Category: IGN

Since late 2021, I’ve been tinkering away at a little column here on IGN.com highlighting indie games I thought were neat. It’s been running quietly away on Saturday afternoons, throwing spotlights on little games and developers that weren’t otherwise getting a lot of attention from mainstream gaming sites like ours.

I’m proud of that coverage up to today, but today I’m extra proud, because my quiet year-plus efforts are about to get much, much louder. My little column today joins a much larger IGN initiative to bring editorial columns of all varieties into the spotlight. Which means I get to take a moment to wax poetic about what my corner of this initiative is actually all about.

Indie game coverage is always a tricky question to answer, especially on sites like this one. With a large audience that rightfully expects us to cover all the biggest beats across games and entertainment every day, combined with the massive size of both industries, it’s inevitable that the vast majority of our resources go toward writing about things people already know they’re interested in. I’m talking about the Marvels, the big PlayStation exclusives, the prestige TV shows, the Marios. Our audiences desperately want to read about those things, we love to write about them, and there are only so many hours in the day to write, so write about them we do.

And yet, the unfortunate inevitability of this is that it often leaves out the truly massive body of work being done by smaller, lesser-known or even unknown creators who don’t have the IP, the budget, the thousand-person studios, or the names to already be known by a mainstream audience. Sure, occasionally an indie surprise garners a large enough community to hit the mainstream (see Stardew Valley, or Vampire Survivors), but those occasions are very, very rare. And yet, every single day, countless innovative, beautiful, moving, strange, clever, and fascinating games are being made that you will never hear about. Many of them are breaking game design, art, music, and conceptual ground that we never see touched in AAA due to fears of missing sales targets. Some are filling gaps in genres that mainstream gaming has forgotten entirely. And others are made by developers who overcame immense obstacles to chase their dream of making video games.

I firmly believe those games are also worth knowing about – not just in passing as part of a showcase or a quick tweet, but with joyful, curious depth and attention. And I think IGN has an important role to play in surfacing them.

So this is Hidden Treasures, a column where every month I’ll introduce you to a small game made by a small team that isn’t otherwise being covered extensively on IGN. I’ll use this space to tell you about my early impressions of it (at least the first few hours, if not more) and chat with its developers about who they are, what they’re making, why they’re making it, and why you should care. My goal isn’t to surface to you only 10/10 perfect indie gems, or the next Stardew Valley. It’s to shed a little light on the brilliant games inhabiting the spaces between the Marios and the Marvels, and celebrate the corners of this creative industry that don’t always get time in the sun.

I hope you’ll end up inspired by this column to at least check a few of them out, or if not, to go hunt for some hidden treasures of your own.

(And you can catch up on all previous Hidden Treasures columns, including from before this column had a name, right here.)

With that out of the way, I’d like to formally kick things off by telling you that I spent at least an hour last night ugly crying my way through the end of A Space for the Unbound – a gorgeous pixel art slice-of-life game that’s consumed my evenings for the last several days.

A Space for the Unbound follows a young man named Atma, who’s on the cusp of adulthood in late ’90s rural Indonesia. In a story structure that gives off massive Your Name and Weathering With You vibes, Atma and his girlfriend Raya are balancing big discussions of their future and completion of a wholesome bucket list with mutual discovery of strange, magical powers. Raya has some kind of matter manipulation thing going on, and Atma can “spacedive” into the hearts of people he meets and help them resolve their internal dilemmas.

Part of the way A Space for the Unbound lets its mystery pleasantly simmer in the backdrop is through its cheerful portrayal of ’90s Indonesia and Atma’s role in it as a young man. Between adventures with Raya, he’s exploring the town: collecting bottle caps, naming and petting every cat he sees, playing games at the arcade, helping local townspeople with their problems, or fending off school bullies. The various vignettes between major story beats offer a loving glimpse into Indonesia in the ’90s and the relatably mundane problems of ordinary people. As someone who has extremely little experience with this setting, I loved the mix of unfamiliar culture and familiar humanity.

A Space for the Unbound is clearly a very personal glimpse into a setting and time period close to game director Dimas Novan D.’s heart. He tells me in an email interview that his idea for the game came from the concept of Seichijunrei, or an “anime pilgrimage,” where you compare real-life locations with an anime counterpart. Through this idea, Dimas began to discover much of the anime he was familiar with referenced real-life locations ranging from iconic buildings or landmarks to common rural neighborhoods. He wanted to do the same, but for places he lived in during a time period that was personally sentimental to him and the development team.

Dimas began work on the game back in 2015 with a team of just two to three people within Surabaya-based Mojiken Studio. For much of that time, Mojiken was making and releasing a number of other games, including She and the Light Bearer and When the Past Was Around. But around 2020, with When the Past Was Around released, the studio was able to dedicate everyone at the studio (around 12-14 people) to Dimas’ project. But Dimas admits the first few years were “probably the hardest” for him personally.

“I [had] to juggle between work and trying to find ASFTU’s game direction,” he recalls. “The very basic concept of the story has already been finished since the ASFTU prototype in 2015, but making it a more substantial experience in a video game format was a heavy task. As somebody who is relatively very new in the game development field, I had a hard time deciding what kind of mechanic was suitable for the full game. If we talk about games, it has to have some kind of entertainment and interactivity aspect so that the player can have a great time with it and immerse themselves in the game.

“Plus the core message of the game is something that can not be said right after the very first part of the game. We have to slowly make the overall experience entertaining and compelling so people are willing to understand the message we want to deliver, especially the story. We made some prototypes, some elements worked and some elements didn’t. But in 2019, we were really glad that we finally found the right formula for the game, and in 2020, the demo was released to very positive reception.”

Along with his desire to depict a place and time close to his heart, Dimas hopes those who play A Space for the Unbound keenly feel the passage of time in Loka Town as they play. He tells me he was also inspired by another Japanese concept: Mono no aware, or “the pathos of things.” He describes it as an appreciation for or awareness of impermanence and the passage of time.

“We picked that theme because we grow older and want to reminisce about the past, those happy times, those difficult times, those growing up times,” Dimas says. “Every generation has its own memories and ASFTU is our memories and we want to preserve that before we completely forget about it. The most important thing for us is that it makes us feel at home as Indonesians, making it feel like our own growing-up time.”

While A Space for the Unbound is certainly about all these things – nostalgia, growing up, being aware of the passage of time as two young people enter a new chapter of their lives – there’s something else going on here that I don’t want to spoil, but that I want to urge you to play and uncover. The good news here is that you don’t have to play A Space for the Unbound long to be hooked on doing that detective work. Very early on, A Space for the Unbound has an overpowering sense of underlying mystery, even when you’re not exactly sure what the mystery is. Part of that comes from the prologue – a dream-like sequence featuring a young girl named Nirmala who’s friends with Atma but doesn’t seem to exist anywhere in his day-to-day life. Or maybe it’s the strange relationship Atma seems to have with everyone in town – he has memories of a favorite food stall, for instance, but not of another young woman in his class. By the end of chapter 2 I was ravenous to keep playing, just to figure out what on earth was going on in this town, because no easy theory seemed to make sense.

So no, I’m not going to spoil why I was blubbering into multiple handkerchiefs by A Space for the Unbound’s beautiful (emotionally and aesthetically) conclusion, but I desperately need to recommend the game as one of the fastest turnarounds from “Oh hey this looks neat” to “I MUST KEEP PLAYING THIS” I’ve ever experienced. If you’re at all keen on anime romances like Your Name, slice-of-life tales that take you to new places, emotional explorations of trauma or identity, or petting cats, give it a shot.

Rebekah Valentine is a news reporter for IGN. You can find her on Twitter @duckvalentine.

There have been plenty of questions about Game Freak’s development bandwidth in recent months, especially in light of Pokémon’s overall lack of polish over the past few years. But that isn’t stopping the studio from pursuing projects like Pocket Card Jockey: Ride On, which launched on Apple Arcade last week.

“The question of resources is always tricky,” says Game Freak General Manager of Development Department 1 Masafumi Saito. “Mr. Taya, the director of the Nintendo 3DS version, worked in parallel on development of game titles for the Pokémon series. And recently, we’ve been partnering with other companies for development, inclusive of Pocket Card Jockey: Ride On!. The technologies required for game development are complex and wide-ranging. We need to ready the best development team for each game, so we need to work together with all sorts of creators both inside Japan or elsewhere in the world.”

Saito’s comments follow the release of Pokémon Scarlet and Violet, which was a notably glitchy entry in the long-running series. Pokémon is supported by a complex array of interlocking companies and support studios, but the core team at Game Freak is extremely small by modern standards, numbering a little over 150 employees. In 2019, Game Freak’s Junichi Masuda talked about his preference for his small teams, which he said was due to the importance of communication.

Despite its size, Game Freak remains committed to making games outside of Pokémon. Speaking with IGN, Saito and Pocket Card Jockey director Masao Taya talked about the origins of Pocket Card Jockey and what the series means to Game Freak, in the process touching on how it’s rooted in the studio’s origins as first a fanzine then an independent studio.

“The departments in charge of developing original games aren’t limited by scale or platforms,” Saito says. “The most important thing is to create new games that will attract users. We are working on various small and large projects regardless of the platform. Game Freak came about out of our experiences of independently creating home video games, so we want to preserve the approach of personally wanting to try to create something new and unique.”

Pocket Card Jockey’s roots

Pocket Card Jockey is one of several original games developed by Game Freak. It was first released in North America for Nintendo 3DS in 2016, where it won praise for its good humor and its card-based mechanics. It’s based in part on Derby Stallion, a popular Japan-only horse-racing sim originally released on the NES.

Taya is a self-professed Derby Stallion fan, and he remembers “the thrill of seeing how the horses displayed in pixels of 16-dot squares behaved.” The experience remained with him even as he grew up and joined Game Freak, and he sought to recreate it with a game of his own.

“I spent time during several vacation days working on implementing a program like that. It went better than I thought, so I showed it to my co-workers and was content with that. I then decided to use that program to try and make a horse racing game. But I thought to myself, if it was just a development-type simulation it would be nothing more than a rehash of Derby Stallion several years too late,” Taya remembers. “So at Game Freak, I put forward the idea of adding in elements of a card game. I can see now that it wasn’t such a great idea because it was really just to avoid copying Derby Stallion. At the time, there were pretty high hurdles that prevented Game Freak from starting development of a new game, so in the end we didn’t go ahead with it.”

Pocket Card Jockey finally went ahead thanks to Game Freak’s Gear Project, an intiative that encourages developers to pitch original projects. If staff members are interested in a pitch, they will collaborate on a prototype. Taya’s idea was supported by Pokémon composer Go Ichinose, a fellow horse-racing fan who recommended a solitaire app to Taya.

“[Ichinose] knew I wanted to make a horse racing game and to bring in card game elements, so he suggested using a solitaire type of card game. I formed a Gear Project with Ichinose and invited another staff member (Toshihiro Obata) to join. The end result was Pocket Card Jockey,” Taya remembers.

Pocket Card Jockey was initially released in Japan in 2013, with a mobile version following the year after. Taya wouldn’t comment on sales numbers in Japan or North America, but did say that the original game ultimately turned a profit.

After Pocket Card Jockey’s release, Taya says he remained interested in releasing a free-to-play version on mobile devices, but was discouraged by the original iOS release, which “didn’t go well in business terms.” He was ultimately attracted to Apple Arcade due to its subscription-based model, which allowed Game Freak to bring the series to mobile without “having to force it into a F2P style.”

In addition to being on a more accessible platform, Pocket Card Jockey: Ride On brings with it several improvements, most notably a new 3D engine that Taya hopes will enhance “ease of understanding to make for richer course views and effects.” Taya also retooled the stamina system, allowing players to recover stamina in areas of the map at the expense of gaining energy to win the race.

‘Even if resources are tight, we won’t stop making original games’

The reception has generally been positive, with plenty of new players discovering it for the first time. Will this be enough for Game Freak to pursue a sequel or a Switch port?

“Making a sequel would require a lot more time for trial and error. So rather than do that, I thought there would be more value in making sure we could provide a new Pocket Card Jockey to the fans who’d been waiting a long time, and to allow people who’d never played it before to try a version close to the original,” Taya says. “Of course, success with Apple Arcade raises the possibility of starting development on a sequel. On a personal level, I’d like to try creating a sequel!”

As for a Switch port, Taya says Game Freak’s “main focus is on Apple Arcade users enjoying. We want to see the reaction we get from that.”

Pocket Card Jockey is far from Game Freak’s stated aim of finding another Pokémon, but it nevertheless seems to be the most successful of the studio’s various side projects. The positive buzz around Ride On is no doubt a refreshing change of pace for Game Freak in light of the relentless negativity from Pokémon’s core fans.

One way or another, these curious and delightful side projects remain a big part of Game Freak’s DNA.

“Even if resources are tight, we won’t stop working on original games,” Saito says. “As a company we have to take on new challenges, and as creators we certainly want to make new fun things.”

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.

After a long break, Lara Croft is on the comeback trail. THR reports that a television show about the famous video game adventurer is in development at Amazon, with Fleabag writer Phoebe Waller-Bridger attached to pen the scripts.

Amazon did not immediately respond to IGN’s request for comment.

Not much is known about the new project, which Waller-Bridger is also set to executive produce. It’s not known who will play the role of Lara Croft, who has been previously portrayed by Angelina Jolie among others.

Waller-Bridger rose to prominence thanks to Fleabag, an acclaimed BBC sitcom based on her one-woman show of the same name. The success of Fleabag earned Waller-Bridger an overall deal at Amazon Studios, which also includes another mystery series that may or may not still be on the schedule.

There hasn’t been a new Tomb Raider game since 2018’s Shadow of the Tomb Raider, but Lara Croft has shown signs of reemerging of late. In addition to new Power Wash Simulator DLC that allowed players to clean her apparently filthy mansion, Amazon recently struck a deal with Crystal Dynamics to make a new game in the series.

Tomb Raider was part of Embracer Group’s $300 million acquisition of Square Enix’s western studios, which also included Deus Ex and Thief among other franchises. You can read our full analysis of the Embracer Group here along with our list of the biggest games of 2023.

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.

The Nintendo Switch has notably less customization features and apps than its Nintendo handheld predecessors — themes aren’t customizable beyond two simple colors, users can’t rearrange their home screens, and it lacks a note-taking feature like the 3DS’ Game Notes app.

But today, indie developer and publisher RedDeerGames released nOS: New Operating System, an app for the Switch that seems to bring back some of these little widgets that the console is missing, all in one tiny OS.

The app contains all of the bits and bobs that come with modern operating systems: a calculator, a gallery, a notebook, a to-do list, an MS Paint-like drawing app, a puzzle game, and customizeable settings. Like any modern OS, users are able to open multiple windows at once, giving them the ability to multitask, though it doesn’t currently have a browser or any other features.

According to the game’s press kit, it’s currently on sale for $1.99 until February 16, though it’s normally priced at a steep $39.99.

Of course, nOS isn’t the only new title headed to the switch this year. There’s plenty to expect from Nintendo in 2023, like the long-awaited The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom and the recently revealed Pikmin 4.

Amelia Zollner is a freelance writer at IGN who loves all things indie and Nintendo. Outside of IGN, they’ve contributed to sites like Polygon and Rock Paper Shotgun. Find them on Twitter: @ameliazollner.

YouTuber Mutekimaru Channel is well-known for livestreaming their pet fish playing various games through motion tracking software, which registers the pets’ positions as button inputs. The fish have accomplished some pretty impressive things during these streams — in 2020, they even beat Pokemon Sapphire after a 3,195 hour run. But earlier this month, their fish did what no fish has (hopefully) done before: commit credit card fraud.

During a livestream 12 days ago, the fish were off to a good start in Pokemon Violet, winning a few battles and slowly but surely progressing through the story. About 5 hours into the stream, however, the game crashed, giving the fish free access to the rest of their owner’s Switch.

These fish committed credit card fraud while playing Pokémon. ????? pic.twitter.com/w0TgKgJSUL

— IGN (@IGN) January 25, 2023

From there, the fish went to the eShop and added 500 yen (about $3.85) of funds to their owner’s account, even exposing their owner’s credit card information to viewers in the process.

They also sent their owner a PayPal verification email, redeemed Nintendo Switch Online points for a Nintendo Switch Sports profile picture, and downloaded the Switch’s Nintendo 64 emulator app.

Luckily, according to TechSpot, the YouTuber was able to get a refund after explaining the situation to Nintendo.

We gave Pokemon Scarlet and Pokemon Violet a 6 in our review, praising its massive open world and story but criticizing its all too apparent performance issues.

Amelia Zollner is a freelance writer at IGN who loves all things indie and Nintendo. Outside of IGN, they’ve contributed to sites like Polygon and Rock Paper Shotgun. Find them on Twitter: @ameliazollner.

Xbox CEO Phil Spencer admits that Microsoft’s $67.8 billion acquisition of Activision Blizzard has been a learning experience, but he remains confident in it going through.

Speaking with IGN, Spencer said he “didn’t know anything” about this type of acquisition when it was announced in January 2022, but having undergone the process and having conversations with key players, he’s more confident now than he was last year.

“The fact that I have more insight, more knowledge about what it means to work with the different regulatory boards, I’m more confident now than I was a year ago, simply based on the information I have and the discussions that we’ve been having,” Spencer said.

“When we announced a year ago, we talked about an 18-month timeframe. We’re 12 months into that. I think we continue to stay focused on getting the deal closed.”

Spencer would have plenty reason to be a little shaken, however, as several government bodies have moved to challenge the deal in the past few months including the United States’ Federal Trade Commission and UK’s Competitions and Markets Authority. The European Union is also reportedly preparing a statement of objections.

The deal, which would see Xbox own several prolific game franchises including Call of Duty and Overwatch, has also been criticised by various U.S. senators, the city of New York, and the U.S. Justice Department. Despite this, Spencer said his “confidence remains high”.

He continued: “We’re actively working with the regulatory boards around the world that need to approve for this, and it’s been a learning experience for me. A lot of time spent, a lot of travel, a lot of conversations, but they’re conversations where I get to talk about our industry and the work that we do and why we do it.

“I think more regulators that are informed about what gaming is, how the business runs, who the players are, and what our aspiration is as Team Xbox is just a good thing for the industry itself.”

Ryan Dinsdale is an IGN freelancer and acting UK news editor. He’ll talk about The Witcher all day.

In an interview with Buzzfeed, Naughty Dog co-president Neil Druckmann confidently said the studio is “Moving on” from the Uncharted series saying, “Uncharted was insanely successful — Uncharted 4 was one of our best selling games — and we’re able to put our final brushstroke on that story and say that we’re done.”

If Naughty Dog is done with the Uncharted series, they ended it about as perfect as they could have. After decades of exploring, Nathan Drake settles down with the love of his life, and together with their daughter, can enjoy peace and retirement. Only, why does it feel like there’s a missed opportunity still?

In the first Uncharted game, Nathan Drake was the charismatic treasure hunter with a joke on his tongue and a song in his heart. Drake’s Fortune was a perfect vehicle to showcase the PlayStation 3’s graphical prowess, rendering incredibly detailed jungles and providing exceptional shooting and seamless parkour. However, somewhere along the way the gorgeous vistas and beautiful locales got sucked into the black hole of Nathan Drake’s various mid-life crises. No location is better suited to contemplate your fear of settling down than in a cathedral tucked away in the misty Scottish Highlands.

Once known for its epic platforming, Naughty Dog has become the standard-bearer of character-driven storytelling starting with The Last of Us and the darker, more character-focused Uncharted 4, which followed after. The studio further cemented its ability as world-class storytellers with the premiere of The Last of Us TV series on HBO, which is already being called one of the most successful video game adaptations of all time.

As Naughty Dog became a more storytelling operation, the Uncharted series began zeroing in on Nathan Drake the character, with his adventures across the world serving as a metaphor for the internal drama he was facing, whether it’s his fear of loss, fear of his past, or fear for his future. It was bold, especially considering Nathan Drake’s nickname when he was first introduced into the world — Dude Raider. But in the same way Temple of Doom is some peoples’ favorite Indiana Jones movie because it’s about the adventure and less about Indiana Jones, to me Uncharted as a whole feels like a series comprised of three Last Crusades — the movie that explained, that actually, Indiana Jones’ life was molded by a single childhood event as well as his relationship with his father.

It doesn’t help that the series broke new ground in the spinoff Uncharted: The Lost Legacy. The seemingly final Naughty Dog Uncharted game introduced a semi-open world that was fertile ground for all kinds of future adventures. The Western Ghats of India that Chloe and Nadine explore partway through Lost Legacy felt like a revolution at the time and could be utilized in any number of ancient temples, ruins, and more wonderful, made-for-Uncharted locations. To quote Kevin Garnett in Uncut Gems, why would you show me something if I couldn’t have it then?

Plus, it also showed that Uncharted games could be headlined by a character who wasn’t Nathan Drake. Never mind that Naughty Dog was still firmly in its tormented protagonist era by having new heroine Chloe Frazer face off against — yup — her father.

The real greatness of Uncharted was how it showcased the beauty of our world, and there’s so much world left to explore. To lose Uncharted as a series will deprive gaming of one of the rare game series that takes joy in the diversity of our shared human history and the splendor of oft-overlooked civilizations, whether it’s the mountains of Nepal or the plains of India. With so many cultures that could still be explored through the virtual adventures of Nathan Drake, it’s a shame that towards the end of the series, its gaze shifted away from our beautiful world and inwards towards the soul of its surprisingly tortured protagonist.

Not many game series can claim a definitive ending like Uncharted. The games industry is littered with half-finished (Half-Life?) series that promise to finish the fight, only for the market to declare the series isn’t selling anymore so let’s move on. Not Uncharted though, which was both critically and commercially successful enough to warrant numerous sequels and a proper finale.

If Naughty Dog has closed the book on Uncharted it’s because there are no more Nathan Drake stories to tell, even though there are still plenty of Uncharted stories that can be told.

Matt T.M. Kim is IGN’s Senior Features Editor. You can reach him @lawoftd.

You know how it is – you go years without a sci-fi survival horror game set in the distant depths of space, and then two arrive in consecutive months. The first, The Callisto Protocol, a spiritual successor to the Dead Space series helmed by Dead Space creator Glen Schofield and reportedly endowed with a monster development budget, released this past December with notable performance issues and ultimately failed to hit its sales targets. The second, a remake of the original 2008 Dead Space crafted with considerable care and creativity by Motive Studio, arrived this past week and managed to outdo the original in almost every way. Earlier in 2022, Schofield was quoted as being “kind of bummed” about not having any involvement in remaking the seminal survival horror game that put his name on the map. One can only wonder how he’s feeling now.

To be clear, I enjoyed my time overall with The Callisto Protocol, even though I felt a number of issues ultimately held it back from greatness, and I think it does eclipse Dead Space in a handful of areas. I’d say the performances from its lead actors, Josh Duhamel as Jacob Lee and Karen Fukuhara as Dani Nakamura, are slightly stronger than that of the cast featured aboard the USG Ishimura, and The Callisto Protocol also takes the prize for serving up the most uncomfortably convincing level of blood and gristle, with a level of onscreen meat-mulching that would make even the most gore-hungry gamer consider becoming a videogame vegan. That said, in almost every other comparison with both the original Dead Space and now even more so with its remake, The Callisto Protocol comes up shorter than a necromorph with its knees knocked out.

Much like Dead Space, Striking Distance Studios’ prison break game involves prison-breaking the arms and legs right off its mutated inhabitants, but the tools you’re given to get the joint-severing job done just don’t have the same kind of panache as Isaac Clarke’s iconic arsenal of repurposed mining implements. The Callisto Protocol is saddled with an ordinary ordnance limited to pistols, shotguns, and an assault rifle, which feel satisfying enough to shoot but are ultimately indistinct from the firearms featured in any number of other action games. To its credit it does differentiate itself with a melee-heavy focus in its opening hours complete with axes and stun batons, but while going toe-to-toe with two-headed titans isn’t a complete swing and a miss, the slightly fussy timing of the melee mechanic means as a feature it lands as more of a glancing blow than a knockout punch.

By the midpoint of Dead Space, however, Isaac is truly spoilt for choice when it comes to creative killing. The swiveling head of his Plasma Cutter may as well have been engineered by the Gillette razor corporation for how effective it is at shaving the stubborn limbs off necromorphs no matter which way their bodies are angled. The Ripper’s spinning saw blade lets you prune the parts off each freak with vengeful glee like you’re attacking the annoying tree branches coming from over your neighbour’s fence. Meanwhile the Contact Beam literally hoses the decaying flesh right off each necromorph’s bones like you’ve somehow stumbled onto an R-rated patch for PowerWash Simulator. Each of these work perfectly in tandem with Dead Space’s object-throwing Kinesis and enemy-slowing Stasis abilities, giving you a variety of ways to problem-solve your way out of each roomful of angry undead astronauts.

While sadly there’s no Stasis in The Callisto Protocol, there is a Kinesis equivalent. However it’s overpowered and too easily abused, allowing you to lift enemies off their feet and hurl them into the always conveniently placed spiked walls and exposed fan blades, meaning you’re able to clear entire areas of threats with a few hand gestures before they’ve had a chance to notice you. It’s fun to quickly Force-push mutants to their doom like you’re a Jedi who’s running late for a council meeting, but it hardly maintains a sense of tension. There really is no contest when it comes to combat variety and balance; The Callisto Protocol’s Jacob is a blunt instrument, while Dead Space’s Isaac is a sci-fi Swiss Army knife.

Isaac is also pitted against a decidedly more ghastly group of ghouls than what Jacob has to contend with. As I stated earlier, The Callisto Protocol’s vivid depiction of viscera is not to be undersold, but most of its enemies are gross in a reanimated roadkill kind of way. Dead Space’s nasties, on the other hand, are the stuff of proper cosmic horror nightmares. There’s a reason that horror movie maestro John Carpenter would love to make a film out of the Dead Space series, and it’s because game recognises game. Or I guess, moviemaking gamer recognises game inspired by moviemaker’s movies. At any rate, it’s clear that Dead Space’s creature designs are a cut above and they come in more shapes and sizes, from tiny tentacle-sprouting babies to a towering Leviathan that can only be described as looking like the largest arsehole in the universe this side of Uranus. (Sorry.)

The Callisto Protocol’s level structure is equally as narrow as its number of enemy types. It certainly serves up some striking and unsettling locales like its opening prison cell block and fetid waste management, but rarely does it give you a moment to linger. It just sluices you through them in a surge of forward momentum, slamming the door shut behind you at the start of each chapter with no way to backtrack for secrets you may have missed. Striking Distance Studios’ artists did an incredible job at realising each area of the Black Iron Prison, so it’s a shame it largely all passes by in a blur with little reason to ever stop in order to scrutinise your surroundings.

On the other hand, in the Dead Space remake you’re given the ability to shuttle back and forth between the various decks of the USG Ishimura, and you’re incentivised to do so with locked doors that can be accessed as Isaac’s security level increases. Doing so gives you access to precious resources and upgrades, and a multi-part side mission that tasks you with tracking down a number of the ‘RIGs’ discarded by deceased crew members that can eventually be combined into an all-access skeleton key for every room and cabinet on the ship. Further, as you return through previously visited areas, Dead Space surprises you with additional enemy ambushes so that you can never really feel safe, and tucks away some interesting environmental puzzles to discover that bring welcome diversions to all the death and destruction. Dead Space encourages you to truly submerge yourself in its haunted house of horrors, while The Callisto Protocol is effectively a rollercoaster ride; thrillingly brisk in pace but linear in direction.

at least as far as its story goes. The Callisto Protocol’s campaign is done in less than eight hours, and although you do ultimately find out how its outbreak occurred, there’s an abruptness to the credits screen that leaves you with a sense that it’s a few hour-long episodes short of a full season of television – at least in terms of the fates of certain characters. On the other hand, despite the fact there’s clearly more to Isaac’s story as evidenced by the existence of Dead Space 2 and 3, Dead Space resolves the events onboard the Ishimura in an extremely satisfying way, even more so in the remake which makes some clever character alterations to better sell its plot-twisting climax.

To be fair, some of The Callisto Protocol’s shortcomings could well be remedied in time. A NewGame+ mode that was noticeably absent at launch has recently been added as part of a free update, while additional gory death animations, new weapons, and added story DLC is promised for later in the year – although these are coming as part of paid season pass content. There’s plenty to build on in The Callisto Protocol, and I’d certainly welcome the announcement of a sequel, too, just… not as much as I’d welcome the announcement of a Dead Space 2 remake helmed by Motive Studio. Because ultimately while The Callisto Protocol is not without its charms, Dead Space still treats it like it’s a suspicious-looking corpse and stomps all over it.

Tristan Ogilvie is a video producer in IGN’s Sydney office. He’s never fought any machines in real life, although he did once have a tense altercation with a robot bartender in Tokyo. He almost never tweets here.

Like A Dragon: Ishin! was originally released during a very different era for the Yakuza franchise. It hit shelves in 2014 as an offbeat launch title for the Playstation 4, when only the most diehard aficionados of Japanese imports were playing Yakuza games in the West. Ishin! positioned itself as one of the strangest entries in the canon, trading in the rain-slicked noir of the mainline succession for a samurai-western mashup set in the 19th century that’s totally disconnected from the prodigal sagas of Kiryu and Majima. Sega never bothered to localize the game for English speakers, probably because they deemed it too frivolous compared to the rest of the Yakuza lineage. But American gamers are currently in the midst of an ongoing Yakuza renaissance, and that means Ishin! is finally coming to our shores in the form of this spruced-up remake that emphasizes all of its glorious anachronistic excess.

Do not be fooled by the historical vintage: Ishin! is very much a Yakuza game, in the sense that it is balanced precariously between a hard-boiled revenge saga and a dizzy ensemble comedy. I played the remake for two hours, which was bracketed by a story mission where our main character, Sakamoto Ryōma, infiltrates a secretive paramilitary organization filled to the brim with ruthless killers who’ve mastered a deathly, impervious sword-fighting style called Tennen Rishin. (In that sense, Ishin! borrows liberally from some of the oldest kung-fu tropes in the book.) Along the way though, I ambled into karaoke bars, chicken race track circuits, dance halls, and gambling dens – each populated with the exact sort of lovable miscreants that give this series its color. We are deep in annals of antiquity, and nothing has changed; the madcap sidequests, intricate relationship-building subsystems, and ridiculously fleshed out mini games are all right in place. Case in point: I bumped into a sweaty samurai otaku — like the Comic Book Guy for katanas — who promised me a huge prize if I could procure for him a specific type of blade. He didn’t want to use it, of course. He just wanted to see it up close.

All of this is rendered pretty well for a game that’s nearly a decade old. Ishin! does have that uncanny plastic sheen you might remember from Yakuza 0, but Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio has done some impressive work in the cutscenes. Ryōma emotes with remarkable clarity, which is important in a series like Yakuza that tells the bulk of its story through long, expository soliloquies. Someday this franchise will need to upgrade its visual chops, but for a re-release of a 2014 curio, Ishin! asserts itself well.

Despite sharing its title with the 2020 reboot Yakuza: Like A Dragon, which pivoted the franchise to a turn-based combat structure, Ishin! retains its brawler roots. Ryōma cycles through four different combat styles, wielding his fists, a blade, or, delightfully, a Wild West revolver. Yes, this is a Yakuza game that gives you a gun, alongside a special ability that lets you enter a dreamy bullet-time like John Marston to better line up your shots. The variant I gravitated towards the most was something Ryōma has dubbed “Wild Dancer,” where he brandishes both his katana and firearm at the same time and drunkenly flails around the arena. One combo ends with him unleashing a hail of bullets in every direction, as if you’re briefly tapping into some latent Devil May Cry DNA. It’s a genuinely innovative flip on the established Yakuza precepts; after years of destroying our enemies with cinder blocks and pool cues, sometimes we want to get the job done by simply aiming down sights.

Again, Ishin! does not dramatically alter the contours of the Yakuza universe. This is a side-story by nature — it’s proudly ancillary — and seems to be best understood as a chance to savor some indulgent fan service injected into a new set of genre trappings. That said, you might be surprised at who pops up over the course of your journey. At the end of my demo, I was introduced to one of the head honchos of this paramilitary battalion. It was a man named Soji, who looked and sounded exactly like Majima. (He even wore an eyepatch.) As part of this remaster, Sega has cast a number of actors who appeared in latter-day Yakuza games to reprise loose facsimiles of themselves in Ishin! I can only hope that this implies the existence of a grand multiverse of Yakuza; from the stone age to the singularity, Kiryu will be beating people up eternally. At last, all is right in the world.