In to a T, players have to navigate the world as a teenager who can't lower their arms from an outstretched, T-shaped position. The character, named Teen, traverses an ordinary coastal town alongside their loyal dog, fending off bullies and discovering the strengths of their unique posture along the way. In the game's reveal trailer, it looks like flying might be the big benefit to T-shaped arms.

The game is an episodic 3D adventure with a rounded, cartoon art style that'll be familiar to anyone who's played Katamari Damacy, Wattam or other titles from creator Keita Takahashi. to a T comes from Takahashi's studio, Uvula, which recently released one of the coolest little games on Playdate, Crankin's Time Travel Adventure.

There's no release date or confirmed platforms for to a T, though Uvula began teasing it back in 2022 and it's being published by Annapurna Interactive. The project is being created in partnership with AbleGamers, a non-profit organization that advocates for people with disabilities in the video game market, leading inclusion efforts in software and hardware development. AbleGamers collaborated with Xbox as it designed the Adaptive Controller, and it provided input to Sony in the creation of the Access controller, the studio's coming accessibility-focused gamepad.

Annapurna Interactive has a terrific track record, and we'll soon learn more about what's next from the highly regarded publisher. It's running a Summer Game Fest-affiliated showcase today, and you can watch the stream on YouTube and Twitch at 3PM ET.

The presentation will include "reveals, spotlights and one of our biggest announcements yet," Annapurna says. The publisher is cooking up a bunch of projects, including Cocoon (the most captivating game we tried at Summer Game Fest earlier this month) and story-driven RPG Thirsty Suitors. My dream of a Sayonara Wild Hearts sequel remains on hold at least for now while Simogo works on murder mystery game Lorelei and the Laser Eyes, and perhaps we'll learn more about that today as well.

Elsewhere, Neon White is coming to Xbox at some point, so we may learn during the showcase exactly when that'll happen. Rumors suggest the wonderful Stray is bound for Xbox as well.

Shark makes some of the best robot vacuums around and you can currently save quite a bit on a self-emptying model. The device is 50 percent off as it has dropped to $300 at Amazon. That's the lowest price we've seen for it to date.

Robot vacuums are an excellent quality of life upgrade for many people compared with having to clean floors manually with a standard vacuum. Shark's RV1001AE model has several features that make it a strong option. It has a bagless, self-emptying base that Shark says can hold up to 45 days worth of muck. You won't need to buy disposal bags like you would with other models.

The vacuum is able to map out your home. You can schedule cleanings for your entire home or ask the robot to take care of a certain room or area immediately using the SharkClean app, Alexa or Google Assistant.

Shark says the vacuum has powerful suction as well as a self-cleaning brushroll that can pull debris and hair from carpets and hardwood floors. The Shark IQ Robot uses a row-by-row cleaning method. When it's done, it returns to its dock to recharge.

A decent smartphone used to cost upwards of $500, but those days are thankfully over. Now it’s possible to find something that meets most of your needs for as little as $160. However, navigating the budget phone market can be tricky. Many options that look good on paper often aren’t great in use, and some handsets will end up costing you more when you consider many come with restrictive storage. This guide will help you find a bargain and highlight our top picks for the best cheap phones you can buy right now.

What to look for in a cheap phone

For this guide, our recommendations cost between $100 and $300. Anything less and you might as well go buy a dumb phone or high-end calculator instead. Since they’re meant to be more affordable than their flagship and midrange siblings, entry-level smartphones involve compromises; the cheaper a device, the lower your expectations around performance and experience should be. For that reason, the best advice I can give is to spend as much as you can afford. In this price range, even $50 or $100 more can get you a dramatically better product.

Second, you should know what you want most from a phone. When buying a budget device, you may need to sacrifice a decent camera for a long-lasting battery or trade a high-resolution display for a faster processor. That’s just what comes with the territory, but knowing your priorities will make it easier to find the right phone.

It’s also worth noting some features can be hard to find on cheap handsets. For instance, you won’t need to search far for a device with all-day battery life — but if you want a great camera, you’re better off shelling out for one of the recommendations in our midrange smartphone guide, which all come in at $600 or less. Wireless charging and waterproofing also aren’t easy to find in this price range and forget about a fast processor. On the bright side, all our recommendations come with headphone jacks, so you won’t need to get wireless headphones.

iOS is also off the table, since the most affordable handset Apple sells is the $400 iPhone SE. That leaves Android as the only option. Thankfully, in 2023, there’s little to complain about Google’s OS – and you may even prefer it to iOS. Lastly, keep in mind most Android manufacturers typically offer far less robust software support for their budget devices. In some cases, your new phone may only receive one major Android update and a year or two of security patches beyond that. That applies to the OnePlus and Motorola recommendations on our list. If you’d like to keep your phone for as long as possible, Samsung has the best software policy of any Android manufacturer in the budget space, offering four years of security updates on all of its devices.

The best budget phone: OnePlus Nord N30 5G

The recently announced $300 OnePlus Nord N30 5G offers the best value of any of the smartphones on our list. No other phone in the price bracket features a processor as fast as the N30’s Snapdragon 695 5G. Moreover, OnePlus has specced the N30 with a generous 8GB of RAM and 128GB of storage, meaning you probably won’t need to budget for a microSD card or cloud storage. It also comes with a 120Hz IPS display, a feature that’s great for both gaming and everyday use. Best of all, the N30 ships with a 50W power adapter that you can use to get a full day of battery life in 30 minutes. The N30 would be almost perfect if it had waterproofing and OnePlus had committed to pushing more than one major Android update to the phone.

Another great option: Samsung Galaxy A14 5G

Don’t let the Samsung Galaxy A14 5G’s modest price and uninspired design fool you — it has a lot to offer. For $200, you get a phone that is surprisingly fast and features a competent camera. Additionally, it has NFC connectivity for contactless payments, something you won’t find on a lot of phones in this price range. Battery life is also excellent, coming in at two days with moderate use. Plus, there’s that great software policy I mentioned above, with Samsung promising to support the A14 with two major Android updates and four years of security patches. The only thing missing from the A14 is waterproofing, so you may want to opt for something sturdier if you live by the beach or like to doomscroll in the tub.

An ultra-budget pick: Samsung Galaxy A03s

If you want to spend as little as possible but still want something from a reputable brand, the $160 Samsung Galaxy A03s is your best bet. Thanks to its MediaTek Helio P35 processor, the A03s performs better than you would expect. Unfortunately, the phone feels about as cheap as it costs and the camera isn’t much better. Oh, and did I mention the A03s ships with a measly 32GB of internal storage? In other words, be prepared to buy a microSD card to store all your photos and music. Thankfully, the A03s, like its more expensive sibling, will receive four years of security updates from Samsung. You won’t find that kind of software support on any other handset in the sub-$200 category.

Honorable mention: Motorola Moto G Stylus

The $200 Motorola Moto G Stylus offers something none of the other picks on this list do: a built-in stylus. If you love doodling and jotting down notes, then this is the cheap phone to buy. Thankfully, it has a few other things going for it too. The Moto G Stylus sports a big and responsive 6.5-inch display and a long-lasting 5,000mAh battery. Plus, it’s available in two lovely colors: midnight blue and glam pink.

As with other options in this price range, it would be nice if the Moto G Stylus came with a more capable camera, a fast charger and better protection against water. One word of advice: steer clear of Moto G Stylus 5G. It doesn’t offer enough of an upgrade to justify costing $400.

Video games have been competitive for as long as people could land their three-character initials on a digital scoreboard. The fighting game genre got its start in the 1970s, but it was when Street Fighter 2 hit the arcades in the '90s that the genre would ascend to a whole new level. Since then, many groundbreaking series have graced the genre, such as Mortal Kombat, Tekken, Super Smash Bros. and much more. 

While fighting games may never have the same mass-market appeal they did in the '90s, 2023 is proving to be a mini-rennaisance for the genre. We've already had Street Fighter 6, Mortal Kombat 1 is arriving this fall, and there's Tekken 8 still to come. That's without mentioning the upcoming reboot of Dead or Alive or Riot Games' League of Legends spin-off Project L. It's a good time to be a fighting game fan — watch the video below for the full story.

The Nintendo Switch Online library just got a bit beefier, thanks to the addition of four classic Sega Genesis titles. The subscription-based classic games platform is now host to Ghouls ‘n Ghosts, The Revenge of Shinobi, Landstalker and Crusader of Centy, joining around 30 pre-existing Genesis titles and many more NES, SNES and Game Boy releases. That’s right. Sonic and Mario are friends now.

For the uninitiated, Ghouls ‘n Ghosts is a tough-as-nails platformer that still gives nightmares to adults of a certain age. The Rise of Shinobi is a serviceable entry in the OG ninja-simulation franchise. Landstalker is a cult favorite action RPG with an isometric view and Crusader of Centy is a well-reviewed, yet relatively obscure, Zelda clone. Crusader of Centy is tough to find, with physical copies selling for thousands of dollars, so this is a boon for retro gaming enthusiasts. Here’s a video of all four games in action, so you can decide if you want to plunk down $50 for a yearly NSO Expansion Pack subscription.

As a note, these games are only available with a $50-yearly Expansion Pack subscription, though that also gets you access to N64 and Game Boy Advance titles. If you just want to play from a library of NES, SNES and Game Boy releases, go with the cheaper standard NSO subscription of $20 each year. Nintendo isn’t exactly speedy with these releases, with game drops around once a month, so check the full library before handing over your debit card information.

Sony announced the PlayStation Plus games lineup for July today. They include Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War, Alan Wake Remastered and Endling – Extinction is Forever. All three titles will be available on PS5 and PS4 for subscribers on the Essential, Extra and Premium tiers.

Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War (2020) is a controversial installment in the long-running military shooter franchise. Set in the early 1980s, its plot borrows from a well-known (and largely baseless) real-world conspiracy theory about a Soviet spy named Perseus who supposedly infiltrated the US atomic weapons program. If you can get past its questionable premise and (arguably tone-deaf) Vietnam War flashback missions, you can enjoy classic Call of Duty shoot-em-up fare as you blast your way across East Berlin, Turkey, Moscow and other Cold War hotspots. In addition to the story mission, it includes the title’s Multiplayer and Zombies modes.

Activision

Meanwhile, Alan Wake Remastered is the 2021 remake of the now 13-year-old adventure title that was initially an Xbox 360 exclusive. The game puts you in the shoes of the title character, a successful author on vacation in the (fictional) Washington state town of Bright Falls. But after his wife mysteriously vanishes, he sets out on a nightmarish investigation that blurs the lines between reality and fiction. The remastered version includes the case game and (initially DLC) expansions “The Signal” and “The Writer.”

Finally, Endling – Extinction is Forever is a third-person survival-adventure title that puts you in the paws of the last surviving fox. Set in a future reality where humans have exhausted Earth’s resources, leaving it in ruin, you must guide your three cubs to safety and save the species. Aside from its obvious thematic commentary about climate change, nature preservation and human excess, it provides fun (and relatively short) stealth gameplay using 2D movement in shifting 3D environments.

Herobeat Studios

The three games will be available for PlayStation Plus subscribers from July 4th through the 31st. In addition, Sony says you’ll have until next Monday, July 3rd, to claim June’s games, including NBA 2K23, Jurassic World Evolution 2 and Trek to Yomi.

Layers of Fear was Bloober Team’s final psychological horror game. The studio didn’t advertise this fact, but behind the scenes, a switch flipped weeks ago: When the remastered and expanded Layers of Fear collection came out on June 15th, it marked the end of a phase that was known internally as Bloober Team 2.0.

“This year is like closing the era of making psychological horror games,” studio co-founder Piotr Babieno told Engadget. “Right now we are going into Bloober Team 3.0, making mass-market horror.”

Bloober is not abandoning horror as a whole, but it is shifting focus. Over the past decade, the studio cemented itself as a powerhouse in the realm of psychological horror games, releasing the Layers of Fear franchise, Observer, Blair Witch and The Medium, all of which generated terror through narrative and environmental cues (otherwise known as “vibes”). Because of these design choices, Bloober games have jokingly been called “walking simulators,” a description that Babieno didn’t deny.

“We focused on the story, we focused on the mood, we focused on the quality of graphics and music, but we didn’t put a lot of attention on the gameplay mechanics,” Babieno said. “It wasn’t our target. But we decided that there was a ceiling that we couldn’t break if we did not deliver something fresh, something new.”

Going forward, developers at Bloober will rely on action and player input to generate disquiet, and they hope that this nudge in creative direction will drastically expand the studio’s audience. This mechanics-first ethos was actually implemented internally in 2019, when Bloober began building the remake of Silent Hill 2 for Konami.

“We decided that our next titles should be much more mass-market oriented,” Babieno said. “We’d like to talk with more people. We’d like to deliver our ideas, with our DNA, not by environment or storytelling, but by action. So all of our future titles will have a lot of gameplay mechanics. They will be much bigger.”

Silent Hill 2 will be the public’s first taste of Bloober’s redirection — but we’re getting ahead of ourselves. Before considering the implications of fresh design philosophies, let’s take a look at how Bloober Team 2.0 became a major name on the global horror scene in just a few years.

Babieno co-founded the studio that would become Bloober Team in 2006, after selling his marketing research company in Poland. His ultimate goal was to be a storyteller: He initially considered entering the film industry, but it was too expensive, so he pivoted to games. The studio started with around 15 employees, and they focused on building contract games and other quasi-soulless experiences.

“We crafted some smaller titles on our end, but we never were really good,” Babieno said. “We tried to catch everything on the market and we were just following the crowd. And you know, if you’re following trends, if you’re following what’s fashionable, you can’t be good.”

Everything changed for Bloober Team in 2015. Though many of us may have blocked this fact from our memories, Bloober is the studio that built Basement Crawl, the worst-reviewed launch game on PlayStation 4. Basement Crawl was essentially a busted Bomberman clone when it came out in 2014, and it was shredded in reviews, settling at a rating of 27 on Metacritic. However, since it was one of just a few games to launch alongside the PS4, it sold well enough. Bloober tried to make things right by releasing Brawl in 2015, a free game that addressed many of the complaints players had with Basement Crawl.

Bloober Team

After the release of Brawl, Bloober underwent an internal reckoning. Babieno sat down with his team and had an honest conversation about the studio’s identity and future.

“It looks like we still don't know how to make something good, and we have a game which has 27 percent on Metacritic, so maybe we should change,” Babieno remembered thinking. “Our decision was, OK, we need to focus on creating something we will be proud of. So that's why we went back to the roots and decided we would like to deliver horror games.”

Horror has a special, blood-soaked place in Babieno’s heart. He grew up devouring books, films and games with unsettling themes, including works from Stephen King, Graham Masterton and the Silent Hill team at Konami. Fear spoke to him, and as a creator, he saw how it functioned as a shortcut to deep human emotion and universal experiences.

Babieno took his team’s plan to their investors and laid it all out: “We sat with our funders and told them, guys, we need some money, but we have a pretty good idea for the next 10 years. We would like to become one of the really good psychological horror game developers.” The investors said yes. Bloober Team 2.0 was born.

Layers of Fear came out in 2016 and was a breakout hit, followed by a succession of well-received psychological horror games, including Observer and Blair Witch. But that was just the public side of things: As Bloober was rebranding and cementing itself as a pillar of psychological horror, Babieno was secretly trying to convince Konami to let Bloober make a Silent Hill game.

Babieno first approached Konami in 2015 with a proposal to make a Silent Hill spin-off game, something completely new in the series. The conversation stayed alive for four years, and finally in 2019, Konami invited Babieno to Japan for a meeting.

“Almost the whole management board came to the meeting, and they requested us to prepare a pitch for a Silent Hill 2 remake,” Babieno said. “And whoa. We were so afraid to touch it. We understood from the first day of the conversation that we will have half of the world which will love us and half of the world which will hate us. We are touching something sacred.”

Other studios were in the running to handle Konami’s secret Silent Hill 2 remake, but Bloober got the gig. Konami made the official announcement in October 2022.

Which brings us back to today. The studio just released Layers of Fear, a complete series remastering done in Unreal Engine 5. With this collection, it’s closing the door early on the 10-year plan it laid out for Bloober 2.0 in 2015. A hard pivot worked out well for Bloober once before; it makes some sense to try that again.

Silent Hill 2 will be the first title out of Bloober Team 3.0, the studio focused on action-first, mass-market horror games. This is a small but significant shift in Babieno’s direction, but he — and Bloober as a whole — is still obsessed with fear.

“We are in a very specific moment in history because we have a lot of crises,” Babieno said. He described horror games as a type of catharsis for everyday terror, a safe place where people can dissect their own reactions to intense stimuli and reckon with real-world emotions. He mentioned the pervasive threat of climate change and global economic crises; he pointed out that Bloober is based in Poland, which has a front-row seat to the carnage of the war in Ukraine.

He continued, “As human beings, we would like to be prepared for something that is unexpected. Those fears are around us … we would like to deliver games that allow us to deal with our fears.”

Meanwhile, Bloober Team has grown to roughly 230 employees, and one of Babieno’s greatest personal fears is letting them down or having to lay anyone off. As of 2023, Bloober doesn’t do layoffs; in the past three years, he said just five people have left the company. Babieno isn’t actively growing Bloober at the moment and he isn’t looking for a buyer, even as the industry’s biggest publishers are buying talented indie studios left and right. From Babieno’s perspective, Bloober works best as an independent company building AAA-quality games — horror games, to be exact.

“I would like to stay independent because only then will we be able to make something new, something fresh and creative,” he said. “I don’t want to create games by watching an Excel spreadsheet. I would like to deliver some new milestones of horror, our niche.”

Google is about to make it a lot easier for you to buy and rent movies across streamers — for better or worse for your wallet. The company has announced it's adding a Shop tab on Android TV, where you can browse, purchase and store movies.

Though it looks a bit similar, the Shop tab differs from the Android TV's Discover tab in a few ways. Both pages show content from a variety of streaming platforms, but the Discover tab displays recommendations based on your viewing habits, whether or not the titles cost anything to watch. On the other hand, the Shop tab only features content you can, well, shop. Instead of having to click through each app individually, you can see all the movies that are available to rent or buy across the streamers you subscribe to.

The Shop Tab also has a Library section that displays every title you've purchased with your Google account on Google TV devices and its mobile app, Android TV devices and YouTube. Speaking of the Google TV mobile app, you can log in to it on your phone or tablet to download content from your Library for offline access later on. The wait to access this new feature shouldn't be long, as Google reports that the Shop tab will roll out across the US and 23 other countries over the next few weeks.

A Samsung Galaxy S23 FE may be on the way after the company declined to offer a mid-range entry point for its previous-gen flagship smartphone lineup. Steve Hemmerstoffer (aka @OnLeaks), who has a solid track record, has provided a first look at renders of the Galaxy S23 FE.

The leaked images suggest Samsung's device will have a triple-camera array. Unusually for a mid-range smartphone, the sensors may include a telephoto lens. The Galaxy S23 FE is said to have a screen size of around 6.4 inches, with a 120Hz AMOLED panel and an under-display fingerprint reader.

Details about the internals are less clear at this point, as The Verge notes. Rumors have pointed to the Galaxy S23 FE running on a Snapdragon 8 Plus Gen 1 chipset from 2022 in some markets and the Exynos 2200 elsewhere. It could have 6GB and 8GB RAM options and 128GB or 256GB of storage.

The Galaxy S23 FE should arrive by the end of 2023, according to Hemmerstoffer. We may not have to wait too much longer to find out about it either, as Samsung will run its second Unpacked event of the year in July.

Steve Hemmerstoffer/Smartprix