The fastest player to beat the game Donkey Kong Bananza, as of now, is a runner going by Vytox, who finished the game in just under an hour. In fact, players have so thoroughly optimized Bananza that even runners who chose to play in categories that involve beating all bosses and collecting all Bananza forms can do it in not too much more time than that. That’s crazy fast for a game with so many literal layers, and is possible because runners have invented all sorts of tricks to speed their way through levels and even fly through the sky in ways that were pretty clearly not intended by the developers.

And yet, it turns out that the Donkey Kong Bananza developers have been watching all along.

I learned this when I spoke to producer Kenta Motokura and programmer Tatsuya Kurihara this week at the Game Developers Conference, following their talk at the show: Constructive Destruction: Fusing Voxel Tech and 3D Action Platforming in ‘Donkey Kong Bananza.’ While their talk focused on the ways in which they encouraged the player to do things like destroy terrain and discover hidden treasures, I followed up with them by asking how they prevented players from doing things they weren’t supposed to do — especially in a game that was so open ended.

Motokura initially responded by telling me that unlike previous games the team has designed, Bananza had a lot more things about the player experience that the developers were unable to anticipate when designing.

“In that sense, we have to give them the play space they can enjoy and everything else would be essentially unreachable,” Motokura said. He gave as examples surfaces that Donkey Kong couldn’t climb, as well as other engineering solutions that made some things simply impossible. I was reminded, for instance, of one of the major barriers remaining in Donkey Kong speedruns: an inability to proceed through a certain boss battle if you haven’t yet broken Pauline out of her Odd Rock prison.

I followed up by asking if they found it was getting harder and harder as time went on to block players from getting into things that the designers wanted them to stay out of. Motokura responded in the affirmative: “To answer your question very briefly, it is getting very hard to keep players from going all over the place. But certainly we take those sorts of things into account as well.”

And indeed, this team in some ways almost appears to have conceded in this battle somewhat. I recalled the Super Mario Odyssey team placing coins up in hard-to-reach places anticipating that players would find savvy ways to jump up there. Bananza, similarly, has special dialogue if the player manages to skip their way to the end of the Racing Layer without going for a Rambi ride.

Motokura alluded to this as well in his answer. “Sometimes there are sequence breaks in game that you can, once you learn about them, design around so that there is a gameplay experience on the other side of that sequence break. And certainly when we see players who actually get to those areas and experience those parts, we look around at each other and say, ‘I’m really glad we made that.'”

Later in the interview, I asked both developers if there was anything players had done since the release that surprised them. Kurihara told me he was surprised that so many people try to break every single voxel on a given layer. He knew this was possible, of course, but didn’t think so many people would do it.

Motokura called back to the speedruns: “One thing that really surprised me, and this is maybe going back to the discussion of the sequence break that we had a little bit earlier, was the surprising ways that people are using voxels for movement, not just double jump, but other movement techniques entirely that they discovered on their own to get to some very interesting places.”

So yes, Donkey Kong Bananza’s designers have seen the silly things people are doing to cross massive gaps and speed across stages, and while they stopped short of condoning the behavior, Motokura at least seemed mildly amused by it. As the team eventually moves to future games, it will be interesting to see if they embrace the chaos or continue to try and find cheeky ways to acknowledge player tricks while simultaneously gating off certain paths.

You can read our full interview with Motokura and Kurihara right here.

Rebekah Valentine is a senior reporter for IGN. Got a story tip? Send it to rvalentine@ign.com.

The Simpsons: Hit & Run remains one of the most beloved spinoffs in the franchise’s long history, even if that game still has yet to receive a remaster or sequel. But The Simpsons showrunner Matt Selman is adamant that fans shouldn’t give up hope on a Hit & Run revival, urging them to “Never say never.”

Selman offered this newfound hope as part of a larger interview with People surrounding the animated series’ recent 800th episode. The series’ showrunner also worked as one of the writers on the GTA-inspired game several decades ago, and he seems convinced that it’s simply a matter of showing the studio that the demand for more Hit & Run still exists.

“Nothing is set in stone. But my quote about Hit & Run would be, ‘Never say never,'” Selman said. “Because we know people love it. We know they want it, so that’s good. If we know people want it, never say never.”

“Hit & Run is so interesting,” Selman also said. “I’m a thousand years old, and when I was in my mid to late 20s, I helped write Hit & Run. I had no idea it would become a cult game, a cult success. Of all the games, the thousands of Simpsons games… that one…”

On the whole, Selman seems somewhat more optimistic about more Hit & Run than he was when IGN spoke to him in 2021. At the time, Selman noted it would be “a complicated corporate octopus to try to make that happen.”

Selman’s comments are well-timed, as it was just a few weeks ago that we learned the original The Simpsons: Hit & Run and Prototype developer Radical Entertainment has returned under the banner New Radical Games. It would certainly be fitting if the reconstituted Radical were tasked with developing a Hit & Run remake or a full-fledged sequel.

Whatever happens with Hit & Run, it’s clear the franchsie as a whole is in no danger of dying out anytime soon. Last year, the long-awaited The Simpsons Movie 2 got its first official poster and a 2027 release date. Selman also recently noted that while the animated series may eventually end, it won’t have an actual finale episode.

Jesse is a mild-mannered staff writer for IGN. Allow him to lend a machete to your intellectual thicket by following @jschedeen on BlueSky.

After a half-hour of headset-on play in an early section of Little Nightmares VR: Altered Echos, I feel optimistic about the franchise’s jump to VR. While its 3D levels may dilute some of the precise puzzle-platforming I’ve come to enjoy from the ‘pancake’ (i.e. non-VR) entries in the series, its charmingly grotesque critters, tense stealth, and cheeky puzzles have seemingly all made the jump. But the differences from its predecessors that VR brings to the table might be the most interesting part of my demo.

Little Nightmares has always succeeded in making you feel small—often helpless. But that’s really the first thing that hit me the moment I stepped into Dark Six’s shoes in first person. As I pitter-pattered around a dreary train station, that’s really what stood out. Suddenly, things that felt secondary in previous flat games, like picking up and lugging around a big diode to pop into a circuit breaker, felt extremely weighty. Where detailed animations once sold something so laborious, when playing with a more objective camera, bending over and picking something up with both hands in first-person, as it drags next to your feet, hammers home how weak you are.

But the developers don’t use the personal sense of scale and perspective that VR provides as a crutch. The chunk I played felt just as moody and tense as the other games in the series. I constantly felt like I was being watched. Sometimes literally, as security cameras locked on and followed me across cavernous terminals, bag rooms full of luggage, and derelict offices littered with ominous, sparingly scattered human remains.

Starting out pushing luggage carts around as I got my VR legs back while getting used to looking around with a FOV restricted by Six’s hood, the gameplay itself is remarkably similar to the non-VR Little Nightmares, but in first-person. Eventually, I made it out of the leathery trove into a massive station terminal. This was when the sense of scale really started to hit. While still abstract in exactly the way you’d hope from this style of offbeat horror, the terminal felt much more real. As its massive, malfunctioning clock ticked back and forth, I felt like vermin, scurrying from corner to corner as the cameras leered at me.

A series of doors ominously opening in front of and behind me brought me to the station’s office. I spent a bulk of my college years doing IT maintenance in silent, spider-webbed offices and classrooms abandoned for Zoom classes during the pandemic, which revealed just how unsettling the modern office is, especially a silent one. This has made the contemporary office one of my favorite settings for horror, so that room was an unexpected highlight.

It did reveal my biggest gameplay issue, though: While Little Nightmares has dabbled in 3D in specific chunks, it mostly functions as a 2D game, occasionally playing with perspective. But building fully explorable 3D levels makes puzzles much more complex. Whether that complexity works or not tends to make or break the jump. In this case, it’s kind of a mixed result. One puzzle had me swapping in diodes into a circuit breaker to turn the power back on at the station. I tried different ones scattered throughout the room, but none worked.

After running from pillar to post, a small blue light underneath a desk caught my eye. Maybe it was the dark lighting in the room, but I just didn’t notice it. In fact, I walked right past it, not noticing the blue light was coming from a diode on the floor. This is a small issue, but I’m always frustrated when I can’t understand a puzzle just because I literally can’t see the missing piece. Again, this is a small problem, but when a camera is completely under the developer’s control, like in every other game in the series, giving the player a free camera while designing things with the same philosophy might overcomplicate what should be simple puzzles.

From there, I slunk through yet another impressive setpiece—an endless sea of people walking in unison between the station and the train. I worked my way to a car between their legs as they started, stopped, and started again. My perspective hardly put me up to their ankles, again reinforcing that immense sense of scale that I really liked in this demo.

Once on the train, I encountered a menagerie of grotesque creatures. All human-ish, but reduced to their most base, animal sensibilities, I dodged the watchful eye of a lizard-like conductor who patrolled the various cars of the train. He’s one of my new favorite monsters from the series, walking on all fours, almost like a komodo dragon. At the slightest sound, he’d crane his neck to catch stowaways in unassuming places. He got me a few times.

I really liked what I’ve played of Little Nightmares VR: Altered Echoes. While I have some concerns about the series’ translation into 3D, most of the demo felt right at home in the series. Aided by a more personal perspective and sense of scale, this entry is both different and similar to the originals in cool ways. I have faith that the rest of the game will live up. Thankfully, I won’t have to wait long, since it’s launching on Meta Quest 2 and 3, PS VR2, and Pico on April 24th.