Players will step into the role of a warlock called Kaatri on a quest to find someone she's lost with the help of powerful witch Tasha. The gameplay makes clear that we're not in for another Baldur's Gate 3.

Kaatri is played by Tricia Helfer, the Canadian-American actress and former model best known for playing Number Six in Battlestar Galactica. Her character is described as an experienced warrior newly bound as a warlock. She must master forbidden magic in a land where she's an outsider. Maggie Robertson (Orin the Red in Baldur's Gate 3) plays the witch Tash.

The game is a single player action adventure in which you can combine magic with melee, with combat giving players a plethora of tools. The gameplay shows a more action-focused experience than the turn-based RPG formula of Baldur’s Gate 3.

At one moment in the reveal, we see Kaatri holds an enemy in the air, finish another and picks up a sword to throw. Se also defeats an enemy after summoning tendrils from the ground.

Fans are praising the darker, gothic aesthetic and strong visual identity, hailing Kaatri’s design as a bold attempt at modernisation. Her look blends battle-worn realism with supernatural flair. One person writing on X describes her as a mix of Galadriel from The Lord of the Rings and Sarah Kerrigan from StarCraft.

In an interview with Variety, Maggie says she believes the game will be "different because we’re following one character’s story,”

"Warlock takes us through the relationships of these specific characters, Tasha and Kaatri. Instead of being pulled in many different directions, we’re asking players to focus on one relationship with a lot of emotional depth,” she adds.

Helfer says of her character: “We really get to understand her, know her motivations, and hopefully become captivated by the emotion driving her. And you’ll still have all the fun parts of D & D. You’ll still see iconic spells, characters, and locations from D & D. I think Warlock is trying to balance being a great experience that is both accessible to newcomers and longtime fans of D & D.”

The game is expected in 2027.

I was worried about Resonance: A Plague Tale Legacy, mostly because of the sword combat. When Asobo announced that Sophia, the pirate we met in the previous game, Requiem, would be running around with a blade and proper melee combat in her own prequel, I couldn't help thinking, do we really need this? A Plague Tale had carved out a little space for itself with an original blend of stealth, puzzles, rats, Medieval misery and beautifully written characters, and suddenly it looked like we were heading towards a 14th-century God of War. There are enough games where I can smash someone in the face with a sword; A Plague Tale didn't need to be another.

But the combat turns out to be one of the least important things about Resonance, and that's why it works so well. The combat is perfectly decent, Sophia is a nimble fighter, and there are some nice but unrevolutionary ideas around parrying, dodging and using the environment – kicking enemies off bridges and into ancient 'holes' is oddly satisfying. The aim is to always knock enemies off balance, such as kicking a shield carrier or throwing objects to stun enemies, which leaves them open to a final killer blow – you've done this before. A simple upgrade tree gives Sophia things like faster dodges and double kicks, and new hidden weapons offer buffs and debuffs, like a broken spearhead for stabbing through shields but only useful when running.

Sword fights are well implemented but feel basic compared to games that make melee combat the whole point, like Devil May Cry 5 or God of War. The ancient Minoan 'vision resonances' where Sophia lives out Theseus' trials centuries earlier show this most clearly, because these gladiatorial encounters don't really develop the system beyond the same parry-and-counter rhythm; in fact, by the credits Sophia is more skilled with a sword than Theseus.

But the thing I kept thinking about while playing was how recognisably A Plague Tale it all felt, despite the introduction of combat into the mix. The writing, the sense of place, the puzzles, the horrible creeping dread, the way a beautiful landscape will evolve into grimly dark decay – it's all still here and done better than ever before.

Still A Plague Tale at heart

Resonance is both a prequel to A Plague Tale: Innocence and Requiem, with Sophia setting out to uncover the truth about her past on the mysterious Minotaur's island. Sophia is already a very different lead from the series' heroine, Amicia. She's a plunderer, a pirate, confident with a sword, and has enough swagger to make the early sections feel lively and just a little carefree, particularly when she's travelling with sidekick Leni. There's a real sense that the two of them have stumbled into something exciting, and for a while Resonance is happy to let you enjoy that feeling.

But things turn dark – visions, secrets, supernatural – and the game doesn't simply turn the lights off and throw monsters at you, but Sophia's whole attitude changes as she discovers what is happening on the island, what it means, and the performance sells that change particularly well. She starts out excited and curious, then becomes frightened, remorseful and increasingly aware that she's dealing with something she can't simply stab her way out of.

That shift is reflected in the environments too, as the spectacular open spaces, brilliant blue skies, clear water, sandy ruins and enormous ancient statues give way to claustrophobic tombs and catacombs where the walls are crawling with the remnants of the Macula – the game's supernatural blood infestation. There's a lovely late-game scene where the sunrise catches the orange rocks and temple ruins, and everything looks almost impossibly beautiful, which makes the uglier things lurking underneath feel even more horrible.

Exploring is enjoyable; there are grapple hooks, hidden tombs, secret passages and ancient mechanisms, and while none of this is especially revolutionary – and the 14th-century Tomb Raider tag feels apt – Asobo has such a good eye for environments that I rarely minded following the obvious path. I kept wanting to see what was around the next corner, and uncover the next tease of why everything went to literal hell for King Minos centuries before, because looking around these crumbling ruins, something wild went down.

The same goes for the puzzles. Most of them revolve around light, using an ancient golden sphere that Sophia can upgrade as she progresses. It can become a prism for matching coloured light or uncovering secret messages and clues, among other things, and eventually a focused beam with a rather more practical use. I wouldn't call the puzzles difficult – there were two that made me properly stop and think –, but I liked the way the idea runs through the game, particularly because manipulating light feels like a natural extension of what A Plague Tale has always done with torchlight and darkness. The more I play, the more Resonance feels like an evolution of the series' core identity and mechanics.

That's because the combat is never allowed to take over. You still spend plenty of time sneaking, solving puzzles and exploring the medieval world's enormous environments, as Sophia's emotional story unfolds, drawing together multiple strings into a slow-burning revelatory arc, and when the game really wants to frighten you, it drops the combat entirely and embraces the series stealth roots.

The tombs of Minoa are covered in fluorescent dust, and Sophia picks it up as she moves around. The Macula has produced a new sort of worm-like creature that can track her by following that dust, so now your footprints become a track it can follow. You have to think about where you're walking, where you can hide, which areas are safe and how quickly you can get from one piece of cover to another.

Artistically, the new creature feels like an evolution of the rat horde in how it moves and attacks – the creature fears light, will suck the dust from the air, and you can see the glowing particles being pulled away from Sophia as it gets closer, and more so, every particle in the scene is sucked past at speed. Its breathing changes too, becoming deeper and more urgent, and as it breathes in slowly, those dust particles move rhythmically on screen; there were several points where I found myself sitting completely still, waiting for it to move away, just watching the particles ebb, flow and subside.

You can light cauldrons to create safe spaces; moving slowly while crouched leaves no dust behind, and jumping across gaps breaks the trail for a little while, but there's never quite enough security to make you comfortable. You're always watching that dust, listening for the creature and wondering whether you've left too obvious a trail, or questioning whether you can run to safety or keep crawling, creating a novel sense of risk and reward. It's a different mechanic from the rats, obviously, but it produces the same kind of tension.

The horror keeps developing as well, with an impressive late-game sequence involving crusted, desiccated figures that starts out looking like another piece of environmental dressing and then becomes much less harmless as they crack into life and chase you down, and like the earlier games' rats, make too much noise, and you'll be swamped in the mannequin-like monsters.

Resonance doesn't just repeat its best tricks either, as the further Sophia gets into Minoa, the more unpleasant everything becomes, and the Macula's organic tendrils start appearing everywhere, turning what should be grand ancient ruins into something diseased and almost alive. The story pulls it all together through Sophia's connection to an ancient Carrier and Protector, with events from the Minoan era bleeding into her own journey.

I don't want to get too deep into what happens here because much of the pleasure comes from watching the pieces connect, but this is where Resonance earns its place in the series. Sophia isn't simply discovering an ancient mystery and ticking off a list of tombs. The Carrier, the Protector and the Macula become tied to the choices she has to make, and the game's revelations gradually explain why she has been drawn into this particular story.

A particularly effective parallel is how Sophia begins the game thinking she can handle whatever is put in front of her, only to confront something that can't be solved with confidence, a sword, or a clever bit of tomb raiding. That emotional progression is more interesting than watching her become a better fighter, especially since, like Requiem, no one here is safe from a gruesome death, and that pendulum hanging over every plot twist gives Resonance the emotional hook I've loved about this series. By the final third, Resonance is fully back in the territory where A Plague Tale has always been strongest. It's miserable, beautiful, frightening and surprisingly heartfelt, with the different pieces of the game finally pushing in the same direction.

I went into Resonance thinking Asobo might have made a mistake by adding combat to the mix; instead, that side of the game is almost beside the point. It gives Sophia a different physicality, and it adds another texture to the game, but the series' identity is strong enough to survive the change, and the new stealth mechanics actually push it somewhere more interesting.

There are still things I'd change. I'd like the combat to have more depth, especially in those ancient sections, and the puzzles could certainly ask more of you. But those aren't the things that stuck with me after finishing it.

What works? It's the landscapes. Sophia's relationship with Leni and her growing connection to Theseus. The slow collapse of that carefree adventure into something much darker. The glowing dust being sucked from the air as something hunts me through the ruins. Those desiccated figures breaking and beginning to move. The orange light over the ancient temples, the huge detailed environments that kept me pausing to enter Photo Mode. The feeling that every time I thought I'd figured out what Resonance is doing, there was another nasty little idea waiting for me.

A Plague Tale didn't need to become a new me-too God of War or even a medieval Tomb Raider; it just needed to remain itself while finding somewhere new to go, and Resonance manages that brilliantly. For all my initial doubts, this is the strongest entry in the series yet, and it leaves Asobo with a much bigger, stranger world to play with next time.

Humankind 2 has finally been revealed, with Amplitude showing off its new historical strategy game at Gamescom during the Opening Night Live event, although it’s the trailer rather than the game itself that has people stopping to ask the same awkward question we hear too often these days: was this made with AI?

I can see why fans have asked the question – the footage, which showed a montage of Earth through humanity's different ages, has those short, sharp edits and uncanny quality we’ve all become pretty familiar with in AI-generated video. Except Humankind 2's trailer isn't made using AI. Amplitude says the trailer was made with real actors, practical sets and custom-made props, which makes the whole thing more interesting and creative than prompting a video into reality, and should be celebrated and not questioned.

The studio made a formal statement on its official X account, stating clearly: "The HUMANKIND 2's live-action announcement trailer was filmed at Nu Boyana Film Studios in Sofia using real actors, practical sets, and custom-made props created specifically for the production. We will be sharing behind-the-scenes images from the shoot soon."

The trailer races through different periods of history, dropping us into scenes packed with costumes, characters, and elaborate environments, and a deliberately exaggerated first-person perspective runs through much of it too. A fisheye-style lens bends the edges of the image, stretching faces and rooms and giving the whole thing a strange, slightly surreal quality.

The reaction has been mixed, with some viewers convinced they’ve spotted AI artefacts, while others have pointed out that the footage looks much more like deliberately stylised cinematography, particularly when you take the fisheye lens and practical production into account. In fact, some on the studio's X account even blamed the developer for putting itself in the situation of being accused of AI, with X user 'centrist fan' writing, "you did kind of set yourself up there because I have seen 'historical figures doing a selfie' AI slop before, so making it the basis of your trailer was a decision".

The distinction between real and AI is becoming increasingly strange for artists and filmmakers to deal with because AI imagery has developed such a recognisable visual language so quickly. And this isn't the first time a studio or artist has been wrongly accused of using AI. We’ve got used to seeing certain kinds of faces, lighting, compositions and impossible camera moves in generated images, to the point where those choices can now make real footage look artificial.

And Humankind 2 is probably one of the more appropriate games to stumble into that particular argument because Amplitude’s original Humankind was built around letting players create their own version of history, mixing cultures and taking civilisations in directions that don’t necessarily follow the traditional historical timeline. The sequel expands that idea with new cultures, progression systems, and a revised interface, and is currently expected to launch on PC in 2027.

Neon Giant knows how to make a good-looking game. The dev's breakout game, The Ascent, was packed with cyberpunk detail, cramming neon, machinery, buildings and characters into almost every available pixel, and No Law looks like the studio is taking that same approach into a much bigger first-person world.

The new No Law trailer (below) gives us another look at Port Desire following the game's reveal at State of Unreal 2026, the game's cyber-noir port city, and it's becoming increasingly difficult to see the city as simply a backdrop for the shooting.

Port Desire is perched on sea cliffs, an industrial cybergrunge city where concrete, machinery and neon sit alongside surprisingly lush greenery. That contrast gives the world a look of its own, rather than making it feel like another futuristic city assembled from the usual cyberpunk ingredients.

It's also a city designed to be looked at from different angles. Rooftops, streets and alleys stack on top of one another, while the mixture of industrial architecture and vegetation gives the environment a sense of age and history. Neon Giant describes Port Desire as a trading hub where anyone can pursue their dreams, although judging by the trailer, some of those dreams are likely to involve considerably more gunfire than others.

This is where No Law becomes particularly interesting from an art direction perspective. Neon Giant has talked about building the game around the idea of "Density Over Scale", rather than simply chasing the biggest possible open world. It's a philosophy that makes sense for a studio coming from The Ascent, where the pleasure often came from simply looking around and seeing another layer of detail tucked behind the one you were already looking at.

The new trailer suggests that Port Desire is built around that same idea. A lot is happening in relatively compact spaces, with the city's vertical layout giving Neon Giant plenty of opportunities to change the view, lighting, and atmosphere as you move through it.

That's important for an Unreal Engine 5 game, because the technology can produce enormous worlds, but bigger doesn't automatically mean more interesting, and No Law appears to be betting that a dense world packed with visual information is more rewarding than an empty landscape that happens to be huge.

It also helps that the city isn't just there to be admired but explored, lived in and used. You play as Grey Harker, a retired veteran who has settled into a peaceful life growing plants after being critically wounded on his final deployment. Naturally, that peace doesn't last, and an unwanted visitor drags him back into the violence he thought he'd left behind.

From there, No Law gives you plenty of control over how you deal with its problems in a kind of emergent way that offers a sense of freedom. You can use Grey's tactical background to stay in the shadows, or push directly into combat, with sci-fi equipment, vertical movement and combat upgrades giving you different ways to approach encounters. Your decisions can also lead to different routes and endings.

That makes Port Desire's design more important than it might seem at first, as the city is built around different routes and approaches that need to feel like somewhere you can actually navigate, rather than a collection of pretty vistas placed between missions. The design of No Law's city aims for a new level of complexity and density, but that also means we need environment design that feels familiar and follows logic we understand.

We've seen plenty of cyberpunk cities since Cyberpunk 2077 raised the bar for the genre, but Neon Giant has already demonstrated with The Ascent that it has its own visual language for the future. No Law is taking that language somewhere considerably larger, and the combination of industrial architecture, greenery and vertical exploration gives Port Desire plenty of personality. The guns might get you into the city, but it's the city itself that I'm increasingly interested in exploring.

No Law will release in 2027 for PC, PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X.

Even though I've already put hundreds of hours into Elden Ring back when it first launched in 2022 as well as the release of its substantial Shadow of the Erdtree expansion in 2024, having the most revolutionary open world game this decade (second only to Nintendo's own Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom) on the Switch 2 was always a tantalising prospect when a complete edition was announced for the console in its original reveal.

Of course, that excitement turned to trepidation when initial reactions to the game's performance and optimisation at last year's Gamescom delayed Elden Ring Tarnished Edition from its original 2025 window. Naturally, it would have been a touch too ironic for this port to be a literally tarnished version compared to other releases, but it would also be in FromSoftware's interest not to make a hash of it, especially when it's partnering with Nintendo for Switch 2 exclusive The Duskbloods. And now, a year later, just in time for the next edition of Gamescom in Cologne, it's a relief that it's still a joy to journey back to The Lands Between in all its majesty.

Elden Ring but current-gen

While Elden Ring was actually a cross-gen release, the Switch 2 version certainly feels closer to current-gen than last-gen. It may not have the hardware grunt to deliver a smooth 60 fps, but the details, from shadows to foliage or the bright lights emitting from the ever-present Erdtree or the sights of grace, don't feel diminished whether you're playing docked or in handheld mode, while I didn't feel like I was stuck on the loading screen for long whenever I died.

The framerate overall feels stable enough that I can freely roam large stretches of this open world on my spectral horse Torrent, just marvelling at anything that catches my eye without things coming to a judder, or parry an enemy's attack and be able to blame myself rather than the game's performance if I mess up the timing.

But one of the refreshing things about coming back to Elden Ring is just how much of a leap it was for FromSoftware. Whereas other Soulslikes feel like they're still working from Dark Souls 3's design, what I had forgotten is how Elden Ring gives you so many more options than parrying, including just being able to block with your shield and immediately follow up with a powerful staggering counter.

More notable is that depending on the weapon you have, the ZL input changes to a much more diverse set of skills, or you can even change them with Ashes of War items. It gives you a much more flexible way to customise your build to fit your playstyle, while you also have the benefit of just being able to browse YouTube guides to all kinds of broken builds. Even then, if you're still struggling by yourself, you also have the ability to seek out and summon spirits to help you out, and while often they're just acting as a distraction, you can also upgrade their effectiveness while they don't increase a boss's HP like when summoning another player.

A map worth exploring

It's the same philosophy applied to its open world map, which just keeps expanding and expanding the more you explore, where you really can go in just about any direction you like. Want to take on a brutally tough enemy the moment you step out onto the grassy grandeur of Limgrave? You can, or just ride another way and level up with some more manageable mini dungeons, or find and summon spirits to aid you in battle. Or you might find a chest that whisks you off to the nightmarish rotting hellscape of Caelid that you normally wouldn't reach for another 10 or so hours (even though actually there's nothing stopping you from riding in that direction in a matter of minutes from the start).

If you run into one brick wall, you'll almost certainly find something a little more surmountable elsewhere, or conversely you can also just race ahead to some of the late game areas, including unlocking the Shadow of the Erdtree expansion that takes you to a completely different map. Found a weapon or spell you want to use but realised you invested runes in a different kind of build? Then there's a way to respec too, even if you have to work for it first. But the benefit of being a game that's been out for a few years is that there's no shortage of YouTube guides where you can find the most optimal route or a path to crafting the most broken builds.

Yet despite all the hours I've put into the game before, I also just enjoyed being able to rediscover The Lands Between by myself, taking different routes than I had before, forgetting about something I had discovered by accident the first time. I did nonetheless make use of one of the new starting classes included in Tarnished Edition (which will also be added to other versions as a free update), Knights of Ide, with a sword I feel definitely helped me breeze through my first couple of hours. But old habits die hard, and I was soon back to wielding my beloved Bloodhound's Fang, which had always been by my side until the endgame.

With such a rich lore to its world, especially one that Game of Thrones' George R.R. Martin helped shape, the best way to experience Elden Ring, almost like any old book, is just to take your time and savour every drop of it. Even with its expansive cast of demigods, many whom I still sometimes struggle to keep track of given the similarities of their names – your Godfreys, your Godricks, or your Melinas and Melanias – it's the smaller questlines and their recurring characters that really give the game its charm, from the tragic Millicent to the jolly giant Living Jar Alexander, or that dirtbag Patches, who has appeared in many of FromSoft's games in some guise or another. There's no definitive or right way to play Elden Ring, but you'd be missing out if you were to skip the questline featuring a group of characters that the lads at RKG affectionately refer to as 'Welsh Avengers'.

Switch 2 delivers The Lands Between on the go

Tarnished Edition is, however, not without some blemishes. Admittedly, I haven't been able to sink in as many hours exploring every nook and cranny of the port as I did with the original release, but I still encountered moments when the game started dropping frames to the point of a slideshow. Yet on these occasions, I think it must also have been something else buggy happening under the hood, as I also spent time wandering in large open fields fighting multiple enemies, including a flying fire-breathing dragon, without the action grinding to a halt. For the most egregious moments, I simply found quitting out and opening the game again usually rectified matters, so it's more occasional bugginess than inconsistent performance.

The benefit of playing Elden Ring on Switch 2 is of course the portability factor but again there's caveats there too since this will definitely drain your battery faster if you don't have a power bank or plug socket to hand, while exploring the darker sections of the game such as its underground caverns and catacombs is going to be a struggle if you're playing outdoors or with sunlight coming from a train or plane window.

Ultimately, however, this remains a masterpiece with an open world that really does offer freedom and discovery, and after several hundred hours, I can still see myself happily rediscovering it all again without dreading another long grind or sluggish pacing that makes other open-world re-releases a tougher time. Well, okay, maybe Radahn is still an absolute pain, especially if you want to get to Shadow of the Erdtree sooner, but at least it's still a spectacular fight all the same.

The aim, it seems, is to create a direct narrative bridge to the December release of Avengers: Doomsday. But the extra footage and a subtle dialogue tweak won't be the biggest changes that fans notice. The entire movie appears to look very different because of altered colour grading, and the new aesthetic is dividing opinion.

Is Marvel recognising that it got it wrong in 2019? Or is it more a case that the fashion has changed since the washed-out look of the original release?

I'm pretty sure that Marvel Studios always knew that log video – the flat low-contrast straight-from-camera footage used to preserve detail – is intended to be colour graded, but Avengers Endgame was released at a time when there was a tendency for filmmakers to intentionally lean towards that washed-out log look.

It's an aesthetic that's since crept into social media now that more consumer cameras and phone can shoot log. Blacks look grey and colours lack pop. There have been different opinions about why it became popular, from people thinking that it looks more premium, to theories that colourists had simply become so used to staring at log footage that it started to look 'right'.

Whatever the reason, it seems that Marvel's finally rediscovered the saturation slider on DaVinci Resolve. At least, the Avengers: Endgame Encore trailer (above) suggests that the muted browns and grays of the 2019 release have been replaced with more vibrant tones.

But fans are divided over the results. For some, this is how the movie should always have looked. Thanos appears more purple, closer to his comic book design, and the final battle's richer saturation should address long‑standing complaints about the original’s “muddy” look.

Some even argue the original cut now looks “embarrassing” by comparison.

It's the "difference between fighting in a concrete basement versus fighting on an actual fiery battlefield," one fan reckons. "Thanos went from a bruised, shadowy eggplant to an actual high-definition galactic menace," someone else writes on X.

There's also speculation that the change has been made to align the MCU’s visual language with upcoming projects, most imminently Avengers: Doomsday.

However, critics question whether altering the original landmark film undermines its historical integrity and the Russo Brothers' original creative vision.

"People's tastes have been completely ruined by oversaturated TikTok edits. There's no way ya'll seriously think this looks better?," one person writes on X.

It's the Toy Story colour grading controversy all over again, but without the technical hurdle of the digital scanning process in the middle. Let me know in the comments which version you prefer, but I think I'd take the Encore look for Marvel's universe.

Avengers: Endgame Encore will be released on 25 September. Avengers: Doomsday will follow on 18 December.

The ad itself is a departure from Apple's traditional aesthetic in many ways, though it retains the usual minimal style across background and product. But the animated components – beginning with a yellow, Hulk-style strongman busting out of the Mac mini, are more in keeping with Apple's current marketing style – whimsical, less corporate and less polished. In that way, this ad is more similar to the style of its TikTok marketing posts, but with more craft added in.

"To show off the power and speed of the Mac mini, we turned it into a character capable of anything," says animator Justin Dasch. "So you got rocket ships, freaking race cars, buff dudes, and super complex robots doing multitasking."

See more of what the animation team had to say in the video below.

I'm enamoured by this ad. After the furore and subsequent apology that came out of Apple's iPad Pro ad of a couple of years ago (in which an iPad Pro crushed musical instruments, paint brushes and other symbols of tactile creativity), it's also an appreciated nod to the value of human creativity. The mac mini is positioned as an enabler rather than a replacement, and that's all creatives really want from their tech.

What do you think of the Apple mac mini ad? Let us know in the comments.

That's why I was surprised by how much I played of Mega Man: Dual Override. It has the same pace and challenge of the best retro games; I still hit that familiar wall, but it came later than usual, and I found myself wanting to have another go rather than simply deciding I'd had enough.

Playing on PS5 Pro, Dual Override looks lovely, with fluid, bouncy animation, bold environments and plenty of modern polish, but Capcom hasn't tried to turn Mega Man into something he isn't. The visuals are cleaner and more sophisticated, obviously, but the series' personality is still all over it, from the cartoon character designs to the ridiculously aggressive and flamboyant Robot Masters and the bright, chunky mechanical world they inhabit.

Mega Man goes back to basics

After my hands-on, I went back to Mega Man: The Wily Wars on Nintendo Switch 2, free on Nintendo Online, and played the original NES games again, which made me appreciate how closely Dual Override sticks to the core design. The levels still feel like collections of little platforming problems, with each screen asking you to work out how you're going to climb, jump, slide and shoot your way through it without getting knocked off a platform or smashed by one of the roaming robots.

That familiar Mega Man tension is there too: you know exactly what you should do, but getting your hands to do it without taking a hit is another matter. Dual Override sits right on that edge for much of the demo, challenging enough to make getting through a section feel like an achievement without immediately making me want to throw the controller across the room (which would have been embarrassing given I was sat in Capcom’s London studio).

The Robot Masters are where things get considerably tougher. The demo gives me three bosses to tackle one after the other, and as with the classic games, they're essentially puzzles disguised as fights. You need to watch what they're doing, learn their movements and attacks, figure out the patterns and rhythms, work out where the safe spaces are and then slowly turn that knowledge into something you can actually execute.

Big Press Don is the most straightforward of the three, a rocket-springed trashcan-like character with a mohawk who spends his fight bouncing around the arena. At first he's all movement and noise, but once I realise Mega Man can slide underneath him when he hops across the screen, the whole thing becomes much easier.

Astro Man is a different story. Fans will recognise him from Mega Man 8, and he's back flying around the arena inside an orb, firing smaller globe patterns at my on-screen Blue Bomber before dropping screen-filling meteors from above. His attacks aren't especially difficult to understand once you've watched them a few times, but trying to remember those patterns while also dealing with everything else happening around you is where the trouble starts.

Battling the new Twinkle Girl

Then Twinkle Girl turns up, and this is where Dual Override sheds any desire to be ‘easy’ and offers up a classic Mega Man difficulty spike. She's one of eight new Robot Masters in the new game and has a suitably chaotic fireworks theme, filling the arena with explosion patterns while mixing in slide attacks and other movements. I spent a fair amount of time simply trying to understand her rhythm before I could concentrate on actually damaging her.

Fed up with losing, retrying, losing again (and again), switching to Proto Man makes the fight a little easier. He's returning as a playable character alongside Mega Man and has his own abilities, including the ability to speed across the screen incredibly quickly, almost like an arrow. That makes it much easier to get out of the way of some of Twinkle Girl's attacks and close the distance when there's an opening. The problem is that Twinkle Girl doesn't just keep doing the same thing. She starts adapting to my approach and countering what I'm doing, so a tactic that works one, two or three times might not work quite so well the fourth. It adds another layer to the usual Mega Man boss routine, where learning the pattern is only half the job and you then have to work out how to use that knowledge when the boss starts changing things up.

There's more flexibility elsewhere too. The game introduces a new Override system that temporarily lets Mega Man and Proto Man push beyond his normal capabilities, but the boost comes with a downside: once it runs out, you suffer a temporary drop in performance. It's something you'll need to decide when to use rather than simply treating it as a button you hit whenever a boss gets difficult.

Custom Chips give you another way to tailor Mega Man and Proto Man, with upgrades including rapid-fire, a protective shield bubble, hover and other abilities – essentially giving you ways to play aggressively and defensively. I didn't get enough time with the system to know how much it will change the finished game, but it's an interesting addition to a series that's traditionally been very focused on learning its levels and bosses rather than building a character. The weapons still have that familiar trade-off too, because special attacks consume energy and you'll need to think about when they're worth using. One of the new weapons in the demo, for example, combines a powerful charge attack with an aerial dash, giving it a use beyond simply hitting an enemy harder.

Don't mess with what works

That's a lot of new stuff around a formula that, for the most part, Capcom clearly doesn't want to mess with, and after playing the demo I think that's probably the right decision. Going back to the NES games afterwards made it obvious how much of Dual Override's appeal comes from keeping those old ideas intact rather than reinventing them.

I'm still not brilliant at Mega Man, and I'm sure there are plenty of opportunities ahead for Dual Override to remind me exactly why I keep falling out with these games, but this is the first time in a while I've come away from a Mega Man hands-on thinking about how much further I might get rather than how quickly I can put the controller down.

Mega Man: Dual Override is coming in 2027 for Nintendo Switch 2, Nintendo Switch, PS5, PS4, Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One and PC.

It’s a straightforward sword fight for about five seconds. Then a pack of wolves joins in. I fire an explosive bolt from my Magic Archer’s bow. The blast catches almost everyone, sending wolves and barbarians tumbling through the air and one unlucky wolf over my head, its four legs flailing comically. Before I’ve had time to enjoy the chaos, a huge woolly-horned thing clutching a tree decides it wants to join the fight.

This is Dragon’s Dogma 2: Dark Arisen, the new snowy expansion to Capcom’s elegantly chaotic role-player, again rendered beautifully in RE Engine, at its best. Battles here don't feel designed to play out one particular way; instead, a fight can go in any direction at any time, often with startling and random results. Playing Dark Arisen is proof again that Capcom is having a good year, coming after Resident Evil Requiem and Pragmata, even if those games don't have this expansion's playful sense of unpredictability.

Dark Arisen is beautifully chaotic

That sense of unpredictability is something Kento Kinoshita, game director of Dragon’s Dogma 2: Dark Arisen, tells me the team has deliberately designed into the expansion. The trick, he explains, is making encounters feel unpredictable without simply becoming random.

“There’s a certain unpredictability – not necessarily random, but a kind of sense that anything can happen when you’ve got so many different characters interacting with the enemy at the same time,” Kinoshita says.

It’s a philosophy that becomes obvious within minutes of playing Dark Arisen on both PS5 Pro and Switch 2. The new Norgan region is a beautiful, sprawling frozen landscape, full of crunchy snow, cold winds and distant hints of danger. But there’s always a sense that the calm could collapse into chaos at any moment, often if I stray off a path to nose around a cave, peer inside an abandoned castle doorway or just linger too long in one spot.

When it all goes sideways, combat demands you adapt. Playing as one of the new Hybrid Vocations, a Magic Archer, I’m constantly dipping into an array of combat shots, magic and spells, switching between fire and electricity depending on what’s attacking, or just instinctively because some shots look more impressive than others. One of the new abilities, the Vocation’s old-school-feeling targeting system, lets me sweep across enemies to highlight multiple targets, pinging each satisfyingly, before unleashing a flurry of projectiles, with empowered attacks capable of turning an already messy fight into something spectacular.

The result is combat that never feels entirely predictable. A fight can begin with a single enemy and quickly become a sprawling battle involving multiple creatures, your Pawns and the environment itself. Sometimes the smartest thing to do is rethink your entire approach halfway through.

That’s exactly what Kinoshita says the team wants. “We want to reward players for reading the situation properly and being able to handle whatever the game throws at them,” he explains.

It’s an important distinction to make, because Dragon’s Dogma 2 isn’t trying to create chaos for chaos’s sake. Its systems are designed to give you enough information and just the right tools to make sense of what is happening, even when the situation is rapidly spiralling out of control.

Exploring Norgan, anything can happen

That philosophy extends beyond combat and into how you go about exploring Norgan, which feels similarly flexible, with hidden cavern runs, ruined castle dungeons and unexpected routes to discover – using gadgets to climb and abseil to new areas of the map. Every new opening feels like it could lead to something useful, spectacular or capable of completely decimating my party.

Kinoshita says this approach is rooted in what makes Dragon’s Dogma different from other role-playing games. The combat has a physical, three-dimensional quality, with your adventurer able to climb and grapple onto enemies, while the game gives you a huge toolbox of items, abilities and Vocations to experiment with, including new Hybrid Vocations Magick Archer, Mystic Spearhand, Warfarer and Trickster- that expand on the base game’s character types. All of them come into use, because there often isn’t one correct solution to a fight.

That freedom is particularly apparent when Capcom’s developers start toying with Dark Arisen’s environments and creatures. Kinoshita says the team deliberately designed the new region, its enemies and its encounters as interconnected parts of the same experience. “We’ve tried to make sure that the enemy design and the encounter design and the map design really gel together and feel consistent,” he says.

The frozen environment is therefore more than a backdrop for the new monsters. It establishes the rules of the place. Snow, ice, storms and cold blue light create an immediate sense of atmosphere, while the occasional warmth of fire hints at a civilisation surviving within this hostile landscape. Then things start to get darker. Kinoshita describes the expansion as gradually shifting from the coldness of its northern setting towards something much more sinister, with that transition reflected in the enemies, environments and story.

The PS5 Pro demo culminates in the clearest expression of that ‘dark’ idea: a colossal dragon encounter that initially feels like a classic Dragon’s Dogma battle. There are huge attacks to avoid, fireballs and arrows flying across the arena, and the familiar thrill of climbing onto a massive creature to attack it at close range. Then the dragon resurrects the dead, and weaponises an army of zombies to tie me and my Pawns in knots.

Suddenly, the battle changes, as the series loves to do, and the undead adventurers become another threat, forcing me to divide my attention between the horde and the enormous dragon dominating the screen, demanding I change tactics on the fly – do I keep battling the creature or turn my attention to saving my Pawns? So, now I’m defending my party while trying not to lose sight of the creature itself, constantly reassessing where the next danger is coming from.

The dragon’s design has already given me clues about its undead nature, if I’d paid closer attention to the dramatic intro. Its skull is stripped down to bone, its long neck is fleshy and decayed, while its wings are riddled with holes and skeletal structures. Kinoshita says this undead dragon was conceived from the beginning of Dark Arisen’s development as something deliberately different for the series, both because of its combat possibilities and because of the story surrounding its existence.

Dark Arisen on Switch 2 spirals

That same design philosophy survives on Nintendo Switch 2, even if the hardware inevitably takes a visual hit compared with the PS5 Pro. The textures and lighting aren't quite as lavish, but the art direction remains intact: the cold vistas, dense environments and sense of an enormous world waiting to be explored. More importantly, the Switch 2 version still captures the expansion’s defining quality: its willingness to let situations spiral.

Playing Dark Arisen on Switch 2, a simple gryphon encounter becomes a literal wild ride as I climb onto its back for extra damage. Elsewhere, a slow crawl up a frozen castle reveals warriors and adventurers seemingly frozen in time before the ice dragon appears, blue light flashing across the tiny screen as its tail sweeps through the arena and my party fights for survival. It’s surprisingly easy to pick up and play on Switch 2, but there’s real depth beneath that accessibility. The complexity is on screen rather than hidden away in menus: watch what the enemy is doing, understand what your party can do, make a decision and be ready to change it.

That may be the most interesting evolution for Dark Arisen, and something Kinoshita says player feedback was instrumental in shaping the expansion. After the original Dragon’s Dogma 2 launched, players told the team they wanted more opportunities to explore the world. Looking back at the original Dragon’s Dogma: Dark Arisen from 2013, he says players enjoyed the replayable loot-driven loop of Bitterblack Isle from that era’s Dark Arisen expansion but also wanted a more open area to explore, alongside a story that gave that exploration greater purpose.

Dark Arisen for Dragon’s Dogma 2 responds by taking that loop out into a much larger open region, tying exploration more closely to its story. But what stands out most after playing it on both PlayStation Pro and Switch 2 isn't simply the extra content that’s been added but the way Capcom’s understood that the best moments in an RPG aren't always the ones the developer can predict. They can build the snowy landscapes, design the dragons and create the combat systems; developers can decide how a monster behaves and where it appears, but once all those pieces collide with a player, their Pawns and a few unexpected creatures, the result belongs to you.

The best stories in Dark Arisen won’t necessarily be the ones Kinoshita wrote or even intended. They're the ones that happen when a gang of barbarians, a pack of wolves, a giant woolly monster thing and one badly timed explosive arrow all meet in the same place.

Dragon's Dogma 2: Dark Arisen releases 9 October on PS5, PC, Xbox Series X/S, and Nintendo Switch 2.

BBG Entertainment's new version of Matthew Smith's 1983 platforming classic is coming to PC and consoles this 'Autumn' (Nintendo Store has it listed as 5 November), bringing all 20 original levels to current-gen consoles, alongside modern controls, a new soundtrack, online leaderboards and an interactive history of the game.

And yes, you can still play it looking like Manic Miner did on the Spectrum, with the original pixel-art presentation with CRT filters available alongside the new HD version, which adds parallax scrolling, lighting, and a much more detailed environment.

Manic Miner's modern update

It's that HD version that's causing the fuss. The reaction on the Lemon64 forum, where retro gamers have strong opinions about this sort of modern remake, has been lively. One poster called the new visuals a "garish visual mess", complaining that the busier backgrounds make it harder to pick out the sprites and scenery. Another user couldn't hold back and was more direct, asking: "How can you ruin this game?!" and taking particular issue with the new version of Miner Willy.

There are plenty of people who aren't quite as horrified, mind you. Some fans are happy to give the remake a chance, particularly because the original presentation hasn't been thrown away. Like BBG Entertainment's other retro remake – Boulder Dash 40th Anniversary – the original version of Manic Miner remains untouched. BBG isn't asking Spectrum fans to accept the HD version or nothing, which is enough for me.

The remake includes the original pixel-art look I remember, so if you want your Miner Willy jumping around against those wonderfully crude, colour-clashing Spectrum backgrounds, you can still have that experience, and there's no need to jump down the retro gaming rabbit hole the likes of Sinclair GamerCard offer (though that is fun).

The new HD mode is essentially another way to play the same 20 levels, with more elaborate backgrounds, lighting, and scrolling effects, while the controls have been tweaked for modern controllers. Whether those changes actually improve Manic Miner is another question.

The game's visual style was born out of necessity, of course, but after more than 40 years those limitations have become part of what people, including myself, love about it. There's a charm to the chunky colours, simple shapes and instantly readable platforms, and when you start layering effects, shadows and detailed backgrounds over everything, some fans clearly feel that readability and charm get lost.

It's a familiar problem with remakes of old games, but Manic Miner is perhaps an especially tricky one because the original is so visually distinctive and managed to convey character in two or three pixel blocks. This makes redesigning Willy himself another sticking point. He's one of those videogame characters whose appearance is inseparable from the machine he came from, a tiny collection of pixels that became an icon, and giving him a more detailed modern makeover was always going to invite comparisons with the original.

Celebrates 1983's Manic Miner

As mentioned, the good news is that Matthew Smith's original game hasn't been forgotten in all of this, and the original version looks excellent. More so, BBG says the remake is officially authorised by Smith, with the developer involved in the project, and the game will include an interactive history of Manic Miner's creation. That gives the remake a little more credibility than yet another unofficial attempt to cash in on retro nostalgia.

Still, the early reaction suggests BBG has picked a difficult game to modernise. Manic Miner doesn't need much explaining, and it certainly doesn't need much adding to it, which leaves the remake with a rather awkward challenge: how do you make a 43-year-old game feel new without making it look like something it was never supposed to be?

We'll find out when Manic Miner launches later this year, but if the reaction from the retro crowd so far is anything to go by, the HD mode is going to be getting almost as much attention as the game's notoriously brutal platforming.

Manic Miner launches on PS4, PS5, Switch, Xbox Series X/S and PC this Autumn.

To achieve this efficiently, I utilised a hybrid 3D-to-2D pipeline. I used Blender (see our guide to the best 3D modelling software) to construct the cavern’s massive multi-tiered architecture ensuring physically accurate perspective, complex bounced lighting and volumetric god rays.

Once this 3D foundation was established, I transitioned to Photoshop for heavy overpainting. This workflow enables me to solve complex spatial and level-design problems in 3D, while the final 2D paintover breathes life into the scene, breaking the ‘CG stiffness’ and delivering a warm, traditional hand painted illustration finish.

(Note that you might want one of the best laptops for 3D modelling or the best drawing tablets to work on).

This article originally appeared in ImagineFX. Subscribe to ImagineFX to never miss an issue. Print and digital subscriptions are available.

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This has resulted in an obsession with Burga, a brand that wraps all the essentials in a seemingly infinite array of stunning patterns. The designs span the product ranges so you can choose to go matchy-matchy, or you can get a smorgasboard of designs – and feel your dopamine rise when you use each thing.

• Browse the Burga website

Most importantly, the quality is premium across the products I've tried (I wouldn't recommend it if that wasn't true). The water bottles and coffee cups don't leak and insulate for hours, the phone cases are genuinely shockproof, the power banks have enough charge, the Apple Watch strap looks and feels seamless and the notebook is luxurious. Note: I haven't yet tried the AirPods case

I've popped a collection of patterns below to give a flavour of Burga's feel – but really, I recommend heading to the website and losing half an hour in a sea of colours and prints.

The below are UK links. In the US? Click through here on each product and you'll be taken to the US site.

The online calendar and scheduling tool has finally pushed the flush button on that, not because it looked like a toilet (or at least not officially), but because its product itself has evolved considerably in the intervening years. More than just a scheduling app, it now has a range of AI-powered productivity tools, and it needed to reflect this expansion.

The design studio Smith & Diction was charged with overhauling the Calendly branding as the company expands its productivity offerings further to to include an AI email assistant and meeting notetaker.

Like several growing productivity services, the brand has the problem that it's become much more than what most people know it for. At the same time, AI is also a challenge as well as an opportunity for the company because the technology has made it easier for people to vibe-code their own productivity tools.

Smith & Diction had the task of crafting a new logo, wordmark and colour and graphics system that would make Calendly feel like more than a calendar app and come across as a tool that still offers significant benefits over DIY solutions.

The result is an intentionally big leap from the previous identity. The neon colours and bold shapes have been flushed away and replaced by something much softer and lighter.

The original concept revolved around the idea of "making space": both making space on the calendar for work and letting Calendly take up some of the slack to give users more space in the day for what they enjoy.

"We wanted the brand to feel like an absolute breath of fresh air. Calm and confident, nothing extra — just like Calendly’s original, simple blue link," says Mike Smith, co-founder of the studio.

The logo turned out to be tricky. "if you put anything figurative next to the word Calendly you’d be like…why isn’t it just a calendar? So after dozens and dozens of explorations, we ended up right back where they started: 'a cool C'.”

But this cool C is more light-and-airy cool than grungy-toilet-bowl cool. From early on, the team began exploring the idea of a "ripple effect" to "represent the idea of how just sending one meeting link can change the trajectory of your business".

Early explorations included experiments with several rings, but the final iteration settled on a single asymmetrical ripple around the C.

As for the wordmark, Smith & Diction decided that the previous design was "too cutesy" for a serious small business tool. It set about adding more structure and sharpness to balance out the C mark's organic wobbliness.

They noticed that when tracked in tight, the letters appeared to lead into each other "with an invisible connection". This gave them the idea of creating this effect intentionally to represent the brand as "the invisible connector for people".

"We edited the C to flow into the A and tilted the E so it would flow into the N. All with just the suggestion of connective tissue," Mike says.

The new branding also includes a set of subbrand icons to represent Calendly's various prongs, from scheduling to payments and the AI assistant Callie. These were infused with "gloop" to soften the connections inside the icons, colour coded for ease of identification and housed in the same squircle as the primary logo.

The new colour system reinforces the feeling of simplicity and effortlessness. The harsh neons have been replaced with softer hues that fade in and out of each other.

The system also includes some AI-generated visuals, which Mike recognises was "pretty uncharted territory" for the studio but led to some interesting dreamy results "sort of like if you tried to paint what a breeze might look like".

Let us know in the comments what you think of the new identity.

Now someone's taken up the challenge of recreating most of the first level of Nintendo's classic Super Mario Bros as an exercise to learn the rope of the free open-source program Godot Engine (see our guide to the best game development software). If you want a dose of nostalgia, the dev's put his work online so you can try it out for yourself.

As posted on Reddit, devellopsomedonkus69 has been learning Godot through the 20 Games Challenge, a self-paced learning framework that involves building a series of 20 classic video games of increasing complexity. And they went all out for the Mario stage of the challenge.

"I really love Mario games, so when I got to that part of the challenge I decided to go all out and recreate SMB 1-1 as faithfully as I could," the budding developer writes.

That involved recreating everything from scratch except the audio, including copying the art pixel by pixel. The developer says they learned a lot and also gained a new appreciation of how much work went in to making such classic games

While they didn't clock how many hours they put into the project, the developer says they worked on 45 days between late March and early this month. While they recommend the experience, they also suggest it's important for beginners to have fun and perhaps not get quite so bogged in trying to make it perfect.

"I took a lot of breaks and I started to get burned out by the end, so I cut some scope (namely the fire flower and star power) so I could call it complete," they write. "I definitely didn't need to go this in-depth to learn game development, and maybe I shouldn't have, but right now I'm glad I did. It gave me a lot of confidence and a better understanding of how to break down a game into small problems that can more easily be solved."

You can play the game on Itch.io.

For more nostalgic gaming, see our picks of the best retro gaming consoles and the best retro gaming handhelds.

Social media is full of memes and parodies inspired by Inde Navarrette's unsettling, manic performance as the cursed Nikki Freeman. But that doesn't mean that sending up a dark psychological horror movie is the right call for every brand, as golf equipment make Callaway has just discovered.

The video showing a golfer violently shove a woman to the ground after she tried to pick up his driver was intended to promote a new co-branded product launched by Callaway with the media company Good Good Golf.

If the aim was to go viral, it worked, but for all the wrong reasons. A significant backlash grew online as people accused the brands of promoting violence against women. One golfer writing on X described the video as a "generationally stupid ad.”

Good Good, whose original YouTube channel now has 2.1 million subscribers, has deleted the video. It posted an apology, saying that the ad "ultimately depicted actions that are not aligned with our values as a brand".

Callaway has also said sorry. It said in a statement: “While the video was produced by Good Good, it was approved by Callaway prior to posting. That approval should never have happened

"To be clear: We are unequivocally against discrimination, domestic violence, or threatening behavior of any kind.”

The equipment make said it's carrying out internal and external investigations and making changes to its approval processes.

But some wonder how the ad got approved by both brands in the first place. It seems it was probably a case of the kind of group think that can set in when brands applaud their own cleverness at quickly jumping on a trending topic. But not every trend is suitable for every brand, and the execution is everything.

We recently revisited the outrageous Gameboy adverts of the '90s. These are very different times. Audiences have matured, casual misogyny is no longer tolerated in mainstream advertising, and golf as a sport has been trying to become more inclusive.

“They didn’t just create an ad that makes golf non-inclusive to women... it endorses violence against women in the scariest and most threatening way,” writes the senior director of social media at golf-focused media company Pro Shop on X. “This is a horrible look for them and for Callaway. Wildly disappointing.”

When Screenbound was first announced in 2024, its 28-second trailer showing its '5D' concept of the player navigating a 3D world in first-person while also playing a 2D game of that same world in front of them on a Game Boy-like handheld immediately caught my eye. A unique dual-focused idea that blends retro and modern styles – what's not to love?

However, this teaser from indie publisher and developer Crescent Moon Games was essentially just a proof of concept rather than an actual game. While the idea of outsourced development, or co-development, is something you'd usually associate with larger AAA games, it also exists in indie development. Radical Forge is one such studio with experience in indie co-development, including work on Gang Beasts and several Vampire Survivors spin-offs, and has been responsible for turning Screenbound into a playable reality. And there was a lot of work involved, as the studio's lead tech artist, Lyra Owen, describes the game based on the original teaser as "bare bones".

"A lot of it was just mockups with very basic artwork that used a lot of asset packs," she tells me. "So when we got hold of it, we started again in a lot of respects, especially from the 3D side where we redeveloped how the terrain system works. We remade all the foliage. Back then, everything was very much just blocky and smooth."

Screenbound's 80s and 90s retro references

The original concept had a blockiness reminiscent of Minecraft that the team wanted to move away from, looking toward more modern takes like various 3D iterations of Mario, though the 3D terrain from the Mario + Rabbids games was a key inspiration to emulate. For the 2D elements of the game played on the Qboy handheld, they referenced 2D games from the '80s and '90s, though they largely entrusted the pixel art to a single pixel artist named Daniel Cossaboon.

When it came to putting the assets together, Owen says the 2D levels were built much like a "primitive" version of the level editor from Super Mario Maker, while the 3D world was created through procedural generation. "That was the best way we found that you could get parity between the two worlds," Owen explains. "So a lot of the procedural systems had to be redone and restarted."

This still, however, leaves the tricky aspect of how a 2D world can accurately represent a 3D world, which naturally has another axis. The practical way to do this was to have multiple 2D planes you can be in, depending on where you are in the 3D world.

"Essentially it's 2D, but it's got layers, and then each layer represents a track in the 3D world," Owen says. "So in the editor we can scroll in and out through the z-depth of the scene, and we basically build the level in z-layers from left, and then all the levels go from left to right like a classic Mario game."

How to make 2D work in 3D

Despite attempts at parity, there are challenges to making something 2D in 3D. One such example she gives is the height of the trees in 2D compared to their 3D iteration. "You've only got so much screen, so many pixels, and it's entirely different trying to convert that into a 3D perspective and get the composition right."

That also brings with it part of the game's twist in that only certain elements are visible in 2D or 3D, which also ensures the player's focus is switching between the two perspectives (it's also worth noting that even though the Qboy is viewed at the bottom of the screen, you can sometimes opt to hold it up closer so that you're really only focused on the 2D part).

"What we don't want is to be like a DS, where you have a map on one screen, and you're playing a 3D game, or the other way around where you could just play it in 2D and never look at the environment, so there are things that are sort of in and out of the 2D and 3D worlds," Owen explains. "There are things that can move between worlds, like enemies that disappear in one world and appear in the other world."

It arguably even breaks its own rules at times, as the Qboy isn't completely limited to 2D gameplay but can also be used as a viewer to see things hidden in 3D or even to aim and shoot at targets. But there's still more work to do to get the balance right, which seems to be why Crescent Moon Games has delayed Screenbound from its September release to a later date. More important is ensuring that the dual-focused 5D concept isn't lost while still making sense to players.

"Essentially, it's two games running on top of each other, and that was one of the challenges. There are no separate things happening; when you are running through the 3D world, you are actually also running through the 2D world. That's kind of the magic of it."

Screenbound is coming to PC and you can try the demo on Steam.

According to everyone's favourite Apple leaker, Mark Gurman, a few lucky users have already been testing the folding iPhone, and initial impressions are positive.

"People who have tried the Apple model like how it fits in a pocket, the feel and durability of the advanced hinge mechanism, and the new iPad-like app layouts that take advantage of the larger internal display," Gurman says.

But apparently there's one "significant omission", and it's one that could be a dealbreaker for creatives. The folding iPhone apparently lacks a telephoto camera, which offers the 'Pro' iPhone models incredible zoom abilities. For a device touted to cost close to £2,000, that seems like a pretty major drawback. As Gurman says, the venn diagram of people who are willing to spend £2k to become an early adopter and people who want the latest and greatest camera tech is "pretty close to a circle".

There are a couple of other expected ommissions which might test the product's rumoured 'Ultra' moniker. One of these is FaceID, with the iPhone Ultra instead rumoured to be falling back on TouchID.

Creatives may end up having to weigh up whether a larger internal display or advanced camera capabilities matter more to them. The former could provide a brilliantly pocketable canvas for digital art. But if it's the latter that matters, the iPhone 18 Pro Max might end up being the one to get – especially if it's cheaper.

Of course, with all that gothic imagery, as well as 'blood' being in the title, you’d assume it has a link to the Japanese developer’s PS4 masterpieces like Bloodborne, Elden Ring and, of course, the upcoming Switch 2 version, Elden Ring Tarnished Edition, but it’s really a different kind of beast altogether. After getting to participate in its network test over the weekend, here’s what I learned about The Duskbloods.

The Duskbloods releases on Nintendo Switch 2 in 2026.

01. The characters are a bunch of weirdos

The appeal of many popular multiplayer games usually comes from the characters you get to play as, if you think of, say, Street Fighter or Overwatch’s rosters. Typically, you create your own avatars in FromSoftware’s games, but The Duskbloods feature a playable preset of characters known as the Bloodsworn, all competing for the title of ‘First Blood’. And they’re some of the biggest weirdos I’ve played as in recent memory.

To be fair, Albert, the Bloodsworn you first see and play as for the tutorial sections, wouldn’t look out of place in Bloodborne’s Yharnam with his rugged hair and white shirt, but the others are an absolutely bonkers mishmash that the concept artists at FromSoft must’ve just had a brief to cut loose on.

There’s Sniper Layla who looks like she had come from one of Fallout’s nuclear wastelands or the skeletal-looking Senator Samir Patres who can transform into a dinosaur for some reason. The most bizarre of the bunch, though, is Zork, some kind of steampunk automaton with the kind of phallic designs that’s getting the internet’s freaks all hot and bothered. Or they might just happen to be inspired by a mecha from Gundam, according to FromSoft and Gundam aficionado Sayem Ahmed.

That’s not all though, as you can also call upon AI-controlled companions called Kin to help you during a match, and they’re a bunch of oddballs too, if not weirder. So far, I’ve had the honour of being partnered with the likes of Undead Marlowe, your stereotypical ‘yes-guv’ cockney urchin who’s also kind of immortal, Baritone, a giant opera singer belting out songs to buff you, and Valentius, a grotesque gluttonous emperor who gets around on a chariot like a wheelchair (potentially as problematic if not more so than the Duke in Resident Evil Village).

02. It’s more accessible than most of FromSoftware’s games, but just as esoteric

FromSoftware’s games have a reputation for being tough and not holding your hand, sometimes to a fault. Owing to its partnership with Nintendo, The Duskbloods does a much better job at onboarding than its previous games, including a fairly substantial set of tutorials that familiarise you with its systems that you’re unlikely to miss from the menu, certainly compared to Elden Ring’s optional tutorial cave that many players infamously missed in its launch version.

Despite the PvP element also being potentially off-putting, especially as someone who dreads being invaded, the structure actually eases you in. Sure, you could just go looking to fight other players or a boss in the first phase (though at Lv.1 it’s basically suicide and a waste of your time for the latter), but you can also get gradually stronger by picking off weaker enemies. You don’t even necessarily have to engage in melee combat (though your attacks don’t cost any stamina) as every character has a ranged weapon, but Layla is an ideal pick for beginners as her rifle packs a punch and once you’ve levelled her up she can even wield a Gatling gun to mow foes down.

This also isn’t a battle royale where death means instant elimination. Instead, surviving being culled at the end of each phase involves gaining more Virtue than other rival players. While this can include defeating other players, you can also earn Virtue through exploration, defeating certain enemies, and random objectives like racing up the clock tower to ring the bell.

To be fair, some objectives feel quite obscure, and I never quite got how or why I would suddenly earn more Virtue, or also lose it. You can even make an allegiance with another player to improve your chances, and one of the stranger options is how each character can start with a Sigil that gives them bespoke objectives, including one who can seek out their long-lost love while using an emote to propose with flowers. There are quite a few unusual ways that you can survive the dusk before being whisked away to an arena in the final phase in a fight to the death between the final three, even if I never succeeded in becoming First Blood during the network test.

03. It’s not related to Bloodborne, but it sure feels like part of the universe

While director Hidetaka Miyazaki has explicitly said in an interview that The Duskbloods is not connected to Bloodborne, perhaps for legal reasons since that is a Sony title that also had the involvement of its now-defunct Japan Studio, it doesn’t mean you can’t see some striking similarities. It’s not just that the Bloodsworn are imbued with a special kind of blood that gives them unique powers, but the network test’s map of Lowanro City seems to share similar assets.

There were more than a few times I did a double-take and thought I was back in Yharnam, especially when heading into the sewer's familiar layout, also infested with rats. For those lucky or skilled enough to make it to the final phase of a match, one of the arenas is essentially a combination of the rooftop where you fight Master Logarius and the final boss with its field of white flowers.

It’s an intriguing form of recycling assets much in the same way Elden Ring: Nightreign also happened to pull in elements from other FromSoft games. But then if The Duskbloods is supposed to be set in no specific setting, then there’s a chance that the final game pulls in more ideas that aren’t just Gothic Victorian.

04. The game runs smoothly, even though the camera is messy

A pleasant surprise is that The Duskbloods runs at 60 fps, which is important for any action-based game, all the more so when your Bloodsworn have supercharged mobility compared to other FromSoft games.

However, that does present a problem when you’re trying to fight or chase another rival Bloodsworn who can also triple jump and air dash high in the air like you can, which the lock-on camera has trouble keeping up with. And when these are fights that might involve several other players and AI-controlled enemies in the same space, it’s a recipe for chaos. At least the latter is usually in a co-op environment where you’re all working towards defeating a tougher boss.

05. The Duskbloods won’t be for everyone

Compared to Elden Ring’s critical and commercial success, The Duskbloods is an unusual and divisive proposition that’s different from what Nintendo fans may expect. Its match-based PvPvE structure may also put off FromSoft fans used to its single-player experiences you can take your time to explore and get to grips with, though they’ll at least have Elden Ring: Tarnished to look forward to very soon.

Then again, despite initial reservations, Elden Ring: Nightreign’s PvE gameplay turned out to be an unusual success in its own right, which also managed to spin out a compelling narrative through repeated runs. With Miyazaki at the helm, I imagine there could be just as much intriguing lore to tie all these seemingly disparate ideas together in a meaningful way.

Still, as a Switch 2 exclusive, I’m curious whether Nintendo, as publisher, will wield its influence on the final game in other ways - maybe not any cameos from Hyrule or the Mushroom Kingdom, but could we potentially get GameChat support as strange as Star Fox’s avatars? There's also no price confirmed, but as an online multiplayer-only title, it's likely this will be in the mid-tier price range of Splatoon Raiders rather than Mario Kart World. That’s certainly going to be a factor if Nintendo wants more Bloodsworn joining the fight to be First Blood rather than just FromSoft sickos.

Get the best Switch 2 bundles to play The Duskbloods

I am, of course, talking about the great Safari logo controversy. Beta testers of iOS 27 have noted that the new app icon for Apple's browser now features a central pin and, confusingly, what looks like two needles overlapping as if they move independently like the hands on a watch.

The initial comment in the X thread above doesn't quite hit on the real problem with the design. Compasses do have a central pin. What they don't have are separate needles, which is what the Safari icon now seems to show because of that overlap of the red over the white. Add a second hand, and the icon would be more watch than compass.

"Whoever designed this doesn't understand how a compass works. They don't know it's just a single pin," one person affirms in the comments. "If it would be like iOS 6 and just a flat line in the middle of the pin it would be fine. Hope it gets fixed before the release," someone else points out, optimistically.

"Someone drew that, and somebody approved it. Details like that give a good idea of what direction things are going. Abandon ship before it's too late. With this compass, this ship ain't sailing the right direction anyway," another person writes, fearing navigational calamities to come.

Some have gone to the trouble of drawing up possible solutions to 'fix' the glaring design error.

You might say people are making a mountain out of a 2D compass pin head, and you'd be right. But let's remember that Apple is a company that's always been about perfect aesthetics and precise attention to detail (apart from when it comes to designing mice, butterfly keyboards or AI).

Since the decline of skeuomorphism, we've come to expect a certain gap between reality and an app icon. But for some, the iOS 27 Safari icon is a new low in what's been a long decline beginning with iOS 7, right after the definitive design that was the iOS 6 iteration.

I'm surprised that nobody's said it yet, so I'll say it myself: Jony Ive wouldn't have allowed this. Jony knows navigation. He designed a sailing lantern before turning his hand to the Ferrari Luce. He would know that compasses don't have two needles.

Perhaps Apple knows something we don’t about the future of geomagnetism, one person suggests. Or of imminent changes in the infrastructure of space time. Or maybe it needs to rethink this design. And then it can tackle the issue of the "transparent metal" in the Settings icon too.

What some people finding harder to fathom is why, at the same time, other companies are willfully using AI image generation themselves, even when it produces nightmarish depictions of what they're selling.

Small restaurants, delis and food trucks seem to be particular culprits. On social media, people have been posting images of depicting bizarre, sometime downright nasty-looking menu items, and it's making people nostalgic for the days of bad amateur Photoshop jobs.

Writing on X, a technology reporter recently suggested that AI image generation is killing the great tradition of 'folk graphic design' at small eateries. He backed up that claim with photos from a deli that appears to serve instant noodles topped with a hiterto undocumented species of headless and tailless shrimp.

Amateur menu design might not always have been very good, but it had its charm. Even when the food photography wasn't the most flattering, there was something to be said for its honesty: you knew what you were getting. With AI-generated food imagery, can you demand a refund if your dish doesn't come topped with a radioactive creature?

Lots of other people have jumped on the thread to share their own evidence of AI food nightmares. A word of warning to anyone who suffers from trypophobia (disgust at clustered patterns of holes and bumps): the alien textures in some of these images may make you never want to eat out again.

Some people have the attitude that if a restaurant uses imagery like this, they're staying well away.

"This is a matter of detail orientation and quality control. If this is the level of your attention to detail and your ability to manage quality, no way am I putting anything you make in my mouth," one person writes.

"I hope all the restaurants who do this are preparing for bankruptcy within the year because nobody wants to eat radioactive food that looks like it was made by brain damaged space aliens," another person comments.

"I just don't understand what was wrong with whatever this deli already had before generative AI, only like what, two three years ago? An old photo is better than this. Written text without picture is surely better than this," someone else says.

It seems AI menus have become their own genre of AI nightmare fuel, up there with AI children's books. Many of us expected this might happen. Despite the worst fears about AI, design agencies remain in business because large companies and brands generally don't want to make their customers feel sick of associate themselves with AI slop (although Coca-Cola and Skechers have turned out to be exceptions).

But smaller businesses that might otherwise have hired an independent freelancer or handled design internally using whatever resources they had see easy access to AI image generators as a time saver. They might need to realise that the hassle of taking photos was worth the time and effort to avoid creeping out potential customers.

It seems students these days have loftier demands. Or at least the British department store chain John Lewis thinks so. Its suggested essential university packing checklist reminds me of Jony Ive's "every day" design tools.

The list includes, among other necessities, up to 40 “Standard” velvet clothes hangers, a £495 Marc Jacobs bag, a £399 desk, an £80 spice rack carousel and a £185 Ralph Lauren quarter-zip for freshers who want to look like they're working on Wall Street.

Other musts include a £50 Cole & Mason electronic pepper mill to save your hands for those late-night essay writing sessions, and, obviously, a Rose Quartz Stanley Quencher to take to the lecture theatre. Suffice it to say, the list is being roasted on TikTok.

Given that buying these "essentials" would blow most students' annual budgets, I've rounded up some thrifty dupes that will allow you to indulge the John Lewis student in you for less than half the money. They all have star ratings of at least 4.5 on Amazon, and together could save you hundreds of pounds.

That will hopefully leave you with some spare change to invest in something you actually need for uni, like one of the best student laptops or the best Android drawing tablets.

It seems we already have more evidence that this might be the case. It appears that AI was also used for concept art for Travis Knight's recent Masters of the Universe. Will fan disappointment make a difference, or are we already beyond the point of no return?

"Yes, we use AI as a tool when it speeds production up. The design work is ours," Chromatic Studio said of its costume exploration sketches for King Randor, ruler of Eternos, when asked on Instagram whether the images were made using AI.

A lot of people aren't buying that justification about speeding up the process. "AI slop + the guy who overpainted this clearly did not enjoy this, such a disappointment to see good outsourcing studios using such a disgusting method just to 'speed up their process'," one person comments.

I can see how studios justify the use of AI art for concept art, or at least I could if were were still in an era where the concept art wouldn't normally see the light of day.

By definition, concept art is exploratory, and it can be highly iterative. Using AI can allow concept artists to test out more ideas more quickly, saving time on work that isn't going to appear in the finished project anyway.

The problem is that today concept art almost always does see the light of day. It's shared in portfolios, making-of-videos and art books for fans eager to see more of the process and artistry behind the film.

In these kinds of pieces, people would previously admire the skills and craftmanship that went into the early development of a movie or game. But when AI was used heavily in the process, what are we supposed to be appreciating or admiring exactly? The idea itself, I guess, but perhaps studios will need to stop showing their working so proudly if they're going to insist on using AI.

Short history lesson: In the first part of the 1970s, new technology meant rock music had become highly produced, which meant it sounded beautifully clean and pure. Unfortunately, it also started to sound a little boring and formulaic, straying very far from its wild and controversial rock 'n' roll roots.

Well, every action has a reaction, as the saying goes. And in the late 1970s, that reaction arrived with a bang in the form of punk rock bands like The Sex Pistols, The Damned and The Clash. Yes, their outfits, lyrics, music and attitude might seem tame, almost cosy now. But back then people – especially my parents – were seriously shocked and offended. Which just made us kids love them more.

50 years on, I've long suspected a similar dynamic will play out with AI. In both cases, new technology has taken over the production of creative works (although with AI, it's not just music but a wide range of cultural products, from art to visual design and now even filmmaking.) So where will the reaction come from? Well, it's probably going to come from some unexpected places, and this Chinese movie looks like being one of them.

What's going on?

For the uninitiated, Niu Lai is an animated film made on an almost zero budget, almost entirely by a mother and son using second-hand computers. I'm not being mean, but the animation is... not high quality. Yet in their native China, it's been an absolute smash. In a world where a $300 million blockbuster like Supergirl struggles to get anyone interested, audiences are flocking to see jerky movements, crude 3D models, weird sound effects, and a plot that doesn't make a lot of sense. Why? Because, the consensus seems to say, it was so obviously, painfully, made by human hands; something that's been long missing from the kind of geometrically-precise CG animation that dominates today.

The story of how it was made reads like the plot of a movie itself. Xin Yumeng is a former interior designer with no film training, based in Dalian, a coastal city in Liaoning province, north-east China. He spent five years building Niu Lai in his spare time, handling every job himself, from modelling and animation to lighting and editing.

His mum, Sun Lifang, taught herself screenwriting and voiced the female characters. The film launched with no trailer, no publicity and a single ink-wash poster. It premiered in 245 cinemas on 5 August and took just 7,169 yuan (around $1000 / £786) in its first nine days.

Then, social media noticed it. People started sharing clips online, initially to take the mickey out of the low-rent animation. But then, as sometimes happens, "so bad" turned to "so bad it's good". People started to become fascinated with this plucky, out-of-the-ordinary movie.

Its cumulative box office has since grossed over ¥25.67 million (about $160K / £120K), putting it among the top 10 highest-grossing animated films in China this year; a staggering return on its minimal investment. It was such a hit that cinemas without official posters got their staff to draw their own by hand.

Reporting on this story last week, fellow Creative Bloq writer Joe Foley took a negative view of this whole phenomenon. But I'm afraid I have to differ. To me, it all sounds like a lot of fun. And I'd rather watch something fun than something technically perfect, but soulless and empty.

More broadly, many of the naysayers here sound eerily like the old men who once dismissed my beloved punk bands as a lot of unlistenable noise. (Well, to be fair a lot of them were. A few of the doom metal bands I saw at Bloodstock last weekend were pretty unlistenable to my ears too. But a lot of people love them, and who am I to say they're wrong?)

More broadly, the love for Niu Lai in China chimes neatly with everything I'm hearing from everyday people in my own country: they're sick of AI visuals, AI music and AI videos, and they're desperately looking for authentic alternatives. It seems that in 2026 the less digital polish there is on things, the more people are likely to like it.

That's another cultural revolution I can get behind, and this time around, there's no need for spitting or swear words. Now, where did I put that Ramones album?

In many cases, such as the recent Spider-man controversy, these concerns turn out to be legitimate. But the latest social media furore surrounding Netflix's splash page for the movie Hamnet suggests some corners of the internet might be becoming a little to quick to cry 'AI'.

"The clearly AI-generated image for HAMNET on Netflix doing some crazy things," X user Erik Anderson complained this week, along with a screenshot of the splash page, which features a close-up of a prop flyer for the first ever performance of Shakespeare's Hamlet. The post has received hundreds of thousands of views.

Yes, it looks a little Photoshopped. The whole thing is overly sharp and saturated in a 'product shot' kind of way, and it all looks rather twee. But that's not what users are taking umbrage with. It's the supposedly mangled text, a bonafide hallmark of an AI-generated image.

Except, the text isn't mangled. It's meant to say 'firft appearance on stage'. That 'f' is an archaic long 'S', the kind of thing that was everywhere in Shakespeare's day. Just wait until these people discover the best Old English fonts.

This might be a minor episode in the grand scheme of AI controversies, but it points to a shift in the landscape. We seem to be reaching a point where anything that looks vaguely uncanny or unfamiliar is liable to be accused of being AI-generated. Rather than seeing the confusion as an opportunity to learn something new, people are becoming increasingly willing to reject the entire thing outright.

Here, it was a simple historical tidbit that left people confused. But the idea that we're becoming increasingly conditioned to reject any visual artefact that leaves us confused or uncomfortable is an alarming one. After all, isn't some of the best art designed to make us uncomfortable?

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