Chinese dev Seed Lab has officially announced that its upcoming cosy life sim, Starsand Island, is getting a Switch 2 version alongside the Switch 1 release when it launches next year.
Scheduled for release in the nebulous “early 2026” and coming to all the usual platforms, that list also now includes Nintendo’s latest console, where the devs will be offering two modes depending on your preference: Quality Mode, “targeting 45FPS in 1080p”, and Performance Mode, delivering “60FPS in 1080p” in both docked and handheld modes.
When I played Escape From Tarkov for the first time in 2018, I remember being captivated by its obtuse, insanely challenging structure. Like PUBG was to the battle royale genre, this promising prototype of what would go on to be called an extraction shooter had so many unique elements going for it, even if it was sometimes completely broken in its Early Access state. All these years later, now finally hitting 1.0, it’s pretty shocking how much has changed while it simultaneously remains exactly as exasperating as I remember it. The hands-off approach to onboarding that forces newcomers to beat their heads against its unforgiving mechanics for dozens of hours before claiming even a single victory captures the same relentless challenge I’ve always adored, while other frustrations, like its continued bugs, poor technical performance, and inability to address an abundance of cheaters, remains disappointingly worse than ever. After over 120 hours with the 1.0 version, there’s still something utterly compelling about the hyper-realistic combat simulation and never-ending loot treadmill it puts you on, but I can’t help but feel like this progenitor may have been left in the dust of the genre it spawned.
Escape From Tarkov isn’t just the original standalone extraction shooter, but also the one most fanatically adherent to the ruthless principles on which the genre was founded. Not only are you thrown into a deadly hellscape filled with lethal NPCs and merciless human opponents, you’re also given absolutely no guidance in your quest for loot as you fight to survive. Practically none of the progression systems are explained to you, there’s no map for you to look at while out in the field to indicate where you or the extraction points are, and you could easily spend tens of hours studying weapon attachments and ammo types just to understand how the heck to use the tools of death you’ll find on your journey.
In some ways, I really admire how unapologetic Tarkov is – its beautifully exacting game design, and the sense of discovery that takes place across hundreds of lessons learned the hard way can be incredibly rewarding. But then there are times where it’s all just so dang frustrating, like how atrociously the UI and menus are organized, as if they were designed specifically to offend you. Whether or not the payoff of finally feeling comfortable enough to bring your best equipment out and try for a proper extraction is worth it will ultimately depend on a couple things: your tolerance for pain, and your drive to master something designed to really test your expertise of systems Tarkov refuses to teach you.
I find myself somewhere in the middle, sometimes mesmerized by its impenetrable and challenging rough edges, while other times just downright disgusted by janky design decisions. For instance, I really got a kick out of figuring out various armor protection levels and corresponding ammo penetration ratings, even though it oftentimes proved to be a complete maze and came with an extremely harsh learning curve of figuring out why I died instantly in one raid but survived getting shot 20 times in the next. For me, this was unforgiving in all the right ways, and a noted lack of handholding is something I connect with much more than the growing number of games that annoyingly treat you like you’re stupid with ongoing tutorials. On the other hand, memorizing maps over the course of 10 hours apiece was less entertaining, specifically because this meant I frequently spent 20 minutes wandering around in search of an exit or a mission objective that was only described to me in the vaguest of terms. It seems like the community’s solution here is to use online tools to figure this stuff out, so it’s sorta baffling that they wouldn’t just integrate one of those directly.
Even with everything that frustrates me about Tarkov, it’ll likely keep me playing for hundreds more hours.
So, with everything that frustrates me about Tarkov, what kept me playing for well over 100 hours, and what will likely keep me playing for hundreds more over the next year? Well, it’s the fact that once you put in the time to dig your way through all the layers of grime and obtuseness, you’ll find a pretty stellar extraction shooter that is quite hard to put down. Combat is an incredibly tense process of listening for rustling footsteps nearby and leaning out from behind cover to take precise shots, where a single bullet is all it could take to end another player’s run or put down a marauding NPC. Running around with your rifle’s flashlight blaring is an invitation for every enemy on the map to head in your direction with the aim of taking the gear from your corpse, and extracting with your loot is almost always accompanied by a deep sigh of relief.
NPC factions, including bosses, add a really interesting element of surprise and randomness to raids, too, where your best-laid plans go sideways when you run into an unexpected badass. They range from a psychopath chasing you around with a giant sledgehammer to a cowardly wimp surrounded by four heavily armed and armored guards. You might also find some other unexpected factions, like robed cultists creeping around in the woods with poisoned daggers, which is exactly as terrifying as it sounds the first time you encounter them. Discovering these things organically and either getting destroyed by or besting especially tough enemies to claim their loot kept me invested in exploring maps even when navigating them was sometimes an enormous pain.
When you’re not raiding, you’ll spend an almost equal amount of time with the tasks any extraction shooter worth its salt will have you doing: managing all that loot back at your hideout and using it to unlock cool stuff. The UI built around those activities is downright bad, and you’ll have to work to figure out some of the unintuitive systems that compose them, but the loot game is just about the best one out there once you do. It puts you on a beautiful treadmill that realistically takes thousands of hours to properly complete. That rewarding sense of forward momentum isn’t always there, as you’ll spend lots of time just grinding for cash by selling everything you find out on raids to vendors and stuffing your pockets with an absolutely obscene amount of nails and screw nuts to craft items you need back at your base. But it’s hard to argue that developer Battlestate Games hasn’t created one of the longest, most consistently enjoyable progression systems out there.
The upgrades in question range from facilities in your hideout that let you do things like restore your damage taken from previous raids faster, store more loot in your stash, or test out your weapons at a firing range, almost all of which are genuinely worth the effort to unlock (though many of those demand a whole helluva lot of resources in order to do so). You’ll also have an absolutely enormous list of story missions and side quests to complete, special items to unlock from vendors by exchanging rare materials, and more. Missions run the gamut of killing a certain amount of enemy combatants or looting specific items while out on raids, to more involved, plot-focused stuff like a side quest where I set up camcorders all over a warehouse to record myself killing people, presumably to then cut into a sick highlights reel. Sure, actually chatting with each of the vendors, who only speak Russian and have little in the way of personalities, is a waste of time that only highlights how not great the story is, but in a game about loot and long-term progression goals, Tarkov absolutely nails that bit, with a truly brilliant, Sisyphean grind.
It takes work to figure out, but the loot game is just about the best one out there once you do.
Although most runs are quite stressful and require you to put all the gear you’re carrying on the line, one nice element of Tarkov is the ability to do “SCAV Runs” where you play as a street rat that uses a random set of borrowed equipment. In these low stakes runs, you have a whole lot to gain from taking out a rival player or geared-up NPC and basically nothing to lose from dying yourself, which provides a great opportunity for a come-up that’s especially helpful after your latest devastating loss. Plus, it puts you on the same team as other SCAVs, and pitting a group of poorly geared plebs against those with better equipment is an entertaining twist on the extraction formula in its own right. I tried to do SCAV runs in between each proper deployment and found them to be a pretty great cooldown option after each sweaty raid.
One of the upsides of bothering to learn each of Tarkov’s 11 maps is that they’re all actually quite diverse and are filled with unique takes on the extraction format. On one map, I fought my way through military bases and bunkers and had to stand my ground while a massive armored train arrived to spirit me and my loot away, while on another I wandered through the woods and the wreckage of a crashed airplane while constantly looking to the horizon for snipers due to a distinct lack of cover. Another level requires keycards to enter and is filled with incredibly good loot, but also has equally formidable foes stalking the halls, while another still is just a massive shopping mall filled with stores waiting to be looted. Learning the ins and outs of these levels can be a bit painful at the outset, especially since some things are quite annoyingly unclear, like how the boundaries of most maps are never explained and lethally enforced. For example, in one level you’ll get sniped by unseen enemies without warning if you walk beyond the ill-defined borders, and in another you’ll get immediately blown to pieces due to the edges of the level being a literal mine field.
Unfortunately, Tarkov’s intentionally punishing design is marred by completely unintentional issues that have made this full launch much harder to enjoy. At least in these first couple of weeks with 1.0, there are still numerous bugs I would’ve hoped to have been cleaned up after so many years in Early Access, like characters getting caught on objects or clipping through walls, desync and rubber-banding that monkeys with hit registration, loot that’s visible but painfully lodged in the environment so it can’t be picked up, and numerous issues with the already ugly-as-sin menus that make navigating them even more frustrating.
Even more alarming is the continued prevalence of cheaters, who continue to plague the PvP servers so they can sell their ill-gotten items back to the people they’ve ripped off via an in-game trading market. It’s all the usual stuff like wallhacks, aimbots, and moving at faster-then-normal speeds, but in a game where all your loot is on the line, not doing a better job to mitigate this kind of stuff is pretty hard to swallow. In fact, it was such an issue in my first 10 hours that I decided to spend the vast majority of my time for this review just focusing on Tarkov’s PvE mode for my sanity’s sake, which removes other players entirely aside from those you bring with you. For a sweaty PvP tryhard like myself, forsaking the competitive mode goes against every instinct I have, but with the exploitable state of the PvP servers as they are, it was definitely the right choice.
This thing looks and performs badly by the standards of the day.
There’s also the matter of just how bad this thing looks and performs by the standards of the day. I remember thinking Tarkov already didn’t look great when I last revisited it a few years ago, and coming back to it again in 2025 has not done it any favors. Objects in the environment are blurry and low res, and (with the exception of the vendors you’ll chat with as you complete quests) human faces look like they were modeled using the monster-generator that is The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion’s character creator. And although the servers have never exactly been speedy, it’s still pretty shocking that it took me about five minutes of loading every time I wanted to enter into a match, during which time my menu was locked up so I couldn’t even fiddle with my inventory or engage in stash organizing busywork while waiting.
Even if you can look past a lot of the jankiness, which I generally can, you still might be infuriated by the current monetization model. Now, normally cost has no actual impact on the quality of a game’s content, but Tarkov is a bit of an exception in that its uber-premium packages come with straight up pay-to-win perks that are just about as nasty as can be. Over the course of the past two weeks, I progressively purchased all four of Tarkov’s escalating packages in order to try them out firsthand, which range from the standard $50 up to a whopping $250, and each one offers more appallingly game-changing boons than the last.
The benefits granted are incredibly powerful boosts that give you quite an advantage. You can get an exclusive safety pouch that’s up to 50% larger, allowing you to keep more of your valuable items upon death. Certain hideout upgrades that offer huge benefits can be unlocked automatically, like a massive amount of additional storage space that normally costs millions of in-game dollars and rare materials to acquire. Most outrageous of all, though, are the boosts to vendor reputations that would otherwise take dozens upon dozens of hours to earn, which are a pathway to purchasing better gear that gives you a huge leg up on progression. It’s so insane and shameless that I honestly felt bad playing alongside my friends who had the standard edition.
Escape From Tarkov also has a purely PvP mode, called Arena, where you go toe-to-toe with rival players in claustrophobic stages, but I can’t really recommend it. Many of Escape From Tarkov’s interesting combat mechanics, like sparse ammo and the need to heal injuries by using a variety of medical equipment on the affected area, just don’t really work in a purely fast-paced arena FPS. Plus, I only spent a small amount of time playing this mode, but in this time I encountered some of the most toxic ghouls I’ve met online in any game. A typical match involves teammates with slurs for usernames threatening you to perform well in the lobby, before screaming at you and quitting the match after a single round. Some of Escape From Tarkov’s quests will point you toward this mode and playing matches can reward loot that you can bring back to the main game, but even so, I don’t suggest spending time here.
This new patch brings all of the tweaks and additions made to other versions of the game (which we reckon is really very good, actually) to Switch 1 and 2, so there’s total parity across all versions.
Norbert Litwiński, Marketing Manager at Windup Games
Summary
Cozy co-op adventure in a magical world inspired by northern Sweden.
Innovative Shade System lets solo players tackle puzzles and traversal challenges designed for multiple characters
Launching in 2026 on Xbox Series X|S.
Hela is a cozy co-op adventure where you play as a tiny mouse on a heartfelt mission to help a kind witch and the land she cares for. Explore freely, solve creative puzzles, and use teamwork—or the clever Shade System—to find the small wonders tucked throughout the world.
Welcome to the World of Hela
Somewhere in the far north of Sweden, beyond the fjords, lies the tranquil world of Hela, a place inspired by the untamed beauty of Norrland. Here, you’ll wander through lush woodlands, flower-dotted meadows, and quiet wetlands, all watched over by an old and kind witch who has long cared for every living thing—plants, animals, and people alike.
But even witches grow weary. After so many years of caring for others, her strength has begun to fade. To continue looking after the land and its tiny (and not-so-tiny) inhabitants, she now turns to her most loyal helpers: brave, curious field mice, each carrying a small, magical frog-shaped backpack gifted by the witch herself.
These little familiars are full of heart and wonder, eager to lend a paw to anyone in need.
A Big World for a Small Hero
In Hela, you’ll play as one of these tiny familiars — a small hero in a big, enchanting world. You’ll explore far and wide, from the forest floor to treetop canopies and underground burrows, listening to the needs of the local folk and helping them in small but meaningful ways.
As the witch’s trusted emissary, you’ll learn to brew potions in her cozy cottage, following each recipe step by step to bring the magic to life.
Throughout your journey, you’ll have access to a range of abilities — some fittingly mouse-like, such as running and climbing, and others tied to your magical backpack: gliding, swinging, plunging, pulling, and even creating Shades.
The world of Hela is designed as a giant playground filled with interactive objects just waiting for you to experiment with and explore. You can enjoy the full adventure on your own or team up with friends through two-player split-screen co-op or online multiplayer for up to four players.
The Shade System: Solo, But Never Alone
While many puzzles and challenges in Hela are built for teamwork, solo players will never have to face challenges by themselves. Thanks to the unique Shade System, you can create up to three spectral copies of your character, each one repeating the exact action you were performing when it was created.
If you’re playing solo, you can summon three Shades. If you’re playing with one friend, you can create two more — always up to a total of four characters.
These Shades aren’t AI companions. They act as extensions of yourself, repeating the action you imprinted onto them. You can switch between all characters freely, allowing you to tackle puzzles and traversal challenges designed for multiple players, even when playing alone.
Let’s Work Together
When playing solo, you can summon up to three Shades to assist you with multipart puzzles or platforming challenges. They’ll stay where you placed them for as long as you need, allowing you to orchestrate complex interactions that would otherwise require multiple players.
Building Bridges
Use your lasso to connect to a Shade just like you would to another player, and create a bridge you can walk or bounce across. Perfect for reaching high ledges and hidden paths.
I’ll Be Your Anchor
If a Shade is positioned higher up, it can serve as an anchor. Grab onto its lasso to pull yourself upward, or swing from it to reach new areas.
Let Me Hold That for You
Need to move an item onto a ledge or branch? Place one Shade, so the item hangs from their lasso, then grab it from another angle to guide it around obstacles.
Go Even Further
Your magical backpack lets you glide through the air. Mid-flight, you can create a Shade that continues gliding forward — then latch onto them to carry your journey even farther. It’s a clever trick for reaching hidden corners of the world and uncovering new discoveries.
A Helping Paw
Shades can also serve as makeshift checkpoints. If you fall or miss a jump, simply switch to a Shade you left behind and keep going, no restart required.
Tools of the Forest
Across the forests and farms of Hela, you’ll find tools meant for teamwork — like catapults. Typically, one player sits in the scoop while another pulls the rope and launches them into the air. With Shades, you can run the entire sequence yourself: place a Shade in the scoop, pull the rope, release, then quickly switch control and enjoy the flight yourself.
Made for Every Kind of Player
These moments are just a glimpse of how the Shade System opens up the world of Hela. Designed for creativity, flexibility, and teamwork, it gives every player the tools to explore and experiment freely.
Whether you’re navigating the forest in quiet solitude or teaming up with friends, Hela invites you to follow your curiosity, take things at your own pace, and enjoy the simple magic of helping others.
Hela is set to launch in 2026 as a multiplatform title, including Xbox Series X|S.
See the world through the eyes of a brave mouse in Hela, an enchanting 3D co-op adventure game. Explore breathtaking Scandinavian-inspired landscapes, solve puzzles, and be a force for good in a land where heartwarming storytelling and the beauty of nature intertwine.
When a kind witch falls ill, her familiars embark on a journey to save her life. Playing as a tiny, intrepid mouse, you must venture out, gather ingredients, and brew magical potions to restore her strength.
Journey Together
Hela encourages you to work hand-in-hand to overcome the challenges that lie ahead. Play solo or with friends through local split-screen multiplayer or online co-op as you delve into lush, vibrant vistas together, from rugged mountains trails, through magical forests, to tranquil lakes.
Explore & Craft Your Tale
Immerse yourself in this enchanting world as you glide through the air, collecting items, solve puzzles, and face the adversity of the natural world. The more you explore, the more story fragments you’ll discover. Weave your own story by performing acts of kindness, feeling your impact ripple through the world.
Game Features:
– Explore & Discover: Traverse an expansive, lovingly crafted region inspired by Scandinavia, full of magical forests, tranquil lakes, and rugged mountains.
– Magical Backpack: Use your trusty backpack to interact with the world, collect resources, and solve puzzles.
– Realistic Physics: Engage with objects that behave realistically, adding a layer of immersion to your magical excursions.
– Dynamic Environments: Adapt to a world that is constantly changing, and contend with the adversity of the natural world.
– Puzzle Solving: Challenge your mind with engaging puzzles that blend seamlessly with the story, enriching your journey with rewarding challenge.
– Heal the World: Influence the world of Hela through acts of kindness, witnessing their transformative effects on characters and yourself.
– Play Together: Experience the journey solo or together with friends through local split-screen or online modes.
We’ve made it, friends. The last month of the year has arrived, and it’s bringing a handful of new PS5, Xbox Series X|S, Nintendo Switch, Switch 2, and PC games to see us through until the new year. Most (but not all!) of the biggest games of 2025 have already arrived, but a few more are yet to come. This month we get games like Metroid Prime 4: Beyond, Octopath Traveler 0, and perhaps most importantly, Terminator 2D: No Fate. Read on to see release dates for all the biggest games and expansions coming out this month and beyond. Let’s have a look.
If you’re the preordering type, you can click the links for the platform of your choice to see the game at Amazon (if available).
We have been keeping an eye on Mina the Hollower for some years now. This is the GBC-looking Zelda-like from Yacht Club Games, the studio behind Shovel Knight, that launched on Kickstarter back in 2022, and only recently missed out on its initial release date thanks to a last-minute delay. It feels like it has been a long time coming, a fact that Yacht Club is reportedly painfully aware of.
In a new report from Bloomberg (paywalled), studio founder Sean Velasco described Mina as “make-or-break” for the future of Yacht Club Games. In the time since Shovel Knight, the studio has downsized, faced a global pandemic and divided its teams into two — later reforged into one — and delays don’t come cheap, either. “If we sold 500,000 copies, then we would be golden,” Velasco told Bloomberg, “If we sold even 200,000, that would be really, really great. If we sold, like, 100,000, that’s not so good”.
Hi everyone.It’s been a few months since our first dev log. We’re balancing time between working on the game and sharing our progress. Today, we wanted to give you a look at the creative process with some key members of the development team who have shaped the game.
Creating a “Judas Simulator”
People often think our games start with the story, but we pretty much always start with a core design element. In BioShock, it was the Big Daddy and Little Sister bond. In Infinite, it was the companion character, Elizabeth. In Judas, it’s the dynamic narrative. We asked ourselves, “How do we tell a fully realized story where the characters can respond in real time to even the smallest choices the player makes?” Figuring out how to do that on a systemic level took many years. Eventually, the pieces formed around our main character, Judas.
“The project began with us wanting to tell stories that are less linear, that react to the player and unfold in ways that no one’s ever seen in one of Ken’s games. That told us a lot up front about what we’d need: namely, characters with strong, competing objectives, who each had a stake in everything the player did. Starting with that framework, we spent a lot of time thinking about those characters, their conflicts, the right setting to force them all together, and the systems underpinning it all. For a long time, there wasn’t even a set protagonist — just sort of a cipher, a blank slate.
Eventually, the story and world started to coalesce into something specific, and we needed to figure out who the player character should be. As a rule, you want to put your heroes in the last place they ever want to find themselves. So, what kind of person would really struggle to deal with all these relationships and warring interests? And I remember that was the point where Ken came up with this monologue that kicked everything off.”
– Drew Mitchell, Lead Narrative Designer
“I often come up with ideas when I’m out on runs, and one day I thought of this speech that would define this character that we were trying to figure out. This speech popped my in my head as I was struggling through the third mile.
I only eat at vending machines, because I don’t like interacting with waiters. Restaurants are more complicated: there are greetings and “hellos” and “Is this table okay?” And I’m thinking, “Why should I care what you recommend? You’re not me!” But I’m not supposed to say that, so I just have to count the seconds until the interaction can end, devise socially acceptable ways of saying “Go f*** yourself.” Because for me, conversation is a prelude to failure. Vending machines never ask me a question that I don’t know the answer to. The exchange is reduced to the transaction: money in, product out. Why can’t people be more like that?”
– Ken Levine, Studio President & Creative Director
Caption: Judas Concept Art
This stream of consciousness became the touchstone we kept coming back to for the character and ultimately the entire game. “Judas,” as she came to be known, understands machines in a way she can never understand people. That became her greatest strength… and greatest weakness. We put her in a science fiction world, a colony ship filled with robots — a futuristic setting that makes someone like her extremely powerful. But it’s also a world where personal success hinges on how well you can conform to the rules, because dissent would lead to the failure of the mission. That makes her an outlaw, a pariah — a Judas. That tension at the heart of the character came to inform everything about the game, which we stopped thinking of as an FPS and started calling a “Judas Simulator.” Everything comes back to that core idea of you interacting with the world as Judas.
“Where I think Judas differs the most from BioShock or BioShock Infinite is right there in the name. The game is named after her. Booker and Jack were strangers in a strange land, just like the player. Judas is a native of the Mayflower. In fact, she’s at the center of the events that set the story in motion. She’s got history with this world and the people in it — most of it very, very bad. Her story is about so much more than getting off a sinking ship, and it gives the player so many ways to determine how her journey plays out.
It’s always a risk to hand the player a really defined, really vocal character to control. You always worry about creating dissonance between them. So, it’s been great to see testers stop and ask themselves, “What would Judas do here? How would she react?” It shows they’re in conversation with the character and taking her and the journey seriously.”
– Drew Mitchell, Lead Narrative Designer
The Mayflower
We want to communicate this world as best we can, not only through lore, but visually. A unique challenge in creating our colony ship setting, is that it’s a much older space to craft for player exploration. Rapture and Columbia existed as they were from their foundings. But the Mayflower is decades into its voyage, and it’s changed immensely since its departure.
“At the beginning of its journey, it was a more practical, conventional, modular starship. But over the course of its mission, due to conflict between factions of people and ideals, it’s changed into what you see now. And we’re working on communicating this through the environment. Like with any city with significant history, if you start digging up the street, you would find layers of the city’s past. Older eras of street long buried, forgotten, and built over by the roads upon which you now walk. With the Mayflower as a generational starship, we want to imbue this world with the same sense of time, history, and credibility; this is a civilization that went through eras of conflict and rebirth. And having the characters and the architecture of the world reflect those layers of the onion is a powerful mechanism for visual storytelling.
This allows players to act as a sort of historian and architect as they explore the Mayflower. Through uncovering more, you’ll make increasingly informed decisions with the story and characters on your journey.”
– Nathan Phail-Liff, Studio Art Director
Another factor in creating this setting is that the world itself is dynamic, not just the story and characters. Just like with the dynamic narrative, we had to train the system on what makes good environments by using sophisticated tagging and rulesets to populate the world with believable design elements.
“We basically identify the puzzle pieces and buckets of content that we want to make up the setting of the Mayflower. One example is living quarters. We don’t just have one type of space — we have different categories: VIP Pilgrim Quarters, Regular Pilgrim Dorms, all the way down to Violator Quarters. The art team creates the set pieces and materials for each of these quarters and the design team does deep dives on how all those pieces can fit together in a variety of layouts that feel grounded for the theme and support gameplay. When assembling the layouts in game, the system has to understand the various buckets of puzzle pieces and the hierarchy of the content so it can stitch it together in a meaningful way that supports the storytelling. More exclusive and fancier places can have high ceilings, giant windows, and grand lobbies. But the Violator space is in the lower, grungy, underbelly of the ship and you have to take what we call the “Stairway to Hell” to get to them — separating these spaces both visually and physically.”
– Karen Segars, Lead Artist
In our previous games we would do all of this by hand, but that doesn’t allow for the dynamism we are chasing. So, we took on this challenge of teaching the system how to be a storyteller and an interior decorator, creating a ruleset that we trust so it can populate the world in believable, compelling ways that allow for reactivity in a way you’ve never seen in our previous games.
Would you kindly?
We would love to know what you would like to read more about in future Dev Logs. So please, let us know on our socials or through email what you’re most interested in about Judas and how we’re creating it.
Last week, we reported that disturbing horror game Horses had been banned from Steam, with developer Santa Ragione claiming that Valve refused to provide a clear reason for the ban or discuss it further with the studio. Now, at the last possible minute before the game was set to release widely across other PC store fronts, Epic Games Store has also banned Horses.
This news was shared with us by Santa Ragione, who passed on a press release stating that Epic informed them 24 hours before the game’s release that it would not be distributing Horses, despite the studio’s build being approved for release weeks earlier. Per the developer, no specifics on what content was at issue were provided, “only broad and demonstrably incorrect claims that it violated their content guidelines.” When Santa Ragione appealed, the studio says it was denied 12 hours later “without further explanation.”
As Santa Ragione explains it:
Epic’s decision comes after the overwhelming support Santa Ragione received last week upon the disclosure of Steam’s ban, including the public announcement by Epic’s and Steam’s competitor GOG that they would promote and support the game. We do not know what triggered Epic’s sudden decision. Following the announcement of Steam’s ban, Horses became highly visible online, with strong support and a small but vocal opposition. It is difficult not to wonder whether this visibility played a greater role in Epic’s choice than any newly discovered issue with the game itself.
IGN has asked Epic Games for comment and will update when and if we hear back. At the time of this article’s publication, Horses is still listed as “Coming Soon” on the Epic Games Store.
Horses was previously revealed several years ago, and has made appearances in showcases like The Indie Horror Showcase and Day of the Devs. It’s gained some attention for its deeply unsettling premise: a young man travels to a remote horse farm to work for several weeks over the summer, only to find the farmer’s “horses” are actually enslaved, naked humans with horse masks affixed to their heads. Horses, says Santa Ragione, is meant to be upsetting: it’s at least partly a commentary on what sorts of morally horrifying things people will accept or even participate in without pushback, a subject we found was executed artfully, if upsettingly, in our 7/10 review of the game.
And yet, the game has been banned from now both Steam and Epic. Last week, we reported that developer Santa Ragione said it was rejected from Steam after the team submitted an unfinished but playable build of the game in order to create a store page, an unusual request that Valve said was necessary. Valve then rejected Horses, generally citing its Steam Onboarding Documentation, as well as the sentence, “Regardless of a developer’s intentions with their product, we will not distribute content that appears, in our judgment, to depict sexual conduct involving a minor.”
Santa Ragione has since guessed this was in relation to a scene in the game at the time that depicted a fully clothed child “riding” one of the horses on their shoulders. However, the studio says it has since changed that scene to involve an adult instead of a child, and that all characters in the game are clearly adults in their 20s and up, a fact that has remained true in the final version of the game that IGN reviewed, ironically, on the Epic Games Store. Santa Ragione says it was not given the opportunity to resubmit a build to be reconsidered by Valve, and remains unsure if this scene was even what triggered the ban in the first place.
In response, Valve issued a statement claiming it “gave the developer feedback about why we couldn’t ship the game on Steam, consistent with our onboarding rules and guidelines” and that its internal content review team discussed a re-review “extensively” but decided against it.
Arc Raiders developers Embark have shed a bit of light on how their looter-shooter changed after shifting away from the free-to-play business model. Apparently, it made Arc “drastically easier” to design, in the sense that the Swedish studio felt less pressure to turn players into whales.
