only drives home the Wii U-ness of it all.

As far as software, you know the drill by now. Valve has rolled out labels for Steam games signifying how well they’ll work on the handheld, with four levels: unknown, unsupported, playable and verified. Playable games generally come with a small caveat, like having to deploy the on-screen keyboard, while verified games have been fully optimized for portable play. Currently, more than 10,000 titles on Steam fall under the playable or verified labels, with more added every day.

The Steam Deck OLED will go on sale on November 16th at 1pm ET, and Valve has units ready to ship that same day. The company has lowered the price of its LCD lineup and will sell through its backstock of 64GB and 512GB models until they’re all gone. It’ll continue selling the 256GB LCD model at a reduced price of $400, while the 512GB OLED model will cost $550 and the 1TB OLED model will cost $650. There’s also a limited edition 1TB OLED version priced at $680 that comes with a special carrying case, a translucent gray body and orange accents.

Valve

According to the developers I spoke with at Valve, this is the definitive version of the Steam Deck. The HDR OLED model is what they would have released the first time around, if the technology had existed before 2022. The handheld market has evolved quickly — in just over a year, the Steam Deck proved there’s widespread demand for handheld PCs, and its success helped drive chip makers and display manufacturers to build hardware specifically for high-fidelity mobile play. This is great news for Valve and the Steam Deck, and also the other handhelds coming out of companies like Ayaneo, ASUS, Ayn, Logitech, Retroid and Razer. Hell, maybe even Playdate will get an HDR OLED display one day. (Just kidding; Playdate is literally perfect).

So, no, the HDR OLED refresh isn't the Steam Deck 2, but it is a welcome improvement on an already good device. The Steam Deck OLED is the facetuned, photoshopped, spit-shined version of Valve’s handheld, and it features tangible, clever improvements. The updated display is the highlight of the device, while things like faster charging, improved antennas and smoother haptics are welcome bonuses. More importantly, this is Valve renewing its commitment to portable PC gaming, and that’s a relief to see. The Steam Deck is the granddaddy of handheld PCs and Valve has the resources to continue innovating in this space. For now, the OLED model is a half-step toward the Steam Deck 2, which may be the final version of the device — unless Valve finally learns how to count to three.

Surprise! There’s a new Steam Deck in town and — double surprise — we’ve already reviewed it. It might not look like a big change from the outside, but the Steam Deck OLED is a thorough mid-cycle refresh of a machine that’s not even two years old. At the same time, Valve is also adjusting the configuration of its entry-level model, making it a far more compelling option. Apologies to anyone who literally bought a Steam Deck yesterday.

In an event held for press prior to the device's launch, Greg Coomer, a product designer at Valve, called the new model "the definitive version of the Steam Deck." He explained that the device contains many things the company wanted to include at the LCD model's launch but wasn't able to, along with some additions based on community feedback.

As its name suggests, the most noticeable upgrade to the Steam Deck OLED is the display. The original Steam Deck had a 7-inch 800p LCD running at 60Hz. The new model squeezes a 7.4-inch OLED panel into the same space, significantly shrinking the bezels around the display. The new panel runs at the same resolution, but with a refresh rate of up to 90Hz. It’s also HDR, covering 110 percent of the P3 color space with a peak brightness of 1,000 nits — the old model maxed out at around 400 nits. Like all OLEDs, it has pure blacks and near-instantaneous response times. As before, anti-glare etched glass is available, but only on the premium model.

The Steam Deck OLED has a die-shrunk version of the same custom APU found in the original Steam Deck. The new APU is produced on a 6nm process, rather than the older 7nm process. Manufacturers typically use die-shrinks to either improve performance or efficiency, and Valve has chosen the latter. The max frequency of both the GPU and CPU are identical between the LCD and OLED models, so for developers tuning their games for Steam Decks, they only have a single performance target.

In concert with the more-efficient processor, there’s also a 25 percent larger battery with a 50Whr capacity, compared to the original’s 40Whr. According to Valve, these changes combined result in a 30-50 percent increase in longevity between the two generations — the official battery life claim is "three to 12 hours." In our review, we measured a playtime increase of 62 percent when playing Hades on the OLED model versus our 18-month-old original. (Batteries degrade over time, which explains why our gains were more pronounced.)

The new internals make the Steam Deck OLED marginally lighter, and also cooler to the touch when playing games, aided by a slightly larger fan. Other improvements include support for both Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth 5.3, together with a new antenna array that will give a better experience when using both at the same time. There’s also a reworked power supply (it has a logo now!) with a longer 2.5m cable that will charge the OLED model from 20 to 80 percent in “as little as 45 minutes.” The thumbsticks have also been made 1mm taller, and the touch pads' haptics are slightly sharper.

Valve

The Steam Deck OLED starts at $549, and will replace all but the entry-level model in the range. The immediate reality is a bit of a mess and a little complicated, but this, Valve says, will be the Steam Deck line-up moving forward:

• 256GB Steam Deck LCD ($399)

• 512GB Steam Deck OLED ($549)

• 1TB Steam Deck OLED ($649)

As a result of the changes, the 64GB LCD Steam Deck (previously sold at $399) will drop to $349, and the 512GB LCD (previously $649) will drop to $499. Once Valve sells through its inventory of both, those lines will be discontinued. Valve says it will continue to support all LCD models with software updates.

So, the long-term lineup starts at the same $399 price, which gets you the old LCD Steam Deck, but with 256GB of storage instead of 64GB. The new step-up model costs $20 more at $549, but comes with an OLED display and the improvements outlined above, plus double the storage. The range still tops out at $649, but you’re getting a lot more for your money: All of the hardware improvements, 1TB of storage instead of 512GB and an improved carry case that can pop out into a slimmer shell that’s smaller and easier to fit in a bag. As mentioned, it also has the same anti-glare etched glass as the outgoing 512GB LCD model.

Finally, there’s also a Limited Edition version of the 1TB model, with a translucent shell and a customized carry case, which will be sold at $679. We imagine stocks will not last very long, as it looks pretty rad:

Valve

While there are no concrete updates on future hardware developments, Valve engineer Pierre-Loup Griffais noted that, so long as interest in the category remains high, the company has "plans for successive generations of handhelds." For now, Griffais explained, it's important to Valve that developers don't need to "split their attention" between different performance targets.

When asked about the potential for future hardware — like a return of the Steam Machine or an updated Steam Controller — there were no firm updates, but there does seem to be something happening. Griffais agreed that enabling the Steam Deck to work as a hybrid living room console was a "side goal" of the team, and noted that everything Valve does to improve SteamOS will benefit other devices. Coomer added that Valve is still working internally on "a bunch of controllers and prototypes." If SteamOS is being used on larger displays, the team would want to augment that experience with better input options. "We don't have any announcements on that front, but it's why we're building prototypes and thinking about the future there," Coomer said.

The Steam Deck OLED will be available to order on November 16th at 1PM ET. Valve expects units to begin shipping as soon as orders start to roll in. The updated pricing on the existing LCD models is already in effect.

Did you know AMC makes video games? The television network responsible for Mad Men, Breaking Bad and The Walking Dead has a full-blown publishing label for video games, and it’s shepherded four titles to market since 2020. Its first was a real-time flight simulator from the NYU Game Center Incubator called Airplane Mode, which trapped players in the window seat of a commercial airliner for six literal hours, complete with the small luxuries and major annoyances of actually flying coach. AMC’s IFC channel even produced the in-flight safety video for that game.

So, yeah, AMC publishes video games. Its latest project is a collaboration with Shudder, the network’s horror-focused streaming service, and it’s developed by Fictiorama Studios, the team behind 2018’s Do Not Feed the Monkeys. Their new title is called The Fabulous Fear Machine and it’s a cheeky real-time strategy game about using terror to gain ultimate power. It’s a heady topic presented in a pulp art style, with a magical fortune-telling automaton, exaggerated stakes and dramatic noir dialogue softening the narrative’s serious edge. Think Tales from the Crypt, but with propaganda and disinformation as the target subject. It’s kitsch, it’s camp, and at times it makes you pause and say, huh. Put simply, I adore it.

Fictiorama Studios

The Fabulous Fear Machine is a dense game that responds to your decisions moment-to-moment and then collects your story in the pages of an old-school comic book. The fortune teller, encased in glass and lights, uses this comic to fuel its own supernatural whims, but all of that is secondary to your personal quests for control, wealth and power. The game features multiple Masters of the Machine, each with a unique goal, and it kicks off with a brilliant, sociopathic scientist who wants to conquer the corporate world through a pharmaceutical company. As a Mistress of the Machine, she first sows seeds of panic and paranoia across the United Kingdom and Scotland.

Gameplay takes place on a bright world map, zoomed in to the appropriate locations. After planting a seed of terror in one spot, players help it spread by dispatching agents to major cities, collecting information, and then dropping Legends cards there, cultivating dark myths and conspiracy theories based on local beliefs. Players set a goal for each region; for the pharmaceutical baron, this could be implanting the dogma that natural medicines are harmful, or that generic drugs don’t work.

There are four psychic centers that the Masters of the Machine can target: The Power, The Form, The Passions and The Occult. There are two sub-categories for each psychic center. Terror of Conspiracy and Terror of the Future fall under The Power, Decrepitude and Pain are part of The Form, Violence and Death are in The Passions, and the Irrational and the Unknown are subsets of The Occult. Specific cards are tied to these sub-categories, and the stories on these cards evolve as they’re played on the map and upgraded.

Fictiorama Studios

Cards include scenarios like The Ultimate Virus, The Toaster is Listening, The Climate Machine, The Boogeyman and The Homicidal Nurse — conspiracies, myths and anxieties that can be exacerbated with the proper messaging. Spreading these terrors is a game of asset management and intuition, feeding the appropriate fears in the right regions.

Things get complicated quickly, though. With the help of agents on the ground, players have to mine resources, generate and maintain fuel for propagating their fear campaigns, and also fend off counter-attacks from activists and rival companies. Upgrading cards progresses the amount of unrest they invoke and involves selecting related terms from a word cloud. The cards tell their own little stories as they’re upgraded, and these evolve from whisper campaigns, to regional talk-radio topics, to headlines on major news programs. Rival companies and peace organizations pop up along the way, attempting to thwart your efforts, and they have to be infiltrated and dispatched by any means necessary.

Fictiorama Studios

Every action requires the appropriate element, which players can mine from cities they’ve discovered. Mining takes time, as does infiltration, intelligence-gathering and fuel cultivation, and deciding what to focus on at any moment drives the game’s tension. Be warned: It gets very difficult.

The Fabulous Fear Machine is available on Steam for $18, just in time for the spookiest season. Input-wise, it would make for a fantastic mobile game, but the amount of fine detail and on-screen writing might explain why it’s only on PC, at least for now.

Fictiorama Studios

Turns out, taking over the world with terror alone is complex, strangely funny and filled with dead ends. At least in The Fabulous Fear Machine, it’s also entirely fictional — and supremely stylish.

Ancient, vine-draped monuments and towering obelisks protrude from the forest floor, connected by a maze of stone paths and one hyper-speed transit capsule. Statues loom among the monoliths: hooded human figures and mythological beasts surrounded by saintly geometry in gold and turquoise. I’m running down an overgrown platform by the water, sun radiating off the side of my face, trying to find the next puzzle. I take a sharp turn, the shadows shift and my silhouette is suddenly projected in front of me: waist on a slim pivot, hip joints jutting out, sticklike arms. I remember I’m made of metal and wires, and for a brief moment, I’m surprised. I forgot — I’m a robot.

The Talos Principle 2 reintroduces a post-apocalyptic world filled with the puzzles and dreams society left behind, and populates it with a race of machines who simultaneously worship humans and consider themselves to be the natural evolution of humanity. The game’s first quarter, which spans roughly seven hours, offers a beautiful and immersive playground of puzzle solving and philosophical inquiry, and it feels both grander and more cohesive than the original Talos Principle. That game came out in 2014 and featured a lone robot in an AI-powered testing ground. The sequel features an entire society of sentient machines. It also has lots of laser-powered, logic-based spatial puzzles, of course.

Croteam

The Talos Principle 2 is set in a futuristic society of robots, and you’re the 1,000th machine to come off the line. There’s debate among the citizens about whether you should be the final addition to the group, as one of its founders once dictated, and your presence unlocks a new prophecy tied to a mysterious island. Elohim, the AI antagonist of the first game, has calmed down significantly and acts as a caretaker to the robots, gently guiding their sleep cycles with a booming voice.

Each robot has its own personality, and it doesn’t take long for these machines to feel fully human, despite their lack of meat and bones. Developers at Croteam took the time to build out backstories and individual points-of-view for each supporting character, and their conversations and arguments flow seamlessly. The Talos Principle 2 features full voice acting and branching dialogue trees with multiple meaningful responses for players to choose from. It’s not uncommon to see six to eight options in conversations, presenting discrete approaches to heavy prompts about faith, doubt, consciousness, life, death and love. This is a game for curious minds, and the dialogue system supports this with rich character development and high-quality conversational writing.

Croteam

This robot society provides the narrative framework for actual gameplay. On the mysterious, prophesied island players encounter a series of puzzles hidden among humanity’s ruins, much like in the original game. The structures on the island are widespread and vast, but navigation is intuitive, thanks to subtle environmental cues, a compass with waypoints and directions from the other robots on the expedition team. This time around, you’re not alone (no offense, Elohim).

The puzzles themselves are devilish. They start simply, prompting players to divert laser beams into portals of the same color using connector rods, jammers, blocks, pressure pads and fans. As players progress through the riddle rooms, the game introduces new tools, like a drill that can create holes in some walls and an inverter that reverses the laser color, adding unexpected complexity to the puzzles. It’s my firm belief that the best puzzles in video games are ones that appear simple, but have a single, incredibly tricky solution buried beneath layers of almost-there answers. Nothing beats that breakthrough feeling when the entire room suddenly makes sense, the lasers align, and all the right doors slide open. The beginning hours of The Talos Principle 2 effortlessly capture this sensation, again and again.

Tetrominoes are back in the sequel, and they’re big. Not only metaphorically (the robots often theorize about the shapes’ supposed purpose), but also in physical size. I made literal bridges out of building-sized tetrominoes, swapping out pieces and rotating them on a grand scale. While this segment wasn’t particularly challenging, it was satisfying in a new kind of way.

Croteam

In its first quarter, The Talos Principle 2 reproduces the brilliance of the original game and adds to this foundation, expanding its world narratively and mechanically. Philosophical conversations are no longer siloed in read-only terminals, though there are still datasets scattered around the map. The story’s main prompts are instead integrated into gameplay via deep, player-driven conversations with NPCs, and even a little bit of light gossip. The Talos Principle 2 has secrets to discover, personalities to explore and questions to answer — and that’s all on top of being a uniquely fantastic (and optimistic) sci-fi puzzle game.

Google is infusing its new Pixel 8 phones with generative AI, adding support for on-demand summarization, translation and read-aloud features in articles and web pages, plus more tricks. All of this is handled through the Assistant, either via spoken word or on-screen prompts.

On Pixel 8s, the Assistant will be able to quickly summarize website text, offering a breakdown of the page and bullet points of relevant content. It's a lot like interacting with Bard or Bing AI, in this regard. Prompts will pop up at the bottom of the summary with potential follow-ups — an article about iPhones, for example, will end with action buttons reading, “About iPhones,” and, “Who invented the iPhone?”

The new Assistant can translate text into various languages and will even read the converted content out loud (in supported languages). In the case of translated or original text, read-aloud mode populates a draggable progress bar, playback-speed controls and 10-second skip buttons in either direction.

Call screening is also improved on Pixel 8, and the Assistant should sound more natural when speaking with callers — meaning a few more pauses and weird sounds, basically. Call screening will also offer an expanded list of potential responses for users to choose from as the conversation carries on in the background.

Another Assistant update will allow users to compose messages twice as fast using their voice, and enable typing, editing and sending messages in multiple languages. Overall, Assistant should be able to better understand users when they speak in natural patterns, even across languages. Additionally, Google's At A Glance feature will provide more useful information, like travel updates and tickets for events.

Google is making the Recorder app more useful with generative AI, too. On Pixel 8s, Recorder will be able to provide high-level summaries of captured content. This is in addition to the Recorder app's existing transcription abilities.

The Pixel 8 and Pixel 8 Pro will go on sale October 12, starting at $700.

Follow all of the news live from Google’s 2023 Pixel event right here.