A GameStop listing for Resident Evil Requiem has stated that the game’s Deluxe Edition will include costumes for a shock second character — and no, it’s not who you might think.
Over the past year, the internet has been waiting for Capcom to confirm that Resident Evil hero Leon S. Kennedy is in Resident Evil Requiem as a second playable character. There have been rumors, there have been AI image leaks, and there have been increasingly cryptic teases from Capcom itself.
And it’s against this backdrop that fans have been left stunned, as GameStop’s Resident Evil Requiem Deluxe Edition listing has gone live and mentioned exclusive content for… Rosemary Winters.
Rosmary Winters?! The daughter of Resident Evil 7 and Village protagonist Ethan Winters, Rosemary initially appears in the latter game as a baby, though has a starring role in that game’s Shadows of Rose expansion, set in the future when she is a teenager.
Her inclusion here, if GameStop’s listing is indeed to be believed, is a huge curveball for Resident Evil fans — as Requiem has so far been pitched as an entry that ties the series back to its roots in Raccoon City. Indeed, Capcom has even said that it wanted the game to tie up older plot threads (such has what happened to Umbrella) rather than focus on characters from more recent games. But perhaps it sees Rosemary as an opportunity to close off those, too.
GameSpot seems to have accidentally just posted more Deluxe Edition content for Resident Evil Requiem, which includes some spoilers, including Mercenaries Mode, Grace having a “FBI Visor” mechanic, & two planned story DLC for RE9. pic.twitter.com/7HoZbqTUzp
— AestheticGamer aka Dusk Golem (@AestheticGamer1) December 7, 2025
GameStop’s listing states the Deluxe Edition includes a “‘Morphic Visor’ cosmetic filter for Rose’s visor” and the “Shadow Walker’ costume pack: 3 exclusive outfits for Rosemary Winters.” There’s also mention of two additional story scenarious and a “major” Mercenaries mode update, included in an expansion pass. None of this content is officially announced.
The listing has come as such a surprise to fans that there is some skepticism over its legitimacy — even as it sits on the website of GameStop, one of the world’s biggest video game retailers. Fan speculation has run the gamut here — that the retailer has been hacked, or the entry updated by a rogue employee just to watch fans react as they are now doing. Or, alternatively, it’s real — and an accident, or even yet another canny piece of marketing from the chain.
And as for Leon? Well, there’s certainly no sign in GameStop’s listing. What does this mean for his inclusion? Well, if GameStop’s listing is accurate, simply that he’s not a part of the Deluxe Edition content.
Whatever’s going on, all eyes will be on Resident Evil Requiem’s appearance at The Game Awards later this week, where Capcom is expected to tease fans with more on the game, now just a few months from launch. Will we see Leon? Will we see Rose? IGN will be reporting live — and in the meantime, we’ve contacted GameStop for comment.
Tom Phillips is IGN’s News Editor. You can reach Tom at tom_phillips@ign.com or find him on Bluesky @tomphillipseg.bsky.social
Katsuhiro Harada has announced his departure from Bandai Namco having worked on the Tekken series for 30 years.
The 55-year-old Japanese video game developer legend, who worked on all the Tekken games right up until last year’s Tekken 8, said in a statement posted to social media that the loss of close friends in his personal life and the retirement or death of senior colleagues had caused him to reflect on the time he has left as a creator. Advice from Ken Kutaragi — the “father of PlayStation” — supported Harada in making the decision, he said. Harada failed to reveal what he plans to do next, but he did not say he was retiring.
Harada has had a somewhat frought relationship with the Tekken series and indeed Bandai Namco in recent years, and has spoken openly about the development difficulties he’s endured while at the company. Most recently, Tekken 8 has caused a great deal of friction between players and the development team, and Harada has stepped in multiple times on social media to address fan concern.
Perhaps the most high-profile example of this came in October last year, when Harada addressed a row over the sale of a premium DLC stage for Tekken 8 after fans accused Bandai Namco of “corporate greed.” His explanation for the DLC stage basically came down to his role on Tekken within Bandai Namco, and his separation from the business side of the operation to focus on development. This structural set-up was a mistake, Harada admitted in a tweet he eventually deleted, and he confirmed plans to reorganize not only the Tekken business but his role within it to ensure community expectations were met in the future.
Here’s what Harada said, at the time:
The Tekken project is divided into two companies: a game development studio and a publisher that is responsible for game sales (at the time of the development and release of Tekken 7, the development and publishing companies were not separate).
As some of you may know, I moved to the Development Studio side a few years ago, and have been focusing on maximizing the quality of the content/tech/graphics etc…
The development side and publishing side each have their own roles, and there are differences in the way they think and the responsibilities, I who should be the one to act as a bridge between the two, have not been able to properly participate in the publishing (sales) decision-making process for Tekken. As a result, I think that there were parts of the process that did not take the Tekken community’s opinion into account.
I think I failed to create an organizational structure that would allow me to oversee things beyond my own position.
One of my roles was to listen to the opinions of the community and reflect them not only in the content but also in the out-game, but I was clearly becoming passive, worrying about the relationships between companies and not exercising my role.
From now on, I will review this structure and change it to one that values the community as it did in the past.
I’d like to share that I’ll be leaving Bandai Namco at the end of 2025.
With the TEKKEN series reaching its 30th anniversary—an important milestone for a project I’ve devoted much of my life to—I felt this was the most fitting moment to bring one chapter to a close.
My roots lie in the days when I supported small local tournaments in Japanese arcades and in small halls and community centers overseas.
I still remember carrying arcade cabinets by myself, encouraging people to “Please try TEKKEN,” and directly facing the players right in front of me.
The conversations and atmosphere we shared in those places became the core of who I am as a developer and game creator.
Even as the times changed, those experiences have remained at the center of my identity.
And even after the tournament scene grew much larger, many of you continued to treat me like an old friend—challenging me at venues, inviting me out for drinks at bars.
Those memories are also deeply precious to me.
In recent years, I experienced the loss of several close friends in my personal life, and in my professional life I witnessed the retirement or passing of many senior colleagues whom I deeply respect.
Those accumulated events made me reflect on the “time I have left as a creator.”
During that period, I sought advice from Ken Kutaragi—whom I respect as though he were another father—and received invaluable encouragement and guidance.
His words quietly supported me in making this decision.
Over the past four to five years, I’ve gradually handed over all of my responsibilities, as well as the stories and worldbuilding I oversaw, to the team, bringing me to the present day.
Looking back, I was fortunate to work on an extraordinary variety of projects—VR titles (such as Summer Lesson), Pokkén Tournament, the SoulCalibur series, and many others, both inside and outside the company.
Each project was full of new discoveries and learning, and every one of them became an irreplaceable experience for me.
To everyone who has supported me, to communities around the world, and to all the colleagues who have walked alongside me for so many years, I offer my deepest gratitude.
I’ll share more about my next steps at a later date.
Thank you very much for everything.
Harada joined Namco (long before the acquisition that created the Bandai Namco we know today) in the early ’90s to work on Tekken’s arcade versions, which always launched first before console ports were released. He spent much of his time visiting Japanese arcades to check how Tekken was being played out in the wild, essentially living at the office.
At the time, Harada was a junior member of staff, but over the course of several years he worked his way up the chain to become the director of Tekken and the face of the franchise, attending community events while wearing his trademark sunglasses and making a fist — a reference to Tekken’s tagline, ‘The King of Iron Fist,’ — for photo opps.
1998’s Tekken 3, which is considered by many to be one of the greatest fighting games of all time, was the first Harada worked on as director and a smash hit, selling at least 8.36 million PlayStation copies worldwide. It became the PS1’s fifth best-selling game ever ahead of the likes of Tomb Raider, Metal Gear Solid, and Resident Evil 2.
Harada’s exit comes at a crossroads for Tekken. Tekken 8 sold 3 million copies a year from release, according to Bandai Namco, which said the game was selling at a faster pace than Tekken 7. But we haven’t had a sales update since January, and Bandai Namco has yet to announce new DLC characters for a potential Season 3. Will Bandai Namco release a Tekken 9 any time soon?
Photo by SIA KAMBOU/AFP via Getty Images.
Wesley is Director, News at IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.
Our picks for the best eShop games on Switch and Switch 2 in November!
At last, we’re almost at the end of 2025. Snow might be settling in where you are, temperature’s dropping — or perhaps you’re lucky to be reading from somewherein the southern hemisphere. But there’s one thing that remains the same wherever you’re reading from; it’s eShop Selects time once again!
Here we are once again, looking back at the last month of excellent releases. And it was a busy one in Switch 2 land, with two major Nintendo releases in Hyrule Warriors: Age of Imprisonment and Kirby Air Riders both launching. Did we get time to play much else?
“I’m waiting for an update, it’s impossible to play”.
Apart from Metroid Prime 4: Beyond, one other significant Switch 2 release this week was the third-party title Assassin’s Creed Shadows. While Ubisoft’s new feudal Japan outing has been mostly well-received by critics on Nintendo’s new hybrid platform, it seems the experience hasn’t been quite as enjoyable for some players.
Multiple message board posts and social media threads online are filled with player reports about the game randomly crashing. Some players have even experienced repeated crashes, forcing them to completely halt their play sessions until Ubisoft deploys a patch.
Hello reader who is also a reader! Today marks the sad and glorious return of Booked for the Week, our reliably irregular Sunday column in which games people talk about books. It’s sad because the original creator of this column, arch word baron Nic Reuben, is no longer full time at RPS. It’s glorious because this is one of the best columns I’ve ever read, and I’m delighted Nic has given permission to keep it rolling. He’s now got a Patreon, by the way.
Today’s advent calendar hails, in both setting and make, from the RPS homeland of the United Kingdom. Which means, like most of RPS, it’ll probably spend Christmas predominantly unconscious, driven into a coma by a combination of tiredness, pigs in blankets overreach, and acute exposure to King Charles. Best play it before then, eh.
It has been a particularly Metroid-packed week, and we’re keeping that Morph Ball rolling in the latest edition of Box Art Brawl.
Before we do that, however, let’s recap what happened last time. Celebrating the arrival of its Game Boy counterpart on NSO, we matched up three covers for Bionic Commando on the NES, and our favourite cover walked away with the win. The action-packed North American cover took the gold with 58% of the vote, Japan followed behind with 36% and Europe mopped up the remaining 6%.
Earlier this week, Nintendo released a new update for the Switch 2 launch title Mario Kart World, bumping the racer up to Version 1.4.0.
In case you missed it, this is a major update, including all sorts of adjustments, changes and improvements. One highlight, in particular, is tied to the game’s courses. As mentioned in the patch notes, the layout of select tracks has been changed for certain modes.
Brett Elston – Manager, Content Communications, SIE
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Kristen Zitani – Globlal Content Content Communications Manager, SIE
Thanks to Dormilón for our rad theme song and show music.
[Editor’s note: PSN game release dates are subject to change without notice. Game details are gathered from press releases from their individual publishers and/or ESRB rating descriptions.]
When you sit down with a game, you make a pact with it: you’ll push the buttons, and it will show you what happens when you do. A lot of games don’t really care to interrogate what that means, to use the physical realities of the medium to tell a story. Remember having to plug your controller into the second port of your PlayStation to fight Psycho Mantis? That’s rare. Instead, many of them are content to be films where you control the action. Rhythm Doctor is not one of those games.
In the eight or so hours I spent seeing its 1.0 version through to completion, Rhythm Doctor frustrated me, earned some laughs, made me tear up, and used this medium to tell a story in ways I’ve never seen a game do before. It is one of the most difficult rhythm games I’ve ever played, and one I couldn’t put down. Near the end, I felt like I might need a little rhythm therapy myself, a shock to the heart to keep me going. But I wanted to live in that world a little longer, listen to these songs a little more, spend a little more time with these characters. It was worth it. Rhythm Doctor drove me crazy, and I loved it.
In Rhythm Doctor, you are an intern assigned to Middlesea Hospital. You work remotely, so you sit behind a screen and watch what’s happening through the hospital’s cameras. The doctors and patients speak to you, but you cannot respond to them. Well, you can, but they can’t hear the intern. Like you as a player, the intern is part of this world but not of it. A participant, but not a resident. When you see yourself on screen, it is as a long arm hovering over a button. The patients sometimes jokingly call you Doctor Finger. It’s a brilliant bit of “player-as-character” that Rhythm Doctor makes the most of throughout its runtime. That this story features some absolutely gorgeous pixel art spritework is just a bonus.
The simple but extremely effective gimmick here is that Middlesea is experimenting with a new treatment that promotes healing by defibrillating patients’ hearts in time with their heartbeats. Your job is to press the button on the defibrillator in sync with the beat of their heart. That’s it. There is only one button. Press it every 7th beat in time with the patient’s heart. Line the beats up properly, and you’ll cure what ails them.
That might not sound hard, and it isn’t. At least at first. One, two, three, four, five, six, press is easy enough. But then you’ll get to polyrhythms, hemiolas, irregular time signatures, silent beats, the works. Again, all you have to do is press your button on every seventh beat. But it gets challenging quickly. I used to think I was good at rhythm games. I played Guitar Hero and Rock Band on Expert. I used to play a couple different instruments. After playing Rhythm Doctor, I no longer think that. Few games have challenged me like this did.
You’ll have to keep pace yourself, and overcoming initially brutal levels was a thrill.
Sometimes you’ll be treating multiple patients at once, each with their own rhythm, and you’ll have to keep track of them simultaneously. Some may drop in and drop out. The excellent songs their hearts are beating to will abruptly change pace. You may have to hit notes in rapid succession or hold them or match a tempo you’ll hear and then have to reproduce. There is a visual indicator here, but it’s not going to hold your hand or tell you exactly when to press your lone button. You’ll have to keep pace yourself, and overcoming initially brutal levels was a thrill.
Rhythm Doctor will help you out – most levels feature a dedicated tutorial teaching you new concepts, certain beats are often preceded by unique sound effects to let you know they’re coming, and a nice nurse will often call out timing changes with a “Get Set Go!” in time to the beat before the change occurs, but visual prompts are limited. There’s no “fit the note into this handy-dandy slot it’s barreling towards” in Rhythm Doctor. You have to keep time. I often found myself tapping my other hand against my thigh, silently counting to seven, or moving my head from side to side to keep time.
And you’ll need to, because Rhythm Doctor likes to mess with you, to use the idea that you’re a guy behind a screen pressing buttons to tell its story. If you’re treating a patient while a virus is messing with your connection, you’ll feel it. There will be static, the beat will be thrown off, and things will pop up or fade out. At one point, a bunch of pop-ups saying “DISTRACTION!” overwhelm your screen. As a player, it’s annoying, especially if you’re somewhat reliant on visual cues. As a storytelling conceit, it’s dynamite. Dealing with that would be difficult and irritating, especially at work! I could practically hear the virus mocking me; J.K. Simmons breathing in my ear. “Not quite my tempo.”
But that’s not the only time Rhythm Doctor pulls this trick. Sometimes, it will shrink your screen and bounce it around to the beat. Once, when Cole, a down on his luck musician with a caffeine addiction, rushes across the screen to get to Nicole, a barista at the hospital’s cafe who he’s grown fond of, the game window travels with him as you struggle to keep up via the hospital’s cameras, going entirely off your monitor before reappearing. Even the songs themselves tell a story: when a patient named Logan has trouble admitting his feelings for another named Hailey, their songs reflect it, and he often loses the beat during that level. As the two get closer across several songs, their heart rates grow closer in time. When he finally summons the courage to make it happen, the track resembles a duet at a Broadway show.
The songs here vary from showtunes to dubstep to techno and everything in-between, and each is used to tell a story like this. Every patient’s unique heart rhythm can and will show up in other tracks as they bond with one another, whether it’s a miner helping an injured baseball player rehab from an injury, an elderly couple at opposite ends of the hospital who long to see one another, or Cole and Nicole hash out their issues through song. In Rhythm Doctor, the music is part of the story. Each track moves the narrative forward, and gets to the heart of who these people are and how they feel about one another. You can treat a lot of things with medicine, but sometimes the only cure for a damaged heart is working through what caused it in the first place. I cared about these characters and their relationships, and I wanted to stick around.
That’s good, because you’ll probably have to. Rhythm Doctor holds you to a high standard. Cs may get you degrees, but you’ll need a B grade or better before you can move on to the next level. That can be a little frustrating if you get stuck, and I’m not ashamed to say I had to turn the difficulty down to clear some of the harder stages. Some even have “Night Shift” versions for an extra challenge and a bit more story, and there are several bonus levels to tackle as well, which are goofy and a lot of fun, like the one where a group of nurses pursues a limousine, kicking away projectiles the limo is hurling at them. Others are just chill vibes where you hang out with the characters.
I cared about these characters and their relationships, and I wanted to stick around.
Through it all, though, you’re reminded that while you’re part of this story, it’s not about you. Without spoilers, there’s a rather touching scene later on that you hear about but don’t witness because you’re busy helping another patient. Almost every other character is there, but you’re helping someone else, and the scene happens without you. You only hear the other characters react to it. On one level, it’s smart commentary on the limitations of being behind a screen and the role of the player; you’re not part of this world physically, not matter how badly you might want to be. Your job is to watch and press buttons. On another, it’s a reminder that no one recovery, no one part of the hospital, and no one patient, is less important than any other. It all matters. And there’s emotional resonance here. When one of Cole’s tracks says “Sometimes I’m angry I’m not doing better than I thought I’d do at this point,” I had to pause the game for a moment. I’ve been there. I understand that feeling. I understood that character, and all his flaws. And I admired his persistence in spite of it all.
Rhythm Doctor also features some shockingly relevant commentary on the state of healthcare and capitalism. As the program you’re part of gains traction, there’s pressure from the hospital’s administrator (and head doctor) to expand it, eventually resulting in layoffs to hospital staff and overworked doctors. After all, why have staff when you can have a miracle treatment an intern in their pajamas can perform from their laptop? You don’t need people, right? Just results. Rhythm Doctor ends about as perfectly as it can given all the plates it’s spinning, but it’s nice that it never pulls punches. Nothing is free; everything has a cost, and that cost might be other people.
If you need a break from the story, there’s also a comprehensive level editor to play with and community tracks to download. I’ll be honest with y’all; I’m not much of a level editor cat, but what I’ve played of the community tracks is genuinely impressive. Rhythm Doctor’s soundtrack is so good that I’ve listened to it in between sessions, but it’s great to see developer 7th Beat Games turn their baby over to the community and say “go nuts.” In a world obsessed with selling you something at every moment, editors like this feel increasingly rare, and I’m glad it’s here.
