The Nintendo Switch 2’s launch is imminent, and with it, free Switch 2 updates for more than ten existing games from the original Switch’s library. A pair of these are Pokémon Scarlet and Pokémon Violet, which are pretty widely criticized for their relatively poor performance on the Switch. I got to play the newly updated Pokémon Scarlet on the Nintendo Switch 2 for thirty minutes, and the Switch 2 upgrades are incredibly clear.

The official Nintendo website says the free Switch 2 updates for Pokémon Scarlet and Pokémon Violet include:

• “Visuals: Optimized for the Nintendo Switch 2 display and high-resolution TVs for improved image quality.”
• “Frame rate: Improved for smoother movement on Nintendo Switch 2.”

The vague description definitely put me off at first, but now I know Pokémon Scarlet and Pokémon Violet on the Nintendo Switch 2 run in 4K at 60FPS. Or, at least, those are the settings–I didn’t have the equipment to measure if that 60FPS is indeed steady–but by the naked eye, I can still recognize it as markedly improved. As soon as I loaded into the game, on a huge 4K TV, I was stunned by how nice everything looked. No jagged pixelated edges on blades of grass, or even Pokémon, here.

The Switch 2 updates have also increased the number of Pokémon that can appear on screen, and from a further distance. For instance, flying over Casseroya Lake on the Switch 2 was a drastically different experience compared to on the Switch: I saw numerous Pokémon swim along the surface from a distance and didn’t experience any noticeable stuttering once I began to swim. Even when it began to rain, Pokémon Scarlet on the Switch 2 still didn’t struggle even a little. In fact, it continued playing like normal, as if the weather effects were meant to just… work.

The framerate improvements are especially immediately obvious when viewing faraway moving objects, like the windmills by West Province (Area One) – Central, or distant Pokémon and people. I also didn’t experience stalling or glitches when in a raid battle or when Terastalizing. I didn’t get to play online or co-op, however, so we’ve yet to see if the updates improved those aspects (that desperately need it.)

Visuals are subjective, so there’s only so much I can say to emphasize that the difference is certainly noticeable, but you can watch the comparison video on this page. I can also report on some favorable loading time comparisons that will let you judge for yourself.

These approximate comparisons are between Pokémon Violet running on a V2 Switch (the Monster Hunter Rise special edition, specifically) in 1080p, and Pokémon Scarlet running on a brand new Nintendo Switch 2 in 4K.

Loading from title screen:

• Switch: 19 seconds
• Switch 2: 5 seconds

Fast travel from North Province (Area One) to Casseroya Lake:

• Switch: 9 seconds
• Switch 2: 4 seconds

Fast travel from Blueberry Academy to Paldea:

• Switch: 17 seconds
• Switch 2: 5 seconds

Besides the fast travel loading time improvements, the menus are also so much snappier. Models in menus load in pretty much immediately, a stark contrast to the agonizing seconds you’d have to wait on the original Switch between trying on clothes in the menu; or hairstyles or accessories in stores.

In a huge reveal at this week’s Unreal Fest Orlando, Epic Games and developer CD Projekt Red showcased a technical demonstration of The Witcher 4. Built in Unreal Engine 5 using many of the latest tools and technologies, it offers a window into the future of The Witcher; not just in terms of what Ciri’s saga will (hopefully) look like, but also the people we’ll meet, the places we’ll go, and the general vibe of the game we’ll one day get our hands on.

There was plenty to see in the 14 minutes of demonstration footage, so we’re here to break it down with the help of CD Projekt Red and Epic Games. Here are the 10 most important things we’ve learned about The Witcher 4 and its new tech demo.

1. The Demo is Not Gameplay

The demo we saw was played live on stage by CD Projekt Red’s Cinematic Director, Kajetan Kapuściński. But while Kapuściński was literally moving Ciri around the game world, the studio is keen to emphasise that the demo is not a true slice of the game. While the mountain region, forest, and port town you saw will be part of The Witcher 4, the quest being played and the characters Ciri interacts with may not be featured in the final game.

As Kapuściński explains to me, this “was a demo that [CD Projekt Red and Epic Games] crafted so both companies can work on some technology that will be powering The Witcher 4 in the future. So it’s not gameplay of The Witcher 4, per se.”

So if it’s not gameplay, what can we learn from it? “It shows our artistic direction and how we would like to approach some things,” Kapuściński explains. And so everything you see – the scope of the world, the density of the foliage, the way Ciri and NPCs react to each other, and how cinematic cutscenes blend with the interactive parts – is CD Project Red’s ambition. It’s how the studio currently envisions the game and what the team is working towards.

“But everything you saw is subject to be changed, because that is a snippet of what we have now,” Kapuściński says. In short, this is not a full representation of the final version of The Witcher 4.

2. Will The Witcher 4 Look Like That?

The visual quality of this tech demo is astonishing, but we’ve been here before. Many people will remember the first footage of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt or Cyberpunk 2077, which turned out to be more ambitious, at least visually, than the final product. In The Witcher 4’s case, it’s especially easy to be skeptical, as this demonstration was running on a regular PlayStation 5 (not even a PS5 Pro!) at 60 frames per second. I asked Wyeth Johnson, Senior Director of Product Strategy at Epic Games, if this quality was genuinely something players could expect to experience on a base PS5.

“Oh absolutely. We can’t lie here,” he says. “I mean the technology that we’re making has to be directly relevant for what players expect, and players across the entire hardware spectrum are asking for amazing 60 frames per second gameplay.”

The new advancements in Unreal Engine 5.6 are allowing developers to run complex tech more efficiently. As explained in an Unreal blog post, “The Hardware Ray Tracing (HWRT) system enhancements are designed to deliver even greater performance for Lumen Global Illumination. By eliminating key CPU bottlenecks, you can author more complex scenes while maintaining a smoother 60 FPS frame rate.” The promise of all this is that the experiences that are currently typically locked behind a 30 frames-per-second ‘Quality’ mode will be available at 60fps – all without requiring new hardware.

“The goal that we set at the very beginning, to make this demo and play it live on a standard PlayStation 5 in 60 frames per second, that was a challenge on its own,” says Kapuściński. “And pushing towards that allowed us to achieve these optimizations that allow us to use technology on a bigger scale.”

3. We’re Headed North. Very North

The technical demo takes place in Kovir, a region in the very north of The Continent, the world in which The Witcher takes place. It’s situated north-west of the lands of Redania and Temeria, locations you’ll be familiar with from The Witcher 3. Its mountainous terrain is resource-rich, and so mining is one of the kingdom’s key industries. Kovir is the world’s leading exporter of minerals, and among those minerals is salt; you’ll have noticed that Ciri’s quest in this demonstration is to investigate a salt merchant’s missing cargo.

Fans of The Witcher books have waited a long time to visit Kovir, but creating it for a video game is no easy task. As Game Director Sebastian Kalemba explained as part of the demonstration, “So much of The Witcher world is natural, organic, especially Kovir with its dense forests and wild nature.” The Witcher 3 featured some grand woodland environments that remain impressive even 10 years later, but the forest shown in this demo is a league ahead of them. It stretches as far as the eye can see, with detailed pine trees creating a blanket of green through the mountain’s ravine. Both vertically and horizontally, there’s an astonishing amount of foliage detail.

“I think for the Witcher franchise, the forest is definitely the soul of the game,” says Charles Tremblay, VP of Technology at CD Projekt Red. “And this is something that we were struggling [with] since the beginning of the project. How are we going to make the next generation of foliage?” The answer was Nanite Foliage, a new Unreal technology that has a whole new approach to how assets like leaves, flowers, and pine needles are loaded into the environment. It allows for a much more detailed natural world without the need for constant load times and pop-in – and it was that that has helped CD Project Red work on a seamless forest environment that is so richly detailed.

4. A Horse Named Kelpie

For hundreds of hours we travelled around The Continent on a very beloved steed. But Roach was Geralt’s horse. Ciri needs her own mount, and luckily she has one. Kelpie is a black horse and we can see her in action for the first time in this tech demo. While Kelpie is new to the games, this horse has roots in The Witcher books. Originally belonging to a member of the Guild of Merchants named Hotspurn, Ciri took ownership of Kelpie when he died. Recognised as a magnificent horse wherever she goes, Kelpie’s best trick is that she can be summoned by rubbing a magical bracelet (it’s as if she were written to be a video game horse).

In the books, Kelpie is said to be able to jump over seven-foot-tall walls with ease. Anyone who’s played The Witcher 3 will tell you that’s an impossibility with Roach – he’s more likely to disappear and end up on a roof. And so all this begs the question: will Kelpie be easier and more enjoyable to control than Geralt’s old steed?

“No offense to Roach, but when you have this jank it can get you out of the immersion, that’s for sure,” admits Tremblay. “We want [players] to explore the world with [Kelpie] as a companion and it has to be close to perfection, for sure.” New tech like Unreal’s multi-character motion matching should hopefully ensure riding Kelpie is a smooth experience.

Like so many of The Witcher’s creatures, Kelpie has a mythological connection. In Scottish folklore, a Kelpie is a shape-shifting water spirit that has the ability to disguise itself as a horse when on dry land. Could this name hint at Kelpie also being able to take Ciri across spans of water? We’ll just have to wait and see.

5. The Quest and The Manticore

As we’ve established, this showcase is a technical demonstration rather than a slice of the game, and so there’s not really a quest to see, at least not in the game sense of the word. But Kalemba wanted to ensure the demo had a sense of narrative running through it – this is CD Projekt Red, after all.

“The big challenge was how to make a tech demo, but in a way that we’ll also be able to incorporate story and bits and pieces from this world,” he explains. “I love that narrative layer in this entire piece, [it] actually even helps to boost the technical achievements behind the entire demo.”

In that narrative layer, we see that Ciri has taken on a classic bit of Witcher work. She’s accepted a contract from a salt merchant to find his missing cargo and crew. Unluckily for him, both his salt and men are long gone. Luckily for Ciri, their grisly fate arrived via the blood-soaked jaws of a manticore. And, as we all know, killing monsters is exactly what Witchers are known for.

It’s a pleasant surprise to see a manticore in this demo. Production materials that were leaked during the development of The Witcher 3 suggested that manticores were planned to be part of Wild Hunt, but they were cut from the final game. While this tech demonstration is by no means confirmation of anything appearing in The Witcher 4, we at the very least have been able to see one of the beasts rendered in Unreal Engine 5. Hopefully we’ll get to fight it in the final version of the game.

Including this quest was important to Kalemba. “One of the common denominators between the writing [in the] books and the games is a cocktail of genres. It’s a cocktail of experience,” he says. The reveal trailer shown at The Game Awards last year, he explains, was a more “grounded” experience that showed the ugly realities of living in the world of The Witcher. “Here you have this adventurous vibe, you know what I mean?”

6. Welcome to Valdrest, Population: Over 300

As Ciri adventures through Kovir, she returns to Valdrest, the port town that’s home to the trader who gave her the salt contract. It’s also home to over 300 other people, thanks to a whole host of tech optimisations and Unreal Engine’s new animation framework. That means larger, more realistic crowds – Novigrad will hopefully feel primitive in comparison.

Among the town’s population we see men, women, and children, a marketplace full of traders and guards, several dwarves, a few sex workers, entertainers, and a number of different animals, including a tamed bear. Perhaps most impressive is the variety of body types and unique animations on display; it feels like everyone is an individual, something emphasised by unique characteristics, such as a disabled man walking with a crutch, or a mother wrapping her arm around her child. It’s an example of Epic’s metahuman technology bringing ever-increasingly lifelike and varied characters to video games. Something that can also be seen in the way they interact with each other…

7. A Responsive, Living World

The NPCs in Valdrest are interesting for many reasons beyond just their visual variety. As Kalemba explained during the demo, “Notice how responsive the world is. Character actions directly affect what happens around you, sometimes even setting off chain reactions. Everything is working together.” We see this in action as Ciri bumps into a merchant carrying a crate of apples, which causes him to lose balance and drop his fruit all over the floor. The apples, fully rendered with physics, begin to roll down the hill. A nearby chicken, startled by the noise, clucks and flaps away.

We also see how NPCs can react to Ciri – upon spotting her, a guard says “Oh bugger, not her again,” and spits at Ciri as she walks past. It’s reactive behaviour like this that helps sell a Witcher’s shadowy reputation. Many people are prejudiced against these mutated monster hunters. “The idea is that there are physical interactions that when you get poked at, you get a reaction to it in a way that feels plausible to you,” says Johnson. “All of these things keep you in the world.”

There are a number of other cool events we see, such as a man being thrown out of a tavern (apparently for cheating at Gwent – does this mean our beloved card game will be back for another round?). It’s unclear if these behaviours are scripted or dynamic based on schedules or routines à la The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion, and when asked, CD Projekt Red would not say what its ambitions were there. But the goal is a living, breathing world.

“For us, the world words we are creating, it’s super important for us to actually make them as vivid and as believable as possible,” says Kapuściński. “Naturally behaving, properly looking NPCs are an important part of it. So yeah, we’ve proved that with previous games, and we’re not aiming any lower than that.”

8. Seamless Cinematics

Because this is a technical demonstration and not actual gameplay, we didn’t see a lot of “game” – you’ll no doubt have noticed how the camera swung away from Ciri’s conversation with the merchant before any kind of dialogue system and UI could be shown. But what we did see is a vision of how dialogue sequences in The Witcher 4 will begin, and it’s completely seamless. The Witcher 3 featured brief loading screens as it transitioned from the gameplay camera to the cinematic camera, but all that’s gone now thanks to Unreal Engine’s tools. Now, as Ciri approaches the geographic trigger point for a dialogue – in this case, a balustrade – the camera automatically ‘unhooks’ itself from its regular game position behind Ciri and begins to frame the scene as required for the cinematic.

CD Projekt Red first achieved seamless game-to-cinematic transitions in Cyberpunk 2077, where it was vital to maintaining the first-person immersion. While things are a little different here, thanks to the third-person perspective, it’s cool to see the studio’s vision for keeping the experience flowing naturally.

9. A Small Gift for All Witcher Fans

Right at the end of the demo, Kalemba said that the demo was going to finish with “a small gift for all Witcher fans.” That gift was a first look at Lan Exeter.

While it is briefly mentioned by characters in both The Witcher 3 and its expansion, Blood and Wine, this is the first time we are seeing this grand city rendered for a video game. Lan Exeter is a port city in Kovir and the kingdom’s winter capital (there is also a summer capital, called Pont Vanis) that features in Andrzej Sapkowski’s Witcher books. With no pedestrian walkways, the only way to navigate Lan Exeter is via its canal network. Unsurprisingly, the city is essentially a wintry, fantasy Venice.

The Great Canal that runs through Lan Exeter leads to a number of important places, but the most important of them all is Ensenada Palace; the residence of the King of Kovir and Poviss. On the boat ride to the palace, a visitor would also be able to see the grand homes of many admirals and business magnates. It seems a sure bet that we’ll be visiting at least one or two of those estates when we visit Lan Exeter in The Witcher 4.

10. The Next Generation of Open World RPGs

As the demo draws to a close, Kalemba says, “I think what we’re doing together [with Epic Games] is going to bring in a new generation of open world RPGs.” But what exactly does that mean?

“For us, story [and] quest is always key,” says Tremblay. “And now with the immersion, we want people to experience this world, but the technology should not be in the way. We want people to feel like they belong to this world, they interact with the world, that they can experience the emotion of the character, feeling that they are connected to the story. With our partnership and all the tools we build and all the technology, I think it’ll be yet another level for us going forward.”

“For us, we don’t want to get in the way of artistic vision,” says Johnson. “We want everybody who uses Unreal Engine to come at the tools and the technology unburdened by what they imagine and believe that it can’t do. We want [them] to come to the technology with a vision of ‘Here’s what we want to achieve. We’re going to dream big, and we hope that the engine moves out of our way as efficiently and effectively as possible and allows us to achieve it.’”

Matt Purslow is IGN’s Senior Features Editor.

I don’t think I’ve hungered for a game this year as much as Holstin. This survival-horror immediately caught my eye with its gorgeous pixel art, perspective-shifting gameplay, and eerie Polish setting.

So I felt super lucky to get hands-on with an all-new, two-hour PC demo, sliced right out of Holstin’s ominous beginnings. While the previous Steam demo captured Holstin’s “feel” through mocked-up puzzles and a firing-range weapons tutorial, this new build puts it all together with a meaty (pun intended) story.

My friends, you’ve gotta keep an eye on Holstin – here are a few reasons why.

#1: “Disgusting” Has Never Looked So Good

It’s the first thing you’ll notice – Holstin is really, really good-looking, right from your sudden drop into a dilapidated train station overgrown with some weird, pulsing yellow substance. The art looks already great in screenshots, but you need to see and feel Holstin in motion to truly understand what an accomplishment these graphics are. Even the title screen is amazing.

What looks like 2D top-down pixel art becomes truly impressive 3D once you learn that you can move the camera around, with slick, seamless transitions through eight different angles. Even if you’re aware of this before you begin playing, swinging around for the first time is honestly one of Holstin’s most surprising moments – yes, right up there with enemy encounters!

(As a side note, the top-down movement in Holstin lends itself really well to twin-stick action on a controller, but it plays perfectly on mouse and keyboard as well.)

While most players won’t necessarily be choosing Holstin because of its technical proficiency, it’s what really makes this aesthetic work. There’s a reason why graphics like this aren’t manifold in the industry – it’s built on the studio’s custom in-house technology, which makes it likely to cement Holstin as a standout game graphically.

#2: Mind-Blowing Perspectives

Okay, so you can spin that third-person, top-down camera around and view the world from multiple angles – but that’s not just an awesome-looking gimmick. Those angles go hand-in-hand with Holstin’s environmental puzzles. If you’re not looking behind boxes or checking around corners to find alleys, you may – and probably will – miss things that will help you find your path forward in Holstin’s strange world.

But wait! There’s more!

There are aggressive mutated people everywhere. That means you need to shoot them. But unlike other twin-stick shooters, you won’t be staying in that fixed-camera view to ready your sights. Entering aim mode transitions you into an over-the-shoulder third-person view, freeing your camera to enable pinpoint precision for your headshots.

These two very different views really add to the suspense – for instance, while in top-down view, you might miss the enemy lurking quietly around a corner. I found myself constantly on my guard, switching between both viewpoints even out of combat. (And sometimes even that didn’t save me from being pounced on and grappled down by some grisly horror of a human.) The only part of combat that initially confused me was melee, as that isn’t in aim mode – but I got used to it quickly.

Holstin plays with other camera perspectives too, though more for atmosphere than for gameplay reasons. Think: a god’s-eye view in an eerily silent, unpopulated area. Your cursor disappears, suddenly removing your primary sense of defense. You might not be switching into aim mode here, but you’ll sure feel like some ominous force is watching your every move.

#3: Meat, Tentacles, and Gore Galore

Survival horror fans will want to know how gruesome the strange environment can get, but don’t worry – the squelchy mainstays of the genre are definitely represented in Holstin. The overall goal in this demo is to find your way to a slaughterhouse, after all.

The town’s dissolution into its kind of otherworld first emerges in the form of “Plasmodium,” the aforementioned yellow substance. At first, it looks like someone went wild with foam spray – but when you approach, tentacles will rise and wiggle at you. Are they saying hi or taunting you? Either way, it’s suitably icky and adds to a pervading sense of unease.

And then there are the mutant enemies. Imagine glowing orange orbs taking over your body, their tendrils taking the place of your tendons. Imagine those same orbs buried in the Plasmodium, which slowly spreads through streets and parks like an aggressive, menacing fungus.

Something I also found unsettling was the implied gore. While you don’t see the actual slaughterhouse in this demo, you will learn how it figures into the overall narrative through conversational dialogue and scribbled scraps scattered through the world. Something wicked is going on in that place, and you know it’s not going to be pretty when you finally get there.

#4: Adventure Gaming Puzzles That Don’t Suck

As a gamer who grew up with classic point-and-click adventures, I was very impressed by Holstin’s approach to its puzzles. Maybe I’m getting old and crotchety, but I’ve been disappointed in recent years with how linear puzzling has become in adventure-adjacent games. Receive an objective, figure out how to solve the objective, then receive the next objective.

Though Holstin is strongly narrative-driven, it never feels like a linear story with disparate puzzles slapped on top. In fact, I’d almost forgotten how challenging a well-designed puzzle tree can be. In Holstin, you won’t be completing objectives in the order they’re listed. You can work on multiple objectives at once, and figuring out which are solvable in any given moment is almost a puzzle in itself. You might have to retrace your steps, which feels realistic (like searching your house thrice for your car keys).

And as for the puzzles themselves – they make sense (well, as much as something can make sense in this mad world). Survival horror fans are all familiar with some of the genre’s most inane challenges – ranging from the dreaded sliding puzzle through to needing an intimate knowledge of Shakespeare to shelve books correctly in order to obtain a door code (*cough* Silent Hill *cough*).

None of that nonsense here. Holstin’s asks of you are simple: How are you going to get this trapdoor open? What twisting path through town will you need to forge in order to reach the playground? How you solve these problems feels organic, and really encourages you to explore your environs thoroughly.

#5: 1990s Poland Is a Trip

The Polish setting forms the bones of quite a specific – and unique – narrative. It’s not exactly a great tourism ad for Poland, but even covered with the weird tentacled Plasmodium, the town of Jeziorne-Kolonia still feels like a distinctly foreign experience compared to other games set in more vague locations.

This demo only has Polish voiceover, and as an English speaker myself, I found that this added to the believability and atmosphere – like watching a foreign flick. Though I don’t have the context of how the Polish language is structured, the voice acting sounded dead-on.

There’s the suicidal woman, her voice filled with defeat as she hands her gun over to you. The large, childlike man, squealing, talking in riddles, and just one plot twist away from losing it entirely. The cast of weirdos here is a lot wider than your usual survival-horror game – but their convincing creepiness doesn’t detract from the suspense at all. (I sure wished they would help me out in combat, though.)

And while Holstin set in the 1990s, it’s not exactly boy bands and GeoCities. For instance, your save checkpoints are decrepit-looking phone booths – and you’ll need to find physical telephone cards to actually make your save (just like the real-life anachronism of digging for change to do your laundry). Our hero Tomasz definitely does not have a cell phone for tracking objectives. Expect all the inconveniences in the pre-internet era – yet another stumbling block in your strange journey through this horrifying town.

All in all, this demo honestly blew me away – and I say that very rarely of any game. If the rest of Holstin is as polished and carefully crafted, it will be considered a survival horror classic in a decade’s time. I’m that impressed by what I’ve seen and played of it so far.