Category: IGN

Back in the day, SNK was one of gaming’s biggest names. King of Fighters and Fatal Fury were hugely popular beat-’em-ups in the 1980s and ’90s, while Metal Slug helped define the side-scrolling action game genre, and the company’s high-spec console, handheld and arcade hardware were the envy of many.

After two tumultuous decades in the 2000s, SNK received investment from Saudi Arabia’s Electronic Gaming Development Company in 2020 and was fully acquired in 2022. The investment has come under scrutiny due to Saudi Arabia’s human rights record, which includes allegations of unfair treatment of women and the LGBTQ community. In the aftermath of the acquisition, an SNK lead insisted that the studio’s new ownership “doesn’t affect us in any way.”

Shortly after the opening of a new development studio in Singapore in April, IGN spoke with SNK President and CEO Kenji Matsubara about the company’s vision, which includes becoming a Top 10 global publisher.

If Alice: Madness Returns was dead on arrival, that would at least be aesthetically consistent.

The 2011 sequel to American McGee’s Alice went even deeper into Alice in Wonderland’s red guts than the first game, pulling out the most nightmarish aspects of the Victorian children’s story and tying their shadows into a neat action-adventure. But it suffered from abysmal launch sales, with reviewers and fans both being disappointed by what they felt were rough controls and level design.

Still, game designer American McGee wasn’t giving up.

McGee, who created the series after being fired by id Software, hoped to gather enough community support for a follow-up, and the most diehard Alice believers gave it to him in spades. But after a decade of this cutting fan pressure, publisher EA finally made a decision in 2023: there would be no more Alice games. They blamed the “analysis of the IP” and market conditions.

Was it all over? Would Alice have to lie facedown in the graveyard once and for all? Not exactly. Alice: Madness Returns doesn’t just live, it thrives.

“Even though EA was going to let Alice die,” says 33-year-old Twitch streamer Foxfire47, who has been a fan of the series since the first game released in 2000, “the fans were absolutely not.”

She credits Madness Returns’ lively online fanbase to McGee himself. He began working on a proposal for a potential follow-up, Alice: Asylum, in 2017, and encouraged fans to contact EA directly to show their support. His now retired Patreon contains all the other ways he incentivized fans to deepen their obsession, like referring to the fandom as “Insane Children” and eventually posting an Alice: Asylum design bible bursting with art.

His otherworldly design is at least one reason why fans could never truly abandon Madness Returns, or the Alice series in general. They are a gorgeous testament to the fact that anyone can survive the worst thing that’s ever happened to them.

Friendships and bonds

Foxfire47 discovered Madness Returns’ online fan base through McGee’s Patreon in 2018. She remembers feeling McGee’s excitement for Asylum bleeding into her preexisting enthusiasm for the series, and it did the same for everyone she met over Patreon and Discord.

“Friendships and bonds were made through Alice: Asylum,” Foxfire47 says.

When EA ultimately passed on the project, they were also rejecting an entire community that had put years and money into materializing a shared dream. But McGee had trained his fans to become personally invested, and an IP issue seemed small in the face of their dedication.

“After [EA rejected Asylum],” Foxfire47 says, “I feel that, as fans for Alice, we wanted to keep the spirit of the games alive. With the camaraderie of this community, we are always going to show our love for these games.”

The community now sustains Madness Returns through YouTube videos with millions of views, pouty TikTok fancams with hundreds of thousands of likes, detailed cosplay, tattoos, and other tangible methods of worship. All of this online word-of-mouth has helped Alice fans succeed in an unprecedented goal. They are actively collecting new fans for an abandoned, 24-year-old franchise telling the strange horror story of an orphan teenager, Alice, who retreats into an hallucinated Wonderland.

“I bought Alice: Madness Returns, and I’m playing the first one for the first time because of your cosplay!” one commenter recently told popular TikTok cosplayer Jessilyn Cupcake. In recent years, she’s made and shared several Alice cosplays with her eager followers, including Alice’s ultramarine tea dress and the yowling Hobby Horse hammer from Madness Returns. She first found Madness Returns in 2011, telling IGN that she “fell in love immediately.”

“It still feels modern and a fresh take despite being 15 years old,” Jessilyn says. “I think [its] hack-and-slash-style gameplay with multiple weapons, costumes, and abilities is one of the best examples in a game, ever.”

The game is an intoxicating blend of deadly and delicate, much like its most famous weapon, the lace-patterned Vorpal Blade – a chef’s knife for short-range combat. In Madness Returns, traumatized 19-year-old Alice must take on the child sex trafficker and psychiatrist Dr. Bumby, who tries to trick her into madness in order to commodify her body. But Alice learns to wield her fragile power against any abomination.

Alice’s ability to work through her pain and tackle any problem, from baby dolls that vomit to dangerous men, is part of her underdog appeal. And McGee accessorizes Alice’s hypnotic visions with touches like the creamy, white bow behind her bloodspattered apron, and the crystal-blue butterflies in the misty, tree-covered Vale of Tears.

At this point, I’ve now played The First Descendant in three or four different beta iterations, and each time I’ve felt no more or less certain whether this would be something my friends and I would want to play, or just another sci-fi shooter in a sea of similar games vying for our attention. After more than 45 hours sunk into a pre-launch preview build over the past week, I’m only slightly closer to answering that question – but I’m certainly not having a bad time. I’ve got a whole lot left to play, including the all-important endgame, for instance, so as of now I’m still not sure if The First Descendant will be my next looter-shooter fixation, or yet another one that misses the mark.

Nexon’s free-to-play third-person multiplayer game plays in the same space as Genshin Impact, complete with cool-looking characters to unlock and countless currencies and materials to grind, all of which can be bypassed by those simply willing to cough up their hard-earned cash. And, like some of its polished contemporaries, there’s a pretty decent game here in spite of a UI that requires a PhD in RPG hogwash to decipher and an irritating monetization model that does crazy things like make you pay real money to increase your inventory capacity or get RNG consumable dye packets just to change the color of your gear. Running around with friends while shooting enemies and unleashing interesting supernatural abilities upon alien armies is an undeniably good time (as it is in Destiny, Warframe, and Outriders, to name a few) and the deep RPG mechanics and loot systems are a spreadsheet-loving nerd’s dream. It’s also a fairly pretty game that feels a lot more premium than one might expect from the free-to-play space, despite the occasional framerate dip or crash (at least in its pre-release state). That said, the free-to-play model is every bit as eyebrow raising as it might sound, the story and dialogue is laughably bad, and much of the campaign is packed with filler that can be a real snooze.

I’ve split my dozens of hours dashing around small hub areas completing repetitive chores in between much more substantial missions and boss battles against robotic kaiju called colossuses. Those self-contained missions and boss fights are exactly the kind of thing I hope for in an action-packed cooperative game: Some seriously awesome combat that rivals its peers, interesting enemies to take down, and a loot system that had me regularly trying out the latest shiny weapon I pulled from some shmuck’s corpse. If The First Descendant would just let me mainline that part, we’d be onto something and my mind would be made up.

Unfortunately, so much of it is kept locked behind sections where you complete a series of really dull errands, like defending a piece of tech from waves of enemy assaults, gathering items from fallen baddies to deposit into a collection robot, or just killing stuff until a miniboss spawns for you to take out. Not even dope combat can stave off boredom when it has you hanging around for a few minutes while you wait for small groups of enemies to spawn until you’re told that you succeeded, then being directed to the next spot on the map to do it again. These sections account for a pretty big chunk of what you do during the main story, too, seemingly to pad out the adventure so you don’t burn through the more interesting activities too quickly. Worst of all, there are only a few flavors of these kinds of quests, so you’ll find yourself being asked to repeat them multiple times in between every boss battle or more meaty story mission.

While I’ve only played through half of the campaign, so far it’s really not looking great, fam. Absolutely brimming with nonsensical sci-fi babble like “dimensional walls,” “inverted data codes,” and “unleashing Arche,” it’s one of the sillier stories I’ve seen in a while. Most of the dialogue is absolutely atrocious: At one point I burst out laughing when a bad guy menacingly declared, “Qliphoth will engulf Ingris. The roars of the Vulgus will fill this land with fear!” In another section I shook my head as an antagonistic character named Jeremy (a grown man with the voice of a whiney, spoiled teenage brat), showed up to be the most annoying person in the world and was mean to me for no reason while I ran quests for him. It’s truly heinous stuff, but some of it is so bad it’s pretty amusing – I eventually found myself looking forward to cutscenes, eager for the next hit of sci-fi gibberish and butchered voice performances. (On top of the absurdity, the English voices rarely come close to matching the lips of the characters speaking. That’s fine if you enjoy watching anime dubs, but I find it pretty distracting.)

Thankfully, the most interesting characters are those you can unlock and play as, like the unflappable electric speedster Bunny (my personal favorite), or the sarcastic and smarmy grenade-chucking soldier Lepic. Some of the cast do still seem a bit shallow, largely because you get only a little backstory and character development for most of them, but hearing them cheer as you blast monsters to bits and seeing their charming animations – which clearly had much more effort put into them than those of the NPCs – is quite nice. Only one of these playable characters has an actual questline associated with them (with more planned for the future), but the bits of that story I played were some of the better content available in The First Descendant at launch, so here’s hoping they at least deliver on that front.

Actually learning to play as them is great too, although I still have plenty more characters to unlock before I’m able to take them all for a spin. One character might control the battlefield with explosive AoE attacks, while another covers enemies in devastating ice-based debuffs. Bunny does insane DPS by running around as much as possible to generate electrical energy, then unleashes it in powerful blasts. Since each of the characters has their own style of play, switching between them offers a markedly different experience, like how Ajax, a heavy tank with protective abilities is all about standing your ground instead. Most games with playable characters as its main chase live or die by how compelling those unlockable avatars are, and so far The First Descendent seems like it’s loaded with distinctive options that are absolutely worth going through the trouble to obtain.

Similarly, the weapons, equipment, and upgrades you earn while shotgunning your way through levels are awesome. Loot drops constantly, most weapons feel distinct and satisfying to play with, and watching the numbers go up as you modify and upgrade every new toy in your arsenal makes The First Descendant hard to put down… until it forces you into about 15 separate menus to juggle dozens of materials and so many different systems that you might want to keep your inhaler at the ready. This kind of thing is pretty typical for looter-shooters, granted, but even by the already gag-inducing standards of the genre, this one’s especially obnoxious to learn – especially since the tutorial robot who shows you the ropes in the social area explains things to you in a series of texts that pass by quickly enough to challenge your speed-reading skills.

Even after spending dozens of hours with this pre-launch preview build, I’ve got plenty more to play and an endgame to dive into once it launches properly next week. Check back in the coming weeks for my final, scored review.

Cyberpunk 2077 developer CD Projekt Red recently discussed the future of the RPG series and where it still has room to grow in its upcoming sequel, codenamed Project Orion. One hope the studio has for its upcoming sequel is to do a better job of pushing the envelope in its commentary on social issues.

During a recent episode of CDProject Red’s AnswerRed Podcast, associate game director Paweł Sasko underscored how, despite the game’s nature of not hand-feeding players answers to prevailing social issues, Cyberpunk 2077 didn’t go far enough in its social commentary.

“I see that we didn’t push the envelope far enough in some places, for instance,” Sasko said. “Like, let’s say, the homeless crisis. When I look at it, I’m like, ‘We weren’t far enough in ‘[Cyberpunk 2077.’] We thought that we were dystopian, but we just touched the surface.”

Dan Hernberg, the executive producer for Project Orion, agreed with Sasko that Cyberpunk’s portrayal of social issues was flawed and voiced his optimism for Orion furthering the game’s social commentary in ways 2077 fell short.

“I think the really cool thing about Cyberpunk—and the dystopian future that it has—is there’s so much relevance to today, of megacorporations, of people on the fringes, you know, of people just being exploited resources, of the wealth gap, of all these things,” Hernberg said. “I think that 2077 allows us to tell these stories in ways where—at the heart of it—there’s always relationships and people, but we’re in a really broken world and that we can call out some of these things.

“I think for me that’s what Cyberpunk is about, exploring those themes but in a very poignant way,” Hernberg continued. “I love the world, and I think that’s what we’re going to try to do with Project Orion. Really continue to lean into that and continue to say, ‘What is [the state of the world ] today,’ and what does it look like in a couple of years.”

Back in March, CD Projekt Red hired Hernberg, a former head of production at Amazon Games and lead product manager at Blizzard Entertainment, as one of the veteran developers working on Orion in its Boston studio. Although details on Project Orion are scarce, one thing we know for sure about the follow-up title is that the company wants it to follow in the footsteps of The Witcher’s evolution. Meaning, that CD Projekt Red aims to have Orion usher in more gameplay enhancements and features than its predecessor once it finally releases. Another rumored idea for the title is that it might include Cyberpunk 2077’s scrapped multiplayer feature.

In our review of Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty, we gave the game a 9/10, writing, “Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty completes an immense turnaround for CD Projekt Red’s future RPG kickstarted with the anime spinoff, Cyberpunk: Edgerunners and its latest 2.0 Update.”

Isaiah Colbert is a freelance writer for IGN. You can follow them on Twitter @ShinEyeZehUhh.

Eight years ago, Japanese director Katsura Hashino announced that he was forming a new team within Atlus after more than a decade spent working on the Persona series (and Catherine), saying he wanted to try something new. Last summer, his game was finally revealed – Metaphor: ReFantazio, an RPG that features plenty of similarities to the Persona games, but has a personality all its own.

In broad strokes, Metaphor retains many familiar elements from Hashino’s previous games. Like its spiritual predecessors, Metaphor utilizes a turn-based command system built around exploiting the weaknesses of enemies. The main character, an outcast who uses forbidden magic, looks a great deal like the hero of Persona 3 Reload thanks in no small part to the art of Shigenori Soejima. Even some of the terminology is the same, a notable example being Tarukaja – a spell that boosts attacks in Persona and now Metaphor (though Hashino denies any link between the two).

Its pedigree and excellent production values has been enough to generate excitement in some RPG circles, with some going so far as to call it their most anticipated game of the year. But others in the broader gaming community are a bit more perplexed, either because of the similarities to Persona, because of the unconventional name, or both.

So what is Metaphor: ReFantazio really all about? And does it have a chance to step out of Persona’s shadow and establish a fanbase all of its own? These are still open questions, but I did get a little closer to developing my own understanding of Metaphor when I played it at Summer Game Fest earlier this month.

About Metaphor’s name, and why it doesn’t have romance

First, that name, which is definitely a mouthful. The Metaphor part is easy enough to understand – Hashino says that he wants players to be able to relate the story to their own lives. In short, he wants it to be a metaphor. “We had all these different ideas. We couldn’t think of many good ones so we were like, ‘Okay, just Metaphor. It’s easy.’”

As for the second part, Hashino says, the team wanted to rethink the idea of a fantasy world. Hence, ReFantazio. Okay, so it doesn’t quite roll off the tongue, but you can’t say it’s not memorable.

As for the game itself, the demo I saw consisted of three different sections – a story sequence, a dungeon crawling sequence, and a boss battle. The demo begins by establishing some of the world through Gallica, a fairy companion who brings a bit of an 80s D&D vibe to Metaphor.

In the sequence, Gallica relates the legend of a place that looks suspiciously like New York City, with Gallica amazed by a world with no magic, no tribal conflict, and “towers of glass that reach the heavens.” It’s a story that seems to suggest that discrimination is a recurring theme through Metaphor, with many of the main cast members battling prejudice of some sort.

Speaking with IGN in a follow-up email, Hashino confirmed that Metaphor’s story is “closely related to the theme of changing the world for the better.”

“As we approached this project, we wanted to challenge ourselves to do something different from our past works while still leveraging the comprehensive strength and experience of Atlus as an RPG maker. As we developed the concept of the game, we realized our interest in exploring the idea of inner strength and how people overcome limitations. Essentially we wanted to explore how we can become the best possible versions of ourselves,” he said.

“To achieve this, we focused on how people perceive each other based on personality or personal interactions. This led us to the idea that biases or prejudices can form around judgements of these characteristics. We created a backdrop to this world around the idea that various characters in this world are exposed to some form of bias or prejudice in this regard.”

While the fantasy world of Metaphor is different from ours in many ways, if we are able to convey it well, we believe fans will be able to find various similarities between it and our own.”

Ultimately, Hashino says, his main goal for Metaphor was to move away from Persona’s modern setting while sticking to the format he knows best. That means that Metaphor plays a great deal like Persona on a moment to moment basis, which is especially evident in the dungeon crawling and boss battle sequences. It even has summons that look a lot like the demons from Personas. Admittedly, there’s plenty of nuance to be found in these comparisons – among other things, a big part of the strategy is positioning your characters in the front or the back row, and the battles overall are much faster – but on the surface the resemblance is clear.

The most meaningful change can be found in the third section of the demo, which in addition to the boss battle showcases a bit of how the story progresses. Where the latter day Persona games are built around a linear daily school calendar, Metaphor is structured more like a road trip where you have the freedom to go where you please (Hashino compares it to a vacation where you won’t be able to see everything in one playthrough).

Setting a destination on the Gauntlet Runner, the crew’s landship, will take a certain amount of time to reach, during which you can build up your stats by reading books with titles like “Pride and Persuasion” or doing laundry.

Notably, Metaphor doesn’t have any romantic connections to build, unlike Persona, which Hashino attributes to the desire to avoid making a “romance game.”

“We made [Persona] as a RPG story about teenagers. And teenagers, they date, they have romance. That’s part of the joy of being a young person exploring your boundaries. So that was why we included it in the game…because if we didn’t have this in, it wouldn’t really feel authentic. For our new gam…we didn’t want to include it because it didn’t feel as natural, if that makes sense,” Hashino explains.

“The second point I would like to make is the main plot focus is that there’s this character, the protagonist, who is trying to become the next king. And rather than focusing on his love life, we wanted to make sure we have this whole follower system. So we wanted people to focus on that.”

Metaphor draws heavily from 80s and 90s fantasy

This approach sits at the core of what separates Metaphor from Hashino’s previous work. I’ve often compared the latter day Persona games to something like an anime Buffy the Vampires Slayer, featuring Japanese teenagers who deal with high school drama by day and battle demons by night. When I played Metaphor, though, the first show that popped into my head was Aura Battle Dunbine – an early example of the isekai sub-genre featuring a young motorcycle enthusiast who is transported to a fantasy world populated by giant robots resembling bugs.

Hashino acknowledges that he’s a fan of Dunbine, but chalks up any influence it might have to its significant popularity in the 1980s. More significant may be what Soejima calls “the fantasy boom” of the 1980s and 90s, which gave rise to Record of Lodoss War, Dragon Quest, and a host of other well-known properties.

“So I lived through the late ’80s and early ’90s when there was a fantasy boom over here, and all the fantasy stuff that existed in that era and that previously came from overseas was part of my artistic DNA,” Soejima says. “After that, I read a lot of really serious fantasy stuff, which came into me and mixed into this other base layer and helped form my DNA as well. The first fantasy I interacted with was [Dungeons & Dragons] way, way back in the day. Probably more than books, Wizardry would be what really influenced me from the fantasy genre.”

One way or another, Metaphor figures to be an interesting experiment for Hashino and company. Given a new canvas, the team seems keen to put their own stamp on the fantasy genre, drawing from well-known influences and giving them a new spin with their distinct verve and style. It feels at once familiar and invigorating – a fresh approach that still leans into their individual strengths, with a heightened art style and even faster battle system. Atlus, for its part, is treating it like the launch of a new franchise, giving it a global launch with a prime release slot in October.

“When we were creating this game, we thought, okay, we know that people do like the approach that we take,” Hashino says, “so we have more confidence to realize our vision without fear of how people will react, because we think people will like our game.”

We’ll be able to see for ourselves when Metaphor: ReFantazio releases October 11 on PlayStation 4, PlayStation 4, Xbox Series X|S, and PC.

Kat Bailey is IGN’s News Director as well as co-host of Nintendo Voice Chat. Have a tip? Send her a DM at @the_katbot.

A few days ago, Capcom and GOG surprised fans by announcing they would be re-releasing the original Resident Evil trilogy on PC. Along with providing easier access to the original trilogy, DRM-free, GOG has also revealed that the original version of Resident Evil 2 is based on the 1998 Windows PC version.

It’s been hard keeping this secret but I’m happy to announce that GOG is doing the impossible and is bringing back the classic Resident Evil Trilogy! I’ve played the ports of RE1/2, and here are my thoughts on what I’ve experienced! RTs very appreciated! https://t.co/lh4dHfsnYd pic.twitter.com/p15HI87qTO

— Suzi Hunter (@TheSphereHunter) June 26, 2024

The news was first reported by YouTuber The Sphere Hunter, who revealed she had the chance to play the first two games in advance — revealing that Resident Evil 2 classic was based on the original Windows PC version, not the Sourcenext version. A GOG spokesperson also confirmed this detail to IGN in a statement sent via email.

If you’re unfamiliar with these two ports, the former was released in 1998 for Windows 98, while the latter, developed by software company Sourcenext, was a WindowsXP-compatible port released exclusively in Japan in 2006.

The biggest difference between these two versions is that the Sourcenext version provided higher-quality full-motion videos (FMVs). Many Resident Evil fans have argued that the Sourcenext version was the definitive way to play Resident Evil 2 on PC. Though this version was only released in Japan, as content creator Ultra Creed pointed out, fans have used the Resident Evil 2 Classic REbirth mod to not only translate the Sourcenext version to English (minus the FMVs) but also add support for modern controllers and added optional gameplay features you could enable, such as quick turns and tactical reloads.

In our review of the original PC version of Resident Evil 2, IGN wrote: “It’s just too shallow for the average PC gamer. With such little change over the Playstation version, it makes you wonder why it took Capcom three months to get this one out on the PC.”

The original Resident Evil is now available on GOG. Resident Evil 2 and 3 are not available yet.

Taylor is a Reporter at IGN. You can follow her on Twitter @TayNixster.

Hideo Kojima left Konami and the Metal Gear series he created nine years ago, but for the person now producing the franchise it would be a “dream” to have the legendary developer back in the fold.

As reported by VGC, Konami’s Metal Gear series producer Noriaki Okamura said on a recent livestream published to YouTube that, personally speaking, he’d love to work with Kojima again on Metal Gear.

“But just speaking for myself, personally, I’d like nothing better than to work with Mr. Kojima and the rest of the team again,” Okamura said. “If that could happen, that would be the dream.

“But people have moved on to new things and new commitments, and that’s just our current reality. We can’t just take it for granted that everyone would work with us again, or let ourselves be completely dependent on them.”

EA Sports has officially revealed the best overall teams available in College Football 25.

In the latest announcement regarding the highly anticipated return of College Football video games, EA Sports revealed the top 25 overall teams. The overall rating number represents the quality of the entire team, using both offensive and defensive parameters to determine it.

College Football 25’s top-rated team is the University of Georgia (UGA), which has an overall team rating of 95. UGA’s overall team rating should not be entirely surprising to some, as we learned yesterday that UGA was ranked the top offensive team and the second-best defensive team in College Football 25. Additionally, we learned earlier this week that UGA’s Sanford Stadium was ranked number five in the top 25 toughest places to play in College Football 25.

Alongside UGA, seven additional teams have a team overall rating of 90 or higher, including Ohio State (93 overall), Texas (92 overall), and LSU (90 overall). The full list is available below.

College Football 25 is the first game in the college football gaming franchise since 2013’s NCAA Football 14. Most notably, College Football 25 marks the first time real-life student-athletes are being used, with all 134 FBS schools confirmed to be featured in the game in some capacity, such as stadium traditions and mascots. Additionally, college bowl games, awards such as the Heisman Trophy, and Name, Image, and Likeness (NIL) deals are featured in College Football 25.

College Football 25 will be released on July 19 for PS5 and Xbox Series X/S. For more, check out our hands-on preview, where I explain why it is more than just a clone of the Madden NFL football games.

College Football 25’s Best Overall TeamsGeorgia – (95 OVR)

1. Georgia – (95 OVR)
2. Ohio State – (93 OVR)
3. Oregon – (93 OVR)
4. Alabama – (92 OVR)
5. Texas – (92 OVR)
6. Clemson – (90 OVR)
7. Notre Dame – (90 OVR)
8. LSU – (90 OVR)
9. Penn State – (88 OVR)
10. Utah – (88 OVR)
11. Michigan – (88 OVR)
12. Florida State – (88 OVR)
13. Miami – (88 OVR)
14. Texas A&M – (88 OVR)
15. Ole Miss – (88 OVR)
16. Colorado – (87 OVR)
17. Oklahoma – (87 OVR)
18. Wisconsin – (87 OVR)
19. USC – (87 OVR)
20. Virginia Tech – (87 OVR)
21. NC State – (87 OVR)
22. Kansas – (87 OVR)
23. Arizona – (87 OVR)
24. Oklahoma State – (87 OVR)
25. Iowa – (87 OVR)

Taylor is a Reporter at IGN. You can follow her on Twitter @TayNixster.

Cardy, Matt, and Emma have all been playing Elden Ring’s new DLC, Shadow of the Erdtree, and give an update on their (mostly spoiler-free) journeys so far, including all of the new weapons, places, and fingers they’ve seen so far. They’ve also been watching the new season of The Bear with a range of thoughts shared on the opening episodes of the restaurant drama. And finally, Emma has been getting to grips with M. Bison in the latest Street Fighter update. Plus, there’s a new Spotify-based Endless Search game to play.

Be sure to send us your thoughts about all the new games, films, and TV shows to ign_ukfeedback@ign.com.

IGN UK Podcast 755: Miyazaki’s Michelin Star

• IGN UK Podcast 754: The Boys, Some Dragons and an Acolyte
• IGN UK Podcast 753: The Best Games From Not-E3
• IGN UK Podcast 752: Our Summer Showcase Predictions
• IGN UK Podcast 751: The State of Astro Bot
• IGN UK Podcast 750: Scrotus, Erectus, and Other Good Boys