Square Enix is moving into the farming sim world with Harvestella, which is coming to Nintendo Switch and PC on November 4th. While this is a 3D game with a distinct art style, you'll surely recognize some elements if you're one of the tens of millions of Stardew Valley players out there. You'll till land, sow seeds, water crops, collect items for cooking and crafting, go fishing, take care of pets, explore dungeons, slay monsters and so on.

You'll be able to visit other towns and get to know their residents. In Nemea Town, cherry blossoms bloom all year, while Seaside Town Shatolla has a vibrant bar scene. There are multiple jobs to choose from as well, including mage, fighter and shadow walker. Each of those will offer different abilities in battle. You'll also be able to explore some of the ocean in a submarine.

The overworld will change based on the season, but there's a catch. Four crystals called Seaslight usually ensure there's a stable transition between seasons. However, the game starts amid some abnormalities. Between each season is a period called the Quietus, when crops die and people are unable to go outside due to deadly dust. Even worse, these Quietus spells are lasting longer every year. You might have to do something about that.

Pokémon Go developer Niantic is creating a new augmented reality mobile game with more big-name partners: the NBA and its players' association. NBA All-World will task you with exploring your neighborhood to find some of the league's stars such as Chris Paul, Steph Curry and James Harden. You can challenge and compete against virtual players in mini-games like three-point contests before recruiting them to your team.

NBA All-World players will be able to deck out their NBA stars in custom apparel. Polygon notes that you can also improve your squad with items you find out in the wild at places such as sporting goods stores and convenience stores. You'll have the chance to battle others in one-on-one matches with swipe-based commands too. These encounters will be available at various locations, including real-life basketball courts.

Following Pokémon Go and Pikmin Bloom, Niantic has a few other games in the works. Transformers: Heavy Metal is in beta, but it's only available in a few countries for now. The same goes for Peridot, a modern AR take on Tamagotchi.

It's not yet clear exactly when Niantic will release NBA All-World, but the game will soon enter a soft launch period. You can sign up for updates if you're interested.

Sayonara Wild Hearts developer Simogo has revealed its next game and the eclectic studio is again moving in a different direction. Lorelei and the Laser Eyes is a non-linear adventure title that will land on Nintendo Switch and Steam in 2023.

Simogo and publisher Annapurna Interactive announced the game during today's Nintendo Direct Mini: Partner Showcase. The first trailer depicts a dark, atmospheric world in which you'll need to solve puzzles to get to the bottom of a murder mystery. While the clip is light on story, there are a few peeks at the titular laser eyes.

The trailer description notes that you'll play as a woman who's looking for answers in a central European manor (or possibly a hotel or museum). Players will need to pay attention to what's going on, and think about numbers, patterns and puzzles that they find. Annapurna suggests these could be part of a "macabre game" or just a "simple treasure hunt."

Simogo shook up the gameplay of Sayonara Wild Hearts from level to level and it looks like it's adopting a similar approach here. The trailer suggests there will be a first-person shooter element, for instance. The visuals will vary too, from lo-fi PS1-era environments and character models to wireframe figures. It looks delightfully strange.

Sayonara Wild Hearts is nearly perfect and one of my favorite games of all time. So, I'm really looking forward to checking out Lorelei and the Laser Eyes next year. Here's hoping for more details during the Annapurna Interactive Showcase, which takes place on July 28th.

Google is working on a way to ensure emails from US political campaigns reach users' Gmail inboxes instead of automatically getting dumped into the spam folder. The company has asked the Federal Election Commission for approval on a plan to make emails from "authorized candidate committees, political party committees and leadership political action committees registered with the FEC" exempt from spam detection, as long they abide by Gmail's rules on phishing, malware and illegal content.

“We want Gmail to provide a great experience for all of our users, including minimizing unwanted email, but we do not filter emails based on political affiliation," Google spokesperson José Castañeda told Axios, which first reported on the move. Castañeda added that the pilot program "may help improve inboxing rates for political bulk senders and provide more transparency into email deliverability, while still letting users protect their inboxes by unsubscribing or labeling emails as spam."

If the project goes ahead, users will see a prominent notification the first time they receive an email from a campaign. They'll be asked if they want to keep receiving such emails. They'll be able to opt out of campaign notices later too. That should help cut down on unwanted campaign emails, especially for users who didn't sign up to receive them in the first place, while making sure they still hit inboxes.

Google has noted that a key reason why Gmail puts many campaign emails in the spam folder is because other users often mark the missives as spam. A North Carolina State University study from earlier this year found that Gmail was more likely than Yahoo (Engadget's parent company) and Microsoft Outlook to algorithmically filter emails from Republican campaigns as spam during the 2020 campaign.

Republican leaders this month introduced a bill that seeks to make it illegal for email service providers to automatically put campaign messages in the spam folder. It would also require operators to issue a quarterly transparency report detailing how many times campaign messages were flagged as spam, with breakdowns for emails from both the Republican and Democratic parties. In addition, providers would have to disclose the tools they use to determine which campaign emails to mark as spam.

Today's Nintendo Direct Mini: Partner Showcase featured a bunch of third-party games that are coming to Switch, including a bunch of big hitters. For one thing, three Persona games are coming to the hybrid console. Persona 5 Royal is the only one with a confirmed release date (October 21st) for now, but more details about Persona 4 Golden and Persona 3 Portable are coming soon.

It recently emerged that Atlus' games are also coming to Xbox Game Pass, as well as Steam, PlayStation 4 and (in P5 Royal's case) PS5. Persona 3 Portable and Persona 4 Golden were ports of PlayStation 2 titles Persona 3 and Persona 4. They were released on PlayStation Portable and PlayStation Vita, respectively.

Nintendo confirmed Nier: Automata is bound for Switch too. Nier: Automata The End of YoRHa Edition will arrive on the console on October 6th. It includes all previously released DLC expansions, as well as some exclusive costumes.

Leaks had suggested Mario + Rabbids Sparks of Hope will debut on Switch on October 20th and that turned out to be the case. Even though the game stars Mario, Nintendo technically stuck to its claim that the showcase would only feature third-party titles, since Ubisoft's Paris and Milan studios co-developed it.

Meanwhile, a cloud version of A Plague Tale: Requiem will be available for Switch on October 18th, the same date that the game will hit other platforms. Focus Home Interactive brought the first game in the series, A Plague Tale: Innocence,to Switch last year, also as a streaming-only version.

You can find out more about all these announcements, as well as other third-party games that are coming to Switch, by checking out the Nintendo Direct Mini: Partner Showcase below:

There's some good news if you've been waiting to get your hands on a Steam Deck. Valve says it has boosted production and will be shipping more than twice the number of units each week than it has over the last few months.

The company planned to start shipping the device in December, but supply chain issues forced it to delay the Steam Deck until February. It now appears Valve has found the parts and production capacity it needs to build units at a faster pace and get them out to customers more quickly.

Were you to reserve a Steam Deck now, you likely wouldn't receive it until at least October. However, since Valve is ramping up the volume of shipments, it may be able to bring down the wait time. Hopefully, it will soon get to the point where it can ship a Steam Deck within days of someone deciding to order one. 

Valve says those who had an expected shipment window of Q3 will start receiving reservation emails on June 30th. When you do eventually get your Steam Deck, though, it's probably best to avoid swapping out the built-in storage. Valve hardware designer Lawrence Yang warned that the power requirements of off-the-shelf SSDs could cause a Steam Deck to overheat and shorten the lifespan.

Nintendo has announced when its next games showcase will take place. A Nintendo Direct Mini is scheduled for June 28th at 9AM ET. It most likely won't feature news on Mario, Zelda, Pokémon or any of Nintendo's other franchises, though. The company said the stream will focus on third-party titles that are on the way to Switch.

Right now, it's unclear what to expect from Nintendo Direct Mini: Partner Showcase (to give the broadcast its full title). However, it could a be fairly meaty affair, since it clocks in at 25 minutes and Nintendo usually zips through announcements during Directs.

This isn't pegged as an Indie World Direct, so it may center more around titles from major publishers and larger studios. One of the more notable third-party games slated for a Switch debut, No Man's Sky, already has a release date of October 7th, so that may not get a heavy focus. There's always the chance of more details on Hollow Knight: Silksong, which is slated to arrive sometime within the next year.

The Nintendo Direct Mini will air a week after a Direct focused on Xenoblade Chronicles 3, though it's not the full-on first-party showcase fans have been waiting for and expecting. You'll be able to watch Tuesday's event on Nintendo's YouTube channel.

Sky Mavis, the developer of blockchain game Axie Infinity, says it will start reimbursing the victims of a $617 million hack that took place earlier this year. The attackers took $25.5 million in USDC (a stablecoin that’s pegged to the value of the US dollar) and 173,600 ether, which was worth around $591.2 million at the time. The FBI claimed North Korean state-backed hacker groups were behind the attack.

Impacted Axie Infinity players will be able to withdraw one ether token for each one they lost in the hack, Sky Mavis told Bloomberg (the company didn't mention a USDC reimbursement). However, as with other cryptocurrencies, the value of Ethereum has plummeted since the attack in March. 

Because of that, Sky Mavis will return around $216.5 million to users. It's possible that the price of Ethereum will rise again, but as things stand, affected users will get back around a third of what they lost.

In April, Sky Mavis raised $150 million in funding to help it pay back the victims. The developer plans to reimburse affected users on June 28th, when it restarts the Ronin software bridge that the hackers targeted. 

Axie Infinity is widely considered the most popular play-to-earn game. Players collect and mint NFTs representing creatures that battle each other, Pokémon-style. These NFTs can be sold to other players, with Sky Mavis charging a transaction fee. By February, Axie Infinity had facilitated $4 billion in NFT sales.

However, the NFT market has all but bottomed out, which has had a significant impact on Axie Infinity. For one thing, according to Bloomberg, the daily active user count dropped from 2.7 million in November to a quarter of that by the end of May.

The 2022 edition of Summer Games Done Quick, the semi-annual speedrunning event, gets underway on June 26th. From then until July 3rd, SGDQ will host a non-stop livestream of skilled players tearing through a wide variety of games as fast as they can. Hopefully, they'll set a few world records in the process.

You can watch the event live on Twitch — the stream is embedded below for your convenience. The pre-show gets underway at 12:30PM ET on Sunday, followed by the first run, a Shadow of the Colossus random boss rush. If you miss anything, you'll be able to catch up on YouTube later.

As ever, viewers will be encouraged to donate to Doctors Without Borders. Last year's event raised $2.9 million for the cause. The most recent winter edition, Awesome Games Done Quick, raised $3.4 million for the Prevent Cancer Foundation. SGDQ 2022 takes place in Bloomington, Minnesota and it's the first in-person GDQ event since Awesome Games Done Quick 2020.

GDQ has released the full schedule, and there are a bunch of intriguing runs in the pipeline. I haven't seen a reverse boss run of Donkey Kong Country before. I'm looking forward to that, as well as the Super Mario Maker 2 relay race. Among the games making their debut at a core GDQ event are Kirby and the Forgotten Land, Halo Infinite, Tunic and, inevitably, Elden Ring.

Juul has asked a federal appeals court to temporarily block a Food and Drug Administration ban on sales of its vaping products in the US. The agency issued the order on Thursday, citing a lack of sufficient evidence provided by the company to show its devices are safe. The FDA acknowledged that it wasn't aware of "an immediate hazard" linked to Juul's vape pen or pods.

“FDA’s decision is arbitrary and capricious and lacks substantial evidence,” Juul said in a filing with the US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit, according to The Wall Street Journal. The company called the ban extraordinary and unlawful. It requested an administrative stay until it can file a motion for an emergency review of the FDA’s order.

Juul claimed that, without the stay, it would suffer significant and irreparable harm. The company makes the lion's share of its revenue in the US. If the stay is granted, Juul and retailers will be able to keep selling its products there. The company argued in the filing that the order marked a move away from the FDA's typical practices, which allow for a transition period. 

"We respectfully disagree with the FDA’s findings and decision and continue to believe we have provided sufficient information and data based on high-quality research to address all issues raised by the agency," Juul's chief regulatory officer Joe Murillo told Engadget after the FDA issued the order. "In our applications, which we submitted over two years ago, we believe that we appropriately characterized the toxicological profile of JUUL products, including comparisons to combustible cigarettes and other vapor products, and believe this data, along with the totality of the evidence, meets the statutory standard of being appropriate for the protection of the public health."

In 2020, the FDA required makers of e-cigarettes to submit their products for review. It looked at the possible benefits of vaping as an alternative to cigarettes for adult smokers. It was weighing those up against concerns about the popularity of vaping among young people. The agency has authorized 23 "electronic nicotine delivery systems," including products from NJOY and Vuse parent Reynolds American.

The FDA slammed Juul in 2019 for telling students that its products are "totally safe." The Federal Trade Commission and state attorney generals have investigated Juul over claims it marketed its vape pens to underage users. In the last year, the company has agreed to pay at least $87 million to settle lawsuits in several states — including North Carolina, Washington state and Arizona — which alleged that it targeted young people with its marketing. It has faced similar suits in other states.