When Miles Tost moved from The Witcher 3 to Cyberpunk 2077 in 2016, he soon realized that he was dealing with a unique challenge. Despite both being RPGs, the two “couldn’t be more different,” with CD Projekt aiming to make a “gigantic leap forward” in terms of the freedom that Cyberpunk 2077 offered with gameplay. As a level designer, Tost was asked to create levels that supported every style of play, from brute force to stealth to everything else in between, all in a huge open world.
“As insane as it sounded, it also sounded f*cking awesome, and boy were we up to the challenge,” Tost said.
Of course, we know what happened next. Cyberpunk 2077 struggled when it was released in 2020, especially on older consoles like the PlayStation 4. Even beyond its technical problems, though, many players observed its shortcomings as an immersive sim. In particular, it did a poor job of making the various playstyles feel meaningful, dampening the sense of reward gained from exploration. Cyberpunk 2077 has since recovered somewhat, but CD Projekt remains keen to figure out exactly what went wrong with its ambitious RPG.
‘We pride ourselves on being storytellers’
Tost’s observations were part of a GDC 2023 panel entitled “What Cyberpunk 2077 Taught Us About Non-Linear Level Design,” which delved into the issues that CD Projekt Red encountered in trying to make branching paths feel rewarding and special. Like many of CD Projekt’s developers, Tost has a blunt and self-deprecating sense of humor about Cyberpunk’s launch. When a power surge makes it difficult to make out some of his level design diagrams during the talk, he joked, “It wouldn’t be a Cyberpunk talk if everything was working fine.”
But these quips belie a company-wide desire to learn as many lessons as possible from its troubled launch, leading the design team to conduct a comprehensive analysis of where Cyberpunk 2077 went wrong. For his part, Tost chose to focus on why the non-linear level design didn’t seem to work. How was it that games with less variety seemed more vital and open-ended than Cyberpunk 2077?
Tost ultimately determined that one of CD Projekt’s biggest strengths – its commitment to telling a strong story – was also a key stumbling block.
“We pride ourselves on being storytellers, and we didn’t want to stop a player’s lack of foresight from enjoying the narrative,” Tost explained.
That meant including what Tost calls a “generic path” for anyone who didn’t properly spec their character, and just to make sure they didn’t miss it, making it as obvious as possible. The result, Tost says, is that most players opted to take the path of least resistance, trivializing what was meant to be a robust selection of playstyles.
As insane as it sounded, it also sounded f*cking awesome, and boy were we up to the challenge.
When criticizing Cyberpunk 2077, many reviewers point to this aspect as one of its fundamental weaknesses, and perhaps a crucial reason that no amount of polish can ever make it a truly great RPG. But in analyzing Cyberpunk 2077’s level design, Tost came away with a handful of new design principles he hopes will inform CD Projekt’s work going forward.
“We need to treat paths as special,” Tost explains. “This is what creates value in the choices players make.”
By contrast, Cyberpunk 2077’s generic path would often have what he called a “cool, bespoke experience,” such as custom interactions or chatter. Often, Tost says, Cyberpunk’s paths would come together in a bottleneck filled with these rewards, leaving players with the sense that none of their choices ever mattered.
Remedying this problem can be as simple as placing separate paths further away from one another, observing that as long as two paths are close to one another, they’re perceived as the same path. The more isolated or exclusive a path feels, Tost says, the more special it can become in the player’s mind, allowing them to “fully focus on experiencing the chosen path.” It also produces a heightened sense of curiosity, he explains, making players wonder what they might have missed.
Three basic principles
Ultimately, Tost developed three basic principles for level design, though he cautions that it ultimately depends on the game they’re being applied to.
The perception of distance. The closer paths are to each other, the less it feels like picking one makes a difference.
The more exclusive or isolated a path feels, the more special it can become in the player’s mind. It allows players to fully focus on experiencing the chosen path. It heightens player’s curiosity about “what if.”
Validation. Paths need to be treated as special. This is what creates value in the choices the player’s make. Make it worth their time and give them a show. Provide exclusive scenes, encounters, or world-building.
Taken together, Tost believes the desired effect can be achieved by spreading out the entrances to the different paths; limiting and controlling what players can see; forcing them to commit to a choice using tricks like one-way drops and passages, and then properly rewarding them with exclusive content and other incentives. Doing so will also give designers more freedom to create incentives to use playstyles, Tost says, such as utilizing stealth abilities to sneak past a powerful enemy to a secret passage.
Even without these improvements, though, Cyberpunk 2077 seems to be growing in esteem among fans, not the least because it’s one of the most technically ambitious RPGs ever made. Whether it ever lives up to its original potential remains an open question, but Tost at least seems confident that these lessons can be applied to future games.
“All three principles [perception, exclusivity, and validation] are not restricted to, but particularly effective at enhancing the powers of two different level design beats, designed to maximize choice and reward: that is, discovery and exploration,” Tost concluded, calling it “food for thought” for other developers.
We’ll get to see whether these lessons pay off with the Phantom Liberty expansion, which is set to launch later this year. For now, Cyberpunk 2077 is available on PS5, Xbox, and PC. A sequel is also in development. Keep an eye on this space for lots more coverage as GDC 2023 continues.
Kat Bailey is a Senior News Editor at IGN as well as co-host of Nintendo Voice Chat. Have a tip? Send her a DM at @the_katbot.
Are you looking to build out your collection of board games at home, or want something new and exciting to play during your next game night? If so, there’s no better time than now to buy one, thanks to Amazon’s board game sale. During this time, you can save plenty (up to 51%!) on select board games, from Pandemic to Betrayal to Azul.
Below, you can see which board games are included in Amazon’s sale right now, along with how much you can save on each one.
Board Games on Sale At Amazon
If you want to see a collection of some of the best board games to play throughout this year, we’ve got you covered there, too. In our guide to the Best Board Games to Play in 2023, we’ve curated a wide selection of board games, from classic picks to exciting new ones, that are perfect for including in your next game night. This selection includes Ticket to Ride, Gloomhaven, Codenames, Pandemic, and many more. Some of these games are even included in Amazon’s board game sale listed above, which is even better! You can now add some of the best board games around to your collection at home for a much cheaper price.
Board games aren’t the only items on sale on Amazon right now, either. For those looking to buy some new tech, you can also save 20% on 2nd Generation Apple Airpods Pro earbuds, which are originally $249and are now available for just $199.99. Or, if you’re looking for a new microSD card for your Nintendo Switch or Steam Deck, you can find the Samsung EVO Select 512GB microSD card on sale on Amazon as well, docked down 53% from $84.99 to $39.99.
Hannah Hoolihan is a freelance writer who works with the Guides and Commerce teams here at IGN.
Arkane Austin has said that it is working on a fix that will reverse Redfall’s always-online requirement, an aspect that was met with backlash when first announced.
In an interview with Eurogamer, game director Harvey Smith said, “We listen. And we have already started work to address this in the future. We have to do some things like encrypt your save games and do a bunch of UI work to support it. And so we are looking into – I’m not supposed to promise anything – but we’re looking into and working actively toward fixing that in the future.”
Smith also went into more detail about why Redfall was designed as an always-online experience from the start. It wasn’t to sell microtransactions from an in-game store, as the game doesn’t even have one (DLC is planned, including guns and costume bundles, but they will be sold via the Xbox store). Instead, the decision behind requiring an online connection was to help Arkane understand how people were playing Redfall and when they were facing difficulties.
“It allows us to do some accessibility stuff. It allows us for telemetry, like – if everybody’s falling off ladders and dying, holy shit that shows up,” Smith explained. “And so we can go and tweak the ladder code. There are reasons we set out to do that that are not insidious.”
Smith noted that Arkane wanted to take the empathetic approach to players’ concerns as not everyone has a stable internet connection and are sometimes prone to outages. “And so I think it is a legitimate critique,” said Smith.
Smith’s use of the term “fixing that in the future” may point to the system being changed after launch, so it currently seems sensible temper any expectations that Redfall will definitely launch with an offline mode.
Redfall launches on May 2 for PC and Xbox Series X|S. In IGN’s Redfall preview, we said, “If Arkane Austin can bring its own version of the kind of innovation [Far Cry 2 and STALKER] did back in the late 2000s, then Redfall could well inject a static genre with some long-overdue excitement.”
George Yang is a freelance writer for IGN. He’s been writing about the industry since 2019 and has worked with other publications such as Insider, Kotaku, NPR, and Variety.
When not writing about video games, George is playing video games. What a surprise! You can follow him on Twitter @Yinyangfooey
In a game all about vampire slaying it’s pretty important that killing your blood-feasting foes feels like an event in and of itself. That’s exactly what Arkane Austin has done with Redfall; much like how assassination-sim Dishonored had gloriously bloody backstab animations, Redfall revels in the act of plunging a wooden stake through a vampire’s heart. There’s weight in the blow as you knock your foe backwards and slam them into the floor, pushing a boot into a jaw that quickly evaporates into fiery dust. Yeah, killing vampires in Redfall feels good.
At a recent hands-on event I played around 90 minutes of Redfall, which gave me the first taste of something akin to a Far Cry game made by Stephen King. It’s an open-world shooter set in modern day Massachusetts, filled with gothic small-town vibes, fanged horrors, and a buffet of activity types.
That means Prey and Dishonored developer Arkane Austin is operating in uncharted territory. Redfall is very different to the studio’s other games and initially feels a lot more conventional. A freely explored map with safehouses, enemy camps, side errands, and tier-graded loot? Check, check, check, and check. But the more I played, the more I saw of what I’d expect from the historically ambitious developer. The island town of Redfall has clever environment design that’s engineered to compliment your skills. The enemy AI is there to be toyed with, allowing you to bait your foes into traps. And every second room I entered felt staged to tell a story. Redfall definitely is an Arkane game, just not the one I expected.
The demo began mid-way through an investigation into Dr. Addison, a physician-turned-vampire god known as The Hollow Man. I was to search his mansion – a ransacked estate that appeared frozen in time, mid-explosion – in the hope of discovering something that may weaken him. Of course, said mansion was crawling with enemies, both blood suckers and the humans who work in service to them. It was a classic infiltration set-up and has much of what you’d expect of Arkane’s work in this field. Patrolling cultists guarded the perimeter, CCTV camera-like vampires lurked on the building’s roof, and there were multiple entry points to choose from. Inside, the route to my objective was spelled out only with clues, and so exploration and close reading of the space is mandatory.
It soon became clear that to find what I was looking for I needed to replace three characters missing from Addison’s daughter’s doll house. After scouring the house and finding the little figures I needed, I was transported back to a period where the mansion was tidy, un-exploded, and Addison hadn’t gone full vampire mode. In this timeline – which felt like a simpler, less fantastical version of Dishonored 2’s Crack in the Slab in the way it repurposed the location to tell its story – I watched apparitions play out a tragedy between Addison and his daughter. It’s a tale I won’t spoil here, but one that reveals the vampire god’s weakness and presumably will help me burn him out of existence in a later mission.
Vampire hunting is a process, a profession. To be the slayer means learning the tricks of the trade.
Of course, Redfall isn’t all about rebuilding creepy doll houses and reliving childrens’ trauma. As mentioned earlier, it’s also very much about sending vampires to hell in very cool ways. Your arsenal comprises a bunch of conventional firearms – shotguns, pistols, assault rifles and the like – as well as a variety of DIY weapons designed specifically for vampire hunting. The selection I’ve used of the former feel heavy and powerful, but even those with the highest stats are unable to truly eliminate a vampire. Bloodsuckers downed by regular guns will reanimate a few moments later and so, in tradition with vampire lore, the only way to properly end them is with a stake driven through their heart. Many guns are equipped with a wooden bayonet for such occasions, but the jury-rigged stake launcher lets you dust vamps from a distance with a single trigger pull. Ammo for the launcher seems much more scarce than regular bullets, though, and so I found myself continually assessing if each fanged target was worth the shot.
Should you be out of stakes, there are other ways to do the job. Fire does the trick, and so exploding hazards or flare guns will turn a vampire into a smouldering barbecue. Electricity also generates heat, and so setting up some kind of a livewire trap will fry them, too. They also hate ultraviolet light (it freezes them into temporary stone statues), so a UV emitter gun is a handy thing to pack – just remember to shatter your targets before the petrification wears off. All these techniques give the sense of vampire hunting being a process, a profession. To be the slayer means learning the tricks of the trade.
Each of Redfall’s four playable protagonists are equipped with unique skills to help with that process. For this session I played as Devinder Crousley, a quippy British cryptozoologist most obviously built around being a modern-day Buffy. His Arc Javelin is an electrified spear that can chain bolts of lightning around a group of enemies, and scoring a perfect throw with it feels immensely satisfying. The Blacklight, meanwhile, floods a wide area with UV light for quick crowd control. They were useful in my single-player demo, but are abilities I’m excited to use as part of a co-op session; I’m interested to see the results of experimentation with a combination of different characters’ skills.
My favourite of Devinder’s gadgets is his Translocator, a frisbee-like device that teleports you to wherever it is thrown. It’s Redfall’s closest answer to Dishonored’s Blink ability and it quickly became my most-used tool, letting me access out-of-reach open windows, flank enemies, appear behind guards for takedowns, and bypass grids of laser trip mines. It also helped just getting around; while Redfall’s map seems much smaller than those in most open world shooters there’s still a lot of ground to cover, and being able to throw the Translocator over houses, streets, and fences was very handy for exploring the town.
Stealth is a component of Redfall, but it adheres to a very different rulebook than that used by Dishonored.
As you’d expect from a game in this genre, there’s a whole bunch of things to do beyond the main storyline. There are multiple safehouses to unlock, each of which becomes an ammunition stockpile and fast-travel location. There are activities which help pull neighbourhoods back from full vampire infestation, such as wiping out cultist rallies or preventing a powerful creature emerging from its blood amber cocoon. Then there are errand-like side quests that appear to be peppered with Arkane Easter eggs, such as one where you head off to find whisky and cigars.
But the best side activities are the strangest ones, at least from the small sample I’ve seen so far. Vampire Nests transport you into a twisted psychic realm where you must destroy a room-sized heart and then claim as much treasure as possible before the entire place collapses around you like some kind of blood splattered game show. Back in the town, you’re frequently reminded that ‘The Vampire Gods Are Watching You’, and if you cause too much trouble they’ll send an Incredible Hulk-like freak to beat seven bells out of you in a battle played out beneath a wild electrical storm. The repeating nature of open-world tasks feels completely at odds with Arkane’s typically hand-crafted approach, but it’s in these two activities that I saw a glimmer of how the studio is rethinking the building blocks of the genre to make them feel more systemic or novel.
The other area in which traditional open-world shooter design is at odds with Arkane’s legacy is stealth. To be clear: stealth is a component of Redfall, but it adheres to a very different rulebook than that used by Dishonored. Sneaking flows between regular bursts of violent, chaotic conflict. And that’s okay. Dishonored was Arkane’s interpretation of pure stealth classics like Thief, but the studio’s touchstones for Redfall are very different. Before my demo began, co-director Harvey Smith namechecked Far Cry 2 and STALKER as influences; two shooters from an experimental period years before the likes of Gearbox and Ubisoft established the largely unwavering open-world FPS formula. If Arkane Austin can bring its own version of the kind of innovation those games did back in the late 2000s, then Redfall could well inject a static genre with some long-overdue excitement.
Matt Purslow is IGN’s UK News and Features Editor.
Playing as a scion of the hereafter fighting his way through the realms beneath in a roguelike graveyard shift might sound familiar. I also played Hades. But Have a Nice Death let me take control of your boy, Death himself, who runs a very different kind of quirky, new underworld order. Full of dark and dry workplace humor, this clerical reimagining of life after death as a soulless corporation forms the backdrop for some wicked hard, frantic, side-scrolling combat. And at its best, it’s a killer time, even if the progression systems don’t do the best job of providing ongoing motivation.
Slaying my way through randomized levels and laying the smackdown on the various, rank-and-file deadbeats was the highlight of this Stygian adventure, with fast and responsive combat featuring a lot of different techniques to master. A variety of swappable scythes with multiple special attacks each are just the beginning. You can also unalive the undead with magic spells and secondary weapons found randomly throughout the levels – from a big, beefy hammer to a sorcery that summons a flock of hungry crows. In addition to responsive jumps, dashes, and powerful “frenzy” finishers, no dust-up is lacking for variety.
Each chapter, based on a different method of death, from war to food poisoning, is distinct and full of new enemy types. One moment I was swatting away slimy seagulls who died in an oil spill, and the next I was doing aerial combat with bubble-headed nerds who suffocated on chewing gum. The designs, both visually and in terms of how they attack, are consistently creative and charming. And the excellent soundtrack compliments all of the mayhem very well.
These are some incredibly unforgiving fights.
Along the descent into darkness, you’ll be collecting red, green, and blue Curse cards, which sounds bad, but these are actually the main passive bonuses you can stack during a run, like adding bleed to your weapons or getting health back when you defeat a boss. And its in the offices of those brutal Thanagers and Sorrows that the difficulty really kicks in. These are some incredibly unforgiving fights, and given your very limited defensive options, they can be very frustrating. Memorizing patterns is essential, as the margin for error is too small to really get by winging it, which can be aggravating when your run ends to a miniboss you haven’t seen in a while due to the randomized floors.
OFF WITH THEIR HEADS
For capital D-Death, lowercase-d death isn’t that big of a deal, of course, as you’ll simply get sent back down to your office to live again and hopefully take revenge on your disobedient underlings. And you get to hear a catchy little jingle every time, too. The main issue I ran into is that the long-term progression systems don’t really give you a feeling of momentum that would have been quite welcome considering the steep difficulty curve. Almost everything you earn goes away as soon as you’re slain.
Let me put it like this: You can kind of break up the types of persistent upgrades you get in a roguelike into three categories. First, you have straight-up permanent increases to your stats. Second would be things like rerolls that don’t necessarily make you stronger directly, but increase your chances of having a good run with good items. Finally, you have unlocks that merely add more abilities or passives into the pool of available drops. Have A Nice Death focuses heavily on that last category, and there is very little meaningful power to earn in the other two. One of the level up perks gives you a whole one percent increased chance to find rare weapons. That just feels like a joke!
It took me over 100 runs to even see the final boss, and I was feeling worn down well before that.
I don’t mind really punishing games, usually. I like to be challenged, and I’ll always be a prisoner to my ambition. But at least in something like Hades or even Elden Ring, I feel like my many defeats are all building to something and I’ll eventually overcome the challenges before me by getting stronger little by little, alongside my skills improving. It takes the sting out of those lose-lose days when it seems like the first boss is just kicking my ass every time I see him. And without much of that persistent progression to look forward to, I found my enthusiasm to keep going in Have A Nice Death was often on a downward trajectory. It took me over 100 runs to even see the final boss, and I was feeling worn down well before that.
CURSED NIGHT
You can eventually unlock elevators that let you skip a lot of normal stages and go directly to some of the big bosses, but this ends up hurting more than it helps as you miss out on all the currency and upgrades you would have earned on those floors. So it’s not really a way of building momentum, but rather another way to make everything more challenging. That said, every elevator does give you a choice of which type of level to visit next, with the exception of the ones that lead to area bosses, which can have a major impact on how well kitted-out you’ll be for the tougher challenges. Knowing which floors are more valuable in which situations, thus, becomes a huge help. And I definitely appreciated that extra bit of control over each run’s progression.
If you’re really feeling stuck, you can activate an optional “Self-Fulfillment Mode” that gives you some extra healing items and slightly nerfs normal enemies, but it doesn’t change the boss fights at all and I found it to not be that much help. It’s definitely not an “Easy Mode.”
Even when I was feeling stuck, at least I was always being rewarded with new lore. The afterlife’s various departments are in turmoil, and as you seek out lowly ghosts and dissident department heads to make them afraid of you again, you’ll unlock entertaining snippets about how this postmortem corporate bureaucracy works. Similar to Hades, you’ll also get new dialogue with the various friendly characters like your pumpkin-headed receptionist. Some of them even have humorous long-term storylines to follow.
These made me chuckle more than once, and at the heart of it all is a powerful conspiracy to uncover. Some of the jokes can feel a bit tired, like they’ve been used in every workplace comedy ever. They even directly reference the stapler in jello gag from The Office. But the off-beat setting and quirky tone keep things interesting.
Tony Todd, the voice actor behind Venom in Insomniac’s Marvel’s Spider-Man 2, revealed that the game will release sometime in September. It was previously only revealed that it would drop Fall 2023.
On Twitter, Todd posted a picture of himself working with motion capture. When someone exclaimed that they couldn’t wait for more details about Spider-Man 2, Todd responded with, “Looks like September! Massive publicity coming in august. Commercials start dropping in august so I’m told. Hold on to your … and hold breath! Gonna be necessary.”
Looks like September! Massive publicity coming in august. Commercials start dropping in august so I’m told. Hold on to your … and hold breath! Gonna be necessary
Sony did not respond to IGN’s request for comment.
While this is far from a confirmation since Insomniac itself didn’t officially announce a release date, having the information coming from someone who is directly working on the game is worth noting.
Spider-Man 2 will follow Peter Parker and Miles Morales on their most epic-single player adventure yet. Both Marvel’s Spider-Man and Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales are available now on PC, PS4, and PS5.
In IGN’s Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales review, we said, “Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales is a fantastic follow-up, telling a wonderful story while improving upon the fundamentals of the first game.”
George Yang is a freelance writer for IGN. He’s been writing about the industry since 2019 and has worked with other publications such as Insider, Kotaku, NPR, and Variety.
When not writing about video games, George is playing video games. What a surprise! You can follow him on Twitter @Yinyangfooey
In its latest submission to the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority, Microsoft responded to Sony’s concerns that Microsoft and Activision Blizzard would sabotage the PlayStation version of future Call of Duty titles. In its filing, Microsoft referenced a new remedy proposal that addresses Sony’s concerns of a “worse version of CoD titles on PlayStation consoles”.
Microsoft claimed that its current proposal would would actually encourage the Call of Duty developers and publishers to create a PlayStation version that’s optimized for the platform.
“As Microsoft will be shipping CoD on PlayStation in compliance with its remedy commitments… Microsoft will have every incentive to develop games with optimised support for PS5 features, such as haptics, and future consoles in order to maximise sales on the platform.”
Elsewhere in the document, Microsoft also wrote about the length of its proposed 10-year deal to Sony, saying, “Microsoft considers that a period of 10 years is sufficient for Sony, as a leading publisher and console platform, to develop alternatives to CoD.”
Earlier this month, a separate document submitted to the UK’s CMA included comments from Sony voicing concerns about the future of Call of Duty. The company was concerned that Microsoft could raise the price of Call of Duty on PlayStation, prioritize the Xbox version, or release a buggy build of the games on PlayStation.
Call of Duty has been the main point of contention during Microsoft and Sony’s battle over the Activision Blizzard acquisition. Sony has said the proposed 10-year Call of Duty offer will “irreparably harm competition”, while Microsoft has signed agreement after agreement to bring Call of Duty to nearly every platform under the sun, including Nintendo Switch. Sony has also said Battlefield can’t keep up with Call of Duty and claimed that “Game Pass leads PlayStation Plus significantly.”
Logan Plant is a freelance writer for IGN covering video game and entertainment news. He has over six years of experience in the gaming industry with bylines at IGN, Nintendo Wire, Switch Player Magazine, and Lifewire. Find him on Twitter @LoganJPlant.
Many of the best board games are competitive contests, with players trying to one-up everyone else for glory and bragging rights. But not everyone has a competitive spirit. Not everyone wants to trounce their friends and family in their free time. Isn’t it better, at least sometimes, to set aside your differences and work towards a common goal? With the cooperative board games below, you can do just that on game night.
Co-op board games come in a wide variety of themes, with levels of complexity that you can find one for players of all ages. Below, we’ve hand-picked our favorites on the market. For more game night ideas, check out our other roundups, including the best board games for kids and the best two-player board games.
To call Gloomhaven a fantasy adventure game is technically accurate, but a bit reductive. It tells the story of mercenaries chasing different goals in a changing world, and the legacy they leave behind. Gloomhaven takes the legacy system from Pandemic Legacy and weaves it into an epic fantasy campaign that takes place over generations.
Each hero comes with a personal goal that, when completed, sends the hero into retirement and unlocks new classes and story elements. Upon retiring a hero, you will take control of another, which results in an impressive sense of time progression. The game includes several sealed boxes that are only opened upon reaching certain milestones, which makes Gloomhaven a game with a grand scale that is unmatched in the board game medium.
Exit: The Game (Series)
An escape room in a box, the Exit series of games does a surprisingly good job of simulating the real thing. Players work together to find clues and solve riddles in real time in an effort to complete the scenario. Each scenario tells you to bring some pens and a pair of scissors because you’ll be permanently modifying your game throughout the session, making these games a one-and-done experience.
There are many different scenarios available for purchase, with titles like The Secret Lab, The Abandoned Cabin, The Sinister Mansion, The Forgotten Island, The Mysterious Museum, and a lot more. Priced at around $15 each (and usually cheaper on Amazon), the Exit series is an ideal replacement for a night at the movies.
Paleo
At first glance, this game of stone-age survival doesn’t look anything special. You create a deck of cards for the scenario you want to play and distribute them between the players. Then you take it in turns to flip a card from your pile and face the challenges thereon with the skills and stone tools available to your tiny tribe. The magic happens when tribes come together, pooling their resources to overcome one tough encounter, but doing so loses them the chance to interact with the other tribe’s card. All at once, this mirrors a real slice of stone-age life, agonizing over passing up opportunities in order to secure an important prize, while giving players real emergent cooperation in how much they choose to aid each other. The survival narrative and variety of scenarios are just the icing on the rock cake.
Pandemic Legacy
Pandemic put cooperative games on the map, and for good reason. Much of the genre’s hallmark mechanics originated here, from action point allocation to player roles with unique abilities. It also spawned a bevy of expansions and spinoffs, but Pandemic Legacy is the best and more revolutionary take on the virus-eradicating co-op game.
It takes the core rules of Pandemic and stretches them into a campaign-length adventure played out over several sessions as you race to cure disease and prevent epidemics. This version introduces permanence as a mechanic, as the rules force you to rip up cards, sticker the board and alter the physical components in other ways as things (inevitably) don’t go your way. The only potential drawback is that you must play with the same players each session, but because the game is so good everyone will be eager to jump back in.
Robinson Crusoe: Adventures on the Cursed Island
Robinson Crusoe: Adventures on the Cursed Island is a daunting and dark game, but players willing to wade through the sea of iconography, hefty rulebook and stifling theme will be rewarded with a satisfying survival simulation that rewards communication and teamwork. Based on the 1719 novel, players take on the role of survivors of a shipwreck that are must work together to gather food, build shelters, stave off attacks and explore the island. The combination of different scenarios and player characters ensure good replayability, while the survival mechanics do a fantastic job of selling the theme.
Just One
A lot of games on this list are, to a greater or lesser extent, strategy affairs. But cooperation is a great mechanic to use in party games too, and Just One tops the list. All the players bar one get to see a clue, and they have to write down a word related to that clue. Then all the clues get revealed to the remaining player who has to guess the original word. Sounds too simple, except the catch is that if any of the clues are the same they get wiped, leaving the guesser far less to work with. It’s an ingenious idea that leaves players caught in an uncertain vice over just how obscure they cant get away with being, while still being worried they might be the victim of doublethink.
Marvel Champions: The Card Game
This is a “Living Card Game”, which means it’s kind of collectable, like Magic: The Gathering, but there’s no random element. You just buy sets and expansions knowing what cards are in each. And unlike a lot of LCG’s, deck building is easy because it’s modular, seeing players pick fixed sets of cards to create decks for their hero and the villain you’re all working against. The meat of play features some classic concepts like dual-use cards alongside novel ideas like each player being able to flip from their hero to their alter-ego, with different abilities and hand sizes. This sets up some really interesting combo-based play where you pull off cinematic moves as you work together to thwart the villain’s schemes and save the day.
The Crew: Mission Deep Sea
You likely know trick-taking games from long time classics like Whist and Bridge. The Crew: Mission Deep Sea cleverly repurposes the concept into a cooperative game through the use of missions, demanding that certain players win tricks of particular types. So you might have to win a trick containing a yellow one, for example, or two consecutive tricks or even no tricks at all. This would be easy if you could show each other your cards, so your communication is limited to one card for the entire hand, recasting the game as a strategic puzzle with plenty of tension as you wait to see whether having to follow suit will tease out a critical card or fail the mission. Fast, fun and with fifty varied undersea missions, this is a pearl of a design. This game earned a spot on our best family board games list as well.
Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective
Sherlock Holmes is one of the most enduring fictional characters of all time, and for good reason. Watching him solve a seemingly impossible mystery with all the confidence and bravado of a stage actor has been a favorite pastime of generations of book readers and television watchers.
With Consulting Detective, you finally get the chance to step into the shoes of Holmes and test your own deduction skills in a series of nonlinear mysteries. What makes the game great is how it refuses to hold your hand; each mystery presents a short setup and then sets you loose on London, leaving you to visit notable locations, interview suspects, and make educated accusations. Be warned, however, that these mysteries are tough, and may make you question your intelligence on more than one occasion.
Arkham Horror: The Card Game
If your co-op group could use an eldritch touch, get Arkham Horror: The Card Game to the table. In this cooperative card game, players take on the role of detectives who are investigating various supernatural occurrences within HP Lovecraft’s world of cosmic horror. It’s a scenario-based experience with each mission at the mercy of an arcane Mythos, a set of conditions that must be met lest the investigators succumb to insanity.
Arkham Horror features customizable decks that are built around each investigator’s special abilities, and most scenarios can play out over a handful of sessions, lending a feeling of progression to the game. As you investigate new location cards, gather clues, and fight monsters, your detective will amass weaknesses that can hinder future games which, thematically, illustrate the mental toll of dealing with arcane horrors.
Spirit Island
Protect your island from a vicious mob of colonizers in this heavy co-op experience. Players are spirits of the land, and must use their unique powers to fend off settlers. Every turn, you’ll play a card from your deck of powers. Matching a card’s element with the element of the spirit usually grants a bonus effect, meaning that careful planning is necessary.
As the game goes on, the colonists will inevitably spread and ravage the land, making Spirit Island a race against the clock. They’re predictable, though, and if you plan efficiently you can head them off before they do too much damage. Players’ cards combo off of each other nicely, too, and there are few things in tabletop gaming as satisfying as eliminating a host of settlers in one fell swoop. Spirit Island is substantially more complex than other games of this style (Pandemic, Forbidden Island, etc.), making it an ideal choice for those seeking a meatier co-op experience. This game can also be found on our list of the best board games for adults.
The Mind
How well do you know your friends? The Mind asks this very question, and forces you to answer without a word. In this mind-bending experimental game, players must play cards from their hands to a common pile in ascending order, from smallest to largest. The deck contains the numbers 1 to 100, and the cards are dealt randomly each round. So, if you carry a 12 and another player has a 34, you must play your card to the center of the table before they do. The trick, though, is that nobody is allowed to talk.
The Mind is a tense game about body language and eye contact. Communicating what numbers are in your hand without speaking is as difficult as it sounds, and inevitably you’ll miss your window more than once. Your hand gets larger the longer the game goes on, too, and soon you’ll be sweating as you wait for the opportune moment to slap down that 52 or 71. It’s a bold design, and a game experience that you won’t soon forget.
Hanabi
Hanabi is a cooperative card game where players attempt to build a magnificent fireworks display by playing cards in rows numbered 1 through 5 in matching colors. The hook is that you cannot see the cards in your hand, but the other players can. On your turn, you can either play a card from your hand in hopes that it’s the proper number and color, or you can give a clue to another player about the cards in their hand. Cooperative in every sense of the word, Hanabi relies almost entirely on your communication and memory skills, which can be rewarding or frustrating depending on your outlook. Just be prepared for arguments when you inevitably play the incorrect card from your hand even after you’ve been explicitly (or so your partners claim) told what you’re holding.
Zombicide: Black Plague
Who doesn’t like to bond over some good old fashioned zombie slaying? Zombicide is a cooperative survival game where players work together to complete scenarios. The Black Plague version puts a fantastical spin on the original game, and drops players into the role of paladins, magicians, and knights to take down the evil necromancers responsible for the zombie outbreak.
You’ll pick up new weapons like crossbows and swords, explore a citadel crawling with the undead, and take on several missions in this dungeon-crawling adventure. It’s a tense and thematically-refreshing take on the tried and true zombie formula with surprisingly easy-to-learn rules.
Cthulhu: Death May Die
Cooperative games where you try and save the world from some deranged monstrosity out of the work of arch-racist HP Lovecraft are ten a penny. What makes Cthulhu: Death May Die stand out isn’t just the beautifully horrible miniatures in the box but the way it integrates help and harm. In order to gain new skills, your characters have to also lose some of their sanity, resulting in a clever balance of tactical trade-offs while encouraging you to come up with daring gameplay plans that deliberately expose yourselves to danger. The resulting reel of cinematic action-horror moments doesn’t feel much like Lovecraft but it is a ton of fun.
CD Projekt Red is re-evaluating The Molasses Flood’s upcoming Witcher game, codenamed Sirius, and has filed an impairment charge as a result.
Twitter user Game Over Thirty (below) shared an announcement to investors from CD Projekt Red, indicating that all may not be well with one of the many upcoming Witcher games. An impairment charge is filed by a business to write off assets that have dropped in value or been lost completely.
What this means for the game is currently unclear, though it is possible that CD Projekt Red has essentially reset development.
1/ CD Projekt Group is taking an impairment charge on Project Sirius. It looks like they evaluated the commercial viability of the current design and decided against it. Taking a charge indicates they want the expenses taken *NOW* because they serve no value to the company. https://t.co/mjuxGcozSX
— Game Over Thirty (aka RallyCarDelta) (@GameOverThirty) March 20, 2023
It has denied the project is scrapped altogether, however, as senior communication manager Paweł Burza told IGN that “our current focus is ensuring that Project Sirius is aligned with the strategy of the CD PROJEKT Group.
“At this point in time, we are neither providing insight into the evaluation of the project nor the potential future frameworks thereof.”
The Molasses Flood, a CD Projekt Red-owned studio, ramped up its hiring for Sirius. It would be one of the first developers outside of CD Projekt Red’s core studios to create a Witcher game, alongside Fool’s Theory who are working on The Witcher Remake.
Former Firaxis director Jake Solomon said that he wants to start his studio, but it most likely won’t be another turn-based strategy game. He worked as the director for Marvel’s Midnight Suns and the XCOM franchise.
On an episode of the podcast My Perfect Console, Solomon explained, “After I made Midnight Suns I looked at, ‘ok, I’m going to make another turn-based strategy game, and am I excited about that?’”
He continued: “I found that I wasn’t that excited about doing another turn-based strategy game, not because the genre isn’t amazing. It’s where I’ve spent my life, but I felt like I didn’t have anything more to say in that area.”
When asked what kind of game he’d make, Solomon said that he’d most likely create a simulation game rather than another turn-based strategy one. He went on to explain that he can’t stray too far away from his expertise and that system design is important to him, as he designed the individual heroes, enemies, and abilities in Marvel’s Midnight Suns.
“My intention, if anybody gives me the funding for it, is to open my own studio locally and make a new kind of game,” Solomon said. “I can’t move too far away from what my experience is. I’m a creative director, but the truth is I’m actually a very in-the-weeds system designer.”
In IGN’s Marvel’s Midnight Suns review, we said, “Marvel’s Midnight Suns is an expansive tactical RPG that makes great use of card game mechanics to inject variety and unpredictability into its excellent combat.”
George Yang is a freelance writer for IGN. He’s been writing about the industry since 2019 and has worked with other publications such as Insider, Kotaku, NPR, and Variety.
When not writing about video games, George is playing video games. What a surprise! You can follow him on Twitter @Yinyangfooey
