Pokémon Fan Claims World First Completion of Resident Evil Requiem Final Puzzle — But Insists They’re Unsure Exactly How They Did It

Resident Evil Requiem players have spent the weekend trying to solve the game’s cryptic Final Puzzle, and now a Pokémon fan has provided video evidence they have completed the challenge — despite being uncertain exactly how they did so.

Pokémon trading card fan Gengar Collects has posted numerous screenshots and video evidence on YouTube suggesting he has indeed finished The Final Puzzle, a labyrinthine quest that thousands of players have been trying to collectively solve since before Requiem officially launched last week.

The only problem? Even with this evidence, which really does suggest Gengar Collects has completed the challenge, fans still aren’t sure exactly how to do it for themselves, as it requires the holding of an item that normally can’t be found.

“I don’t even know if it was how it was supposed to be done,” Gengar Collects says in a video that attempts to walk fans through his solution. Essentially, it boils down to him holding an item, Marie’s Doll, and then inputting the puzzle’s now-infamous code sequence. Doing so then granted him the challenge completion — something he also provided screenshots of.

But how to get Marie’s doll? The past few hours have seen a frantic back and forth between Gengar Collects and other fans via YouTube comments, and to be fair, it looks like he’s trying his best to help. A series of screenshots show the location he claims he found Marie’s Doll in (which is different to the doll you find in the cell). Further screenshots show he is playing on Xbox Series X/S, which limits the suggestion he has somehow used a cheat or hack to get the doll item to spawn, where for others it can’t be found.

Yet more screenshots, requested by other players, show a close-up examination of the doll in his inventory. There are no other clues on the item itself — “no name in ink on the bottom of the shoe,” Gengar Collects says, as the doll in the cell has — only more evidence that he is being honest with his claim.

So, what’s going on? Why can no one else find the doll and complete the puzzle? The best working theory at the moment is that Gengar Collects legitimately completed the Final Puzzle, but only after unconsciously doing something during his playthrough that spawned the doll. And it’s this step, now, that fans are rushing to reproduce. (Alternatively, it’s possible the doll spawned due to some kind of bug or random glitch.)

On the upside, fans say they now know the challenge’s ending — and as soon as the doll is obtained, the puzzle can finally be completed. On the downside, Gengar Collects seems equally stumped on what he did in order to be able to pick the doll up in the first place.

Back over on reddit, the work continues. “Inputting the code is the last step, but you need Marie’s doll,” one fan summed up. “That’s the step we need to focus [on].”

“This is just a guess, but could the doll spawning be tied to how often we spoke to Emily?” questioned one fan. “Has anyone tried flushing the toilets using the numbers 204,” suggested another. “This is the room number that Grace and her mom stayed in the hotel.” For more detailed pointers, be sure to check out IGN’s Resident Evil Requiem Final Puzzle challenge guide — maybe you can help solve it?

IGN’s Resident Evil: Requiem guide will help you every step of the way through RE9. Take note of these key tips and tricks before you get started, and focus on finding these important items early. Plus, our comprehensive walkthrough will make sure you don’t miss a single Bobblehead or file as you try to survive from the Rhodes Hill Chronic Care Center all the way to Raccoon City.

Tom Phillips is IGN’s News Editor. You can reach Tom at tom_phillips@ign.com or find him on Bluesky @tomphillipseg.bsky.social

Meet the man who stuffed as much Deus Ex into Fallout 3 as was “humanly possible”

Here, put on this pair of reflective sunglasses. Now regard the 21st century so far. Doesn’t it look as if the ideas of Deus Ex have spread into the mainstream? Like fire propagating across a dry hillside, the prevalence of emergent action with cascading consequences has spread throughout the gaming medium.

Much of this movement towards Ion Storm-style thinking may be coincidental. Were the Nintendo team behind The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild making injokes about the Denton brothers on their lunch breaks? Did they praise Warren Spector as they imbued metal weapons with the capacity to attract lightning strikes? Perhaps not, and without slipping a bug under a Kyoto water cooler, we’ll likely never know.

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BIT.TRIP Runner Dev Needs Your Help To Bring Remake To Switch 2

Kickstarter now live.

BIT.TRIP developer Choice Provisions (once known as Gaijin Games back in the day) has a Kickstarter campaign in progress to bring BIT.TRIP Rerunner to the Switch 2. First released on Steam in 2023 and PS5/Xbox in 2024, it’s a complete remake of the original BIT.TRIP RUNNER for the WiiWare service on Wii. The accompanying trailer brings back industry legend Charles Martinet for some key voiceover work

At the time of writing, the Kickstarter is sitting at $16,933 with 17 days left to reach its $50,000 goal. $20 pledges will net a Switch 2 code for when the game launches, but this looks to be one of those “all or nothing” kind of campaigns. If Choice Provisions fails to complete its funding, it could be that the game just doesn’t get ported at all. The devs state that funding is “an important financial boost that helps keep the studio healthy while we complete the port and fulfil rewards”.

Read the full article on nintendolife.com

There Are Just 50 Copies Worldwide of the Extremely Rare Tsukihime Trial Edition, And U.S. Customs Allegedly Just Cut One Up

An extraordinarily rare floppy disk — one of just 50 copies of Tsukihime Trial Edition ever produced — was allegedly destroyed coming through U.S. Customs.

Collector Keripo shared a video of themselves opening the demo floppy disk delivery on X/Twitter, only to discover the disk had been damaged in such a way that it could only have been deliberate. Across the original packaging tape is another labelled “Opened and Resealed By Customs.” It’s unclear if it was courier DHL or U.S. Customs that destroyed the disk.

“My Tsukhime Trial Edition (月姫 体験版) finally arrived, one of only 50 copies in the world,” wrote Keripo on X/Twitter (thanks, Tom’s Hardware). “Only to discover that U.S. Customs had removed all the bubble wrap and physically destroyed the floppy disk. Will file a report, but literally crying right now.”

The tweet includes a video of Keripo opening the package. Getting a peek at the contents, they mutter “Oh my god,” under their breath, before exclaiming: “What the f***! No way. No way. Noooo way. What… they actually destroyed the floppy disk. What the hell. W-w… what the f***.”

If you’re wondering if the sender/seller could’ve sent it like that, Keripo wrote: “This [embedded above] was what it looked like before it was shipped. The sender even took extra care to sandwich it between cardboard paper and use lots of bubble wrap to protect it. Would never have expected U.S. Customs to both remove all that AND intentionally damage the floppy directly…

“It was actually a friend who helped me buy and ship it. He has his own copy, so he was able to do a scan and confirm its authenticity, including some unfortunate bad sectors. But the value isn’t the content but the physical collectors item, which has been damaged beyond repair.”

Challenged on why they just-so-happened to be recording as the package was opened, Keripo wrote: “When your carefully packaged box containing a historical artifact arrives at your doorstep completely ripped apart and barely held together with ‘Opened and resealed by Customs’ tape, plus makes rattling noises that it shouldn’t when you pick it up, the first thing you should do is whip out your camera and record.

“The video is real, U.S. Customs opened/resealed the box poorly, the item is genuine, not a fake, the package shipped from my friend in Portugal, not Japan, the excess packaging is common for fragile Japanese collector item,” they added.

It’s unclear why the disk was destroyed, but some suggest the demo’s ‘Adult Only’ label may have been the issue, as the law states “all persons are prohibited from importing into the United States from any foreign country […] any obscene book, pamphlet, paper, writing, advertisement, circular, print, picture, drawing, or other representation, figure, or image on or of paper or other material, or any cast, instrument, or other article which is obscene or immoral.” What constitutes “obscene or immortal” is determined on a case-by-case basis.

Tsukihime is a Japanese adult visual novel released in 2000 developed by Type-Moon. It has since been adapted into both an anime and manga series. Keripo hasn’t said how much they paid for Tsukihime Trial Edition, but did point to what they described as an authentic auction listing for it, which went for around $16,000.

IGN has asked the U.S. Customs and Border Protection department for comment.

Keripo added that they intended for Tsukihime Trial Edition to be the main attraction at a public Type-Moon museum “featuring all their historical works before they became big.” “Now its even more special as the one-of-a-kind ‘destroyed by U.S. Customs’ edition!” they joked.

Image credit: Keripo / X.

Vikki Blake is a reporter for IGN, as well as a critic, columnist, and consultant with 15+ years experience working with some of the world’s biggest gaming sites and publications. She’s also a Guardian, Spartan, Silent Hillian, Legend, and perpetually High Chaos. Find her at BlueSky.

Nearly a year on from release, Stardew Valley Baldur’s Gate 3 modders provide a rare update on their Halsin romance

The creators of Baldur’s Village, a Stardew Valley mod revolving around a community of characters from Baldur’s Gate 3, have been pretty quiet since their work escaped being “mistakenly” zapped out of existence by Wizards of the Coast last April. Now, ahead of Baldur’s Village’s first birthday, they’ve provided a progress update on the Halsin romance arc they’ve been working on in the interim.

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Ex-Highguard Dev Says The Shooter ‘Leaned Too Far Into the Competitive Scene,’ And That ‘Turned a Lot of Players Off’

Highguard, the free-to-play PvP raid shooter announced at The Game Awards last year and released only for most of its developers to be laid off just weeks after launch, may have failed because it “leaned too far into the competitive scene.”

That’s according to former Wildlight developer and level designer Alex Graner, who told Quad Damage Podcast that developers “don’t strive to create something that doesn’t work out,” throughout development, Wildlight “really leaned into the competitive side of it, and that was always one of my biggest fears as a player.”

“I can only speak to my side of it as a level designer, but when I joined [Wildlight], it was trying to figure out this new, ambitious game, and this team is always pushing the boundaries,” Graner said, as transcribed by PCGN, via Eurogamer. “You don’t strive to create something that doesn’t work out, but it happens, unfortunately. Throughout development, we really leaned into the competitive side of it, and that was always one of my biggest fears as a player.”

“3v3 duos is always the sweatiest version of anything like battle royale, objective modes, wingman, you know it, you name it. It requires such a high intensity of communication with your team, and team play, that it doesn’t leave much room for casualness. I think that was the biggest thing that turned a lot of players off Highguard,” he added.

The issue, Graner believes, is that Highguard had “all these different rules and stages,” which made it difficult for players who don’t already have a team to play with, and particularly challenging for new players.

“It’s like, ‘Oh, you want to loot, now we’ve got to chase this objective, now we have to plant this objective, now it’s overtime… It has all these rules, which I think works at a really high level, but when players are first coming in it’s a lot to grasp,” Graner explained. “On top of all that, because it was 3v3, that kind of game just requires high-skill movement and shooting, which is already a pretty high [bar to] entry as well. So if you just have a few bad games or your teammates aren’t sticking together, you’re just going to get rolled, and it’s very hard to 1v2 in our game.

“It’s all designed to be a team-based shooter. I think that was the biggest thing. People just kind of turned it off because they didn’t have the team.”

Another former developer also recently spoke out about the disastrous announcement and launch, saying the game, and by extension its team, “turned into a joke from minute one, largely due to false assumptions about a million-dollar ad placement.” A number of high-profile video game developers have also defended Highguard following the online backlash during the game’s launch.

We recently learned that Highguard was apparently financially backed by Tencent, which seemingly pulled funding just a couple of weeks after it launched. It reportedly has fewer than 20 developers working on it. Highguard hit a peak of 97,249 concurrent players when it launched on Steam. Now, it has just 105 on Valve’s platform.

Vikki Blake is a reporter for IGN, as well as a critic, columnist, and consultant with 15+ years experience working with some of the world’s biggest gaming sites and publications. She’s also a Guardian, Spartan, Silent Hillian, Legend, and perpetually High Chaos. Find her at BlueSky.

Bungie share top feedback from Marathon’s playtest, including PC performance, UI issues and ammo shortages

DANGER DANGER, you now have 30 minutes till the RPS Monday morning meeting. 30 minutes till Julian asks us what we got up to this weekend, with the deceptively cuddly air of King Lear asking his daughters which of them doth love him most. What can I get written and published inside 30 minutes?

Ah, here’s Bungie with thoughts on this weekend’s Marathon reboot “server slam”, a server slam being a playtest that is designed to deliberately overload the online functionality in the hope that this won’t happen come release day on, in this case, 5th March. A fair few of you participated in the server slam, and a fair few of you have notes. The developers have rounded up the feedback they consider most vital. Beware: the following blockquote contains weasels.

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The Best Deals Today: Twin Peaks Blu-ray, Super Mario RPG, Fantasion Neo Dimension, and More

Another month has ended, and we are now officially in March! Today, there are quite a few solid discounts across the board, including savings on the Twin Peaks Blu-ray, Super Mario RPG, Death Stranding 2, and more. Check out our top picks for Sunday, March 1, below.

Twin Peaks: From Z to A for $43.56

Twin Peaks is one of the most beloved projects of the late David Lynch, inspiring countless creatives across TV, film, and even video games. Currently, the Twin Peaks: From Z to A Blu-ray set is discounted to $52.51. This 21-disc set includes all three seasons of Twin Peaks, the Twin Peaks: Fire Walks With Me film, and over 20 hours of special features.

Super Mario RPG for $35.99

Super Mario RPG is one of the best Mario games on Nintendo Switch, as it brings back the beloved SNES classic in brilliant fashion. This adventure is a collaboration between Square Enix and Nintendo, following Mario, Bowser, Peach, and new friends on a journey to find the seven star pieces. In our 8/10 review, we wrote, “Super Mario RPG is considered a classic for a reason, and this faithful remake makes it easy for anyone who missed it in the SNES era to see why.”

Pokémon Pokopia Out This Week

Pokémon Pokopia is finally out this week, and if you’ve been itching for a new Switch 2 game, look no further. As Ditto, it’s up to you to rebuild the world, team up with other Pokémon to complete tasks, grow crops, and more! Pokopia is shaping up to be a big hit for both Pokémon fans and cozy gamers. Now is the time to lock in your pre-order.

Death Stranding 2: On The Beach for $49.99

Death Stranding 2: On The Beach is an incredible follow-up to 2019’s Death Stranding that is one of the must-play games on PS5. Sam Porter Bridges is forced to venture out to the continent of Australia as the world continues to face the challenges thrown at it by the Death Stranding, and this sequel packs together a wild, sci-fi story, ultimate gameplay freedom, and some of the best visuals we’ve ever seen. Grab a copy this weekend for $49.99 at Amazon.

Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze for $39.88

Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze is one of the best games on the Nintendo Switch, and you can pick up a copy today for $39.88 at Walmart. If you played Donkey Kong Bananza on Switch 2 and are searching for another adventure with DK and friends, Tropical Freeze is an amazing choice.

Fantasian Neo Dimension for $24.99

Fantasian Neo Dimension is the latest game from a legendary creator who needs no introduction: Hironobu Sakaguchi. This incredible turn-based RPG is a joy to play through, featuring a great story with music from the all-time great Nobuo Uematsu. Pick up a Nintendo Switch or PS5 copy today and add it to your collection for only $24.99.

Super Monkey Ball Banana Rumble for $20

Super Monkey Ball Banana Rumble was the brilliant return to Monkey Ball we all hoped for, bringing a wonderful adventure to Nintendo Switch. In our 8/10 review, we wrote, “Super Monkey Ball Banana Rumble is a brilliant return to form with the best stages and controls the series has seen in over 20 years.”

Save Big on This Woodkid Death Stranding 2 Vinyl

Woodkid was one of the two main composers for Death Stranding 2, and his work truly shaped the sound and feel of the game. Tracks like ‘To the Wilder’ and ‘Story of Rainy’ elevate key scenes throughout, and you can count on this album being added to your playlist. Right now, you can score the gorgeous 2xLP of Woodkid for Death Stranding 2: On The Beach for $40.49. Don’t miss out on your chance to add this to your collection.

Scarlet 4K UHD Blu-ray Up for Pre-Order

Scarlet is the latest film from renowned director Mamoru Hosoda, and you can pre-order the 4K UHD Blu-ray starting today at Amazon. This film was directly inspired by Hamlet, following Princess Scarlet on a journey of revenge.

Feature: Nintendo Life eShop Selects (February 2026)

Our picks for the best eShop games on Switch 1 & 2 in February.

February 2026, hey? It’s been a busy one with a Nintendo Direct, a Pokémon Presents, and a couple of shadow drops and Switch 2 surprises. That means it’s time for a lovely edition of eShop Selects.

So yeah, a big month for what is the shortest one of the year. Spring is approaching, but that doesn’t mean we want to start stepping outside and enjoying the crisp, early sunshine. There’s a lot of games on the eShop right now, so let’s look at the best of them.

Read the full article on nintendolife.com

Guide: Upcoming Nintendo Switch 2 Games & Accessories For March & April 2026

March is on.

As we head into the third month of 2026, there’s plenty to be looking forward to once you’ve dragged yourselves away from the shambling hordes of Raccoon City and the two other Resident Evils that dropped on Switch 2 last week.

There’s a new Pokémon spin-off, for starters, followed by the return of Fatal Frame, the third Monster Hunter Stories game, and Nintendo’s capping off the month with a trip for Mario and co. to Bellabel Park. And that’s before we even get to April, which kicks off with The Super Mario Galaxy Movie in the cinemas.

Read the full article on nintendolife.com