Embark Studios is keeping its promise to take action against players who took advantage of duplication exploits and other glitches in Arc Raiders by issuing warnings and suspensions.

The developer behind the popular survival shooter offered an update for its ongoing cheater crackdown with a blog post on its website. While its efforts to stamp out nefarious Raiders began last month, the message arrives as a sign that it shows no signs of slowing anytime soon.

Embark promised to subject those who utilized exploits to “further review and possible penalties” with the launch of last week’s 1.15.0 update. Today’s message follows up on that promise, offering a detailed explanation as to why it’s taken the team some time to issue a response. Now that reports of exploit usage have been confirmed and their impact on the in-game Arc Raiders economy has been measured, the studio is ready to act.

“We want to act once, with intention, and with confidence that we’re doing the right thing,” Embark said. “This is the first time we’ve handled an incident of this nature at such scale in ARC Raiders. Rather than rushing, we chose to take the time needed to fully understand the situation and make sure our response was consistent with our values and expectations.”

Players who took advantage of glitches such as the dupe exploit to a limited degree could find a warning on their accounts as soon as today and through the next week. At least one Reddit user has already shared such a notification, telling them that “continued use of exploits could lead to a suspension.”

Glitch abusers are now receiving messages from the team in ARC Raiders. https://t.co/c5CnTGRWtq pic.twitter.com/lbU9znPqc2

— Rooster (@TheRooster) February 17, 2026

Embark added that any Coins tied to dupe activity have also been removed. For “severe cases,” or instances where exploit usage had a notable impact on other players’ experiences, players could receive an immediate ban. It’s unclear how many warnings or suspensions Embark plans to deal through the week, or how long suspensions will be. The Arc Raiders team tells players to report new exploits and glitches on its official Discord.

“It’s our hope that this response provides a platform for future action, and we’ve already improved our detection and tracking, internal review tools, and safeguards to limit the impact of similar exploits,” the message continues.

“We take this incident seriously, and we’re approaching it as both a corrective effort and a learning opportunity to strengthen the systems that support fair play.”

While Arc Raiders has continued as one of the most popular games of the year, Embark has found itself facing a stream of technical issues. Some, as the studio admitted today, stem “from a design flaw,” while others, such as a late-January Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attack, are more difficult to anticipate.

One early exploit saw players sneakily hiding behind walls in Stella Montis, while dupe exploits have seen players finding mountains of ducks in Buried City. After a fix brought an end to duck duplication last week, some players were almost immediately hit by an issue that cleared their inventory.

We spoke to Embark CEO Patrick Söderlund about all things Arc Raiders earlier this month and learned that the studio has already banned “tens of thousands of players so far.” We also found out how the studio’s success will help it make more games while keeping its existing fans happy.

Michael Cripe is a freelance writer with IGN. He’s best known for his work at sites like The Pitch, The Escapist, and OnlySP. Be sure to give him a follow on Bluesky (@mikecripe.bsky.social) and Twitter (@MikeCripe).

Early copies of Resident Evil Requiem have been glimpsed in the wild — meaning it is now time to take action to avoid spoilers, fans have warned, such as the ultimate fate of Leon S. Kennedy in Capcom’s hugely anticipated game.

Requiem has been pitched by Capcom as a special title in the series — one that returns to the franchise’s origins to wrap up long-standing plotlines and feature fan-favorite characters — such as Leon, of course, but also what appears to be Sherry — as part of a much-anticipated return to Raccoon City.

As the franchise celebrates its 30th anniversary, Resident Evil Requiem is believed by some fans to likely be the final time we see or play as some of these characters, as Capcom moves its franchise forward. (Also, hot uncle Leon is one thing, but hot grandad Leon seems less believable.)

All of which is to say that there’s a particular level of concern around Resident Evil Requiem plot leaks — with some fans now saying they will be avoiding social media fully for the foreseeable future.

“I can personally verify there is at least one person out there who bought Resident Evil Requiem from a store selling early,” wrote noted Resident Evil leaker Dusk Golem, who repeatedly stated that Leon was in the game months before Capcom made it official. “Funnily enough someone I vaguely know & have talked to a few times, no spoilers out there yet but brace yourselves.”

The account then shared a link to an image of a boxed PlayStation 5 copy of Resident Evil Requiem, seemingly out in the wild.

I can personally verify there is at least one person out there who bought Resident Evil Requiem from a store selling early, funnily enough someone I vaguely know & have talked to a few times, no spoilers out there yet but brave yourselves.https://t.co/xoDURKOWVw

— AestheticGamer aka Dusk Golem (@AestheticGamer1) February 17, 2026

As ever, the best advice to avoid spoilers is simply to avoid the internet as much as you can before next week, but particularly to be careful of YouTube and Twitch comments where people spread spoilers in chat. Muting keywords on social media is also recommended.

Resident Evil Requiem’s February 27 release date is now just 10 days away, and we’ll be keeping spoiler free here on IGN as much as possible.

“After getting hands-on with a total of about four hours of Resident Evil 9 Requiem at this point, and sharing that experience with colleagues, I’m more excited for the series than I have been in recent memory,” IGN wrote after going hands-on with Resident Evil Requiem recently. “It’s the old mixed with the new, but all in a modern package with two protagonists I already like a lot.”

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

Screamer doesn’t ease you in. Within seconds of the first race, a car zoomed past me and detonated — parts scattering across a rain-slicked tunnel — because an opponent activated Strike mode and clipped the wall at full speed. That’s the tone of this anime-inspired combat racer, which is kind of like Wipeout meets Mario Kart, but instead of picking up shells to shoot at the competition, every vehicle is equipped with a powerful device called the Echo, which gradually converts defensive energy into offensive firepower. Here, you have to weigh your decisions carefully instead of hoping to drive over a particular item. The satisfyingly complex resource management system underneath gives Screamer a tactical backbone that neither of those games attempted. After a few hours with a pre-release PC build, the arcade racing already has a confident mechanical identity — fast, physical, and surprisingly deep — and while the story mode serves primarily as a tutorial for those systems, the arcade racing is where Screamer’s identity truly shines. What I played suggests that Screamer’s combat racing foundation is strong enough to carry the weight the developer is placing on it.

Sync or Swim

Screamer’s central system is built around two resource meters that sit on opposite sides of the HUD, and the interplay between them sets it apart from the combat racing pack. On the left, Sync — the defensive resource — builds passively over time and actively through skilled play: cornering well, timing gear shifts, maintaining speed through turns. Sync powers your Boost (hold LB for a sustained speed increase) and your Shield (tap RB, which costs one full Sync tank and provides temporary protection against incoming Strikes and Overdrive hits). When you spend Sync on either of those actions, it converts into Entropy, the offensive meter on the right side of the screen.

Entropy is where things get dangerous. Two bars of Entropy activate Strike (press RB), which grants a temporary speed burst during which any opponent you collide with explodes — a full KO that removes them from the race temporarily. Fill all four Entropy tanks and you unlock Overdrive (click both thumbsticks), which turns your car into a flaming battering ram that detonates everything it touches. The catch is lethal: during Overdrive, hitting any track barrier detonates you instead. It’s the most powerful tool in Screamer, and it punishes even a slight misjudgment with the same instant death it dishes out.

The conversion loop is what makes this more than a standard boost-and-shoot racer. Boosting spends Sync but generates Entropy, which means aggressive drivers who constantly burn speed are also passively building toward their combat abilities. Shielding spends Sync and directly banks one tank of Entropy, so even a defensive play feeds the offensive meter. Every race becomes a rolling calculation: do you burn Sync on a boost to close the gap, or bank a Shield to both protect yourself and charge toward a Strike? Do you spend two Entropy bars on an immediate KO attempt, or hold out for the full Overdrive? The system teaches restraint through its own logic rather than through punishment, and even on balanced difficulty, the races produced a rhythm that felt strategic rather than purely chaotic — I felt like I was making real decisions at 200 miles per hour, not just button mashing.

The right thumbstick handles drifting, and this is the control that makes Screamer’s handling feel distinct. Rather than braking into corners, you pull the right stick to execute a drift that whips the car sideways through turns without losing meaningful speed. Once you internalize the two-stick rhythm — left for steering, right for drifting — the movement stops feeling like you’re fighting the car and starts feeling like you’re commanding it. There’s also an upshift system: over the course of a race, you manually shift gears to increase your top speed, which layers a progression curve onto each race rather than just the meta-game. The cars have weight to them, too. Not the sluggish, input-delay kind — more like the satisfying heft of something that wants you to feel every collision and every wall scrape. Consecutive clean upshifts without collisions also accelerate Sync generation, rewarding precision beyond individual inputs. Meanwhile, hitting a barrier at speed costs you momentum but doesn’t destroy you (unless you’re in Overdrive), which keeps the racing forgiving enough to stay fun while the combat systems layer on the tension.

Built Different

Screamer’s initial boot experience demonstrates surprising care. Players can choose between a Quick Start, which throws them directly into the action, or a Guided Setup that walks them through video, audio, and accessibility options. The accessibility suite is particularly comprehensive, featuring: full one-handed control remapping for either the left or right hand, complete with automatic throttle and the ability to reassign every input to a single side of the controller; deuteranopia, protanopia, and tritanopia colorblindness filters with adjustable intensity on a scale of one to ten; independently scalable subtitle and menu text sizing; and a tinnitus reduction filter with configurable frequency (default ten kilohertz) and gain (default negative twelve decibels). This level of audio accessibility is rare in racing games, and its upfront inclusion, rather than being buried in a submenu, is commendable.

Streamers, meanwhile, will immediately appreciate the licensed audio content toggle. A single switch disables copyrighted music before going live, eliminating the need for third-party workarounds. This small inclusion demonstrates an understanding of how people actually play and broadcast games in 2026.

This preview was played on PC at a 3440×1440 ultrawide resolution, where the visual style looked impressive. The arcade modes ran smoothly on medium settings with DLSS set to balanced, delivering solid visuals: neon-soaked tracks popped with color, car models showed visible collision damage, and the sense of speed remained strong even without maxed-out post-processing. The graphics menu is highly granular, offering individual sliders for anti-aliasing, post-processing, effects, shadows, reflections, global illumination, texture quality, foliage, and shading, as well as upscaling options across Nvidia DLSS, AMD FSR 4.0, and TSR, with frame generation support for compatible hardware.

One final note: Screamer offers five AI difficulty tiers, ranging from Very Easy to Very Hard, along with driving aids, including arcade throttle (automatic full acceleration), neural throttle and brake assist, neural steer and drift assist, and neural handling for cornering and wall avoidance. While these are useful options, they are hidden within the custom game settings rather than being presented during the initial setup. For a game that otherwise prioritizes accessibility so effectively, burying the driving aids behind layers of menus feels like an oversight that could unnecessarily challenge less experienced players during their initial races.

Full Roster

Each of the fifteen characters is split across five teams of three — one Leader and two Members per squad — and brings a unique passive ability that meaningfully alters their playstyle. For example, Frederick’s Reaper’s Dance empowers his Strike and grants bonus Sync on KO, but makes him explode on contact with track barriers while Striking — a high-risk, high-reward tradeoff. Hiroshi’s Unstable Boost extends boost duration the longer you hold it, rewarding players who can maintain clean racing lines. Roisin’s One More Freckle reduces Strike’s Entropy cost and allows it to chain continuously, turning her into a relentless close-range threat. Only a handful of characters were accessible in the arcade build, but the differences between them were pronounced enough that swapping rosters changed your approach to the same tracks.

The character and world design leans heavily into an anime aesthetic, which sets the tone for Screamer’s hero shooter-esque vibe. Screamer’s opening cutscene uses fully animated, cel-shaded sequences to introduce its tournament cast — veterans and newcomers assembling for the Screamer Tournament, run by a figure named Gage who installs the Echo device on every vehicle. The voice acting, at least in the brief cinematic that played before the crashes began, is standard English-dubbed anime: serviceable, occasionally cheesy, and tonally consistent with the art style.

The Echo system — which in gameplay terms is the Sync-to-Entropy resource loop — is positioned in the lore as the bridge between narrative and mechanics, justifying why these racers can blow each other up. It’s an ambitious framework. However, the preview build’s story mode, which includes six episodes of anime-driven narrative with special race rules, functions effectively as a tutorial for Screamer’s systems but struggles with pacing and presentation. The dialogue frequently interrupts races mid-action to deliver exposition, and at least from my first impressions during the opening segments, the character writing lacks the personality needed to justify the dramatic framing. It’s functional, but the arcade modes remain the stronger draw.

Rules of the Road

Arcade mode, where I spent most of my time for this preview, offers substantially more customization than the genre typically provides. Three preset race types — Free For All (all fifteen racers on the grid), Leaders (just the five team captains), and Members (the ten sidekicks) — each produce distinct competitive dynamics. Free For All is maximum chaos, with fifteen vehicles jostling for position as Strikes and Overdrives erupt across the pack. Leaders is tighter and more personal: a five-racer sprint where every KO matters. Members sits in the middle, offering ten-racer fields with a different tactical flavor, since sidekick abilities tend toward more specialized functions.

The custom ruleset editor is the real surprise. You can adjust lap counts up to nine, set competitor numbers up to sixteen, and toggle from a long list of modifiers that reshape the racing experience: deactivate Overdrive entirely for a pure racing mode; disable all fighting mechanics to remove Strikes; toggle off individual character skills; force permanent Overdrive for every racer from the opening lap; adjust passive Sync generation rates; activate Power Shift (where Active Shifting unleashes a massive speed surge); enable Volatile Ecosystem mode where all racers are permanently vulnerable to KOs; or turn on Gage’s Finest, which prevents vehicles from losing parts on collision — essentially a no-destruction cosmetic mode. I didn’t test every permutation, but the breadth suggests serious potential for community-driven rulesets and custom competitive formats.

Team Race adds another layer. Duo and Trio variants allow mixed teams across factions, as long as a Leader is present, and scoring combines final placement points with KO tallies. Smashing your own teammates hurts your combined total, which creates an interesting wrinkle when everyone is fighting for position in the same pack. The map selection across the preview’s initial tracks — Port, Downtown Run, Route 1N, Stadium Olympus — offers a strong mix of environments, and I even noticed a fifth map unlock as a reward for playing the mode. Tight urban corridors lined with neon signage give way to wider circuits with sweeping elevation changes, and day versus night settings noticeably affect visibility and atmosphere. Repeated arcade play also unlocked a new character, new music, and cosmetic items, hinting at a progression system that rewards continued engagement — though how deep that progression goes remains an open question.

Waiting for Green

After spending a few hours exploring the arcade modes, what emerged is a combat racer with a genuinely clever resource system, meaningful character differentiation, and a custom ruleset editor that could give Screamer real longevity. The Sync-to-Entropy conversion loop forces players to think two steps ahead, spending defensively to build offensively. This tactical layer elevates Screamer’s racing above the typical grab-a-pickup-and-fire template. Milestone’s expertise in crafting racing games shines through in every drift, boost, and well-timed Strike.

However, some big questions remain. It’s unclear whether the writing of the much broader campaign arc ultimately does justice to the character-driven structure, whether the pacing between cutscenes and races ends up feeling earned, and whether the campaign’s special rules add meaningful variety beyond what exists in the arcade mode. These unanswered questions are central to Screamer’s overall appeal, but for now, Screamer’s strong racing foundation warrants attention, and I look forward to its upcoming March 26 release on PS5, Xbox Series, and PC.

Seeing Cthulhu in the title of a game will, fairly or not, stack a pile of expectations on top of it as tall as the walls of R’lyeh. The Cosmic Abyss does meet some of them, focusing heavily on not just the physical danger involved in immersing oneself in the mysteries of lost and cursed history, but the mental toll as well. It exceeds some too, placing the well worn fictional mythos in a setting it doesn’t often get fit into. But the limited time I had with the first couple of chapters was soaked with the sinking fear that even though its puzzles and atmosphere were brain tickling, there weren’t enough moments where the consequences of playing with this eldritch fire felt real or dangerous.

Cthul-clue

In the Lord’s Year of 2026, you’re going to have a hard time adapting HP Lovecraft’s cosmic horror mythopoeia in a way that feels fresh, but developers Big Bad Wolf make a good effort. It follows well worn tropes, like putting players in the shoes of a detective chasing more and more bizarre clues down an inter-dimensional rabbit hole. But the near-future setting, in a world that clearly benefits from advanced technology but still remains recognizable to denizens of our real world, spices things up in curious ways. My favorite is its optimistic take on an AI companion named Key that can actually be a general benefit to society, or at the very least towards your investigative efforts to know the unknowable.

Cthulhu: The Cosmic Abyss gives you a million chances to use it in crime scenes, which are dense with dark nooks to shed light on and stones to be turned over. Its key feature, the Vault, takes every clue you find that could be consequential to solving the mystery and puts it in a big board, where you can move them around and draw connections between them, Charlie Day-style. Some of these clues may become a deduction, which asks a question that can be answered by another clue in order to unlock some key breakthrough to help solve your case. These weren’t common, but were always impactful.

The handiest tool in Key’s arsenal is the sonar. After spending energy to scan the chemical makeup of an item or material, you can send a sonar ping out into the wild to find more objects that match that chemical. Pick up a weird rock and think it might have friends? Send a ping! Bloodstained drag marks suddenly and suspiciously end? Send a ping! You can even combine different materials, up to four, to further narrow down a thing you might be looking for, like if you wanted to find a specific sort of metal that is also covered in eldritch mold for some reason. It’s a clever way to help nudge players along who might be stuck, but without completely blowing the answers to some of the more important puzzles along the way.

Key can also be upgraded to give itself bonus abilities, like one where discovering clues has a slim chance to earn back some energy. I wasn’t really moved either way about the offerings available in the two chapters of the demo. When I did take the time to apply these, it never required me to change the way I play, and I spent no time weighing the value between potential opportunity costs of any of my available options. These might be more consequential in the full release, but I found them to be completely ignorable here.

A Policy of Non-Confrontation

Another way The Cosmic Abyss stands out among its peers is that it’s entirely free of combat, relying completely on the investigative and exploration aspects to provide tension and conflict. That’s a pretty bold choice, and puts a lot of faith in the team’s ability to create bad enough vibes that walking into dark rooms can feel like their own sort of boss fight. I’m not sure The Cosmic Abyss crushes this every time, though.

Many of the spaces make great first impressions. In chapter one, you and your partner, Elsa, arrive at the flooded and dilapidated home of a missing agent of your mysterious organization, Ancile. This house is a mess, floor littered with ancient artifacts, archeological relics, notes scribbled with nonsense, and just straight up trash. The rundown walls cast just the right kinds of shadows that make it feel like touching anything might wake the monstrous building itself.

This goes doubly so for chapter two’s undersea mining facility that sprawls like a metal maze of corridors covered in blood and some sort of goop that is somehow more upsetting than blood. Every wing is a new set of uncomfortably disheveled but relatively routine looking things that lead you through a door and into a room where something obviously blasphemous went down.

But it’s really all sizzle that is hot when you’re in the moment but cools quickly. Besides some things falling off of shelves without warning, you’re never actually in danger in the haunted-feeling house of the first chapter. Though the second chapter’s complex heavily implies that there might be a sort of eldritch minotaur trapped in its watery labyrinth, you never get the displeasure of having to directly encounter one. I did a lot of running around and backtracking through the expansive sea base, and besides unlocking doors to get to new rooms, the building itself remained static, not really changing based on my actions or the progression of the plot, which definitely made it feel like I was treading water when trying to solve my way to the next big moment.

The other side of that coin, though, is that a lot of the solutions to the puzzles are hiding in plain sight, with the clever assessment of the clues you encounter and proper use of your tools being all you really need to find answers. It made me feel like a genius when I skipped from point A to point C in a logic path because I came to my own conclusions that let me skip B entirely (or simply got lucky and found a vital piece of a puzzle early). It also made me feel like a real dunce when I would continually miss the solution despite very clear clues that might as well have been neon signs pointing to it. The puzzles themselves aren’t tough, nothing more than just pattern recognition or just good old fashioned problem solving. The Witness, this is not.

Path of Least Resistance

The Cosmic Abyss does create a bit of friction by tempting the players themselves to take shortcuts at the risk of their sanity. Corruption is introduced in chapter two, and wracks your brain anytime you come into contact with some real evil juju, limiting Key’s abilities and possibly having more adverse effects that are unclear in the scope of this demo. The miners under the sea found a mysterious altar, and now they’re all missing. You can follow their footsteps to see how they activated this demonic device, but participating in the same ritual that vanished the people you were down here to find seems like a terrible idea, doesn’t it? Trying to find a relatively safe alternative to that requires taking the deductive reasoning version of the long way seemed the more sensible alternative, which meant me frustratingly spending a lot of time poking every object I could to figure out what I was missing, the lure of just trading my sanity for the quick and easy solution always hanging above me. In this limited demo, taking corruption seemed largely harmless, but as you move from chapter to chapter, carrying the mental scars of your past mistakes with you, I can see how this could hang over you like a long, Cthulhu face tentacle of Damocles.

My biggest fear for Cthulhu: The Cosmic Abyss was assuaged pretty early – this game does a great job setting Lovecraft’s well-worn mythos in a time and place that feels unique among its many, many contemporaries. It also leans into problem solving in a way maybe other games like it don’t, focusing more on the finding out parts of diligent detective work than the effing around parts of attempting to gun fight a bog monster. And though the puzzles you’ll encounter throughout tend to balance feeling rewarding to solve while being approachable, the tense and slow-burning pace is great for the process of discovery but doesn’t pay off the patience with many scares or really any pushback at all from anything that isn’t a puzzle. That said, I’ve only seen the tip of what it has to offer, so it’s hard to speak to how these elements evolve as you get closer to the real deal monsters, and how systems like Key’s upgrades and clever Sonar expand without playing more, which we will all have the chance to do when Cthulhu: The Cosmic Abyss releases on April 16th.