While there may not be as many sales today as last weekend for Memorial Day, there are still many deals to be had. Whether you’re after a plug-and-play mic to take your streaming game up a level or want a new controller for your PS5, we’re seeing some deep discounts. With Father’s Day only a couple of weeks away, maybe you’re looking to snag a great gift for the father figures in your life? Portable chargers, a grill set, or even new lawn mower might be right up their alley. Check out all the best deals we’ve found today:
TL;DR: Deals for Today
Pokémon Destined Rivals is here, and we’re already seeing chase cards crash in value, leaving some with pre-order regrets. But that means you can just grab some single cards rather than shelling out a ton on booster packs. Still want a sealed pack? We’ve got you. Plus, there’s a Magic: The Gathering Final Fantasy Bundle pre-order available from Walmart that’s not a bad deal.
PlayStation DualSense Controller
The controller that comes packaged with the PlayStation 5 is at its lowest price of the year, setting you back under $55 for 27% savings. This wireless gamepad is comfortable to use, compatible with a range of gaming devices, and full of reliable controls. Haptics and adaptive triggers are baked in, amplifying your playing experience further. Plus, you can remap buttons, customizing the controls to give you a leg up in certain games.
JLab Talk Pro USB Mic
Kick your game streams up a notch, as the JLab Talk Pro USB Mic is on sale for over 77% off on Woot, making it just $34.99. This plug-and-play microphone is easy to set up and features four directional patterns. Whether you’re looking to record podcasts and music or take phone calls and do ASMR, it’ll be the perfect partner. Sound quality will even be optimized for whatever you’re recording, and the mic features volume and gain controls, ensuring you come across crystal clear.
Cuisinart 13-Piece Wooden Grill Tool Set
Summer means it’s grilling season, so it’s always a good idea to have a grill tool set on hand. Right now, Cuisinart has a great deal on a high-quality set for just $23.99. The reputable brand includes all the barbecue essentials in the kit, like a spatula, grill fork, cleaning brush, and tongs. Each of the tools features a sturdy wooden handle and stainless steel for a premium look and feel, while a case is included for safe storage. If you’re on the hunt for a Father’s Day gift, it also makes a great gift for those hard-to-buy-for dads and father figures.
Metaphor: ReFantazio PS4 & PS5
PlayStation’s Days of Play sale is still in full swing, offering discounts up to 75% on top games. While countless titles are included in this sale, we’re particularly excited about Metaphor: ReFantazio. This action-packed adventure takes place in the medieval fantasy realm of Euchronia, where you’re on a journey to save a cursed prince and determine a new king in a Royal Tournament. It deals with social and political issues, mirroring the real-world issues we’re facing. Right now, you can grab it for only $45.49, saving you $24.50.
bella PRO 10.5-qt. Touchscreen 5-in-1 Indoor Grill & Air Fryer
Whether you live in an apartment or just don’t have a way to grill outside, bella PRO offers an airfryer that brings the grill inside, and it does a whole lot more than that. It has a spacious 10.5-qt capacity, five cooking modes, and eight presets to make everything from fish and chicken to bread and fries. When it comes to grilling, the temperature is adjustable up to a toasty 500°F, allowing for the searing and char-grilled marks you expect from a BBQ. Best of all, $100 has been knocked off the price tag, so it’s only $69.99 for a limited time.
Five Nights at Freddy’s: Tales from the Pizzaplex Graphic Novel Collection Vol. 1
If you’re a fan of the horror video game, Five Nights at Freddy’s, a new graphic novel series from the creator, Scott Cawthon, is already discounted to the low price of just $8.90. This volume brings some horrifying and detailed comics to the story from the bestselling series Five Nights at Freddy’s: Tales from the Pizzaplex, featuring the under-construction section of Freddy Fazbear’s Mega Pizzaplex, a Tube Maze, and some chaos.
It’s lawn mowing season, and battery-powered lawn mowers are beginning to take the reign from their gas-powered counterparts. You might think that these electric mowers offer less oomph, but the EGO Power+ LM2135SP 21-Inch Self-Propelled Lawn Mower Kit will prove you wrong. It’s self-propelled, has a multicut blade system, and runs for 60 minutes on a single charge. A second battery is even included, so you can keep mowing while the other battery charges. Right now, you can grab this kit for its lowest price ever, $599.99. That’s 43% off.
Charmast Portable Charger with Built in Cables
Portable chargers are great and all, but if you forget the right cord, they’re pretty useless. Charmast fixes this problem by offering a 10,000mAh power bank with USB-C, Lightning, and MicroUSB cables built in, so it’s ready to top off just about any device. Plus, there’s a USB-A cord for charging up the power bank. Each of the cables also has a slot for storage on the portable charger, preventing anything from getting snagged when on the go. Now is the time to buy, too, as it’s back to its lowest price, costing just under $20.
Pokémon Destined Rivals Sealed Products and Single Cards
After the best market value on Pokémon Destined Rivals sealed products? Some great deals are available from TCG Player, as big box stores continue to hike up the prices.
Don’t want to deal with the ripping open boosters to find a chase card? TCG Player has a bunch of single cards available, and the prices continue to fluctuate as I write this.
MTG Final Fantasy Pre Order
Pre-orders for MTG Final Fantasy continue to pop up occasionally at retailers, but selection is pretty limited at the moment. However, this bundle from Walmart is an excellent deal ahead of the launch in a couple of weeks.
Late last month, mega publisher EA fired 300 workers, including around 100 at developer Respawn. The studio, founded by ex-Call of Duty developers, is responsible for Apex Legends and the Star Wars Jedi games, and was reportedly working on a third game in its beloved Titanfall series before its staff roster was cut. Now cancelled, the rumours suggest that this Titanfall project was an extraction shooter – a difficult-by-design PvPvE genre that currently only enjoys niche popularity. But an extraction shooter set in the world of Titanfall and Apex Legends could have been the genre’s ticket to the big leagues. So if not EA, who will take the “Tarkov-like” beyond its enthusiastic niche and into the mainstream? The answer may be just months away.
“As part of our continued focus on our long-term strategic priorities, we’ve made select changes within our organization that more effectively aligns teams and allocates resources in service of driving future growth,” an EA spokesperson said of the layoffs that cut away at Respawn. It’s a sentiment EA employees have heard before. This move follows a rash of downsizing in other segments of EA’s portfolio, including at developers Codemasters and BioWare, and a more general 670 company-wide employees back in March of last year. This trend has many decrying the state of the games industry as unsustainable and calling for unionization.
But what of that rumored Titanfall extraction shooter? Naturally, its apparent cancellation has many fans disappointed; the existence (and lack of public appearance) of a new Titanfall game has become something of an in-joke in recent years. Further, rumors of a new extraction shooter from a triple-A studio has shone a spotlight on a style of game that has struggled to garner a significant audience thus far. And whether or not the cancelled Respawn title was indeed an extraction shooter, more people are discussing the potential of a genre that is in its infancy.
“This is an enthusiast genre which has, thus far, not significantly broken out to the mass market player,” Mat Piscatella, Video Games Industry Advisor at Circana, tells IGN.
Last month, developer Bungie finally revealed gameplay footage for Marathon, the upcoming extraction shooter that some predict will launch the genre into the mainstream. It’s a game that’s already found itself in hot water, accused of plagarising art assets. But while there are ethical questions around Marathon’s production, the response to the game itself after press went hands-on with it seems largely positive. Perhaps this is to be expected from the studio with a reputation for stellar first-person shooter experiences like Halo and Destiny. But, come September, Marathon will be launching into a very different market, and the extraction shooter is a relatively untested genre. Will pedigree and tight FPS design be enough to carry the game to success? Analysts say: perhaps.
“If I were to bet on any developer being able to bring this genre to the mass market it would be Bungie,” Piscatella says.
For those unfamiliar, extraction shooters tend to be made up of a combination of player-versus-player and player-versus-environment gameplay loops. Small squads of players are dropped into a world, where they fight AI enemies and sometimes other player-controlled squads, to complete goals and gather resources, then escape the map. The genre was popularized by Escape From Tarkov, an incredibly unforgiving take on the formula characterized by its high-risk, high-reward firefights, which garnered a respectable audience during the COVID-19 lockdowns.
If I were to bet on any developer being able to bring this genre to the mass market it would be Bungie.
Since then, a number of other developers have tried their hand at the genre with varying degrees of success. One of the most prominent is last year’s Helldivers 2, developed by Arrowhead Game Studios and published by Sony. It leans heavily on a campy schtick, community engagement, and in-game events, which has made it a standout among extraction shooters. Also, and perhaps most importantly, it’s a co-op only affair, with none of the tense PvP encounters that make games like Escape from Tarkov so challenging. According to Piscatella’s data, Helldivers 2 was the eighth most-played game on Steam in April, and ranked 34 on PlayStation.
“Helldivers 2 is the outlier success among this group,” Piscatella explains. “In April, approximately 9% of US active Steam users played Helldivers 2, while around 3% of PS5 players engaged with the game at least once. No other [extraction shooter] reached more than 2.3% of active players on any platform on which that particular game was played.”
It’s immediately obvious that these stats are small when compared to more popular genres like battle royale or multiplayer FPS games. As hugely popular as Helldivers 2 seems to dedicated PlayStation owners, the mainstream is Fortnite, Call of Duty, and EA’s FC – games that garner much, much larger audiences. But Piscatella is quick to point out that the extraction shooter is a burgeoning genre with a great deal of potential, and it faces the same challenges as any other genre does in its early days.
“Small or developing genres often only get big after one game makes it so,” he says. “The dance/music genre was a pretty small niche until Guitar Hero showed up. Console FPS games didn’t usually sell all that well at all until Halo. MMOs comprised a relatively small portion of the market until World of Warcraft became the biggest thing in the world. Maybe Marathon does that for extraction shooters. Maybe it doesn’t. Nothing is guaranteed for any new game in today’s market.”
Other popular games in the extraction shooter genre include Deep Rock Galactic, Hunt: Showdown 1896, and Delta Force. The latter is a free-to-play title launched late last year and has been enjoying a steady rise in popularity in recent months: as of this writing, it ranks 15th in daily players on Steam, with somewhere around 135,000 players at peak. This is a respectable number, but nowhere near the numbers consistently put up by the battle royale genre and its titans. And let’s face it: executives have exhibited a certain amount of tunnel vision chasing the high monetization bars set by the Fortnites, Warzones, and PUBGs of the world.
There’s an argument that this sort of fixation has led to a certain amount of creative stagnation in the development space, and studio heads are less willing to take a chance on an unproven genre such as extraction shooters (it’s perhaps telling that Call of Duty’s attempt at it was an under-supported, now abandoned mode added to Warzone, rather than its own flagship release). In that way, Marathon represents the first significant triple-A effort to bring the genre to the masses. And it’s going to need all the help it can get along the way.
“Bungie being the developer certainly does not guarantee Marathon success,” Piscatella says. “In order for [it] to break through it would certainly help if the game could win over dedicated fans of the genre so they could advocate for the game among family and friends.”
The biggest challenge facing Marathon is the untested nature of the extraction shooter genre as a whole.
Beyond word of mouth, Bungie will need to ensure smooth onboarding for prospective players. In particular, converting core players familiar with first-person shooters will likely figure into Bungie’s rollout strategy, but long-term retention will all boil down to the gameplay.
“It would…be helpful if Marathon were to have a ramping path for people that are more familiar with the big FPS titles like Call of Duty to help initiate trial and conversion,” Piscatella explains. “It would also have to nail the whole ‘easy to pick up, difficult to master’ trick that many mass market hits are able to pull off.”
The reality is that these are all the same problems faced by any new title, and the one true decider of success or failure is the market, which, as Piscatella points out, is extremely unwelcoming.
“It is a very fickle market at the moment. People have their favorite long-running games that are constantly being updated, are familiar, have significant social and monetary hooks, and many of these titles are free-to-play or easily accessible without an upfront purchase price. So, the challenges facing Bungie and Marathon are not dissimilar to those facing any new game.”
Fickle market notwithstanding, the biggest challenge facing Marathon is the untested nature of the extraction shooter genre as a whole. Escape From Tarkov has enjoyed its accolades, but that game benefitted from an audience inflated by pandemic lockdowns, as well as a gameplay loop that appealed to the core gamer segment. Subsequent titles have only seen middling performances (with Helldivers 2 being the outlier), so it’s easy to understand why studios have been reticent to devote significant resources to such a project, especially when the battle royale genre has proven its dominance.
In that way, Marathon should prove to be a useful litmus test for the rest of the industry. It’s surprising to see a studio like Bungie going all-in on an extraction shooter in this environment, and if it receives a strong reception you can expect other developers and publishers to take its lead. Of course there are dozens of factors to account for – things like monetization and market trends – and nobody can predict how things will unfold. But Bungie certainly has the clout and design chops to make something special. And it’s going to take something special to take the extraction shooter genre from niche to mainstream. You can be sure that, come September, the industry will be eagerly watching the launch of Marathon.
If you’re looking for Infinity Nikki codes, IGN has you covered! In this article, you’ll find a list of active and working Infinity Nikki codes that you can redeem for free rewards and bonuses in May 2025, including Diamonds and Energy Crystals.
Active Infinity Nikki Codes (May 2025)
Below, you’ll find all the active and working Infinity Nikki codes in May 2025, the free rewards you get for redeeming them, and their expiry date (if known):
The Infinity Nikki codes listed below have expired and are no longer working as of May 2025:
NOSTRANGELINKS
WARMSPRINGBONUS
RevelrySeasonDC
GIRLPOWER25
100THDAYCELEBRATION
MAYEVERYGIRLHAPPINESS
Newstoryawaits
Newyearbliss
NIKKIFIREWORKS
NIKKIEXCURSIONTIME
NIKKINEWBLOOM2025
HEARTFELTGIFTS
NIKKIBEWITHYOU
NIKKIRELEASE
dreamweavernikki
NIKKI20241022
infinitynikki1205
BDAYSURPRISE
GIFTFROMMOMO
GIFTTONIKKI
nikkihappybirthday2024
NIKKITHEBEST
QUACKQUACK
AAbNxRNMmSm
AAbQjjYKwbH
AAb7xf6hWuS
AAbtWkna3V7
AAbaEyDU4EX
AAbMNJX8hxF
AAb5S3RSK8M
AAbUfWnYUtd
AAbUa8e2U3a
AAbtk9jmpnV
How to Redeem Infinity Nikki Codes
To redeem Infinity Nikki codes, follow the steps below:
Unlock your Pear-Pal during the Chapter 1: Wishes Without Wings – Land of Wishes main quest. It’s about 20 minutes into your Infinity Nikki adventure.
Open the Pear-Pal menu by pressing ESC on PC (or the Menu button when using an Xbox controller on PC), the Menu button on PlayStation, or by tapping the Pear-Pal icon in the top-left corner on mobile.
Click on the gear icon to open the Settings menu.
Scroll over to the Other tab.
You’ll see a “Redeem Code” option here. Click on “Apply” and a Redeem Rewards pop-up menu will appear.
Input your code into the “Enter the redeem code” field and tap “Apply.”
If successful, a pop-up will appear showing your free rewards.
Why Isn’t My Infinity Nikki Code Working?
If the Infinity Nikki code that you’re trying to redeem isn’t working, it’s likely due to one of the following reasons:
There’s a typo in the code.
The Infinity Nikki code is expired.
When inputting a code into Infinity Nikki, make sure there are no typos (Os instead of zeroes, capital Is instead of lowercase Ls, etc.) and that there are no accidental spaces before or after the code. If your Infinity Nikki code still doesn’t work, it’s probably expired and can no longer be redeemed. You’ll get a message informing you that the code is wrong if it’s expired.
How to Get More Infinity Nikki Codes
The best way to get more Infinity Nikki codes is to join the official Infinity Nikki Discord server. Once you’re in, head to the #self-assign-roles channel and opt-in for the Redeem Code role. You’ll receive a notification when a new code is released so you can receive your free rewards ASAP!
Alternatively, bookmark this Infinity Nikki Codes article, as we update it each time a new code comes out. The Discord server has missed a couple of codes posted to other channels, so we’d recommend checking our article every so often.
What is Infinity Nikki?
Developed by Infold Games, Infinity Nikki is a cozy, open-world RPG. You play as Nikki, as she’s whisked away to the world of Miraland, a place where people make Wishes with the help of Stylists. You’ll find and create a plethora of outfits and accessories, take on quests, and gather many types of collectibles with the help of Momo, Nikki’s adorable feline companion. As you play, you earn Diamonds, which can be spent on Revelation and Resonite Crystals, which are used to pull on the limited time and permanent outfit banners for 5-star and 4-star clothing.
Meg Koepp is a Guides Editor on the IGN Guides team, with a focus on trends. When she’s not working, you can find her playing an RPG or spending time with her corgi.
When George R.R. Martin crafted the world of Westeros back in the 90s, he probably didn’t think his words would go on to spawn graphic novels, TV shows, action figures, video games, and more. Moreover, I doubt the author expected his works to be adapted into a mobile-friendly action-RPG built to prioritize predatory microtransactions over the rich lore he’d spent decades perfecting. Yet in 2025, we have Game of Thrones: Kingsroad, a visually striking open-world exploration game that looks compelling in motion, but hones in more on menus and currency than fantasy adventure. And, as you push deeper into its sizable campaign to uncover a plethora of in-game currencies and progress-halting hurdles, the neo-medieval jaunt starts to feel more like a lesson in asset management than a thoughtful RPG.
Kingsroad takes place during season four of the HBO TV series, putting you in the fur-lined boots of a northern-born bastard of House Tyre. With your father sickly and your inheritance caught up in the strict succession rules of the realm, the only hope for the safety of your people is to borrow, beg, and steal your way into the hearts of the lords and ladies of Westeros. Naturally, things aren’t as simple as just asking, and you’ll have to go round the houses (literally) to solve land disputes, find missing soldiers, and knock together the heads of vassal-house warriors on your way to earning your flowers. Alongside a cavalcade of curious NPCs, there are also White Walkers, mythical beasts, and traitorous Boltons to butt heads with. Thankfully, Westeros’ misfortune makes for an enticing landing pad for you to start from.
Before you dive into the cobbled streets and open roads of Westeros, though, you’ll first need to pick a combat archetype to play as: a brutish Sellsword, a skilful Knight, or a nimble Assassin. Fuelled by my love of Brienne of Tarth and Dungeons & Dragons’ Barbarian class, I opted for the axe-wielding Sellsword, whose heavy strikes can easily wind gaggles of enemy forces. Indecisive? Good news: Kingsroad does allow you to switch between archetypes at any time, and your inventory is shared across your three possible characters, so you can boost your alts with your main’s hard-earned loot. That said, I was disappointed to find that once you finalise a character, you can’t delete them and start that class over, or change their name, a feature that bit me in the butt when testing how unsightly I could make my Knight.
With your combat destiny chosen, Kingsroad’s decently impressive character creator lets you use a mixture of face-contorting sliders and colour-pickers to specialise your plucky hero. It doesn’t have the depth of something like Dragon’s Dogma 2 (although that’s an admittedly high bar), but I am glad I was able to bestow my characters with an identity that felt personal to me – which is to say moody, and tastefully adorned with smudgy eyeliner and edgy facial scars.
You’ll explore an impressively recreated map of Westeros.
Kingsroad wastes no time teaching you the basics of its combat and platforming with a tight but comprehensive tutorial, which takes you beyond the wall and back again. That’s where you’ll meet the first of many familiar faces for any fans of the show, as Jon Snow and Samwell Tarley do a decent job of filling in the narrative gaps for those in need of a season four recap. While the digital renditions of these well-known characters aren’t the most flattering, their conversations felt thoughtfully written and helped to establish my lowborn place within the setting.
Soon enough, though, Kingsroad lets go of your hand and allows you to roam free across the countryside, providing a choice of campaign quests and side missions to follow, as well as plenty of points of interest to chase on your map. The open world of Kingsroad gave me the freedom to explore this (mostly) faithfully reimagined Westeros, and I enjoyed riding across snowy plateaus and uncovering the secrets of curious stone architecture nestled on the horizon. But the initial exhilaration of high fantasy galavanting wore off quickly as the edges of developer Netmarble’s fantasy panopticon started to show.
For every delicate snowflake at Castle Black or butterfly dancing in Winterfell, there were plenty more low-poly fruit trees, bouncy grass patches, and possessed weapons to pick at the sheen. I admire the sheer scale of the open world Kingsroad is offering, but it’s lacking the visual consistency to make it realistic and immersive. As I soon noticed those cracks in the facade, Kingsroad started to feel like a game full of pulled punches, despite how promising it seemed at a distance.
This lack of polish extends to your movement on both foot and horseback – ice skating would be the most fitting comparison. When exploring the frosty reaches of the North, this sensation is strangely fitting. However, it became wholly frustrating when it persisted while charting the sunny coastal areas near Highgarden, especially when attempting to complete the occasional platforming puzzles dotted around the icon-covered map. Typically, I was only one slip away from falling down an unscalable hillside, or worse, into a camp of fierce opponents with no way out. Up close, the animations also err on the eerie side in cutscenes. My character would often deliver a wide-eyed death stare, and I couldn’t take them seriously as they’d burn holes in the townsfolk’s skulls as they explained their heart wrenching tragedies.
Memorable characters surface as uncanny valley clones of themselves.
Speaking of the citizens of Westeros, their heads and eyes wobble around like strange marionettes during conversations, which dampens the atmosphere considerably. It’s a shame, because their dialogue does a great job of affirming the grim, corrupt cloud that hangs over the continent as winter approaches. I felt particularly bad laughing when an old lady thanked me for saving her daughter from being eaten by Ramsay Bolton’s dogs. Unfortunately, the most egregious offenders are often Kingsroad’s recreations of characters from the show. Memorable players, like Nymeria Sand and Varys, surface as uncanny valley clones of their likenesses. I’ll be seeing yassifed Cersei in my nightmares for many moons to come…
Beyond exploration, the bulk of your time in Kingsroad is split between investing in complex resource management systems at your homestead and completing multi-stage quests and battles out in the world. As such, you can find a plethora of challenges that boost both of these areas, like dungeon crawls, bandit camps, occupied villages, and giant mythical beasts, all of which reward you handsomely for spilling blood by the gallon. How efficiently you blend your time between these two aspects is integral to maintaining a solid pace within the grind-heavy progression system – alas, a lack of technical balance makes succeeding in this endeavour profoundly painful.
The trouble begins with the combat, which is a total mixed bag. While your actions feel pleasantly grounded, and rugged blows always arrive with flashy particle-heavy animations, the process begins to feel overfamiliar fast. Despite the solid variety of moves available – light, heavy, and special attacks, as well as decent dodge and parry options – inaccurate hit boxes consistently hampered my attempts at strategy. Occasionally, I would need to use my head a little and skulk around an area to remove edge threats, though those tactical moments arrived few and far between. It says something unflattering that Kingsroad feels almost identical at 60 hours as it did at 20.
You can specialise and upgrade your moveset in combat with traits and skill trees, too, but they do little to impact how the combat feels in motion. Kingsroad gives the impression of having useful Traits by putting options like learning to parry and crafting arrows up at the top of the trees, but as you work your way down, many of the lower options offer small percentage-based improvements to defense and attack that barely make a dent. So as your sparkly slashes lose their lustre, you’re often left cycling through the same few enemies and combos until the battle is won. It seems as though the architecture of a solid combat system is there, but much like the rest of Kingsroad, it’s all facade with no foundation.
What hampers the fun most are the frequent and appropriately-named Momentum roadblocks.
Still, what hampers the fun of Kingsroad most of all are the frequently appearing and appropriately-named Momentum roadblocks. Similar to Destiny’s Gear Score, Kingsroad tallies up the quality of all your equipment, accessories, and skills into one neat number called your Momentum Score. These pesky little digits are the cruel gatekeepers of story content, forcing you to scour the map for dull side objectives that can juice the numbers and shuffle you towards the next episode.
While I’m more than happy to invest in grind-heavy games like World of Warcraft Classic and no stranger to mobile-minded progress gating, the Momentum system in Kingsroad is a particularly brutish arbiter that doesn’t allow you to get crafty or punch above your weight by taking on more challenging enemies. Instead, imposing forces appear with a skull icon over their head, their damage and health ratings untouchably high. But as soon as you inch over the Momentum line, the fight shifts dramatically in your favour. This black and white process neutralises any sense of gamesmanship, and frequently forced me into hours of toil to get back to the story I was, for the most part, enjoying.
When you’re ready to take some time out from the combat, you can invest more in the slower-paced aspects of Kingsroad, namely the tedious Estate Management side game. As the last remaining heir to Lord Tyre, his homestead, Renan’s Rest, becomes your project. As is to be expected, helping this dilapidated village flourish rewards you with the tools necessary to beef up your arsenal, and gives you a place to spend all those resources you’ve been hoarding by completing missions – though the process of cleaning up this town is about as much fun as cleaning your actual room.
While the jeweller and the forge are convenient additions that allow you to craft wearable items, the most valuable activity is embarking on gacha-based Artefact Expeditions. You’ll spend resources to hire workers and send them into the wild to find more resources, as well as historical items called Relics you can then leverage to further bolster your Momentum. Similar to other gacha game systems, you’re guaranteed a high-quality item after a set amount of runs, but a standard expedition takes eight actual hours to complete, which is a frustrating turnaround when not every run guarantees a good haul. That is, unless you’re willing to pay real money to speed things up.
That brings us to the elephant in the room. Almost every activity in Kingsroad can be expedited with the use of cold hard cash, which translates to Iron Bank Marks in-game. Of course, you can pay to complete an aforementioned expedition early, or buy higher-rarity expedition wagons by the dozen that don’t take time to complete. Stuck behind a Momentum block? Just purchase Gold to speedrun your jewellery maker’s upgrades and smelt higher-rated necklaces and rings to jolt your score. Typically, you can only fast travel by making your way to a special signpost first, and there’s a copper fee for each warp – but you can fast travel from anywhere for free if you pay for the premium option. Behind nearly every aggravating system in Kingsroad is a far more user-friendly one, but only if you’re willing to cough up the dough. It seems intent to toe the line between being intentionally frustrating and passably functional, subtly egging you on to pay up rather than sit through the repetitive, time-consuming activities necessary to proceed.
While it’s to be expected that there will be premium aspects in a free-to-play game available on mobile devices (in addition to Steam), the overwhelming flood of paid subscriptions, resource packs, and confounding currencies feels like a heartbreaking affront to Game of Thrones fans, like myself, who have been begging for a fully-fledged Westeros RPG similar to this. Across the 60 hours I’ve played so far, I’ve felt guilty for slashing down innocent defectors and filled with joy for feeding the starving smallfolk. It’s clear Netmarble wants you to feel like you’re making a difference in this world, but it’s also just as keen to remind you that you can make a difference quicker if you’re willing to enter your credit card details first. It’s sad to see so much effort put into the underlying concept of a Game of Thrones adventure like this only for it to be tarnished by microtransactions and the repetitive gameplay loops that enable them.
Elden Ring Nightreign is upon us! Time to choose your Nightfarer and set out into Limveld in hopes of defeating the Nightlord before you’re lost to the rains. We’ve teamed up with Maxroll to bring you a variety of guides to help you get started, introduce you to each of the Nightfarers and help you navigate the dangers of Limveld.
Getting Started in Nightreign
Maxroll’s Nightreign beginner’s guide goes over everything you need to get started: an introduction to each of the 8 playable characters, an explanation of the game’s central hub, nagivating Limveld, the basics of combat, and how to handle the Nightlords, before wrapping everything up with a bit of information on Nightreign’s metaprogression systems.
Maxroll Nightreign Character Guides
Learn more about each of the game’s Nightfarers, how their skills work, and some additional information about each of their unique playstyles.
Wylder
Wylder is a well-rounded character, suitable for beginners. His Sixth Sense passive allows you to cheat death and stay up through one instance of fatal damage. As a generalist, he doesn’t excel with any specific weapons, but can use most martial armaments. His favorite weapon is the Greatsword.
The Guardian is Nightreign’s tank class. He’s most comfortable wielding a large shield and a weapon that can be used while guarding, such as a Halberd, Rapier, or Hand Crossbow. The Guardian deals less damage than the other Nightfarers, but has immense durability and multiple ways to disrupt foes.
Ironeye is the bow specialist, though his high Dexterity makes him proficient with a variety of other melee weapons such as daggers and curved swords. Unfortunately, his low durability makes him a poor choice as a front-line fighter, so use melee weapons with caution. Overall, his abilities are simple to use, making him an excellent choice for beginners.
The Duchess is a dagger-wielding Nightfarer who excels at evasive action to weave in and out of combat. Her starting weapon comes with a potent character skill, enchanting your blade with the Magic affinity for extra damage. In addition, she can adeptly wield Glintstone Sorceries due to her high intelligence, and she has decent Faith scaling for Incantations as well. For the Duchess, look out for weapons with the Magic or Frost Affinity, and those that can trigger statuses like Frostbite or Blood Loss.
The Raider has high Strength and uses large/colossal weapons to smash his foes. While he can use a variety of martial armaments well, his FP is extremely low, making it difficult to use weapon skills. The Raider’s inherent durability makes him difficult to stagger, helping him ensure that his blows connect.
The Revenant is a support class, though her high Faith allows her to use offensive Incantations with ease. However, her ability to deal damage is limited as she has no method of FP recovery. Her passive ability summons the shades of foes to fight at your side, distracting enemies and dealing damage.
A spellcaster adept who can use her character skill to restore FP, the Recluse excels at unleashing devastation from afar. Her stats favor Sorceries and Incantations, but she can use Magic, Frost, Fire, Holy, and Lightning affinity weapons. This character is a bit more difficult to play as you don’t have as many defensive options, and need to manage FP in addition to your Health and Stamina. However, if you do everything correctly, she deals significant damage.
The Executor excels in single combat. He has high Dexterity and Arcane, giving him access to a majority of the game’s smaller weapons. Look out for Katanas in particular, as these scale off of Dexterity while also triggering the Blood Loss status to enemies. Position carefully because the Executor has low durability.
The Limveld map is teeming with points of interest to explore. Maxroll’s Limveld Map & Key Locations guide teaches you about the various encounters, what mob types to expect, and the rewards you can earn for clearing them.
As you explore, you’ll encounter random events known as Raid Events which often involve fighting a challenging foe. If you clear the raid, you earn a valuable Power for the remainder of your run; learn more with Maxroll’s Raid Events guide.
Defeating Nightlords unlocks Shifting Earth events. Each of these events transforms a quadrant of the map into a unique zone, frequently filled with lots of bosses to fight – and similar to Raid Events, they award a special power when cleared. Learn more with Maxroll’s Shifting Earth event guide.
Nightreign Resources
Explore Roundtable Hold, Nightreign’s main hub area. Here, you can switch your characters, perform Relic Rites to prepare for the next expedition, test things in the Sparring ground, read up on the game with the Visual Codex, explore your character’s story at the Journal, and set out from the Table of Lost Grace to do battle against a Nightlord. Learn about all this in Maxroll’s Roundtable Hold guide.
Relics and Vessels are part of Nightreign’s metaprogression system. At the end of each run, you earn Relics and Murk, which you can spend at the Small Jar Bazaar. Some Relics have random affixes that may or may not be useful, whereas others (often earned through character quests or by defeating bosses) have fixed stats and are quite powerful. As you progress in the game, you also unlock additional Vessels, letting you equip a different Relic combination on your Nightfarer. Learn more about this system with Maxroll’s Relics and Vessels guide.
Many of the Sorceries and Incantations in Nightreign belong to a specific Spell School. The Spell School determines which modifiers buff your spells – for example, a Glintstone Sorcery won’t benefit from bonuses to Godslayer Incantations. This isn’t very clearly explained, though, so if you’re curious on how to buff your Spells, check out Maxroll’s Sorcery and Incantation School Guide.
Maxroll’s Nightreign Database
Browse Maxroll’s Elden Ring Nightreign Database to learn more about the Weapons, skills, spells, Relics, Vessels, Relic modifiers, Talismans, passive traits, and Nightfarers available in the game. Each item has a page with expanded tooltip information, which you can use to discover hidden secrets about Nightreign’s weapons (or just look for fun lore tidbits).
Roblox farming simulator Grow a Garden is attracting millions of players across PC, mobile, and console devices, eclipsing numbers achieved by some of the most popular games on any platform – so what exactly is it?
If you load up Roblox at any time on any day in the next week, there’s a good chance around 2 million people will be playing Grow a Garden in some capacity. That’s according to the official user tracker found on all Roblox experiences, which plants the colorful free-to-play game firmly atop trending charts in a variety of categories. These are numbers that see the free-to-play game leaving other Roblox projects in its dust, with the second-most-popular “Playing Now” experience, Brookhaven RP, showing 590,000 players at the time of this piece’s publication.
Pulling 1.5 million players is an impressive feat, and it’s also on the low end for Grow a Garden.
The farming simulator peaked at more than 8.8 million active users last weekend, annihilating only competing experiences but multiple active user records, starting when it crossed the 5 million active users mark earlier this month. The 16-year-old behind Grow a Garden released it March 25, 2025. It has since been visited 3.4 billion times.
For comparison, Counter-Strike 2, currently the most popular Steam game, reached its all-time peak just last month at just under 1.86 million players (via SteamDB). PUBG: Battlegrounds holds the trophy for the highest-ever active player count on Valve’s PC storefront, and even its peak topped out at 3.25 million players in 2018.
Grow a Garden is still trailing behind the free-to-play battle royale megaton that is Fortnite, which boasts a peak active player count of 15.3 million from an event held in 2020. Grow a Garden isn’t quite at the top of the mountain, but it is climbing – and fast. It’s at least another significant piece of evidence that the Roblox platform is one to be taken seriously, as millions continue to flock to the dense forest of content it offers.
What Do You Do in Grow a Garden?
In Grow a Garden, you – if you can believe it – grow a garden. There’s little complexity to the gameplay formula currently setting Roblox ablaze. It’s not yet another anime tie-in or tower-defense experience but instead a straightforward farming game with a tutorial that lays out everything you need to know in just a few seconds.
Each player is plopped into a server with a handful of other Roblox users, with everyone granted their own plot of land to begin their garden on. While new players are gifted 20 Sheckles, Grow a Garden’s in-game currency, to purchase simple seeds for vegetables like carrots, it’s also almost immediately clear how far you can take the premise, as other players’ fenced-in areas will often be brimming with towering trees, bamboo, lively fruits, and more. Growth takes time, but gardens will continuously flourish, even when a player is offline, until picked.
Grow a carrot and sell it, and you’ll profit a few Sheckles. Rinse, repeat, and earn enough for blueberries, then mangos, then orange tulips, then grapes, then peppers, and so on. The satisfaction comes from the tangible growth you can see in your garden – and money – in real time. It’s a far-from-unique cycle distilled into its purest form, though there is more to do for those looking to dig for it.
Customizing a garden can be as simple as organizing your yard by color, height, or type, or flavor can be added with optional cosmetic items, tools, and pets. Updates and events keep players coming back for more, as do weather modifiers that can potentially increase the value of your crops. Every gameplay wrinkle is part of the formula that has seen Grow a Garden’s player base balloon to levels unheard of in Roblox’s blocky world. Not everyone understands it, but the success is undeniable.
Who Made Grow a Garden?
The 16-year-old who first broke ground with Grow a Garden remains creatively involved in what it’s become but is no longer the only name attached. Sharing responsibilities are Roblox experience management company DoBig Studios and popular developer Janzen Madsen (a.k.a. Jandel) and his network of creators at Splitting Point. These are major players in the space, but Grow a Garden stuck out to Madsen before it exploded.
“The game was developed by a 16-year-old in a few days, and we saw the game when it was on about 1,000, 2,000 CCUs,” Madsen tells us, describing Grow a Garden’s active players, “and we just partnered with that developer, built in a live-ops plan, did some general updates to the game, and, pretty much, the rest is history.”
It was here the now-gargantuan farming experience began to plant its roots, as the 20-person team at Splitting Point began to help create a foundation for growth. That’s not to say the original, anonymous developer stopped being involved.
I actually think they’re, creatively, pretty incredible.
“I actually think they’re, creatively, pretty incredible,” Madsen said when describing how development responsibilities are shared. “I think they bring a pretty unique perspective to the game, and I think there’s maybe a generational gap between me and them. Everyone has… I would say it’s almost equal, honestly, in terms of, we get on a call, we plan an update – it’s probably not what you’d expect. Sometimes we’re planning the update week to week, you know?”
Madsen can’t nail down what triggered Grow a Garden’s meteoric rise, mostly because “it happened so quickly,” but points to tight update strategies and events as reliable draws for Roblox players. Recent examples include bringing in a DJ for entertainment and organizing a mass dance party in hopes of breaking a world record. Every update presents an opportunity to create a moment that sucks players in while making them feel involved in the journey.
This goes out to all the haters at GDC from 2022-2024 if you aren’t taking Roblox seriously then you are getting left behind! pic.twitter.com/6MeE1vVABL
The small free-to-play project with humble beginnings eventually exploded into the biggest game in Roblox history. There’s a full-on operation maintaining its success to ensure its millions of fans continue showing up, and the developers aren’t tending to it for free. Although Madsen declined to share the details regarding Grow a Garden’s earnings past an acknowledgement of Roblox’s previously established cut of in-game spending, the experience offers more than a few clear ways for players to spend real-world cash.
Nearly every item of interest can be purchased with the Roblox premium currency known as Robux, Grow a Garden’s primary source of income. On PC, $5 translates to 500 Robux, with seed prices ranging from seven to 715 Robux and decorations like crates and campfires asking for 119 and 149 Robux. There are also seed packs and eggs that can be purchased one at a time or in packs, essentially serving as loot boxes containing special crops and pets, respectively. Most these items can still be purchased with in-game Sheckles, even if the price tag can sometimes reach numbers higher than Grow a Garden’s player average player count. It’s unclear how much players are spending to kit out their farms, but with at least 1.5 million users playing at any moment, we can guess it’s probably a lot.
Climbing the Beanstalk
Grow a Garden is pulling attention the likes of which Roblox has never seen, but success is far from a foreign concept on this platform. New experiences flood in every day, and while many of them never reach the top of trending charts, plenty of others, such as Blue Lock: Rivals and Dress to Impress, still boast hundreds of thousands of engaged players months after release. Roblox isn’t a gaming fresh phenomenon – it’s been here for years, and it’s only attracting more attention.
Still, reaching around nearly 9 million active users is so unbelievable that many have questioned the legitimacy of Grow a Garden’s success. Some have suggested bots have played a role in inflated numbers and fabricated popularity, but Roblox says this isn’t the case.
“Grow a Garden’s global success is fueled by exceptional user retention, vibrant social interactions — with friends driving play — and strong Robux engagement,” a Roblox spokesperson told Game File. “Our preliminary analysis confirms genuine popularity, not artificial inflation, validating the game’s authentic community-driven growth.”
Look at AAA. No one takes big risks, you know? Every day on Roblox, there’s a new concept or a new game out – I think it’s kind of cool.
While those on the outside raise eyebrows at Roblox’s attraction to gamers, Madsen says he has worked to legitimize the platform he calls home for the majority of the time he’s been in this space. He sees Roblox as both a slice of gaming that’s gone ignored and a hub for creativity.
“Most people’s first impression of Roblox is, ‘This is a silly platform for kids, and there’s no depth to the gameplay or games,’ and I think legitimately some of the best game designers in the world are on Roblox making games,” Madsen explained. “It’s like, ‘Yeah, they look simple, but they’re actually like… they’re solving hard problems there in the platform. They’re pushing the boundaries.’
“Look at AAA. No one takes big risks, you know? Every day on Roblox, there’s a new concept or a new game out – I think it’s kind of cool. I think it’s easy to judge from the outside without really taking a few weeks to look at it.”
Even if Grow a Garden has already bloomed to its fullest extent, it’s no doubt planted the seeds for other Roblox experiences to reach or even exceed its high bar. While we wait for it to grow, you can read up on all active Grow a Garden codes here.
Michael Cripe is a freelance contributor 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).
If we’re honest, today’s tease doesn’t provide much more information — we’ve got a close-up of Sam Fisher’s face and a hashtag, Splinter Cell — but interestingly, the alt description is a little more revealing.
“Close-up of Sam Fisher from Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory, showing a stern expression with focused eyes, short dark hair, and a rugged beard, set against a blurred high-tech background,” the description explains. “He’s locked in.”
It’s also interesting that Ubisoft specifies this screenshot is from Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory, and not from the upcoming Splinter Cell Remake, so make of that what you will.
The Splinter Cell series is set to sneak back into action with a remake of the classic first game in the franchise, Splinter Cell Remake. We still don’t know very much about it other than the new version will be built from the ground up using the advanced Snowdrop engine. Our last meaningful update came in 2022 when IGN met with Ubisoft Toronto developers to discuss their design philosophy behind the game.
“20 years later, we can look back at the plot, the characters, the overall story of the game [and] make some improvements — things that might not have aged particularly well,” said creative director Chris Auty at the time. “But the core of the story, the core of the experience will remain as it was in the original game.”
Perhaps Ubisoft is priming fans for a Summer Game Fest announcement, but without confirmation, it’s hard to know for sure. On the plus side, we don’t have too long to wait — Summer Game Fest and IGN Live are right around the corner. The Last of US Season 2 will be at IGN Live, as well as Sonic Team, Demon Slayer -Kimetsu no Yaiba- The Hinokami Chronicles 2, Norse: Oath of Blood, and more.
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.
Elden Ring Nightreign is out, and players are already diving into the shifting lands to fight the Nightlord. If they warmed up a bit on the original Elden Ring, though, they might be finding themselves a little turned around by some control changes.
While the controls in Elden Ring Nightreign are mostly the same as the original Elden Ring, a few changes have been made, either to accommodate new abilities or simply move things around a bit. Some of these are just for new moves, or updated versions of old tools. One in particular, though, seems to be causing at least a little confusion: the flask.
In FromSoftware’s Souls games and Elden Ring, the “flask” is a mainstay of your kit: a refillable potion holder that acts as your main source of healing in combat. Usually, the flask is one of several consumables, and you’d cycle through them and use them mid-combat. In Elden Ring Nightreign, the flask is a static element. You hit the left-most face button (X or Square, depending on your controller) to drink it, by default, while Up on the D-Pad becomes your ‘use item’ option.
Alongside the flask, there’s now the Nightreign-specific super-sprint mapped to L3. Though you won’t have your trusty steed Torrent in Nightreign, FromSoftware has instead given players a surprisingly fast sprint option. The wrinkle is, there’s also a sprint option from the traditional method of holding your dodge button. And as one player notes, they keep defaulting to the original Elden Ring sprint, rather than the new one.
The really odd change, though, is that there doesn’t seem to be a way to crouch now. I booted up Elden Ring Nightreign myself just to check and, sure enough, I couldn’t find a crouch option anywhere in the controller settings. While it was clicking in the left-stick on controller, by default, it seems like the option didn’t just move, but was completely ejected. Granted, Elden Ring Nightreign does seem like it’s more about moving fast and wiping out enemies than sneaking around.
Other players report that mouse-and-keyboard default controls also feel strange in comparison to the original Elden Ring. Granted, this is not the first time FromSoftware has shifted control schemes. Every Souls or Souls-like usually has some degree of change, especially for games like Bloodborne, which have very notable mechanical and systemic differences from other FromSoft Souls-likes.
Ultimately, controls are re-bindable, so you can still make things fit as comfortably in your hands as you’d like. Maybe take this article as a PSA, then, to spend some time acquainting yourself with your control scheme for Elden Ring Nightreign and fine-tuning it before heading out on your first venture. And maybe spare some sympathy for a player who keeps accidentally chugging their Estus mid-fight. We’ve all been there.
One should really never the doubt the tenacity of modders. Elden Ring Nightreign is now live, and within 24 hours of its launch, one well-known FromSoftware game modder has already demonstrated a Duos mode mod.
Luke Yui, the modder behind popular co-op mods for games like Elden Ring and Armored Core VI, uploaded a short video to their YouTube channel yesterday. It shows off an Elden Ring Nightreign two-player mod, allowing just two Nightfarers to team up rather than forcing the choice between one or three.
It’s important to note that, as of this writing, this is not a public or playable mod, but a short demonstration from Yui. They noted that the mod runs without connecting to the matchmaking server, so while it’s possible to use additional mods during gameplay, that also means you’re not running through the normal channels. Whether this becomes a real solve or just an interesting curiosity, we’ll have to see.
While Elden Ring Nightreign can be played solo or in a group of three, there’s no option to run it with just two players; you’d need to either kick your friend and run solo, or matchmake and find a third. It might sound like a small hindrance, but for those who like to play with just one pal, it can be a frustration.
Speaking to IGN, Elden Ring Nightreign director Junya Ishizaki said the team “kind of overlooked and neglected the duos aspect,” but it was something the Nightreign team was looking at and considering for post-launch support. With this much desire for a duos-specific mode, I’d imagine it’s hard not to take notice.
It’s early days for Elden Ring Nightreign, but already developer FromSoftware has announced a patch that will make solo play easier.
Patch 1.02, due out next week, will include bug fixes as well as improvements for solo expeditions, FromSoftware announced in a post on social media.
Elden Ring Nightreign drops players into the shifting lands of Limveld, exploring and fighting for survival either solo or in groups of three. There is no way to play two-player co-op. We’ve already reported on Elden Ring Nightreign’s ‘mixed’ Steam user review rating, with most of the complaints revolving around a lack of a duos option as well as no voice chat.
Playing Elden Ring Nightreign solo is proving to be a particularly difficult experience. As explained in IGN’s Elden Ring Nightreign review: “Let’s get the most important caveat out of the way first: if you are hoping to tackle Nightreign entirely solo, and are anything less than a hardcore Elden Ring player that actively seeks out ways to make that already difficult game even more challenging, Nightreign isn’t for you. Yes, there is technically a single-player option, but it is so poorly balanced that I would be shocked if it isn’t patched and adjusted within the first month of release. And this is coming from someone who lives and breathes these types of games.”
It seems FromSoftware is moving fast to address solo play. According to the early patch notes, below, next week’s update will add the effect “Automatic Revival Upon Defeat,” which allows revival once per night boss battle, to solo expeditions, and will increase the amount of runs gained.
Despite these issues, Elden Ring Nightreign has enjoyed a massive launch on Steam, with an incredible 313,593 peak concurrent users on Steam overnight. That was enough to make Elden Ring Nightreign one of the most-played games on Valve’s platform.
Elden Ring Nightreign update 1.02 early patch notes:
The following improvements for solo expeditions will be added to the game: – The effect “Automatic Revival Upon Defeat”, which allows revival once per night boss battle, will be added to solo expeditions. – The amount of runes gained will be increased. Thank you for your support.
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.
