Steam Next Fest is back with a new batch of demos, livestreams, and spotlights on several upcoming games from indie developers. And as has become tradition, games from publishing platform indie.io are heavily featured.
So clearly, there are lots of different gaming experiences on offer. But we decided to focus on four specific titles that you can try for yourself right now, most of which just got new updated demos as part of Steam Next Fest.
From a dev team of two co-creators, Pluto sees you play as a less-than-heroic wizard who needs to break out of jail to attend their niece’s birthday party. It’s a roguelike deckbuilder with a unique spellcasting system where elemental sigils are connected to each of your fingers. Your deck is made up of spells that use different combinations of these sigils, and some spells can share sigils, meaning it’s possible for spells to overlap and combine.
So building your deck isn’t just about stacking the most powerful cards, it’s about experimenting with several different cards and finding ones that synergize well together and let you pull off gradually more complicated interactions. You’ll need them to take out the monstrosities you face as you race against the clock to get out of jail in time. Pluto recently announced it will be fully released on March 9, and it got a brand-new demo as part of Steam Next Fest, which you can download for free here.
As you could hopefully guess from the name, Esports Manager 2026 is a strategy-sim game where you lead an esports team and control its day-to-day operations. That means managing all facets of the team: talent acquisition, team finances, player morale, tournament performance, brand growth, leadership structure, everything.
You can scout and recruit real-life players, and you’ll need to consider market dynamics to figure out the right time to add them to your team. You’ll design training programs to help them grow, hire a staff to support them, and chat with them to make sure they’re happy and their goals are being met. Then take them into Simulation mode, where you’ll take part in esports tournaments and control your team’s tactics as you try to establish yourself as the team to beat. Esports Manager 2026 also has a brand-new free demo included in Steam Next Fest, which you can download here.
Inspired by Celtic mythology and Arthurian legends, SoulQuest has you take up the sword of Alys, a woman whose husband’s soul has been taken by the gods. She’s not a fan of that and will hack and slash her way through hordes of divine servants and the gods themselves to get him back.
Combat is fast-paced and has you combine sword attacks, magic, and ultimate abilities to unleash your wrath. It’s a system designed to be easy to pick up and play quickly, but difficult to truly master. You can string certain attacks into jump strikes, allowing you to juggle enemies in the air and pull off long combos. There are also secrets to discover, using basic platforming or Alys’s ability to slide down vertical surfaces and jump off them.
Like the previous two entries on this list, SoulQuest also dropped a new demo as part of Next Fest. It adds a new zone with new enemies and the game’s first god boss fight against the pagan deity Cernunnos. It also adds a new secret mission that wasn’t possible to find before. To try it yourself, you can download the demo here.
We finish off this list with a medieval city builder from Reverie World Studios, developers of the Kingdom Wars series. In City States: Medieval, a continent lies divided, and you lead a city state as it vies for power, wealth, and status while surrounded by powerful kingdoms. You’ll be charged with leading your city state to prominence by building up trade routes across the known world, improving your economy, and protecting your land from your greedy neighbors.
Your city will also have a legendary hero to help lead it, one whose skills will develop as time goes on, expanding your options for supporting the city. They can do things like defend the city, boost construction and city growth speed, or be sent to foreign courts to engage in political intrigue. You only have one hero, though, so you need to think through how best to use them. If you keep them at home, growth opportunities could pass you by. But if you send them on expeditions, your city’s defenses will suffer. And foreign invaders will try to besiege you. You’ll need to use a combination of real-time strategy combat and tower defense mechanics to push them back and prevent your city from falling. To get a taste of these strategic possibilities, you can try the demo here.
“Zero Parades is ultimately about identity,” explains Kaspar Tamsalu, art director at developer ZA/UM. “The conflict between what you subscribe to as an individual, as a private person outside of the professional sphere, and then how that mixes with what your vocation is.”
Your vocation in ZA/UM’s latest RPG is espionage. Hershel Wilk, your protagonist, is a spy for The Superbloc, a union of left-wing republics. She was born bourgeois before ending up spying for the communists, a background story intentionally filled with blanks to allow you to shape Hershel as you see fit.
“Just because she’s from a communist country does not mean that she subscribes to the ideology,” says Siim “Kosmos” Sinamäe, Zero Parades’ principal writer. “This is up to the player to decide. Spies can be spies for ideology, for money, for a sense of accomplishment, or because they are batshit insane and want to do things like that.”
Sinamäe quickly offers an example of the latter: “I’m going to subscribe to this thought called Unguided Missile Strikes, because I want to say violent things to people. I want to threaten people with nuclear strikes, because that’s the type of spy I am.”
When Sinamäe says “subscribe to this thought”, he’s referring to Zero Parades’ Conditioning system, which reformats Disco Elysium’s Thought Cabinet for an espionage setting. When exploring the world and talking with characters, you’ll encounter new ideas and concepts you can “subscribe” to, rewriting your personality to unlock new dialogue options and roleplaying opportunities. But where ZA/UM’s previous game explored what it would be like for an alcoholic amnesiac detective to soak up ideas like a sponge, Zero Parades approaches the mind of a spy like a collection of masks. Which one is required for today’s task? This required a new method for thought subscription.
“You get the choice about whether or not you want to reinforce or punish the thought,” explains Nicolas Pirot, Zero Parades’ lead technical artist. “You have a branching option of, ‘I don’t like this. I don’t want that to be a part of myself. I was always a violent spy. I no longer want to be a violent spy.’ You can resist that, and then that’ll have a different impact on the way you do things.”
“It’s really framed as this violent reordering of your mind,” he concludes.
It’s All in Your Head
That violent reordering is viewed through the flickering glass screen of an old CRT television. Much of Zero Parades’ in-world technology is modelled after the gizmos and appliances of the 1990s – down at the Bootleg Bazaar, you’ll find vinyl records housed in plastic cartridges in an analogue echo of Sony’s old MiniDisc format. This approach extends past the boundaries of reality and into Hershel’s psyche. The art team needed something functional but flawed to represent this spy’s troubled mind – a mind that could tune itself into dangerous thoughts and settle into uncomfortable programming. And so the Conditioning system’s menu sits inside that box of cathode rays.
“It’s in an imperfect state,” explains Maeve Bonefacic, a technical artist at ZA/UM who helped create the system’s look and feel. “In the sense that [the television] works, it does, but there’s a slight imperfection to that tool. We worked a lot on the particular glitches and effects that a CRT might have.”
I want to threaten people with nuclear strikes, because that’s the type of spy I am.
The CRT is just one example of Zero Parades’ fascinating, two-pronged approach to art design. There’s the physical – the environments you explore, the people you meet, the items you acquire – and then there’s the creations of Hershel’s mind, represented by the wild art cards assigned to each quest, the disturbing televised thoughts assessed through Conditioning, and the badges assigned to your sentient skills. ZA/UM describes this approach as representing the two realms that Hershel exists in: the objective and subjective.
The subjective side of Hershel’s reality is spearheaded by lead illustrator Anton Vill, who created the surrealist artwork for Disco Elysium, including its grotesque Thought Cabinet. Once again, he took inspiration from the work of David Lynch, particularly the ominous tone of Twin Peaks’ dark forests, reflecting the messed-up thoughts of a broken character in his bizarre, twisted, emotionally heavy artwork. In one example, a collection of five, cigarette-smoking Hershel doppelgangers face each other in an unnerving pentagon as words of insecurity, such as “abandoner”, “liar”, and “f***ing spy”, hover above them on flowing reams of paper.
“I’m a huge fan of this kind of mysterious, dark, inner world of a person,” says Vill. “I think that shines through [in Zero Parades’ subjective artwork] and I think it’s perfect for the game.”
The Portofiran Identity
While the art team understandably wanted to create a sense of warped darkness for Hershel’s interior thoughts, it needed to create a complementary vibe for the physical world. It would need to be via different techniques, though, so that subjective thoughts didn’t merge with objective reality.
“We try to subtly inject this unease for the players,” says Tamsalu. “There is a lot of detail that we put into the game, but the way we have textured these [details], and how we approach lighting for the scenes and set up these situations, there is this underlying current of something brewing.”
This thing that is brewing is, of course, why Hershel is in the city of Portofiro. But her job is very unlike that of Disco Elysium’s disaster cop protagonist, and the espionage story Zero Parades tells had a significant influence on the way the city was designed.
“When you’re a police officer looking into a crime, anybody who’s in the vicinity is a potential suspect and expected to speak with you,” Tamsalu explains. “And in a spy game, it’s kind of like the inverse of that. You don’t want to stand out. And because of that, we needed to create a slightly busier backdrop. That’s why you have these characters that go about their own business, and you have your own covert business as you navigate through that.”
While capturing the heart of spy fiction has been an important part of the project, ZA/UM has been very intentional with how it has approached a genre filled with tropes, staples, and conventions. As you’d expect from the studio, this isn’t a James Bond or Jason Bourne adventure, but nor does it aspire to be a John le Carré novel repackaged as a video game. This had to be a fresh take on this shadowy world, and so a number of rules have been set in place. For instance, Herschel is an “operant”, rather than an agent. Her mission takes her “in-theatre” rather than in the field. And her employer, the communist Superbloc, flips the typical capitalist nation perspective of classic Cold War thrillers.
“We wanted to avoid the obvious spy themes,” says character artist Liis Väljaots, who explained how this philosophy extended into the art. “One of the things we wanted to avoid was making the world look too noir-y and too oppressive, to kind of contrast the subject matter, which is quite serious.”
“There are a lot of trench coats in the game, though,” she laughs. “That’s undeniable.”
Roll Play
Your choice to wear a trench coat or not is just one of many decisions that shape the kind of spy you are – clothing, as in Disco Elysium, provides stat modifiers that boost or inflict penalties on your skills. That pool of skills has been reduced (now 15, down from Disco’s 24) with the idea of making each attribute more prominent and viable. They’ll also be tested with much more frequency.
“We have a skill check every 3,000 words, compared to Disco Elysium’s every 6,000 words,” reveals Sinamäe. “We feel this makes the player more engaged with what they’re doing and what type of spy they want to be.”
As I explored in IGN’s hands-on preview of Zero Parades, skill checks have deeper mechanical complexity this time around thanks to the Pressures system. Each of your skills fits into one of three categories – athletic, psychological, and intellectual – and those categories have corresponding “health” bars that measure your fatigue, anxiety, and delirium levels. Fail a psychological skill check and your anxiety bar will fill. Max the bar out, and you’ll take a permanent stat penalty.
Things are made even more interesting by the ability to “exert” a skill check – you can roll an extra die to increase your chances of passing the check, but at the cost of purposefully damaging the skill’s corresponding pressure bar.
“It’s like, how much more can the player take?,” says Bonefacic. “Can I afford to, for example, exert a dice roll? Am I allowed to do that? Do I have the resources to do that? I think it has added an interesting element of strategy.”
That strategy wouldn’t work if there were no method for reducing your pressure gauges. By default, a bar will reset after taking so much damage that you endure a stat penalty, but that’s hardly an approach to build a self-care system around. Instead, you can have Hershel perform a ritual.
“Rituals are a system that we have where you can reduce your pressures by doing all kinds of small things in the world,” explains Pirot. “It can be sitting on a bench and watching the sunrise that might lower your anxiety. It can be smoking a cigarette, having a cup of coffee, or yelling at someone in the street. These very small, very immersive moments, that are available in different parts of the world at different times, that can help an incredibly stressed out, anxious, fatigued, or delirious spy to keep their sanity more or less in check.”
Rather than, say, the classic health potion of other RPGs, which are clearly labelled and a genre staple, you’ll need to discover these rituals through exploration and experimentation. They also unlock further roleplay opportunities – yelling at someone in the street doesn’t exactly sound like a traditional remedy, but for an operant boiling over with rage, it may be very cathartic.
“By the player making a build choice of, ‘I want to be a very violent spy’, they would naturally seek out the rituals that complement that,” says Pirot.
Rituals, mental masks, blending into busy cities, and threats of nuclear armageddon. These are all important aspects of Zero Parades’ spy fantasy, and each is manifested within the game by a different team at ZA/UM. Writing works alongside artwork and system design to produce a world through which you can observe, bargain, and bully. A world in which you can roleplay the type of spy you think can change the world. Or, at the very least, change their place in it.
Matt Purslow is IGN’s Executive Editor of Features.
Vantage Studios, the Ubisoft subsidiary that now manages the publisher’s biggest brands, has announced a fresh leadership team for Assassin’s Creed.
The blockbuster historical stabathon series will now be led by Martin Schelling, a veteran Ubisoft producer who previously served senior roles on Assassin’s Creed titles such as Black Flag, Origins and Valhalla, and has recently served as Ubisoft’s Chief Production Officer.
Schelling will be assisted by Assassin’s Creed veteran Jean Guesdon, who will assume the role of Head of Content for the franchise. Looking after the series’ creative direction, Guesdon will be applying the experience he’s gained as a long-term designer on the series, working on more than a dozen titles in the franchise, back to Assassin’s Creed 1 in 2007.
Finally, François de Billy will serve as Head of Production Excellence, following previously acting as Production Director on Valhalla and Origins.
Ubisoft told staff of Côté’s departure via an internal email that discussed the need for Vantage Studios’ leadership team to be “aligned” with its core goals. At the time, IGN reported that Côté had been offered a role as part of Vantage Studios’ leadership, but declined.
Côté has since launched a lawsuit against Ubisoft that claims he was essentially replaced in his role early in 2025 by Vantage Studios’ newly-installed leadership, Christophe Derennes and Charlie Guillemot — the cousin and son of Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot. With this layer of management now above him, Côté alleges he then learned over the summer of 2025 that Vantage was now seeking to hire a new Assassin’s Creed franchise boss, too.
Last week, Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot reaffirmed that the company had “several” Assassin’s Creed titles in development, comprised of both single-player and multiplayer experiences. Back in 2022, Ubisoft announced a raft of upcoming games including the now-launched Assassin’s Creed Shadows, the witchcraft-inspired Assassin’s Creed: Hexe (another single-player blockbuster) and Invictus (a multiplayer game). The company is also widely-expected to announce its long-awaited Black Flag remake soon.
Tom Phillips is IGN’s News Editor. You can reach Tom at tom_phillips@ign.com or find him on Bluesky @tomphillipseg.bsky.social
KPop Demon Hunters voice actor Kevin Woo has exclusively revealed a new Dead By Daylight Survivor to IGN — for which he’ll be providing the voice, if not his singing talents.
If you’ve watched or sung along to the animated Netflix phenomenon, you’ll have heard Woo as the singing voice of Mystery (the boyband member with purple hair over his eyes).
“I personally think as a Killer, Mystery Saja would thrive on psychological manipulation rather than brute aggression,” Woo said Woo, who’s set to star in a brand new chapter for the horror game, All-Kill:Comeback.
Here, he plays Kwon Tae-young, a tech designer Survivor hired to work on a virtual idol. Players will be able to check him out in a Public Test Build that will go live on Steam tomorrow, on February 24.
“I focused on making every breath, every strained scream, and every moment of fear feel grounded”
Woo previously worked on Dead By Daylight as a consultant on its previous K-pop storyline, which introduced the sociopathic idol the Trickster.
“Transitioning from consultant to fully embodying a character through voice was both surreal and deeply fulfilling,” Woo said. “As a consultant on the original chapter, I was involved in shaping the Trickster’s emotional identity — his ego, his obsession with artistry, and the narcissistic rage simmering beneath his polished idol exterior.
“Stepping into Kwon Tae-young’s perspective in this new release allowed me to approach the world of Dead by Daylight from the other side of that mythology. Because I understood the Trickster’s lore so intimately, his betrayal, his fixation on control, and his warped perception of performance. I was able to layer that history into Kwon Tae-young’s fear and internal conflict.”
Woo is the perfect person to act as a consultant on the world of K-pop. He performed as part of the line up for K-pop bands XING and U-KISS, and recently announced he was part of a new subunit of U-KISS with bandmates Hoon and Kiseop. But how did his bandmates feel after his consultant work on the role of a killer K-pop idol?
“The irony is that while Ji-Woon Hak’s lore in Dead by Daylight explores betrayal and ego within a band dynamic, my real-life band experience was built on camaraderie and growth. That contrast actually helped me understand the tragedy of the Trickster even more,” he revealed.
“They mostly praised me about becoming a ‘global Hollywood superstar’ after KPop Demon Hunters. It was flattering — but I reminded them that none of this exists without our shared experience as global idols that paved the way for K-pop.”
Since Woo first worked on the game in 2021 the world of K-pop has grown to be a much bigger force in the world of global entertainment, in no small part thanks to the incredible success of the Netflix movie KPop Demon Hunters, which first aired last year. Woo explained how his work on that project helped him embody the character of Kwon Tae-young in All-Kill: Comeback.
“Voice acting for KPop Demon Hunters deepened my appreciation for how much storytelling can be communicated purely through tone, breath control, and texture. Without physical performance to rely on, your voice becomes the entire emotional instrument. In a game like Dead by Daylight, that responsibility is amplified,” he explained.
“As a consultant, I wanted to ensure that the cultural references remained authentic. As a voice actor, I focused on making every breath, every strained scream, and every moment of fear feel grounded within the brutal, high-stakes environment of the Entity’s realm.”
He also revealed that voicing a Dead By Daylight Survivor demanded a lot more of him than just reading a script.
“To authentically capture that experience, I had to embody exhaustion, adrenaline spikes, and sudden bursts of panic. I would run in place during takes to elevate my breathing. I rehearsed strained vocalizations that mimic being hooked, injured, or chased,” he continued.
“Unlike polished K-pop tracks, which prioritize control and tonal perfection, horror voice work embraces imperfection, cracked screams, unstable breathing, and vocal strain. The chaos is the performance.”
And Woo isn’t just a consultant or a voice actor when it comes to Dead By Daylight, he’s a player too.
“I gravitate toward a tactical Survivor play-style, focusing on stealth loops, careful map awareness, and team synergy,” he said. “I’m usually the one prioritizing safe unhooks, body-blocking when necessary, and healing teammates in concealed areas.”
Dead By Daylight was first released in 2016 and since then has introduced a steady and increasingly terrifying number of Killers and Survivors to the game, including characters from Stranger Things, Attack On Titan, Resident Evil and of course, Nicolas Cage.
Rachel Weber is the Head of Editorial Development at IGN and an elder millennial. She’s been a professional nerd since 2006 when she got her start on Official PlayStation Magazine in the UK, and has since worked for GamesIndustry.Biz, Rolling Stone and GamesRadar. She loves horror, horror movies, horror games, Red Dead Redemption 2, and her Love and Deepspace boyfriends.
Nintendo will hold a special livestream tomorrow, Tuesday February 24, detailing more information on its upcoming Mario and Pokémon games for Switch 2.
Tune in at 2pm Pacific / 5pm Eastern / 10pm UK time for an in-depth look at Super Mario Bros. Wonder — Nintendo Switch 2 Edition + Meetup in Bellabel Park, plus Pokémon Pokopia.
Both games are set to debut in the coming months exclusively for Switch 2, and interestingly Nintendo has decided to promote them both in a dedicated Nintendo Treehouse: Live presentation that’s set to last around 80 minutes.
More to follow…
Tom Phillips is IGN’s News Editor. You can reach Tom at tom_phillips@ign.com or find him on Bluesky @tomphillipseg.bsky.social
The launch of BioShock’s beleaguered movie adaptation may now be accompanied by other BioShock projects — including the long-awaited next BioShock game.
Talking to Collider, BioShock movie producer Roy Lee confirmed that while the project’s director Francis Lawrence is still tied up in post-production on The Hunger Games prequel Sunrise on the Reaping, the adaptation of 2K’s blockbuster BioShock remains “next on the docket.”
“We would have gotten it made a few years back, but then other movies got in the way, with one being The Long Walk and the other being The Hunger Games prequel, which comes out this December,” Lee explained, before hinting that the film’s eventual release may prove to be part of a wider BioShock push.
“We’re just waiting for [Lawrence] to finish post-production, because he’s going to be working on it through at least September, and then jump back into it,” Lee continued. “I know that Netflix and Take-Two are very anxious to see the movie come out because they want to have the release coincide with some of the potential new incarnations of the game.”
That latter sentence is particularly exciting, as it teases that publisher Take-Two is keen to see the film debut around the same time as a new BioShock game (or two). Exactly what is meant by “incarnations” remains to be seen, though.
When pressed for timescales, Lee cautiously said: “It’s steadily on the path, but you know how it goes. It’s… so many things could get in the way, but I know that the intent is to hopefully get in production next year.”
Netflix announced plans for a BioShock adaptation back in 2022, though the project has stalled due to budget cuts impacting the scope of the movie and its script. Prior to that, Pirates of the Caribbean director Gore Verbinski was working on his own adaptation, though that ultimately came to nothing.
“It’s a tricky adaptation, so there’s lots of things to figure out and to get right,” Lawrence told IGN at the time. “There’s regime changes at Netflix, and so things stall out and get re-energized and stall out and get re-energized, and I think we’re in a pretty good place, honestly.”
As for the long-awaited BioShock 4? After layoffs and a further delay to the project’s release, former Gears of War head and Diablo franchise lead Rod Fergusson will now oversee Cloud Chamber and the project itself, which has been in development for the last decade.
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.
PlayStation’s Direct store is holding a huge sale on PS5 games, accessories, and more, helping you fill out the gaps in your collection, and one of the big beneficiaries of this is Kratos himself.
That’s $50 in savings, and well worth picking up over playing via PlayStation Plus (at least in my opinion), especially if you want to take your sweet time with what is a genuine masterpiece.
The game picks up after the events of the 2018 reboot of the series, which took Kratos from Greek mythology to his new life, where he’s raising his son, Atreus. After revelations about the place of both in the wider pantheon, Ragnarok is packed with unforgettable moments.
“Impeccable writing, pitch-perfect performances, knockout action – it’s a complete work of art from top to bottom. Reflecting its core themes, it’s everything a sequel should be: respectful of its legendary lineage, but not afraid to take it to exciting new places.”
Couldn’t have put it better ourselves, and now’s a great time to jump on board ahead of the remake of the Ghost of Sparta’s earliest adventures, which were recently confirmed to be in development (but are likely some ways off yet).
Kratos isn’t alone, either. Other discounts include almost 30% off of 2025’s Ghost of Yotei, essentially marking its first sizeable discount, as well as deals on the likes of Helldivers 2, Stellar Blade, Spider-Man 2, and many more.
There are even controllers on sale, including the limited Death Stranding 2 pad – but you’ll likely want to move fast for that one.
Lloyd Coombes is an experienced freelancer in tech, gaming and fitness seen at Polygon, Eurogamer, Macworld, TechRadar and many more. He’s a big fan of Magic: The Gathering and other collectible card games, much to his wife’s dismay.
Resident Evil 2‘s director and famed developer, Hideki Kamiya, has opened up on his thoughts about leaks and spoilers, suggesting those who revel in ruining surprises for others “deserve a thousand deaths” and “be cursed to never be able to play games again.”
Now, in a message posted to Twitter/X and translated by machine (which means there may be some inaccuracies or missing nuance), Kamiya reflected on how spoilers also impacted the release of Resident Evil 2.
“I’m sure the final developments of [Resident Evil 2] were also exposed in a weekly photo magazine…” he wrote. “For your own selfish satisfaction, you trample on the feelings of the users who were looking forward to the game, as well as the feelings of the creators who put all their effort into making it.
“It’s a despicable act that destroys the happiness of everyone, and deserves a thousand deaths… May you be cursed to never be able to play games again…”
Capcom stressed the posting of these videos constitutes copyright infringement, as well as generally being “an act that offends other customers.” However, the publisher seems somewhat limited in what it can actually do in response, suggesting it will simply delete the videos or issue “warnings.”
Thankfully, we don’t have long to wait now, as Resident Evil Requiem’s February 27 release date is but a few short days away. “After getting hands-on with a total of about four hours of Resident Evil 9 Requiem at this point, and sharing that experience with colleagues, I’m more excited for the series than I have been in recent memory,” IGN wrote after going hands-on with Resident Evil Requiem recently. “It’s the old mixed with the new, but all in a modern package with two protagonists I already like a lot.”
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.
The weekend is finally here, and new deals have popped up as a result! There are quite a few solid discounts across the board, including savings on Donkey Kong Bananza, Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater, and even a Zojirushi rice cooker. Check out our top picks for Saturday, February 21, below.
Save $10 on Donkey Kong Bananza for Switch 2
Donkey Kong Bananza was, without a doubt, one of the best games of 2025. It had been decades since DK had received a 3D entry, and Nintendo did not hold anything back with Bananza. This inventive platformer brought the act of destruction, allowing DK to punch and smash his way through any surface on his quest to the center of the planet. You can save $10 off a Switch 2 copy today at Woot!
Ghost of Yotei for $49.99
Ghost of Yotei has hit its first major sale at PS Direct, with copies available for $49.99. This second entry in the Ghost franchise brings a new protagonist, Atsu, plus a new region of Hokkaido. In our 8/10 review, we wrote, “A predictable but well-executed story takes you through Ghost of Yotei’s gorgeous landscapes and satisfying, fluid action – it may not be revolutionizing open world games, but it’s a great distillation of the samurai fantasy.”
Save 28% Off This Zojirushi Rice Cooker
Zojirushi rice cookers are often known as the best brand around, and Amazon has a sweet deal on this model for a limited time. You can save over $100 off this rice cooker, which can hold 1.8 L / 10 cups uncooked rice. This is the perfect appliance for perfect rice every time, or a quick all-in-one meal during the busy week.
Xenoblade Chronicles X: Definitive Edition – Nintendo Switch 2 Edition Out Now
Nintendo shadow dropped Xenoblade Chronicles X: Definitive Edition – Nintendo Switch 2 Edition this week, bringing support for 4K60FPS to the 2025 release. The upgrade pack is available now for $4.99 on the Nintendo eShop, with a physical copy due out in April. Unfortunately, there are some visual smoothing and shimmering issues thanks to heavy MSAA use, but Nintendo and Monolith Soft will likely bring a patch forward in the near future to address this.
Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater for $29.99
Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater was one of the most faithful remakes of 2025. You can save $40 MSRP this weekend at Amazon, as PS5 copies have dropped to $29.99. With Metal Gear Solid: Master Collection Vol. 2’s release set for August, now is the time to check out the Snake Eater remake.
Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze for $39.88
Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze is one of the best games on the Nintendo Switch, and you can pick up a copy today for $39.88 at Walmart. If you played Donkey Kong Bananza on Switch 2 and are searching for another adventure with DK and friends, Tropical Freeze is an amazing choice.
The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening for $39.88
The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening is one of the best Zelda games on Nintendo Switch. This Presidents Day weekend, you can score a copy of the game at Walmart for $39.88. If you’re playing on Nintendo Switch 2, you can play the game at 60FPS with a higher frame rate in both docked and handheld modes.
I would not be in this line of work without The Legend of Zelda. It’s my favorite franchise of all time – video game or otherwise – and it’s the series that will always draw me back into gaming and Nintendo, no matter what. My story is not unique; I know several IGN editors who feel the exact same way.
It’s not a secret to anyone that Zelda is critically important to so many of us here: we’ve awarded seven different Zelda games a 10/10 since IGN was founded in 1996 (the most of any franchise), we were one of very few outlets to recognize Tears of the Kingdom as Game of the Year in a packed 2023, and we crowned Breath of the Wild as the greatest game ever made on our most recent Top 100 Games of All Time list, compiled in 2021. It’s a series that’s constantly growing alongside us: how many franchises contain a game that’s essentially redefined a genre? You could argue Zelda would appear on that short list at least twice.
So as The Legend of Zelda celebrates its 40th anniversary this weekend, a few of us wanted to share our personal memories of this beloved franchise that we hold most dear. These are our legends of Zelda.
Zelda II: The Adventure of Link – By Seth Macy
There aren’t a lot of people whose first exposure to The Legend of Zelda franchise was The Adventure of Link. I’d go so far as to say, for most normal, well adjusted people, playing Zelda’s NES sequel as their first foray into the series would turn them away from it forever. But not me. No. I was completely hooked.
I rented Zelda 2 for a weekend and, when I went to school the following Monday, my thumbs hurt from playing for so long. And the thing is, I didn’t really even understand what the hell was going on. I just fell in love with the setting, the weird way it transitioned from an overhead map to self-contained battles, and the massive castles filled with opportunities for Link to die. It set my young imagination on fire and I became obsessed with it from a stylistic and presentational point of view.
I need to point out, at no point did I actually like the gameplay. It was, and remains, brutally difficult, practically impossible for a kid to complete over the course of a rental weekend. The Death Mountain section was where I hung it up many times out of sheer frustration. And even though I was so angry and defeated and saddened to be unable to get through to the end, I still could not resist renting it week after week. I pored through the tattered rental store copy of the manual, captivated by the art style – so distinctively Japanese and at the time, so new and exciting. I borrowed concepts for my own middle-school drawings and rudimentary pen and paper role-playing creations. I also didn’t realize it at the time, but that top-down world view and the experience point grind had awakened in me a love for JRPGs I didn’t even know existed at the time.
It wasn’t until 2018 I finally beat The Legend of Zelda: The Adventure of Link, playing through the version available on Nintendo Switch Online, and only because I spammed the hell out of save states. Still, even all these years later, my imagination roars to life when I look at those classic illustrations, and I get a weird inkling to start up another playthrough. Then I remember how brutally unfun it is and I play something else. But man. What a world changing experience it was when I was a kid.
The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening – By Brian Altano
I hated school. OK, maybe “hated” is too strong a word. I strongly disliked school and it probably didn’t like me very much back. To give the place some credit, I loved cracking jokes with my friends before class started. I loved that the cafeteria sold warm, three-for-a-dollar Otis Spunkmeyer cookies. I loved every art class, the only class where the teacher didn’t have to call my parents after and say “Brian is smart and creative, he just doesn’t seem to care about this class.” See, in 1993, I didn’t want to be in school. All I wanted to do was play video games, talk about video games, read about video games, draw video game characters, and eat video game-themed breakfast cereals.
A particular video game that I could not stop reading about (specifically in a Nintendo Power preview article that made frequent trips with me everywhere in my school backpack) was The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening, the first portable Zelda game ever made, which was making its way to the Nintendo Game Boy. The idea of a Zelda game that I could bring with me everywhere was absolutely mindblowing at the time. I would hop off the school bus every day to do chores, scrounge for coins in the couch cushions, and save money until I had enough to buy Link’s Awakening.
But if I’m being honest, the real cash cow was my daily lunch money. Every day I got three bucks for lunch, which back then was enough to buy a sad cafeteria meal and a drink, usually one of those hockey puck shaped breaded chicken patties smooshed between two wet buns with a canned ice tea made by some questionable bootleg brand like “Ol’ Orchard” or “Teaslees” to wash it down. But one day I realized that if I instead bought three Otis Spunkmeyer cookies, I’d A) still be sort of full, B) get to eat cookies for lunch like some sort of child king, and C) save two whole bucks a day to put towards The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening. I’d have the game in a few weeks without having to do much of anything for it. There were some downsides to this plan, obviously. For starters, I’d have to hide the money from my parents. I’d also have to find a way to buy the game without them knowing it. And lastly, (and I can confirm this as a father now) there’s a very real science fact that if a little kid eats nothing but sugary breakfast cereals and three chocolate chip cookies all day and then needs to focus on school work, that kid will instead bounce off of the walls like an insane little maniac. By now you’re probably figuring out why my teachers didn’t like me very much.
A few weeks (and probably several detentions and cavities later) I had successfully saved enough money to buy my game. I walked down a highway in New Jersey to that magical, brown roofed, giraffe themed castle known as Toys ‘R’ Us and came home with my treasure tucked inside the big pocket of my winter jacket. To be fair, I paid every penny for it, but by the way I covertly and anxiously snuck it into my house you’d think I stole the thing. To this day, my parents never found out. Dad, if you’re reading this, a different Brian Altano at IGN wrote it, not the one who is your son. He would never steal lunch money to buy a video game. Weird coincidence that there’s two guys here named Brian Altano, right?
Anyway, for the next several months, my Game Boy came with me everywhere, but especially to school. On the bus, I played Zelda. In between classes, I played Zelda. On the playground, I played Zelda. Strangely enough, having video games to play at school between the actual school parts of school helped me focus on my classes more. Instead of day dreaming about when I’d get to play video games next, I’d walk into class feeling fresh after taking down another Zelda dungeon, and then I’d do everything the teacher needed me to do until I could play video games again. My grades started improving and my parents stopped getting as many disappointed phone calls from my teachers. This also coincided with me not eating chocolate chip cookies for lunch anymore, which also definitely helped.
So thank you to Link’s Awakening for being my first portable Zelda game, one of my favorite games ever made, and a game that rescued my academic career and also almost made me fail out of school. Thank you to Otis Spunkmeyer and Geoffrey Giraffe who went on to get married to each other, maybe. Apologies to my teachers and my parents and to the other Brian Altano here who is now in huge trouble with my dad. And happy birthday to The Legend of Zelda, a franchise that I’ll always be there for on day one, to purchase a brand new game with actual money that is no longer earned by eating chocolate chip cookies for lunch.
The Zelda Timeline – By Logan Plant
Spoilers for The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker.
Hyrule’s history has been passed down countless times from one generation to the next. In that same tradition, I didn’t discover my love for Zelda on my own: I inherited it. Just like every child with pointy ears who gets wrapped up in the never-ending battle for Hyrule, this story begins before my time. My dad played The Legend of Zelda at a friend’s house when he and my mom were in college, which led to them eventually saving to buy an NES of their own, just so they could bomb every last wall in that original 8-bit Hyrule.
Fast-forward roughly a decade to when I entered the picture, born the same year as The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time’s launch on N64. My mom tells me I’d sit on her lap and watch my dad explore a new Hyrule, this time in 3D. Like our favorite childhood bedtime stories, I have no recollection of witnessing Link’s journey to stop Ganondorf. I’ve just always known it. This universe of talking trees and evil pigs and boys without fairies carved a home in my mind during my earliest days and hasn’t budged since.
Which is why it should come as no surprise that my first vivid memory comes from Hyrule, too. I’m four now, and my older sister and I are watching my dad fight the final boss of The Wind Waker. The very first thing I remember is Toon Link leaping into the air and plunging the Master Sword straight into Ganondorf’s skull. I was shocked: it was far and away the most violent, gruesome thing I’d ever seen. I recall walking into the living room to tell my mom what had happened, but then everything goes fuzzy again and all I’m left with is the everlasting image of Ganondorf turning to stone.
No matter where I’ve gone, I’ve taken my love for Zelda with me. Breath of the Wild came out when I was in college, and I spent launch night marathoning it on the enormous, blurry TV in the dormitory lounge as my floormates passed by and watched for a bit on their way out to the evening’s events. Once the hall was empty, and the motion-activated overhead lights went dark, there was nothing left but me and the peaceful glow of the Great Plateau. I was confused when my friends returned just a few moments later. “You’re back already?” I asked, only to learn that four hours had glided by in what felt like minutes. That was the first of dozens of long nights with Breath of the Wild, and later, Tears of the Kingdom, which still managed to hijack my sleep schedule years after the days of going to college parties were long gone. Time changes all things, but Zelda has never seemed to mind.
Zelda tells us a tale about an endless cycle of good rising up to ward off evil, and as we eagerly await its next chapter, I can’t help but wonder where I’ll be when a new 3D entry finally arrives. Maybe I’ll have a child of my own by then, and they’ll watch me take my first steps into whatever wild world Nintendo offers us next. Maybe their first memory will be something creepy or strange in a Zelda game years from now. I like to think they’ll play a new Zelda while off at college, homesick for their childhood but equally giddy to be experiencing a brand new take on Hyrule for themselves. And hopefully, they’ll always call their parents and siblings to talk about Zelda, just like I do to this day. That’s a cycle I wouldn’t mind repeating for generations to come.
Logan Plant is the host of Nintendo Voice Chat and IGN’s Database Manager & Playlist Editor. The Legend of Zelda is his favorite video game franchise of all time, and he is patiently awaiting the day Nintendo announces a brand new F-Zero. You can find new episodes of NVC every Friday on the IGN Games YouTube channel, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app.
