Seeing Cthulhu in the title of a game will, fairly or not, stack a pile of expectations on top of it as tall as the walls of R’lyeh. The Cosmic Abyss does meet some of them, focusing heavily on not just the physical danger involved in immersing oneself in the mysteries of lost and cursed history, but the mental toll as well. It exceeds some too, placing the well worn fictional mythos in a setting it doesn’t often get fit into. But the limited time I had with the first couple of chapters was soaked with the sinking fear that even though its puzzles and atmosphere were brain tickling, there weren’t enough moments where the consequences of playing with this eldritch fire felt real or dangerous.

Cthul-clue

In the Lord’s Year of 2026, you’re going to have a hard time adapting HP Lovecraft’s cosmic horror mythopoeia in a way that feels fresh, but developers Big Bad Wolf make a good effort. It follows well worn tropes, like putting players in the shoes of a detective chasing more and more bizarre clues down an inter-dimensional rabbit hole. But the near-future setting, in a world that clearly benefits from advanced technology but still remains recognizable to denizens of our real world, spices things up in curious ways. My favorite is its optimistic take on an AI companion named Key that can actually be a general benefit to society, or at the very least towards your investigative efforts to know the unknowable.

Cthulhu: The Cosmic Abyss gives you a million chances to use it in crime scenes, which are dense with dark nooks to shed light on and stones to be turned over. Its key feature, the Vault, takes every clue you find that could be consequential to solving the mystery and puts it in a big board, where you can move them around and draw connections between them, Charlie Day-style. Some of these clues may become a deduction, which asks a question that can be answered by another clue in order to unlock some key breakthrough to help solve your case. These weren’t common, but were always impactful.

The handiest tool in Key’s arsenal is the sonar. After spending energy to scan the chemical makeup of an item or material, you can send a sonar ping out into the wild to find more objects that match that chemical. Pick up a weird rock and think it might have friends? Send a ping! Bloodstained drag marks suddenly and suspiciously end? Send a ping! You can even combine different materials, up to four, to further narrow down a thing you might be looking for, like if you wanted to find a specific sort of metal that is also covered in eldritch mold for some reason. It’s a clever way to help nudge players along who might be stuck, but without completely blowing the answers to some of the more important puzzles along the way.

Key can also be upgraded to give itself bonus abilities, like one where discovering clues has a slim chance to earn back some energy. I wasn’t really moved either way about the offerings available in the two chapters of the demo. When I did take the time to apply these, it never required me to change the way I play, and I spent no time weighing the value between potential opportunity costs of any of my available options. These might be more consequential in the full release, but I found them to be completely ignorable here.

A Policy of Non-Confrontation

Another way The Cosmic Abyss stands out among its peers is that it’s entirely free of combat, relying completely on the investigative and exploration aspects to provide tension and conflict. That’s a pretty bold choice, and puts a lot of faith in the team’s ability to create bad enough vibes that walking into dark rooms can feel like their own sort of boss fight. I’m not sure The Cosmic Abyss crushes this every time, though.

Many of the spaces make great first impressions. In chapter one, you and your partner, Elsa, arrive at the flooded and dilapidated home of a missing agent of your mysterious organization, Ancile. This house is a mess, floor littered with ancient artifacts, archeological relics, notes scribbled with nonsense, and just straight up trash. The rundown walls cast just the right kinds of shadows that make it feel like touching anything might wake the monstrous building itself.

This goes doubly so for chapter two’s undersea mining facility that sprawls like a metal maze of corridors covered in blood and some sort of goop that is somehow more upsetting than blood. Every wing is a new set of uncomfortably disheveled but relatively routine looking things that lead you through a door and into a room where something obviously blasphemous went down.

But it’s really all sizzle that is hot when you’re in the moment but cools quickly. Besides some things falling off of shelves without warning, you’re never actually in danger in the haunted-feeling house of the first chapter. Though the second chapter’s complex heavily implies that there might be a sort of eldritch minotaur trapped in its watery labyrinth, you never get the displeasure of having to directly encounter one. I did a lot of running around and backtracking through the expansive sea base, and besides unlocking doors to get to new rooms, the building itself remained static, not really changing based on my actions or the progression of the plot, which definitely made it feel like I was treading water when trying to solve my way to the next big moment.

The other side of that coin, though, is that a lot of the solutions to the puzzles are hiding in plain sight, with the clever assessment of the clues you encounter and proper use of your tools being all you really need to find answers. It made me feel like a genius when I skipped from point A to point C in a logic path because I came to my own conclusions that let me skip B entirely (or simply got lucky and found a vital piece of a puzzle early). It also made me feel like a real dunce when I would continually miss the solution despite very clear clues that might as well have been neon signs pointing to it. The puzzles themselves aren’t tough, nothing more than just pattern recognition or just good old fashioned problem solving. The Witness, this is not.

Path of Least Resistance

The Cosmic Abyss does create a bit of friction by tempting the players themselves to take shortcuts at the risk of their sanity. Corruption is introduced in chapter two, and wracks your brain anytime you come into contact with some real evil juju, limiting Key’s abilities and possibly having more adverse effects that are unclear in the scope of this demo. The miners under the sea found a mysterious altar, and now they’re all missing. You can follow their footsteps to see how they activated this demonic device, but participating in the same ritual that vanished the people you were down here to find seems like a terrible idea, doesn’t it? Trying to find a relatively safe alternative to that requires taking the deductive reasoning version of the long way seemed the more sensible alternative, which meant me frustratingly spending a lot of time poking every object I could to figure out what I was missing, the lure of just trading my sanity for the quick and easy solution always hanging above me. In this limited demo, taking corruption seemed largely harmless, but as you move from chapter to chapter, carrying the mental scars of your past mistakes with you, I can see how this could hang over you like a long, Cthulhu face tentacle of Damocles.

My biggest fear for Cthulhu: The Cosmic Abyss was assuaged pretty early – this game does a great job setting Lovecraft’s well-worn mythos in a time and place that feels unique among its many, many contemporaries. It also leans into problem solving in a way maybe other games like it don’t, focusing more on the finding out parts of diligent detective work than the effing around parts of attempting to gun fight a bog monster. And though the puzzles you’ll encounter throughout tend to balance feeling rewarding to solve while being approachable, the tense and slow-burning pace is great for the process of discovery but doesn’t pay off the patience with many scares or really any pushback at all from anything that isn’t a puzzle. That said, I’ve only seen the tip of what it has to offer, so it’s hard to speak to how these elements evolve as you get closer to the real deal monsters, and how systems like Key’s upgrades and clever Sonar expand without playing more, which we will all have the chance to do when Cthulhu: The Cosmic Abyss releases on April 16th.

While the promise of a Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time Remake disappeared along with several other games earlier this year, Prince of Persia fans still have spin-off The Rogue Prince of Persia — and now its team has unveiled a sizable 2026 spring roadmap.

Via Steam, developer Evil Empire wished its community a happy 2026, and confirmed the addition of a Flaming Horses tool as a nod to lunar new Year of the Horse. This tool unleashes a herd of flaming horses that “charge forward, leaving a burning trail behind them.”

“We’ve always wanted a burning tool that works like Altan’s Bracelets, and the year of the fire horse provided the perfect creative spark,” the team teased. “Plus, when you talk about Persian culture, you have to talk about the horse! From the Nisean Horse and the Royal Road to the legendary Rakhsh from the Shahnameh, horses are legendary.”

That’s not all, though. The “Breathless” update is slated to arrive with a public beta at the end of March, promising a “quicker and more intense” experience. This includes a rework of the game’s first hour, tighter pacing and improvements to when and how you unlock new game content and new mechanics, as well as changes to bosses’ difficulty. “Reworks of the level design of the first few biomes will also highlight our iconic wall-run move and make each biome quicker and tougher,” developer Evil Empire said.

There are changes for established players, too, including a new Freeze element, which is coming with a new weapon, the slingshot, arenas — “zones that lock you in, and the only way out is to defeat wave after wave of enemies!” — and weapon affixes which can “make each weapon that appears in your run much more interesting and varied, giving you some difficult choices to take…”

Here’s the full update:

The “Breathless update” will arrive with a public beta around the end of March! As you can guess from its title, this update means making the whole experience quicker and more intense, leaving you… breathless!

We have done a big rework of the pacing of the first hour, including when and how you will unlock new game content and new mechanics, as well as the bosses’ difficulty. Reworks of the level design of the first few biomes will also highlight our iconic wall-run move and make each biome quicker and tougher.

For veteran players who have been looking forward to new toys to play with, don’t worry, we’ve got you covered! First up, we’re introducing a new element – freeze – which is coming with a new weapon, the slingshot!

Next on the list is the arenas – zones that lock you in, and the only way out is to defeat wave after wave of enemies!

Most importantly, weapon affixes are coming too!! These affixes will make each weapon that appears in your run much more interesting and varied, giving you some difficult choices to take…

End Game Update

That’s it for the first update, let’s quickly talk about the second one!

We’re planning for it to land in early May, and some of the content may change, but we know what we’d like to do… It will focus on the End Game, plus bringing more challenges like Speed Run mode and Daily Awakening.

You’ll be able to really test your skill and push the limit with this update coming! Speed, precision, and strategy—show us what you’ve got.

From 2025 to 2026

Looking back on 2025, it was a big year for The Rogue Prince of Persia. We finally graduated from Early Access and increased the game’s Steam review score from 70% upon Early Access release to 88% so far with your support and help!

Of course, we’re not just on Steam, we’ve also successfully brought the game to Switch, Xbox, and Playstation! Right now, we are almost at the point of having 1 million people who’ve played our game!

Even though we are only in the second month of 2026, the game has already achieved something else: we have been included in the Bafta awards longlist and gained 4 nominations at the french game awards ceremony PEGASUS, including best game. We’re crossing all the fingers and toes we have until March.

Following the awards season, vinyl and physical collector editions are also on the way! We believe it will be a great year for the rogue prince of persia, and we can’t wait to make this game better with you guys in 2026!

Ubisoft began this year by announcing a sizable company restructure, resulting in the cancelation of six games, including its Prince of Persia: Sands of Time remake, and a delay to a further seven titles. Two Ubisoft studios will close completely as a result of the changes, while others are subject to further layoffs.

Prince of Persia creator Jordan Mechner recently reacted to Ubisoft’s cancelation of its Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time Remake, describing the loss of any project as a “brutal experience” for developers. “A cancelation so close to release can be particularly devastating for younger team members who don’t have decades of past shipped titles on their resumé,” he said. “It’s tough to suddenly absorb that the past four years of hard work you were proud of, and looking forward to seeing out in the world as your new calling card, will now never see daylight.”

Vikki Blake is a reporter for IGN, as well as a critic, columnist, and consultant with 15+ years experience working with some of the world’s biggest gaming sites and publications. She’s also a Guardian, Spartan, Silent Hillian, Legend, and perpetually High Chaos. Find her at BlueSky.

Surprise! Japanese studio CyberConnect2 is marking its 30th anniversary with the announcement of a new .hack game: .hack//Z.E.R.O.

To whet our collective appetites, we’ve even been treated to a teaser trailer, which you can watch below.

.hack is a series of action RPG games that explore a virtual game-space called The World, with action taking place both there and in our real world, branching off of a multimedia franchise that extends to a collectible card game, a Japanese-only MMORPG, plus animated movies, manga, and live-action TV shows.

Today, February 16, 2026 marks the 30th anniversary of CyberConnect2.

To commemorate, we will begin development of .hack//Z.E.R.O., a new original game. This title will be fully self-published by CyberConnect2, from planning to development to release.#hackZERO #dothack pic.twitter.com/J5nrgnXU83

— CyberConnect2 Official (EN) (@cc2information) February 16, 2026

It’s been the best part of ten years since we last had a .hack game — the last was .hack//G.U. Last Recode in 2017 — but don’t let that put you off: Hiroshi “Piros” Matsuyama recently told Famitsu that the new release won’t link directly to any previous title, so you don’t need to come into the game with any prior knowledge.

Although .hack has always been developed by CyberConnect2 and has usually been published by Bandai Namco, Bandai Namco has given CyberConnect2 permission to “manage the entirety of the project from planning and development to release.”

As for what to expect? “World-renowned violinist Taro Hakase has penned the music, kick-starting the project to the dexterous tune of his violin. .hack//Z.E.R.O. will be a novel RPG experience that blends the series’ trademark duality of fantasy (game world) and reality (real world) with modern expectations, infused with 100% pure CyberConnect2 spirit.

“The game will be enjoyable for both veteran fans and new players alike,” the team said. “Please look forward to this newest iteration of .hack.”

Vikki Blake is a reporter for IGN, as well as a critic, columnist, and consultant with 15+ years experience working with some of the world’s biggest gaming sites and publications. She’s also a Guardian, Spartan, Silent Hillian, Legend, and perpetually High Chaos. Find her at BlueSky.

Activision has confirmed Call of Duty: Warzone Mobile will go dark on April 17, 2026.

We already knew that Activision had decided to walk away from Warzone Mobile — the publisher admitted last May that it “unfortunately has not met [Activision’s] expectations” — but now we have a specific date as to when the smartphone battle royale will be taken offline.

In a brief statement posted to its official website, the team thanked players for their “dedication and passion,” and said “as a final step in the previously communicated service changes to Call of Duty: Warzone Mobile, the servers for Call of Duty: Warzone Mobile will go offline on April 17, 2026, after which the game will no longer be available for play.”

Up until that time, players can still play and “engage with existing content,” but refunds are not available for any unused COD Points or previously purchased in-game content, so you’re advised to use them up before the game shutdowns in April.

Mobile fans are encouraged to migrate to the free-to-play Call of Duty: Mobile — a different game, albeit with a confusingly similar title — “which offers franchise-favorite game modes, including Battle Royale, Multiplayer, and Zombies, as well as the new extraction-based DMZ: Recon.

“The standalone Call of Duty: Mobile delivers frequent seasonal content updates that include Ranked Play, Events, and the tier-based Battle Pass rewards system offering,” the team explained. “Call of Duty: Mobile is available to download through Google Play and Apple’s App Store. Additionally, Call of Duty: Warzone is available on PC and console and is also free to play.”

Warzone Mobile launched in March 2024 on iOS and Android as a Warzone-specific Call of Duty mobile experience that offered battle royale for up to 120 players, with cross-progression to the PC and console versions of Warzone, Modern Warfare 2 and 3, and, later in the year, Black Ops 6. It struggled right out of the gate, though, and failed to make a mark with “mobile-first players like it has with PC and console audiences,” leading to Activision’s decision to cull it just a little over a year later.

IGN’s Call of Duty Warzone Mobile review returned an 8/10. We said: “Call of Duty: Warzone Mobile includes all the best elements of Warzone, while speeding up and streamlining matches and using cross-progression to make this a meaningful extension of the traditional experience.”

Vikki Blake is a reporter for IGN, as well as a critic, columnist, and consultant with 15+ years experience working with some of the world’s biggest gaming sites and publications. She’s also a Guardian, Spartan, Silent Hillian, Legend, and perpetually High Chaos. Find her at BlueSky.