PlayStation’s Direct store is holding a sizeable sale on PS5 games, controllers, and even consoles, but there’s an added incentive for fans of Hideo Kojima’s Death Stranding 2: On the Beach.
The pad itself isn’t exactly subtle. It’s the classic black DualSense with a big Drawbridge logo on the touchpad and decals on the grips, but it’s pretty slick if we do say so. There’s also some detailing around the symbol buttons, which is a nice touch, making them look connected.
Elsewhere in the deals, you can save $100 on the Death Stranding 2: On the Beach Collector’s Edition. It includes a digital version of the game, along with a 15-inch Magellan Man Statue and an adorable/creepy (depending on your point of view) 3-inch Dollman figure you can attach to your keys or backpack.
There are art cards and a letter from Hideo Kojima, as well as in-game items like patches and a machine gun unlock.
In our review, Simon Cardy said the game delivers on the promise of the divisive original, awarding it a 9 out of 10.
“It removes almost all of the friction that weighed down its rookie effort, delighting with a truly unpredictable story full of intrigue and malleable stealth-action playgrounds hidden in its vast, hauntingly beautiful version of Australia.”
Elsewhere, you can save on huge first-party titles like God of War: Ragnarok and Marvel’s Spider-Man 2, as well as games like Stellar Blade.
Lloyd Coombes is an experienced freelancer in tech, gaming and fitness seen at Polygon, Eurogamer, Macworld, TechRadar and many more. He’s a big fan of Magic: The Gathering and other collectible card games, much to his wife’s dismay.
As far as technical showcases for the PlayStation 5 (or its pricier Pro sibling) go, Stellar Blade is certainly up there.
This character action title puts players in the cyber-shoes of EVE, pitting her against waves of foes and challenging boss fights, but giving her some of the flashiest combat skills in this console generation.
Our reviewer Mitchell Saltzman gave the game 7 out of 10 in his review for IGN, saying “Stellar Blade is great in all of the most important ways for an action game, but dull characters, a lackluster story, and several frustrating elements of its RPG mechanics prevent it from soaring along with the best of the genre.”
If you’re here for the action, though, this saving is well worth a look. A sequel, unsurprisingly titled Stellar Blade 2, is in development at the time of writing.
For more sale items, the PlayStation Direct sale is well worth a look for Death Stranding fans. The Death Stranding 2: On the Beach Collector’s Edition is discounted, as well as the limited edition controller commemorating the game’s 2025 launch.
Lloyd Coombes is an experienced freelancer in tech, gaming and fitness seen at Polygon, Eurogamer, Macworld, TechRadar and many more. He’s a big fan of Magic: The Gathering and other collectible card games, much to his wife’s dismay.
The ever-reliable PlayStation Plus leaker billbil-kun has revealed the headline game for March 2026.
As reported on dealabs, PGA Tour 2K25 will be available to download from March 3 to April 7 free for all PS Plus subscribers (Essential, Extra, and Premium). Expect an announcement from Sony this Wednesday, February 25.
PS Plus is a regular stomping ground for old 2K sports games (indeed previous PGA Tour games have hit PS Plus), so the addition of PGA Tour 2K25 comes as little surprise. The golf sim launched on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X and S, and PC in February 2025, so it hits PS Plus just over a year later. A Nintendo Switch 2 version came out earlier this month.
IGN’s PGA Tour 2K25 review returned an 8/10. We said: “PGA Tour 2K25 comes back strong, with substantial changes to how it looks and plays bringing it within striking distance of the competition.”
The rest of March’s PS Plus lineup remains under wraps for now (expect the additional games to be confirmed alongside PGA Tour 2K25 on Wednesday). You’ve got until March 3 to grab February’s games before they’re rotated out of the subscription service.
PlayStation Plus February 2026 Monthly Games Lineup
Wesley is Director, News at IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.
Today is a huge deal for our tiny team. We’re over the moon to announce that Revival is launching on PS4 and PS5 on February 26!
The story of Revival began over 20 years ago, way back in 2003. Inspired by the Civilization series and the sci-fi novels of the Strugatsky brothers, especially Roadside Picnic and Noon World, we released our very first game on the Symbian platform.
It was basically a tiny Civilization, just 100 KB in size, yet it delivered a full 4X experience: eXplore, eXpand, eXploit, and eXterminate.
Revival: Recolonization takes place on Earth after an apocalypse caused by an superpower AI uprising. The forward-thinking remnants of humanity, the Emissaries, escaped into cryopods hidden deep underground.
Your mission? Rebuild cities, research tech, explore dangerous lands for rare resources and mysterious anomalies, battle aggressive neighbors, and strike trade deals with friendlier ones. All in the name of restoring human civilization.
On the map, you’ll meet diverse Peoples, survivors of the catastrophe who’ve regressed to a primitive state. Which clan you lead shapes your entire playstyle. It determines your faction’s culture, politics, special weapons, unique buildings, and even exclusive sciences to research.
Each clan in the game belongs to one of five Peoples, each adapted to one of five climate types: Cold, Cool, Temperate, Hot, and Desert.
Units that enter climates they’re not used to can lose health points, block building options, or not yield any resources at all.
But hey, you can change the climate with edicts, an advanced technology from the past. It’s even possible to turn the climate into a weapon by altering the temperature in the enemy’s region.
Oh, and that’s just the start. Edicts let you do all sorts of awesome stuff: raise or destroy mountains, grow forests, drench the land in acid, mind-control your foes, or even starting a zombie apocalypse.
Every battle in Revival plays out on its own map, which reflects the climate and terrain of the global map. Before the fight, you get to scout the battlefield and place your units on the most favorable hexes.
Plus, the Unit Editor lets you mix and match a ton of combinations, creating truly unique units with wildly different traits. As your empire grows, you unlock new sciences and resources, and even more ways to evolve your squads.
Diplomacy evolves too, based on your relationship with other factions. Want to land a sweet deal? You’ll need to raise your standing with them first. And in Revival, you can trade more than just resources — swap techs and edicts too.
You start the game with one clan and one region. The lands next to yours might belong to another faction… or be totally unclaimed. If a neighboring clan is independent, you can make them your vassal — and eventually assimilate them.
How friendly a clan is toward you? That’s Loyalty. It shifts gradually, and you can influence it through your actions.
A massive thank you to every player and fan of the Revival universe.
Because of you, our little team made it this far, and brought our wildest dreams to life. Jump into Revival: Recolonization on PlayStation now!
Embark Studios has laid out everything included in the Arc Raiders Shrouded Sky update, revealing a first look at two new Arc threats, the Surgeon Raider Deck, Dam Battleground map changes, and, yeah, you guessed it: beards.
Information about the big February update was unveiled in a blog post published on its official website. The message comes with more information about all of the new content set to be added tomorrow, February 24, and it even includes a proper trailer for the previously announced Hurricane map condition.
“Shani is blindsided by a Hurricane that engulfs the Rust Belt with ferocious speed and unrelenting force,” an official description for Shrouded Sky says. “Raiders have been caught in the howling, gnashing winds, the Tubes are at risk of flooding, and rumors quickly spread of new ARC prowling the surface among the fog.
“You are not cleared to leave in such conditions; between the low visibility, unsuitable equipment, and risk to the Tube systems, it’s just not worth the danger… but that’s just an invitation to a Raider.”
As the Hurricane blows in extra challenge for those who had just started to get comfortable with Embark’s rotating selection of Arc Raiders events, players should expect to brave more than just the weather. Two new unique Arcs, for example, can be found topside starting with Shrouded Sky: the Firefly and the Comet. The former is another drone-style enemy, but instead of firing light ammo or stun shots, this armored aerial pest spits fire from above. The latter is a ground, sphere enemy not unlike Pops and Fireballs that is said to calmly patrol the surface before smacking raiders with a “seismic boom.”
Another one of the headliners for the February content drop is a map update for Dam Battlegrounds. During a conversation with IGN, Embark CEO Patrick Söderlund spoke about the map, saying, “we know from data that’s the map that people seem to gravitate mostly toward, that people like the most, but there’s still things in there that I think the developers feel like we can improve.” He teased that “all maps are going to get, most likely, touched,” but in the case of Dam Battlegrounds, today’s post tells players to expect a new high-value loot area called the Controlled Access Zone.
As new Arc threats and existing enemies like the Rocketeer will no doubt continue sending Raiders back to Speranza, players should be happy to see there are some not-so-threatening additions coming in the next Arc Raiders update, too. The third Raider Deck, for example, comes with a Surgeon theme, with Embark also directing players to head to the in-game store to check out The Volare and Devotee cosmetic sets.
Those looking to dress up their survivors with a little something special will also be happy to find that facial hair has finally made its way to Speranza, too. All players can access the new Stubble cosmetic when the update launches, with a Full Beard option available to unlock via the Surgeon Deck. Stubble Beard and Thick Moustache options will also be purchasable in the store.
Michael Cripe is a freelance writer with IGN. He’s best known for his work at sites like The Pitch, The Escapist, and OnlySP. Be sure to give him a follow on Bluesky (@mikecripe.bsky.social) and Twitter (@MikeCripe).
Steam Next Fest is back with a new batch of demos, livestreams, and spotlights on several upcoming games from indie developers. And as has become tradition, games from publishing platform indie.io are heavily featured.
So clearly, there are lots of different gaming experiences on offer. But we decided to focus on four specific titles that you can try for yourself right now, most of which just got new updated demos as part of Steam Next Fest.
From a dev team of two co-creators, Pluto sees you play as a less-than-heroic wizard who needs to break out of jail to attend their niece’s birthday party. It’s a roguelike deckbuilder with a unique spellcasting system where elemental sigils are connected to each of your fingers. Your deck is made up of spells that use different combinations of these sigils, and some spells can share sigils, meaning it’s possible for spells to overlap and combine.
So building your deck isn’t just about stacking the most powerful cards, it’s about experimenting with several different cards and finding ones that synergize well together and let you pull off gradually more complicated interactions. You’ll need them to take out the monstrosities you face as you race against the clock to get out of jail in time. Pluto recently announced it will be fully released on March 9, and it got a brand-new demo as part of Steam Next Fest, which you can download for free here.
As you could hopefully guess from the name, Esports Manager 2026 is a strategy-sim game where you lead an esports team and control its day-to-day operations. That means managing all facets of the team: talent acquisition, team finances, player morale, tournament performance, brand growth, leadership structure, everything.
You can scout and recruit real-life players, and you’ll need to consider market dynamics to figure out the right time to add them to your team. You’ll design training programs to help them grow, hire a staff to support them, and chat with them to make sure they’re happy and their goals are being met. Then take them into Simulation mode, where you’ll take part in esports tournaments and control your team’s tactics as you try to establish yourself as the team to beat. Esports Manager 2026 also has a brand-new free demo included in Steam Next Fest, which you can download here.
Inspired by Celtic mythology and Arthurian legends, SoulQuest has you take up the sword of Alys, a woman whose husband’s soul has been taken by the gods. She’s not a fan of that and will hack and slash her way through hordes of divine servants and the gods themselves to get him back.
Combat is fast-paced and has you combine sword attacks, magic, and ultimate abilities to unleash your wrath. It’s a system designed to be easy to pick up and play quickly, but difficult to truly master. You can string certain attacks into jump strikes, allowing you to juggle enemies in the air and pull off long combos. There are also secrets to discover, using basic platforming or Alys’s ability to slide down vertical surfaces and jump off them.
Like the previous two entries on this list, SoulQuest also dropped a new demo as part of Next Fest. It adds a new zone with new enemies and the game’s first god boss fight against the pagan deity Cernunnos. It also adds a new secret mission that wasn’t possible to find before. To try it yourself, you can download the demo here.
We finish off this list with a medieval city builder from Reverie World Studios, developers of the Kingdom Wars series. In City States: Medieval, a continent lies divided, and you lead a city state as it vies for power, wealth, and status while surrounded by powerful kingdoms. You’ll be charged with leading your city state to prominence by building up trade routes across the known world, improving your economy, and protecting your land from your greedy neighbors.
Your city will also have a legendary hero to help lead it, one whose skills will develop as time goes on, expanding your options for supporting the city. They can do things like defend the city, boost construction and city growth speed, or be sent to foreign courts to engage in political intrigue. You only have one hero, though, so you need to think through how best to use them. If you keep them at home, growth opportunities could pass you by. But if you send them on expeditions, your city’s defenses will suffer. And foreign invaders will try to besiege you. You’ll need to use a combination of real-time strategy combat and tower defense mechanics to push them back and prevent your city from falling. To get a taste of these strategic possibilities, you can try the demo here.
Helix: Descent N Ascent sounds like it should be a mascot platformer starring a jaunty DNA molecule with floating Rayman hands, whose special power is making stuff go up and down. Up and down the evolutionary ladder, even! A platform game in which you can evolve and devolve your character at will, to solve different puzzles? Good lord, we’ll make one million dollars out of this! Somebody get me the CEO of Midway.
Alas for my career prospects, Midway is no more. And Helix is not a mascot platformer, probably to its benefit. As revealed by the new Steam demo, it’s a slow and atmospheric puzzler in which you investigate a fallen civilisation, while chasing your doppelganger. You being a lanky Area-51-looking lad, who acquires paranormal powers and must weave them into solutions for terrain puzzles of the Pressure Plate N Lever variety.
And while, initially, we were in awe of how Mira looked on the newest Nintendo console, as time has gone on, and fans have been digging into the update, some are disappointed, reportedly asking Nintendo to refund the $5 NS2E, Eurogamer reports.
Warhammer 40,000: Boltgun 2 – A Holy Warrior of the God-Emperor Joins the Battle Against Chaos
Matt Bone, Lead Designer, Warhammer 40,000: Boltgun 2
Summary
Sister of Battle Nyra Veyrath joins the fight as a second playable character alongside returning Ultramarine Malum Caedo.
See the never-before-seen key art for Warhammer 40,000: Boltgun 2.
Warhammer 40,000: Boltgun 2 will launch on Xbox Series X|S in 2026.
One of the most requested features from fans of Boltgun was to add a second playable character to the game, in addition to Malum Caedo. Right from the start, we knew we wanted to do this for Boltgun 2, especially as it aligned so well with two of our goals for the game: adding more variety and replayability.
Today I’m excited to share more about our new player character: Nyra Veyrath, a battle-hardened Sister of Battle Celestian who loves nothing more than bathing heretics in righteous flames.
A Wild Torrent of Flame
To make for a truly different experience, it was important to us that Nyra had her own unique set of weapons. When it comes to Sisters of Battle, their “holy trinity” of guns are bolters, flamers, and melta weapons, so we knew we had to do these justice.
We’ve spent a lot of time during development making sure her flame-based weapons are as gratifying as possible to use. For these weapons more than most, visual and audio feedback can make or break their feel. They’ve got to be convincingly destructive – as befits a wild torrent of flame – whilst still clearly communicating to the player where and how damage is being applied. My personal favourite is the Heavy Flamer — our internal goal was to make a weapon that feels like the end of the world, and I’m very happy with (and slightly terrified by) the results.
Enhancing Mobility with Fervent Slide
For a breakneck-paced shooter like Boltgun 2, mobility is key when creating a new character – especially for Nyra, who we wanted to feel even more agile than Malum.
One of Nyra’s core abilities is Fervent Slide, a rapid means of getting around levels, with the bonus that it’ll tear right through any cultists in your path. By pressing jump during the slide, Nyra uses her momentum to perform a special Leap – an effective way of reaching higher areas.
Immediacy is a central pillar for Boltgun 2, and part of that means creating abilities that are instantly understandable and satisfying to use. Onto that straightforward base we add optional layers of functionality, expanding the ability’s utility in the game.
As such, Fervent Slide is a great way to both enter and escape combat, whilst the Leap is not only a handy means of reaching high ground, but also – as you can slow time by holding jump – can be used to take stock of the battle around you, or to take some precision shots with your current weapon.
Melting the Enemies of the Emperor
We really wanted to ramp up grenades for Boltgun 2 and make them a unique part of each character’s arsenal. To suit Nyra’s affinity for righteous flame, she has a devastating Melta Bomb at her disposal.
Again, the ability is straightforward to use: simply lob the bomb at an unfortunate heretic and watch the explosion. But there’s added depth to play around with: Holding throw will
slow time whilst priming the grenade, allowing a more precise throw, whilst pressing it again after it’s thrown will detonate it early. The latter allows high skill play such as exploding the bomb over a group of enemies. Or, if you really want to impress the Emperor, you can shoot the bomb in midair…
Adding a Cutting Edge
Anyone who has played Boltgun will know Malum Caedo’s Chainsword is an integral part of his gameplay. When it came to Nyra, we needed her Power Sword to feel equally important to her character.
We wanted her first ranged weapon in the game to be a one-handed Bolt Pistol partly because it allowed us to show the Power Sword on screen at the same time. That way we’re immediately encouraging the player to get in the faces of your enemies, performing vicious combo slashes with the Power Sword.
And for enemies just out of reach, holding the melee attack button performs a forward thrust with the sword, causing increased damage and often showering the screen in gore.
Reinforcing the themes of mobility and extra utility, the thrust attack can also be used as a means of moving around. For this and Nyra’s other abilities, we’re really looking forward to players’ creativity in how they use and combine them.
Boltgun 2 Key Art Reveal
As you may have noticed at the top of the post, we wanted to share the brand-new key art for Boltgun 2! This was created by the supremely talented Johan Grenier, who also created the key art for the original Boltgun! In the new key art for Boltgun 2, Nyra naturally takes centre stage alongside Malum on a battlefield of chaos factions.
This is only the start for Warhammer 40,000: Boltgun 2 and we’ll have even more exciting reveals to share over the next few months! Be sure to add Warhammer 40,000: Boltgun 2 to your wishlist to be notified when it releases later this year, and follow Auroch Digital on X, TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube for all the latest updates.
Warhammer 40,000: Boltgun 2 is the brutal and fast-paced sequel to retro FPS Warhammer 40,000: Boltgun.
Following directly on from the end of Warhammer 40,000: Boltgun, your duty takes you to new locations in a branching, single-player campaign that effortlessly blends the grimdark Warhammer 40,000 universe with a fast-paced first-person shooter.
A New Champion
Lock in as one of two playable characters, each offering their own unique abilities, weapons, and play style.
Dominate combat as the unrelenting force that is Malum Caedo, a formidable Sternguard Veteran with a reputation for purging heretics. Or quickly take control of the battlefield as the swift and nimble Sister of Battle, Nyra Veyrath, torching enemies and leaving only ashes in her wake.
Discover New Worlds
Take the fight to never-before-seen worlds and vanquish the foes that lurk there. From the colossal heights of a hive city to the impenetrable mangrove swamps of a jungle, you’ll need to overcome the challenges of each biome to complete your mission.
Bloody Action-Packed Combat
Built on the explosive combat of Warhammer 40,000: Boltgun, charge headfirst into glorious battle armed with an arsenal of deadly Space Marine weapons. Shred enemies with your lethal chainsword or blast them into an explosion of pixels and blood with your Shotgun!
Never-Before-Seen Foes
As your arsenal improves, so do the enemies! The ferocious Bloodletters and their daemonic Juggernauts are a near unstoppable force as they charge into battle hungry for blood!
Features
Two Playable Characters – Play as the formidable Malum Caedo or battle-hardened Nyra Veyrath, each with their own playstyle.
Explosive FPS Gameplay – Obliterate foes in high-octane combat.
Branching Campaign – Choose your own path through the campaign with each branch featuring unique levels.
NEW Enemies – Face never-before-seen foes from different factions.
NEW Weapons – Eviscerate hordes of relentless heretical scum with devastating weapons.
NEW Locations – Discover a range of worlds and biomes.
Navigation Guide – Effortlessly navigate the battlefield so you’re always at the center of the combat.
AND MORE!
“Zero Parades is ultimately about identity,” explains Kaspar Tamsalu, art director at developer ZA/UM. “The conflict between what you subscribe to as an individual, as a private person outside of the professional sphere, and then how that mixes with what your vocation is.”
Your vocation in ZA/UM’s latest RPG is espionage. Hershel Wilk, your protagonist, is a spy for The Superbloc, a union of left-wing republics. She was born bourgeois before ending up spying for the communists, a background story intentionally filled with blanks to allow you to shape Hershel as you see fit.
“Just because she’s from a communist country does not mean that she subscribes to the ideology,” says Siim “Kosmos” Sinamäe, Zero Parades’ principal writer. “This is up to the player to decide. Spies can be spies for ideology, for money, for a sense of accomplishment, or because they are batshit insane and want to do things like that.”
Sinamäe quickly offers an example of the latter: “I’m going to subscribe to this thought called Unguided Missile Strikes, because I want to say violent things to people. I want to threaten people with nuclear strikes, because that’s the type of spy I am.”
When Sinamäe says “subscribe to this thought”, he’s referring to Zero Parades’ Conditioning system, which reformats Disco Elysium’s Thought Cabinet for an espionage setting. When exploring the world and talking with characters, you’ll encounter new ideas and concepts you can “subscribe” to, rewriting your personality to unlock new dialogue options and roleplaying opportunities. But where ZA/UM’s previous game explored what it would be like for an alcoholic amnesiac detective to soak up ideas like a sponge, Zero Parades approaches the mind of a spy like a collection of masks. Which one is required for today’s task? This required a new method for thought subscription.
“You get the choice about whether or not you want to reinforce or punish the thought,” explains Nicolas Pirot, Zero Parades’ lead technical artist. “You have a branching option of, ‘I don’t like this. I don’t want that to be a part of myself. I was always a violent spy. I no longer want to be a violent spy.’ You can resist that, and then that’ll have a different impact on the way you do things.”
“It’s really framed as this violent reordering of your mind,” he concludes.
It’s All in Your Head
That violent reordering is viewed through the flickering glass screen of an old CRT television. Much of Zero Parades’ in-world technology is modelled after the gizmos and appliances of the 1990s – down at the Bootleg Bazaar, you’ll find vinyl records housed in plastic cartridges in an analogue echo of Sony’s old MiniDisc format. This approach extends past the boundaries of reality and into Hershel’s psyche. The art team needed something functional but flawed to represent this spy’s troubled mind – a mind that could tune itself into dangerous thoughts and settle into uncomfortable programming. And so the Conditioning system’s menu sits inside that box of cathode rays.
“It’s in an imperfect state,” explains Maeve Bonefacic, a technical artist at ZA/UM who helped create the system’s look and feel. “In the sense that [the television] works, it does, but there’s a slight imperfection to that tool. We worked a lot on the particular glitches and effects that a CRT might have.”
I want to threaten people with nuclear strikes, because that’s the type of spy I am.
The CRT is just one example of Zero Parades’ fascinating, two-pronged approach to art design. There’s the physical – the environments you explore, the people you meet, the items you acquire – and then there’s the creations of Hershel’s mind, represented by the wild art cards assigned to each quest, the disturbing televised thoughts assessed through Conditioning, and the badges assigned to your sentient skills. ZA/UM describes this approach as representing the two realms that Hershel exists in: the objective and subjective.
The subjective side of Hershel’s reality is spearheaded by lead illustrator Anton Vill, who created the surrealist artwork for Disco Elysium, including its grotesque Thought Cabinet. Once again, he took inspiration from the work of David Lynch, particularly the ominous tone of Twin Peaks’ dark forests, reflecting the messed-up thoughts of a broken character in his bizarre, twisted, emotionally heavy artwork. In one example, a collection of five, cigarette-smoking Hershel doppelgangers face each other in an unnerving pentagon as words of insecurity, such as “abandoner”, “liar”, and “f***ing spy”, hover above them on flowing reams of paper.
“I’m a huge fan of this kind of mysterious, dark, inner world of a person,” says Vill. “I think that shines through [in Zero Parades’ subjective artwork] and I think it’s perfect for the game.”
The Portofiran Identity
While the art team understandably wanted to create a sense of warped darkness for Hershel’s interior thoughts, it needed to create a complementary vibe for the physical world. It would need to be via different techniques, though, so that subjective thoughts didn’t merge with objective reality.
“We try to subtly inject this unease for the players,” says Tamsalu. “There is a lot of detail that we put into the game, but the way we have textured these [details], and how we approach lighting for the scenes and set up these situations, there is this underlying current of something brewing.”
This thing that is brewing is, of course, why Hershel is in the city of Portofiro. But her job is very unlike that of Disco Elysium’s disaster cop protagonist, and the espionage story Zero Parades tells had a significant influence on the way the city was designed.
“When you’re a police officer looking into a crime, anybody who’s in the vicinity is a potential suspect and expected to speak with you,” Tamsalu explains. “And in a spy game, it’s kind of like the inverse of that. You don’t want to stand out. And because of that, we needed to create a slightly busier backdrop. That’s why you have these characters that go about their own business, and you have your own covert business as you navigate through that.”
While capturing the heart of spy fiction has been an important part of the project, ZA/UM has been very intentional with how it has approached a genre filled with tropes, staples, and conventions. As you’d expect from the studio, this isn’t a James Bond or Jason Bourne adventure, but nor does it aspire to be a John le Carré novel repackaged as a video game. This had to be a fresh take on this shadowy world, and so a number of rules have been set in place. For instance, Herschel is an “operant”, rather than an agent. Her mission takes her “in-theatre” rather than in the field. And her employer, the communist Superbloc, flips the typical capitalist nation perspective of classic Cold War thrillers.
“We wanted to avoid the obvious spy themes,” says character artist Liis Väljaots, who explained how this philosophy extended into the art. “One of the things we wanted to avoid was making the world look too noir-y and too oppressive, to kind of contrast the subject matter, which is quite serious.”
“There are a lot of trench coats in the game, though,” she laughs. “That’s undeniable.”
Roll Play
Your choice to wear a trench coat or not is just one of many decisions that shape the kind of spy you are – clothing, as in Disco Elysium, provides stat modifiers that boost or inflict penalties on your skills. That pool of skills has been reduced (now 15, down from Disco’s 24) with the idea of making each attribute more prominent and viable. They’ll also be tested with much more frequency.
“We have a skill check every 3,000 words, compared to Disco Elysium’s every 6,000 words,” reveals Sinamäe. “We feel this makes the player more engaged with what they’re doing and what type of spy they want to be.”
As I explored in IGN’s hands-on preview of Zero Parades, skill checks have deeper mechanical complexity this time around thanks to the Pressures system. Each of your skills fits into one of three categories – athletic, psychological, and intellectual – and those categories have corresponding “health” bars that measure your fatigue, anxiety, and delirium levels. Fail a psychological skill check and your anxiety bar will fill. Max the bar out, and you’ll take a permanent stat penalty.
Things are made even more interesting by the ability to “exert” a skill check – you can roll an extra die to increase your chances of passing the check, but at the cost of purposefully damaging the skill’s corresponding pressure bar.
“It’s like, how much more can the player take?,” says Bonefacic. “Can I afford to, for example, exert a dice roll? Am I allowed to do that? Do I have the resources to do that? I think it has added an interesting element of strategy.”
That strategy wouldn’t work if there were no method for reducing your pressure gauges. By default, a bar will reset after taking so much damage that you endure a stat penalty, but that’s hardly an approach to build a self-care system around. Instead, you can have Hershel perform a ritual.
“Rituals are a system that we have where you can reduce your pressures by doing all kinds of small things in the world,” explains Pirot. “It can be sitting on a bench and watching the sunrise that might lower your anxiety. It can be smoking a cigarette, having a cup of coffee, or yelling at someone in the street. These very small, very immersive moments, that are available in different parts of the world at different times, that can help an incredibly stressed out, anxious, fatigued, or delirious spy to keep their sanity more or less in check.”
Rather than, say, the classic health potion of other RPGs, which are clearly labelled and a genre staple, you’ll need to discover these rituals through exploration and experimentation. They also unlock further roleplay opportunities – yelling at someone in the street doesn’t exactly sound like a traditional remedy, but for an operant boiling over with rage, it may be very cathartic.
“By the player making a build choice of, ‘I want to be a very violent spy’, they would naturally seek out the rituals that complement that,” says Pirot.
Rituals, mental masks, blending into busy cities, and threats of nuclear armageddon. These are all important aspects of Zero Parades’ spy fantasy, and each is manifested within the game by a different team at ZA/UM. Writing works alongside artwork and system design to produce a world through which you can observe, bargain, and bully. A world in which you can roleplay the type of spy you think can change the world. Or, at the very least, change their place in it.
Matt Purslow is IGN’s Executive Editor of Features.
