At the Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences in Las Vegas tonight Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 took home an impressive five of the awards across 23 categories, including Game of the Year.

The Sandfall Interactive game has been a critical hit and a stand out at award shows since it was released in April 2025, and the development team was even given the status of Knight under the French Order of Arts and Letters in recognition of its work.

Ghost of Yotei took home three awards, including Outstanding Achievement in Character, while Arc Raiders won Online Game of the Year. Naughty Dog’s Evan Wells, former president and co-founder at the studio, was inducted into the AIAS Hall of Fame.

“The games recognized at this year’s D.I.C.E. Awards showcase the extraordinary range of talent and creativity that define our industry,” said Meggan Scavio, President of the Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences.

“It’s inspiring to see how these developers continue to elevate interactive entertainment through innovation, storytelling, and meaningful player experiences.”

This year the DICE Summit also marked the passing of Vince Zampella, the co-creator of the Call of Duty franchise, co-founder of Infinity Ward, and co-founder of Respawn Entertainment, who passed in December 2025. Hideo Kojima, Phil Spencer, Todd Howard and others from across the industry spoke about how his work had impacted both the world of video games, and them as people.

DICE Awards 2026 Winners

• Outstanding Achievement in Animation – South of Midnight
• Outstanding Achievement in Art Direction – Clair Obscur: Expedition 33
• Outstanding Achievement in Character – Ghost of Yōtei – Atsu
• Outstanding Achievement in Original Music Composition – Ghost of Yōtei
• Outstanding Achievement in Audio Design – Death Stranding 2: On the Beach
• Outstanding Achievement in Story – Clair Obscur: Expedition 33
• Outstanding Technical Achievement – Death Stranding 2: On the Beach
• Action Game of the Year – Hades II
• Adventure Game of the Year – Ghost of Yōtei
• Family Game of the Year – LEGO® Party!
• Fighting Game of the Year – Mortal Kombat: Legacy Kollection
• Racing Game of the Year – Mario Kart World
• Role-Playing Game of the Year – Clair Obscur: Expedition 33
• Sports Game of the Year – Rematch
• Strategy/Simulation Game of the Year – The Alters
• Online Game of the Year – Arc Raiders
• Immersive Reality Technical Achievement – Hotel Infinity
• Immersive Reality Game of the Year – Ghost Town
• Outstanding Achievement for an Independent Game – Blue Prince
• Mobile Game of the Year – Persona5: The Phantom X
• Outstanding Achievement in Game Design – Blue Prince
• Outstanding Achievement in Game Direction – Clair Obscur: Expedition 33
• Game of the Year – Clair Obscur: Expedition 33

Rachel Weber is the Head of Editorial Development at IGN and an elder millennial. She’s been a professional nerd since 2006 when she got her start on Official PlayStation Magazine in the UK, and has since worked for GamesIndustry.Biz, Rolling Stone and GamesRadar. She loves horror, horror movies, horror games, Red Dead Redemption 2, and her Love and Deepspace boyfriends.

Fatal Frame 2: Crimson Butterfly Remake doesn’t open with a jump scare; it opens in a trance. As Mio, you watch helplessly as a crimson butterfly lures your twin sister, Mayu, into a fog-covered forest. There, the Lost Village swallows her whole. For over twenty-two years, this scene has haunted fans, myself included. Seeing the village emerge from the mist, modern lighting draping every rooftop and tree branch in dense volumetric fog, I knew immediately: this isn’t a low-budget remaster. The dread in Fatal Frame 2 stems not only from the individually named wraiths stalking you through its haunted Japanese village – a place trapped in a festival of death – but also from the way Mayu grips your hand, dragging you toward dangers you’re unprepared for. After roughly four hours with the first four chapters on PC, this remake already has its hooks in me — not only is it a faithful yet modernized take on what many consider the scariest game ever, its added visual fidelity makes the core mechanic of looking directly at what’s trying to kill you that much harder to endure.

Fatal Frame 2’s central mechanic remains one of the cleverest in survival horror. Your primary weapon is the Camera Obscura — a modified camera that damages wraiths by photographing them. That’s it. No shotguns, no grenades stashed in a locker. You point a camera at something terrifying, and you take its picture. The series has been doing this since 2001, and it’s still unlike anything else in the genre.

The Camera Obscura uses focal points: crosshairs that identify a wraith’s weak spots. Aligning more of these points when you take a photo increases the damage dealt. You can upgrade these focal points with prayer beads found throughout the environment, making each shot more lethal and rewarding exploration in classic survival horror style. But your camera can also deliver special shots that require willpower, and the effect varies depending on the equipped filter. While auto-focus helps you lock onto targets, manual focus rewards precision with more serious damage. And, despite Fatal Frame 2’s penalties for proximity, keeping the viewfinder pulled back and standing dangerously close to a spirit was often the better strategy for dealing more damage and taking control of a fight.

However, willpower is a limited and valuable resource. If you get too close, a wraith will drain your willpower, leaving you vulnerable to a leering attack that flashes your screen and momentarily steals control, or allows the wraith to strike you more easily than it would at range.

Film types serve as your ammunition and create their own layer of resource tension. The basic Type-07 film is infinite but reloads slowly and hits weakly, while stronger film like the Type-61 deals significantly more damage but caps at eight shots and must be scavenged, as you can’t buy more when you run out. Interchangeable filters add further complexity: the Standard Filter stuns enemies, the Paraceptual Filter blinds them at range and can eventually be upgraded to see through walls, and the Exposure Filter can unlock secret items and areas by reconstructing certain scenes with the Phantom Exposé mode. Each filter has its own upgrade path covering range, reload speed, and special shot duration, and since special shots cost willpower, you’re also incentivized to invest your limited prayer beads into upgrading willpower recovery at the expense of raw damage. There’s a lot of strategy here for players who want to dig into Fatal Frame 2’s intricate system.

This excellent combat loop revolves around timing. You enter camera mode by holding the left trigger, frame the wraith with the right thumbstick, and slam the right trigger to activate the shutter. But your shots will typically be weaker unless you wait for it to telegraph an attack — you’ll hear the wraith moaning while the screen flashes red — and then you hit the shutter for a Fatal Frame shot, which staggers the spirit and deals massive damage. Nail one while a wraith is already vulnerable and you trigger Fatal Time, a window for rapid-fire photos that automatically burns through your basic Type-07 film. The whole system punishes impatience and rewards the nerve to stand still while something horrible lunges at you, but it is slow. Deliberately so. Film reload times are long, enemies take a while to go down, and the rhythm of shooting, exiting camera mode, backpedaling, and re-entering is methodical by design — kinda like jousting, but with a camera instead of a lance. When the atmosphere is doing its job, which it usually is, the deliberateness feels meditative. Whether it stays that way across a full campaign is one of the bigger questions this preview can’t yet answer.

Through the Viewfinder

Three difficulty modes are available: Story, Normal, and Hard (Battle). Each is meaningfully tuned, with harder settings increasing wraith damage while rewarding more Photo Points for skilled shots. Those points feed into an item shop where you can purchase healing items and equippable stat-boosting charms, creating a risk-reward scale that shifts rather than simply punishing the player. I played most of the preview on Normal before switching to Story after Chapter Three. Even in Story, enemies hit hard enough to maintain tension — meaning these difficulty modes preserve the horror rather than trivialize it.

Speaking of customizing the experience, I previewed Fatal Frame 2: Crimson Butterfly Remake on a machine equipped with a Ryzen 3900X, RTX 4070 Ti, and 32GB of RAM at 3440x1440p ultrawide with max settings. In typical PC gamer fashion, my first adventure was the options menu itself, which deserves mention for its satisfying granularity. You can adjust vibration intensity separately for damage feedback, item searching, and even how hard Mio’s heart races during cutscenes. You can fine-tune camera behavior down to obstacle avoidance and rotation inertia; customize your graphical settings with precision; and even change the Camera Obscura’s viewfinder style between a classic and modern look. If you can imagine a setting, this remake probably has it. It also ships with both English and Japanese audio, which is a welcome touch for a series with such deep roots in Japanese horror.

PC players expecting an unlocked frame rate should note that it is capped at 60fps. Considering the attention to detail in areas like viewfinder styles and vibration settings, Fatal Frame 2’s lack of broader accessibility features stands out. It already offers a deep UI and subtitle scaling, customizable text colors, named character labels, and text backgrounds — a solid foundation. However, the absence of screen reading or colorblind modes is particularly striking for a game built around photographing ghosts, where visual feedback like crosshair lock-ons, screen flashes, and color inversions drive the core loop. Screen reader support for the extensive menus, item descriptions, and collectible documents seems a natural extension of the text customization already in place. Games like The Last of Us Part 2 have shown that colorblind accessibility can be addressed through audiovisual indicators that don’t rely on color alone, an approach that could work here without undermining the atmosphere.

Spirited Away

Fatal Frame 2’s engrossing story centers on twin sisters Mio and Mayu, who stumble into Minakami Village — a place that vanished from a mountainside on the night of a failed ritual. The village was built over a gate to the underworld called the Hellish Abyss, and its residents performed a gruesome twin sacrifice to keep it sealed. When the ritual failed, the village was consumed by mist, and now it’s full of restless spirits who want to reenact the whole thing using you.

The story setup hooked me immediately. Every room feels handcrafted to maximize unease — items clattering off shelves in adjacent hallways, rain pattering against rooftops while ghosts stalk corridors, the distant wail of a wraith telling you exactly where it is and exactly why you shouldn’t be there. The sound design is relentless. Everything is precisely mixed, which makes the jump scares land harder because the baseline atmosphere is already ratcheted tight. Reach out to pick up an item, and a wraith may grab your hand instead, draining your willpower until you frantically mash the A button to shake it off. It’s a small touch, but it means even looting feels dangerous.

Each ghost has a name and backstory you can piece together through collectible documents and a spirit list that catalogs every encounter: the drowned woman on the bridge, the woman sealed in a box, the spirit in the Osaka house still searching for her lost boyfriend Masumi. It goes deep into the lore as well: by digging into the richly detailed village for scraps of lost journals and other items left behind, I uncovered that Masumi was a folklorist’s assistant who vanished while surveying a forest slated for a dam, only for his girlfriend Miyako to follow him into the mist and meet the same fate.

She’s the spirit I fought in the Osaka house, and I loved playing through an entire 30-minute side quest dedicated to demystifying her background. Throughout the campaign, you photograph the former residents’ spectral remnants and slowly build a picture of the tragedy that consumed Minakami Village, giving Fatal Frame 2 a level of world-building that rewards curiosity without requiring it and gives every encounter a layer of melancholy underneath the fear.

The preview build also featured the Kusabi, a massive, unkillable entity that patrols certain areas. When it shows up, you can’t fight it; you hide. It drains your willpower on contact, forces your screen into black and white, and disables the Camera Obscura entirely. One extended sequence in the Kurosawa mansion strips you of your flashlight while the Kusabi hunts you through dark hallways, and it’s the most effective horror set piece in the preview. It’s the kind of sequence that makes you realize how much the Camera Obscura normally functions as a security blanket.

What in the Junji Ito?

Outside of combat, Fatal Frame 2 plays like a classic Resident Evil game, and that’s a specific comparison. Players navigate interconnected rooms, find keys, solve puzzles to unlock new areas, and occasionally discover that previously safe rooms now contain threats. Save points can be blocked by enemies. The structure creates a loop of dread, relief, and fresh dread that survival horror fans will immediately recognize.

Puzzles are straightforward — one has you arranging dolls on a temple altar based on clues from a photograph — but they’re woven into the environmental storytelling in ways that keep them from feeling like arbitrary roadblocks. Hidden collectibles include pairs of twin dolls that unlock items at the Photo Point exchange shop when photographed together. The previously mentioned Phantom Exposé system lets you recreate old photographs found in the environment to reveal hidden items. You match the framing of an old photo to uncover something that had vanished, giving genuine reason to revisit earlier areas with fresh eyes and a charged filter.

Additionally, your flashlight helps spot items but makes it easier for enemies to detect you, adding a stealth element that feeds directly into the tension. Some areas are better to sneak through if you can’t afford to fight a wraith head-on, and running away from a fight to the nearest save point is usually an option. It’s great that you heal automatically at save points, and while holding Mayu’s hand also regenerates health, she was separated from Mio for two full chapters during the preview, leaving me reliant on rare healing items and careful play. Equippable charms provide small stat boosts — the Moonstone extends your dodge window, while Mayu’s Charm increases health recovery when holding hands. They’re small build decisions that add texture without overcomplicating things.

Finally, Fatal Frame 2 Remake’s controls feel deliberately stiff — you dodge on A, crouch on B, and open your inventory on X. There’s also some inertia when entering and exiting the Camera Obscura’s viewfinder with the left trigger. This layout makes sense after a while, but during the first two chapters, I often fumbled for the right input with a wraith bearing down on me. Depending on your tolerance, that’s either a control issue or a horror feature.

Point and Shoot

It took roughly four hours to clear the first four chapters, partly due to combat difficulty and partly because the world rewards exploration, with plenty of nooks and crannies to dip into while scavenging for critical items and uncovering the elaborate depth of Minakami Village itself. The graphics and UI translate well to ultrawide, and fans will find the rebuilt classic scenes rich with detail. But some questions do remain about how well the rest of the campaign fares. The 60fps cap is an annoying albeit forgivable ceiling; the deliberate combat pacing could grow tiresome over a full campaign. It’s also too early to tell how faithfully the remake handles the original’s multiple endings, although Fatal Frame 2’s history and the deft handling of its campaign so far suggests greater narrative complexity ahead.

The Camera Obscura system remains unique in survival horror, the atmosphere is thick enough to feel physical, and the storytelling rewards the slow, careful attention this genre demands. If you loved the original, this is shaping up to be a worthy reintroduction. If you’ve never played Fatal Frame, this is the place to start — the entries are largely standalone, and this one was already considered the best back in 2003. Fatal Frame 2: Crimson Butterfly Remake launches for PC, PS5, Switch 2, and Xbox Series on March 12, 2026.

Tonight has brought our best look yet at Silent Hill: Townfall, the next installment in Konami’s classic survival horror series that’s set and developed in Scotland.

In an initial trailer shown during Sony’s State of Play broadcast, and then Konami’s own dedicated Silent Hill Transmission show, fans got to see the suitably foggy setting of St. Amelia and the game’s protagonist Simon Ordell, all in Townfall’s first-person perspective.

Made by Scottish development team Screen Burn (of Stories Untold and Observation fame) and published by Annapurna Interactive, the game looks set to offer a unique take on the Silent Hill formula, while still retaining some core elements.

So, yes, you can defend yourself from horrible-headed enemies with planks of wood, pipes and a pistol. But you can also use stealth to sneak and hide — equipped with a portable “CRTV” device.

The analog-looking CRTV handheld is a tool to deliver narrative (and you’ll need to tune it during gameplay) but also a clever way to show the outlines of enemies while you’re ducked behind cover. The outlines of said enemies show up in its static, which is a clever touch.

Townfall’s story is designed to be something of a mystery, with Ordell repeatedly waking up in St. Amelia. One moment in the Silent Hill Transmission highlighted the fact he was wearing a hospital tag on his wrist. Could it all be a dream, or hallucination from within a coma?

Tonight’s look at the game concluded without any further word on when we’ll get to play Townfall ourselves. (Several references to 8-19 in the trailer had me thinking it was set for an August 19 date, but alas this was not confirmed.) It is, however, now available to wishlist on PlayStation, and on PC via Steam and the Epic Game Store.

For much more, catch up with everything announced during Sony’s State of Play broadcast right here.

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