Mind-bending puzzle metroidvania Animal Well just released yesterday, and already a community of players is tearing the game apart to find its many, many, many, many secrets. Right now, that includes a ridiculously complicated puzzle that requires at least 50 different people to participate. And just one day after launch, the community is on the cusp of completing it.

Warning: Massive spoilers for Animal Well’s “third layer” of secrets follow! If you want to get into its multi-tiered puzzle layers yourself, please shift into reverse and come back later! Read our spoiler-free review instead!

Animal Well effectively contains a three-tiered secret hunt of sorts. The first tier just involves collecting four flames and seeing the credits roll, while the second is a very literal Easter egg hunt. The third, which many players may never discover, is about collecting rabbits hidden in increasingly esoteric ways. While reviewing the game, the small Discord community of reviewers I was in managed to find a total of 12 rabbits collectively in two weeks, and we suspect there are at least 20. In the first 24 hours since the game has been out, the community has handlily pushed that total to 14, and seems to be on the cusp of working together as a group to achieve bunny 15 by participating in a bonkers group puzzle.

Early on in the game, players will pass a massive, 40×10 mural of a pixelated rabbit mid-hop. At first, it seems like this mural is just decoration, but once you enter the late-game rabbit hunt, it becomes increasingly suspicious. Poking around further in the same room reveals a control panel that lets players manipulate the mural’s tiles, and digging even deeper will give players access to a 4×4 grid of tiles similar to the ones on the rabbit mural. But taken alone, it’s not clear what the solution to this is or how the 4×4 grid factors into the big rabbit.

Upcoming 2D roguelite The Rogue Prince of Persia has been delayed from its May 14, 2024 release date to avoid competition with Hades 2, which was released into Steam Early Access on May 6.

Developer Evil Empire announced the delay on X/Twitter but assured it wouldn’t push the game too far. Though it won’t reveal an exact release date until May 13, Evil Empire said it would still be in May 2024.

“Seeing as everyone and their mum is playing [Hades 2] (including out entire team and their mums), we have decided to let people have their fun with it before we release The Rogue Prince of Persia,” the developer said.

“While we have every confidence in The Rogue Prince of Persia, it’s not every day that a game in the same genre as you, which is one of the most anticipated upcoming games of 2024, will release into Early Access a week before you plan to do the same.

“We are not prideful enough to ignore the implications of that, and we truly believe that this short delay is the best decision for us and our Early Access journey.”

Evil Empire said it would keep polishing the game in the meantime by adding “more cool things” and removing bugs, but said it understands the delay is still frustrating. “We can only hold our hands up, apologise, and hope you understand,” the developer said. “It will be worth the wait.”

Hades 2 is certainly proving popular on Steam despite only being in Early Access, having doubled the original game’s concurrent player count in a single day. As a sequel to the critically acclaimed Greek mythology themed roguelite, Hades 2 returns players to that world as they meet legendary figures like Odysseus, Nemesis, and Dora through a blend of storytelling, action gameplay, and dungeon crawling.

Ryan Dinsdale is an IGN freelance reporter. He’ll talk about The Witcher all day.

God of War: Ragnarok is the next PlayStation exclusive to launch on PC, according to a fresh report.

Reliable PlayStation Store leaker billbil-kun, writing for Dealabs, claimed Sony Santa Monica’s hugely popular action game will soon land on PC, although they failed to offer a release date. An announcement, billbil-kun said, is set for sometime in May.

God of War: Ragnarok launched on PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5 in November 2022 and was a monster hit with critics and players. It became the fastest-selling first-party game in PlayStation history, shifting 5.1 million units in its first week. As of November 2023, God of War: Ragnarok had sold over 15 million copies. Last year’s Valhalla DLC was equally well-received. A PC release this fall would come two years after the game’s console debut.

Sony has form when it comes to launching its games on PC, with Guerrilla’s Horizon Forbidden West, Insomniac’s Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart, and Naughty Dog’s The Last of Us Part 1 all launching on Steam in recent years. Sucker Punch’s Ghost of Tsushima launches on PC on May 16 having launched on PS4 in July 2020.

This is all part of Sony’s increasing push to make more of its PlayStation games by releasing them on PC also, but it has so-far resisted the temptation to follow in Microsoft’s footsteps by launching its console exclusives on PC at the same time. There have been a handful of exceptions, however. This year’s smash hit shooter Helldivers 2 launched on PC and PS5 with cross-play, but it’s worth noting that Arrowhead’s game revolves around co-op and live service, as opposed to single-player story.

Sony is yet to comment on the latest report, but rumors are swirling that it is set to host a State of Play broadcast in May.

Wesley is the UK News Editor for IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.

The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim is a sprawling role-playing game that usually requires hundreds of hours of gameplay before players can reach Level 80 and fight the infamous Ebony Warrior, but one player has condensed all that down to less than 10 minutes.

Speedrunner and YouTuber nucular uploaded his record-breaking Skyrim Ebony Warrior speedrun (which can also be viewed below) where he defeated the foe, which only appears at Level 80, in just nine minutes and 55 seconds. How the heck? Well, it’s complicated.

Speaking to IGN, nucular broke down his extensive strategies and reason for doing so, explaining the run was conceptualised by legendary Skyrim speedrunner Waz, who held the previous world record of 14 minutes and 27 seconds.

But the methods used by Waz could be improved upon, nucular said, as they used an outdated version of something called the Restoration Loop, Skyrim’s best-known method of gaining a bunch of levels really fast.

Restoration Loopy

The Restoration Loop works by drinking several Fortify Restoration potions in order from weakest to strongest, which multiplies their effectiveness exponentially. Items with a Fortify enchantment then get a serious buff due to Fortify being classed as a Restoration effect.

“By crafting and drinking a Fortify Restoration potion, re-equipping your Fortify Alchemy gear, and repeating, your Alchemy and Restoration effect multipliers will buff each other in a positive feedback loop until you can make extremely powerful potions,” nucular explained.

“This will give you an extreme amount of XP; enough to instantly raise your Alchemy from 15 to 100, so you can then reset it to 15, allowing it to be raised again.” Myriad items and gold are required to make these potions, of course, but a couple of simple vendor glitches allow these to be acquired easily.

Levelling in Skyrim is based on these skill increases, and once maxed out skills can be reset to gain experience from them again. Level 80 can therefore easily be attained using this method of gaining and resetting levels, but moving through the myriad animations required to do so can slow things down considerably (in the context of speedruns).

It’s this element that nucular focused on when he set out to beat Waz’s time. “All of the techniques in Waz’s run are essentially standard practice in Skyrim speedruns,” he said. “Since the run had no major mistakes, I needed to get creative if I wanted to beat it.”

But nucular detected two shortcomings in the strategy. “First, his Fortify Restoration loop could’ve been made faster simply by making more than one potion each time he used the alchemy lab,” he said. “It’s not entirely necessary to re-equip the Fortify Alchemy gear every time you craft a potion, and doing so would require duplicating the ingredients only one or two more times while greatly reducing the number of times Waz needed to go through the slow animation of entering and exiting the alchemy lab.

“Second, as soon as he was able to make extremely strong potions there were faster ways he could use that to power level some skill other than Alchemy. Some others pointed out that he could make a batch of extremely valuable potions at once and sell them individually to repeatedly increase the Speech skill to 100.”

Superstacking

The 14-minute run still required a lot of time, effort, and practice, of course, so no-one attempted to beat it themselves. But nucular’s attention was grabbed when YouTuber Sickliff outlined a technique dubbed “Superstacking”, which was claimed to be “an easier Restoration loop.”

Superstacking has players repeatedly click an enchanted item in their inventory to stack its enchantment effects, meaning if, for example, a Fortify Health +40 Ring was clicked 100 times, the player would gain 4,000 health.

“This sounds extremely useful, and can potentially be used to significantly speed up the Fortify Restoration loop by reducing the number of alchemy cycles, but it has some hefty requirements,” nucular said.

Xbox president Sarah Bond has indicated Microsoft will launch 2024’s Call of Duty game straight into Game Pass.

Earlier this week, The Verge reported that Microsoft was still debating whether to release this year’s Call of Duty, reportedly a Black Ops game set in the Gulf War, day-one on its subscription service. The same report claimed Microsoft is mulling a Game Pass price hike, too.

Microsoft has faced tough questions around the potential cannibalization effect of Game Pass, particularly on games that launch on the service day-one. While Xbox executives have insisted sales can be boosted by a game’s presence on Game Pass, some publishers remain unconvinced. Unlike Microsoft, console rival Sony does not release its new exclusives straight into its subscription service.

Call of Duty, of course, is another matter entirely. Having splashed out $69 billion on Activision Blizzard, Microsoft’s gaming business is reportedly under increased financial scrutiny. This is one of the factors cited in reports surrounding Microsoft’s shock decision to shutter Hi-Fi Rush developer Tango Gameworks and Redfall studio Arkane Austin.

Will Microsoft risk negatively impacting Call of Duty sales by releasing the game day-one on Game Pass, or risk upsetting Game Pass subscribers by failing to do so? Speaking in an interview with Bloomberg’s Dina Bass at Bloomberg Tech in San Francisco, Xbox president Sarah Bond strongly suggested Microsoft has decided to bite the bullet and release Call of Duty 2024 straight into its subscription service. While she failed to namecheck Call of Duty, Bond said all Xbox games will release day-one on Game Pass.

“We know our core users love Game Pass,” Bond said. “Game Pass is a gaming subscription. You get a whole portfolio of games, but importantly, you get every single one of our games that we build day-one in Game Pass, and the quality and the breadth of those games has only been going up over time. You’re going to see some more really big games going into Game Pass later this year.

Bond was then asked if this included Activision games. “Across the whole slate,” Bond replied. “You’re going to see some really amazing things. And keeping that as something that is really special for Xbox players is central for us.”

That’s a clear sign that Call of Duty 2024 is a day-one Game Pass title, but of course it will also launch across Xbox, PlayStation, and PC as a game that can be bought outright, too.

With Game Pass subscriber numbers failing to grow meaningfully Microsoft is under pressure to attract new customers, and adding a mainline Call of Duty game at launch will no doubt help with that. But Microsoft is also under increasing pressure to reverse its gaming fortunes amid collapsing console sales and increased development costs. Selling video games, especially those at full price, will surely help with that.

Microsoft is set to hold an Xbox showcase event in June, where it will reveal this year’s Call of Duty and, reports indicate, announce the arrival of the Call of Duty back catalog in Game Pass.

Wesley is the UK News Editor for IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.