“...no, you can have some water in the afternoon if you’re quiet.” I’m sorry, you’ve caught me just cramming the last of the Kotaku team in the Holiday Closet. As they rest and recuperate in tangled proximity, I have control of the site, and as such can write about indie games no one’s heard of yet. And use proper…
I have found my happy place! Escape Simulator is such a lovely thing, a first-person simulacrum of escape rooms, built in 3D, with realistic physics. It is, as its title suggests, a simulation of attending a real-world escape room, in a way that almost all room-escape video games are not. Apart from when it’s in space.
Nintendo released a demo today for its upcoming soccer game, Mario Strikers: Battle League. How does it play? Is it a worthy follow-up to the older games? Is it fun? These are questions for which I don’t have answers. What I can tell you is that in this latest game Waluigi retains his crown as the king of swagger,…
In recent weeks, WB Games Montreal has been shedding new light on its upcoming Batman game sans Batman, Gotham Knights, and some details have left fans skeptical about the direction the game is taking with Bruce Wayne’s surviving Bat Family. First, a 13-minute gameplay video revealed that GK’s incarnation of Nightwing…
Star Wars Jedi: Survivor, the highly-anticipated sequel to 2019's Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order was finally revealed today via a new teaser trailer during Star Wars Celebration. It will be released in 2023 for PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X/S.
I was horrified by the trailer for Warped Kart Racers, a new kart-racing game that blends together several popular animated shows. But like a terrible car wreck, I couldn’t look away from the waking nightmare of Peter Griffin and Hank Hill racing each other in a Mario Kart clone. It was cursed. And yet, now that I’ve…
Morbius can’t be contained. The Jared Leto-led vampire flick has been infecting various pockets of the internet all this week, spreading from Discord to Twitch to Twitter. Now, with a rabid new audience who call themselves “Morbheads,” excited by 24/7 broadcasts of the Marvel film from rogue Twitch streamers, the…
It feels like the current console generation is only just getting started, and yet, a corner of the internet spent a good part of this week obsessing over the next iteration, the presumed mid-generation hardware refreshes for Sony’s PlayStation 5 and Microsoft’s Xbox Series X/S. The commotion is all thanks to an event…
Today, Valve released a highly-anticipated update to its portable PC. SteamOS 3.2 brings a lot of fun changes to both the operating system and the Steam client itself, enabling Remote Play Together, tweaks to some visual and UI elements, and the ability to change the screen’s refresh rate The updates to the fan noise,…
Players have been hungry for details about Cyberpunk 2077’s first DLC since the game came out, yet nearly 18 months later, the only official news has been about additional delays. But now the dam of secrecy around the upcoming story expansion finally appears to have broken. A dataminer reportedly leaked hundreds of…
If you were wondering what was next on the horizon for the Game Grumps following their zaddy-filled dating game Dream Daddy: A Dad Dating Simulator, the answer is a horror game.
The Steam Deck has unquestionably revitalized people’s interests in handheld gaming on anything other than a Switch. But had it never happened, 2022 would still have been a year packed with Switch-sized gaming devices, primarily thanks to evolutions in the world of emulation. Right at the front of that pack is new…
Horizon Forbidden West has been out long enough now that the game’s artists are free to post their work on sites like ArtStation, so tonight we’re going to be taking a look at all kinds of stuff that went into the game’s creation.
So, for a little while at least, there was a plan for Daybreak’s Dimension Ink studio (DC Universe Online) to develop an MMO based on the Marvel universe. That game, whatever it was called and however it was shaping up, has now been cancelled.
I’m not going to do a “Would you kindly” joke. I’m not going to do it. I’m better than that. Besides, you don’t need to be brainwashed to know how good a deal it is to get all three Bioshock games on PC for absolutely nothing at all via the latest Epic Games Store giveaway.
With lengthy wait times a distant memory, the Final Fantasy XIV team is ready to return to normalcy by letting folks stay logged in forever, no matter how long they go without, you know, actually playing the massively multiplayer online game.
To follow Halo Infinite closely is to subject yourself to constant emotional whiplash. One day it’s on the top of the charts. The next, it feels like all of social media is calling it a “dead game.” Or maybe the developer adds a ton of cool stuff to the game…and then breaks a ton of other cool stuff…and then un-breaks…
A 29-year-old former airport cop, Evan Baltierra, was arrested this week and charged in federal court with allegedly harassing a World of Warcraft streamer off of Twitch. The two met in person at BlizzCon 2019, according to an accompanying affidavit, but when the streamer declined to be his “valentine” and later took…
Hunter x Hunter fans around the world clamored in celebration earlier this week after creator Yoshihiro Togashi teased the end of the beloved shonen manga’s hiatus. But while some merely waited for two years, one unsung fan put himself through real-life training until the day the manga resumed serialization.
In today’s internal all-hands meeting with Xbox Game Studios employees, Head of Xbox Phil Spencer said that he would recognize Raven Software’s union. This came after the QA testers at Raven voted to form the first labor union at a major studio.
Actor and producer Ray Liotta, famous for his starring role as Tommy Vercetti in the PS2 open-world classic Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, has died. He was 67 years old. He leaves behind a daughter and fiancée.
Hangar 13 can’t catch a break. The studio behind Mafia III, which suffered multiple rounds of layoffs in the years that followed its 2016 launch, is once again on the chopping block. Kotaku has learned that in addition to a steady stream of departures, developers across the studio’s three global sites have been let…
You can find lots of things being broadcast on Twitch. Video games, political commentary, podcasts and e-speeddating events, even erotic ASMR. And sometimes, just sometimes, when you’re on the Amazon-owned livestreaming platform, you’ll find a 24/7 loop of an entire film for your viewing pleasure, complete with closed…
In a financial call yesterday, Sony told investors that no first-party games will be released on the PlayStation 4 in 2025, showing Sony is finally preparing to leave its legacy platform entirely and switch fully over to the PS5. But there are a few barriers to a more aggressive transition to the next gen. Namely, the…
During a business briefing earlier today, Sony confirmed that it was working with Netflix and Amazon Prime to create TV shows based on God of War and Horizon. The company also confirmed a Gran Turismo show was in development. These shows join the growing list of video game TV shows that have been announced or…
Sony plans to expand significantly into PC gaming, according to an investor briefing published this week. By 2025, Sony says, roughly a third of the games in PlayStation’s portfolio will come out on PC.
Among the various treats offered at Kirby Café locations in Japan, one that really stands out is a side known as “Waddle Dee’s fried balls.” Instead of making a joke, I’m just going to let that one sit with you for a while.
In a recent Washington Post article, Amazon-owned streaming platform Twitch said it is working on making ban notification emails, an ongoing issue for content creators, more transparent and concise. One option under consideration is the inclusion of clips in enforcement emails, though the concept is still a work in…
One of my favourite things to write about on this website are the creative ways developers have learned to fuck with people pirating their video games, so it’s with great pleasure I get to share another example today.
Back in April 2020 I took a look at a game called Old World, which at the time was both exclusive to the Epic Games Store and also in Early Access. Back then it was a promising if still obviously under-cooked game. Now, two years later, it’s so much more.
I wrote about V Rising yesterday, and noted that it had sold over 500,000 copies. Well, it has now sold a lot more than that, having hit the one million mark less than a week after release.
A new Sims 4 update released yesterday added new pronoun options to the latest entry in EA’s long-running life simulator. With this update, players will be able to set their Sims’ pronouns, including completely custom ones, without the use of mods across all platforms that The Sims 4 is available on.
Elden Ring is full of hard bosses, many of whom have no problem quickly showing you the nearest gravesite if you’re lost, and defeating them is often a matter of slowly whittling away at their lengthy health bars until you breathe a huge sigh of relief as the words “Enemy Felled” finally appear. One player, however,…
Electronic Arts won’t be joining some other big game studios in publicly supporting abortion and transgender rights, Kotaku has learned. Asked about it during a May 24 company-wide town hall meeting, the gaming publisher told staff it couldn’t take a stance on every public issue and that “being an inclusive company…
Until recently, a “Witcher School” in Poland ran live-action role-playing (LARP) events for fans of the wildly popular fantasy series with the official blessing of Witcher-series game publisher CD Projekt Red. But last Friday, its organizers, a company called 5 Żywiołów, announced that the “school” would be…
It’s the color of a shrunken oily olive. Its true eyes are pinpricks of light situated on either side of its threateningly wide mouth, and its false eyes wobble like (boobs?) batteries rolling around a broken flashlight on top of its scaly head. It is FromSoftware’s loathed but consistent creature the burping…
A future issue of DC Comics’ Detective Comics (that’s Detective Comics Comics’ Detective Comics for those of you keeping score at home) will feature a variant cover by none other than prolific Final Fantasy artist Yoshitaka Amano, the company’s August 2022 catalog announces.
Elon Musk, who is 50 years old, is just like any other 13-year-old. Between long days spent fanboy-tweeting at Metal Gear Solid video game designer Hideo Kojima, drinking chocolate milk, and determining the definition and reach of “free speech”, Musk plays Elden Ring.
On May 5, a man in Glendale, California met up with another man to buy from him a sealed two-pack of ultra-rare Funko Pops for $100K cash. This deal, the first six-digit Funko Pop sale ever recorded, is believed to be the largest in Funko Pop collecting history, and it might just be the start of bigger deals to come.
