Eurogamer

Sony has announced new games heading to its PlayStation Plus subscription service on 19th July for Extra and Premium members.

It's headlined by Stray, the brand new Annapurna-published game featuring a cute cat in a dystopian cyberpunk world on both PS4 and PS5.

Then there's Final Fantasy 7 Remake Intergrade on PS5, which includes the Yuffie-starring INTERmission episode (PS4 owners can access the original Remake game).

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A fan of the original Mass Effect has created an opening credits sequence for the game - in the style of League of Legends animated show Arcane, one of the best things on Netflix.

Posted to reddit by user ZeoNyph, the video replaces the models of Arcane's heroes with Mass Effect's main characters. So, in place of Arcane's sister stars Vi and Jynx, we have FemShep and Liara - a little generous to the latter perhaps, though both Liara and Jynx are associated with the colour blue.

Next up, there's brief shots of boring Kaiden Alenko swapped into the place of Jayce, fan-favourite engineer fangirl Tali in the place of Viktor, and then space bro Garrus - who as a cop gets the spot of Caitlyn.

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Update 14/07/2022: The Quarry's missing god ray effect on PS5 has now been fixed in a new patch. This now brings PS5 up to par with Xbox Series X's delivery of the effect, confirming it was a bug with the previous build.

Supermassive Games seems to have found a winning formula with its choose-your-own-adventure horror games - and The Quarry is the most compelling and visually striking effort yet. The game uses the popular Unreal engine and is out on PS5, Xbox Series X/S, PC and last-gen machines, a proper cross-platform release despite reports that it was originally a Stadia exclusive. How does each platform perform - especially the underpowered Series S - and does the unique cinematic presentation work on a technical level? Let's find out.

Before we get to the numbers, let's set the scene with a few words on The Quarry's cinematic presentation. With limited player agency - and even a movie mode that strips out inputs entirely - there's a huge emphasis on the motion-captured cast performances. Presented in a filmic 2.35:1 aspect ratio, every character is put in tight, close-up shots where any technical shortcomings would be quite obvious.

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A free update to Evil Dead: The Game adds new content based on Sam Raimi's 1992 film Army of Darkness.

The third instalment in the Evil Dead franchise, the film sees its lead characters trapped in the Middle Ages to battle the undead.

Fittingly, this medieval-themed DLC adds a new map featuring the film's iconic Castle Kandar - check it out in the trailer below.

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Bayonetta 3 will include a family-friendly mode to cover up the game's partial nudity.

Following the announcement of the game's release date - that's 28th October - a tweet from developer Platinum Games shows a video of the mode that's not been included in previous Bayonetta games.

It's called "Naive Angel Mode" and will have the titular witch completely covered in all scenes, as well as extra coverage on her demonic form's breasts.

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The Mothman is my favourite cryptid. I am always willing to drop everything and make the case for him. I love the way Mothman wears the tattered grey shrouds of the most funereal of insects, and the way it offsets this with blazing red eyes. What does a Mothman smell like? The tomb, of course, and he is at home in forests, like Bigfoot, but also in the post-human spaces of abandoned factories and dried up industrial towns. Mothman seems drawn to the craters and wreckage of great dreams.

I have more, alas! The Mothman Prophecies is my favourite cryptid book, because it takes a bunch of sightings of shadowed beasts and UFOs and lights and what-have-you, and it just screws with them from page to page, a truly rangy postmodern text, playfully twitching at the fore-edges of belief and our sense of a shared reality. The movie, which I saw one rainy Sunday afternoon back when it came out, almost undone by a throbbing migraine, turned out to be the perfect movie for rain, for Sundays and migraines - again, taking the idea of horror films and extra-terrestrial investigations and turning it all into something where the detailing lines up and points towards a deep psychic wrongness. Look at this beautiful bit of business with a de-synchronised mirror. It takes a horrible kind of love to create that.

The long-awaited Nintendo Switch exclusive Bayonetta 3 will finally launch on 28th October, a new trailer has confirmed.

Platinum Games' threequel was first announced nearly five years ago, and has been MIA for much of that time. Today's lengthy trailer offers us a good look at the game, however. Here it is:

"The titular Umbra Witch must face a mysterious evil using her signature guns and time-slowing Witch Time ability," Nintendo writes. "This time, invading man-made bioweapons called Homunculi find themselves in Bayonetta's crosshairs."

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The upcoming remake of cult classic Lollipop Chainsaw will not make broad changes to the story or design of the original game, its producer has said.

This includes the potential of any changes to the look of its main character, the cheerleader Juliet Starling, who spends the game slashing through hordes of zombies in a skimpy outfit.

A new statement on the remake was posted to Twitter last night by producer Yoshimi Yasuda, in a bid to clear up fan confusion over several lines from the project's original announcement.

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Cuphead's Delicious Last Course expansion has sold 1m copies in just over a week.

The DLC was released across all platforms and adds a new island to the game, along with a host of new bosses to defeat.

By 2020, the original game had sold 6m copies, so this means a considerable portion of players have picked up the new DLC.

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The developer of EA's upcoming Skate reboot has acknowledged the leaked early build of the game currently floating around the internet - and suggested you do not download it for yourself.

In a blog post mentioning the leak, developer Full Circle revealed that it comprised a version of the game dating back to September 2021 that was "never intended for external use" - rather than a leaked playtest or demo.

"While we understand you're excited to get into the game, we encourage you to be careful when downloading files from unknown sources (and remind you of the potential consequences of breaking EA's Terms of Service)," Full Circle wrote.

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Twitch is reducing its streamer payout threshold by half.

At present, Partners and Affiliates only receive a payment from subscriptions, bits and more at a minimum of $100.

That's now being reduced to $50, meaning streamers receiving smaller amounts will get their funds more frequently.

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It looks like some previously-delisted Metal Gear games are set to return on sale.

A tweet from the official Metal Gear account celebrating the 35th anniversary of the series mentioned: "We ask for your patience as preparations are underway to make the temporarily removed titles available again."

This likely refers to Metal Gear Solid 2 and 3 which were removed from digital stores last year due to licensing issues with the historical footage utilised.

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Bandai Namco has confirmed yesterday's report it was targeted by hackers, and admitted that confidential information was accessed on its servers.

There is "a possibility" this includes customer information, the publisher admitted today in a statement passed to Eurogamer.

The publisher of Dark Souls, Elden Ring and Soulcalibur is now "currently identifying the status about existence of leakage, scope of the damage, and investigating the cause," it wrote.

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The New York Times has announced plans to solidify your precious Wordle statistics via a single account.

This means you will be able to log-in and play Wordle from any browser on any device, and still have access to your daily streak, win ratio and guess distribution.

The option is being made available to some users now, with more to follow "soon", The New York Times confirmed via Twitter last night.

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Nintendo Japan has updated the Corporate Social Responsibility Information on its website to recognise same-sex marriage, even though it's banned in Japanese law.

A new section called Introduction of a Partnership System notes that since March 2021, employees in a domestic partnership with a same-sex partner have the same benefits as employees in an opposite-sex marriage.

"We have also established that a common-law marriage between couples will be observed in the same way as a legal marriage," it reads.

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Spotify has bought the Wordle-alike Heardle, meaning it's now only available in certain countries.

The web game rose to popularity in the wake of Wordle and has players guessing the intro to pop songs second by second.

Previously it was powered by Soundcloud, but now Swedish music streaming platform Spotify has acquired the game.

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Aliens: Fireteam Elite, developer Cold Iron Studios' co-op shooter spin-on the beloved sci-fi movie series, is getting a new seasonal update on 26th July, bringing crossplay, a new progression system, a new game mode, and more.

Come Season 4's arrival, players on Steam, Xbox, and PlayStation will be able to band together in order to quell the Xenomorph threat, which should help bolster the available pool of potential cohorts for faster matchmaking.

Crossplay will be accompanied by a new game mode - known as Restock Turrets - which does pretty much exactly what its name implies, challenging players to keep their turrets stocked in order to defend their position and fight off Xenomorph waves.

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Tomonobu Itagaki - the Japanese designer best known for creating Tecmo's Dead or Alive series and rebooted Ninja Gaiden games - has announced his new company Apex Game Studios, which is currently 'incubating' an NFT-focused MMORPG for mobile and PC named Warrior.

Itagaki shared his announcement on Twitter, explaining Apex Game Studios would specialise in creating "high-quality and immersive" triple-A "Web3" titles - Web 3.0 being the umbrella term incorporating (frequently controversial) technologies such as blockchain and NFT.

Apex Game Studios' first project, Warrior, is an MMORPG developed in Unreal Engine that's due to launch in Q1 next year. Unfortunately, details remain pretty limited at this juncture, with the official website being primarily interested in detailing the NFT economy at Warrior's core.

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At the risk of simply repeating some marketing blurb, "Humanising the battlefield" is apparently one of Relic's three key "franchise pillars" for Company of Heroes. The other two are "emergent storytelling" and "cinematic warfare," for those interested, and while those two probably sound a bit more exciting for the average player, it's the first that probably holds the most importance today.

This is because the setting for Company of Heroes 3, due this November, is a delicate one. There are two campaigns, one in Italy and the Mediterranean, and the other, where this preview focused, in North Africa. The North African "theatre" of the Second World War is one dominated by armoured warfare, and is also the place were Erwin Rommel, the commander of the Nazis' Deutsches Afrika Corps (DAK), earned his reputation as the "Desert Fox".

The delicacy here comes from that reputation. Rommel's Afrika Korps was something Relic described as "heavily requested by our community," while Rommel himself was built up by the Germans, and then Allies, as a brilliant but detached tactician who sought to wage a "war without hate" and an almost victim of Nazi rule - something since referred to as the "Rommel myth", given the fact that plenty of war crimes still persisted in that region throughout the period of his command.

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Following their well-recieved appearance in last month's Shredder's Revenge, the ever-enduring Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles still aren't quite done with video games in 2022; as previously announced, Konami is giving the fearsome foursome their very own compilation of retro titles later this year, and a few new details have now emerged.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Cowabunga Collection, as the compilation is known, is being handed by Digital Eclipse and gathers together 13 Konami-developed titles - released for 8-bit and 16-bit home consoles, portables, and arcade in the 80s and 90s - alongside various new quality of life features and supplementary content.

First, the full list of games included in the Cowabunga Collection:

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Pokémon's wallet-busting online store is offering an exclusive Charizard trading card that has gotten fans rather excited.

Special Delivery Charizard is an eye-catching take on everyone's favourite Starter evolution - which imagines him as a postman.

The card is strongly reminiscent of the famous Dragonite promo card given out many, many years ago to celebrate the Pokémon franchise's first movie launching in cinemas.

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New strategy RPG The DioField Chronicles will be released in September, following a demo in August.

The tactics title was first announced at the PlayStation State of Play in March, but will be released across PlayStation and Xbox consoles, Switch, and PC.

To celebrate the release date - 22nd September - Square Enix has released a new trailer with a fresh look at the story.

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There's a familiar-looking game at the top of the iPhone app chart here in the UK, a battle royale platformer based on colourful obstacle courses and It's a Knockout-style survival rounds.

But it's not Fall Guys, no. This is Stumble Guys, a suspiciously-similar app that's also in the top 10 chart on Google Play.

As reported by MobileGamer.biz, Stumble Guys has been around for a while in soft launch, before exploding in popularity this year. Downloads have spiked over the past few months, with up to 1.5 million players now downloading the game per day.

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A game developer set to speak on the "Future of Game Design" at Brazil's International Games Festival instead surprised attendees with a talk on "Why NFTs are a nightmare".

Sponsors of the festival included a number of NFT and blockchain companies, such as Lakea and Ripio, as well as panels from sponsors like "Web3 and the New Generation of Games".

However, Mark Venturelli - best known for developing the game Chroma Squad - surprised attendees and sponsors alike with his statement against crypto gaming.

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Previously unreleased footage of the canned Doom 4 game has been revealed.

Documentary YouTube channel Noclip shared the footage in its latest video, focused on the development of Doom 2016.

It begins, however, with a first look at Doom 4 which was later scrapped.

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Surprise! Nintendo has just announced Kirby's Dream Buffet, a brand new downloadable Kirby game due to hit the Switch eShop this summer.

The tasty-looking title sees up to four players roll around levels as different-coloured Kirby characters, gobbling up types of food and sweet treats.

Copy abilities let you pick up food from further afield, or flatten rivals. At the end of each course, the Kirby who has eaten the most will win.

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"Diversity is not just a token, it's just interesting to have different people coming from different cultural backgrounds, professional backgrounds, and countries," says former Quantic Dream developer Caroline Marchal.

"You've got people with different points of views coming at the story and at the experience and being like, 'what do you think about that? How about we do that like this?' It just improves what we're making."

Marchal is the CEO and creative director of Interior/Night, a new London-based studio creating Xbox exclusive As Dusk Falls as its first game.

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Nintendo has issued a series of warnings for Switch owners using their consoles in the current hot weather.

The advice notes that the Switch should be used only in temperatures up to 35 degrees Celsius - so be careful in hot rooms, stuffy cars, or at the beach this weekend.

London is set to hit 31 degrees outdoors today as the UK swelters through a scorching week, while The Met Office has issued an amber warning of "extreme heat" which is set to last until next Monday.

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LGBT+ publisher MidBoss has launched the Season of Pride 2022 collection on Steam.

The collection includes some incredible games, including Celeste, If Found, Arcade Spirits, Sword of the Necromancer, Tell Me Why, Paradise Killer and Boyfriend Dungeon, as well as some lesser known indies.

There's also a list of forthcoming games to wishlist, such as Grid Force, A Long Journey to an Uncertain End, and Midboss's own Read Only Memories: Neurodiver.

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Bandai Namco, publisher of Dark Souls, Elden Ring and Soulcalibur, has reportedly been targeted by a ransomware attack.

Word of the hack was surfaced by malware tracker vx-underground, which spotted a claim by notorious ransomware group ALPHV, otherwise known as BlackCat.

A post by the group suggested it was poised to release data acquired from Bandai Namco's servers "soon" (thanks, Kotaku).

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At least a few Eurogamer readers were probably in secondary school in April 1995, when Hubble took the famous Pillars of Creation photograph. It is impossible to restate just how much of an impact this image had: it was space seen in an entirely new way. It changed our collective idea of what the universe might look like.

It's rippled down in popular culture across movies and video games. If you want to see a really great example of its impact, imagine this opening shot to the film Contact but in a world that never got to see any Hubble pictures:

Today we'll all be getting to see the first images from Hubble's successor, the James Webb Telescope. It's time to have our views of the cosmos rearranged once again. We wanted to celebrate this moment in some way, and how better to do it than take a look at some of the great space vistas from some of our favourite video games? Just a few. Please add any shots of your own in the comments.

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A gameplay trailer for Kingdom: The Blood has been released, based on the hit Korean Netflix show.

The show is set in medieval Korea during a zombie apocalypse and focuses on prince Lee Chang attempting to investigate a mysterious illness afflicting the king.

The game, from developer Action Square, is an adaptation of the show set for release on PC and mobile globally.

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Season Two of strategy title Age of Empires 4 kicks off today with a big update. It's headlined by a new event, Age of Discovery, that brings plenty of rewards.

Elsewhere the season brings a plethora of bug fixes and balance changes to tweak gameplay.

Age of Discovery is the first of two events this season and involves completing a number of tasks for unique items.

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Supermassive Games, the British studio behind The Dark Pictures Anthology, Until Dawn and recent release The Quarry, is now fully owned by Copenhagen-based company Nordisk Games.

The Scandinavian outfit previously bought a 30.7 percent stake in Supermassive just over a year ago. There's no word on how much today's deal was worth.

Nordisk Games, part of the Egmont media group, also owns a small roster of other game developers, including the Stockholm-based Just Cause creator Avalanche Studios and Metroid Dread maker MercurySteam.

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If you left Earth in a rocket ship in the 1820s, headed for Jupiter, I guess that would be pretty incredible by itself. What I want to talk about today, though, is something I continue to find mind-bending. On your journey, as you moved between Mars and Jupiter, you would pass four other planets: Vesta, Juno, Ceres and Pallas.

It's likely that you know all this stuff already, so apologies for going over it again. These four planets were discovered between 1801 and 1807, lying in what we now consider to be the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. They hung around in text books and the popular imagination as planets until, I gather, the 1850s, when they were demoted.

I was thinking of this again this week because of the James Webb Telescope, which should hopefully be giving us its first pictures by the time you read this. This telescope will peer deeper into our universe than we've ever been able to look before. And along the way it will probably not just discover new stuff, but change the way we think about old stuff.

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The co-op flight test for Halo Infinite is still due out this week, according to community manager Brian Jarrard.

Many players expected it to launch yesterday, 11th July, but it's still not live. It should still arrive this week, though.

"The team is still working on our upcoming Halo Infinite network co-op Insider flight build. While we always said our 'target was the week of July 11', many sites reported it simply as 'starting July 11.' Still hoping for this week, but it will not start today," tweeted Jarrard yesterday.

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It's got to the point where my phone is unlocked and Pokémon Go is open in my hand as soon as I leave the house. A twirl of the map screen, a quick survey of the local area, and I'm off. On the days I don't have something or somewhere specific to walk at lunch, or after work, I let the game choose my route. A creature on the Nearby radar, a gym or raid to battle on the horizon. Job done, daily step count up, dopamine gained.

This month is Pokémon Go's sixth anniversary and yes, six years on, a lot of people still play Pokémon Go. Perhaps that's not a surprise - with a launch that big, any game would linger on in the public consciousness, and on the billion or so devices it has been downloaded upon to date. But that, of course, is not why millions of people still regularly play - and the reasons why people do are as diverse as its player base.

Pokémon Go is still primarily a collection game, built on a hugely successful live service model which continually rolls out new events, rotates available creatures, tempts you with exclusives, and lets you do it all while showing off to others. What's your Pokédex total? How many Shiny Pokémon? How good are their stats? Pokémon Go is the perfect franchise for Niantic's real-world exploration model - and if this was a State of the Game for Niantic, or indeed the genre of game Pokémon Go helped popularise, I'd have a lot of things to say about how no one (including Niantic) has ever come close to topping it.

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When was the last time you played a game on Facebook? Well, Meta is hoping to tempt you back to its platform with an interesting prospect: a daily, choice-based narrative experience taking place over the course of the next four months, titled The Walking Dead: Last Mile.

A massively interactive live event (MILE), the project is a collaboration between publisher Genvid, which specialises in these part-game, part-interactive stream, part-live show creations, with design and narrative input from The Walking Dead's team at Skybound and funding from Facebook.

The big sell is that Last Mile is a new chapter of The Walking Dead's lore, which will unfold across the next couple of months based upon decisions made by players, with the resulting narrative becoming franchise "canon" in line with the original comic books. And for fans of Telltale's The Walking Dead games, there's a clear influence in art style and design language, if not gameplay.

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A new novel based in the Halo universe is coming to stores on 9th August.

This book, which is called Halo: The Rubicon Protocol, will act as a prequel to Halo Infinite and tells of the six months before Master Chief wakes up and the game's campaign begins.

It sounds like this will offer up some useful bits of background information for those who started Halo Infinite and found themselves a touch confused by what exactly was going on. While some of this history can be picked up in-game thanks to some well-placed audio logs, it could definitely be made clearer for players from the off.

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Welcome to the landmark 69th edition of DF Direct Weekly, our regular scheduled show where the team takes a break from their various projects to talk about the latest gaming technology news. This week's offering kicks off with detailed impressions of Horizon Forbidden West's 1.17 patch, introducing support for 120Hz features on PlayStation 5 including VRR (variable refresh rate) features for the performance mode and a 'balanced' alternative to the quality mode, running at 40 frames per second.

We were looking to produce come 'bespoke' content for this update because it's actually rather good, but ultimately opted against it because what we're essentially looking at here are some impressive HDMI 2.1-orientated add-ons to the 1.16 patch we've already looked at in depth. But before we go into the details, a warning: if you've got an older HDMI 2.0 display which does have 120Hz support, I'd recommend disabling the PS5's 120Hz output, as you'll likely be downscaling to 1080p to access the new features.