Against the overbearing weight of modernity, Old School RuneScape continues to complete a Sisyphean task of simply existing two and a half decades after it originally launched. It just celebrated that 25th anniversary at the start of the year in fact, and now during a Winter Summit a slew of updates coming to the MMO were shown off in a roadmap from developer Jagex.
Actress Eman Ayaz has said she’s lost three years of work in a “life-changing role,” just days after Ubisoft canceled its long-awaited Prince of Persia: Sands of Time Remake.
“So hi, my name is Eman, I’m an actor, and last week I experienced the most devastating moment of my career,” Ayaz said in a video message posted online today. “I’m still under NDA so I’m going to try my best to speak as vaguely as possible about the details, and I hope you understand.”
At no point does Ayaz specifically say the game she worked on was Prince of Persia: Sands of Time Remake, but the actress has also retweeted comments from those who have linked her to the role of Farah in the game, seemingly making the connection clear.
The most devastating moment of my acting career: https://t.co/ZzbWftGL1t
— Eman Ayaz (@emanayazz) January 26, 2026
“Three years ago I booked a life-changing role on a life-changing project,” Ayaz began. “It was a rigorous audition process, including a self-tape audition, an in-person callback, and a chemistry read that I had to fly out of the city for. When I got the role I remember crying my eyes out.
“I’ve spent the last three years getting to know the team which has become like a family to me. I’ve watched it grow through countless stages of development and I’ve waited and waited for it to finally be released so I could talk about it. And this week, I found out through the internet that the project was canceled.”
Ayaz says she was first contacted by her brother who had seen the news of the game’s cancelation via an online article. Ubisoft confirmed it had canned its Prince of Persia: The Sans of Time Remake last week, as part of a wider reorganization that featured layoffs at three development studios, the closure of two more, and the shutdown of five other game projects.
“I was in total shock,” Ayaz continued. “Just two months ago I filmed marketing for this project, everything had been running smoothly and that was the last I had heard. We were all looking forward to it being released this year, so it felt like an emotional whiplash to suddenly find this out in such a random way.”
Indeed, a report late last year suggested Ubisoft’s Prince of Persia: Sands of Time Remake was finally just a few months away, after first being announced in 2020. The project was then rebooted, with its most recent incarnation having been in development since early 2023.
“When I initially booked this role, what it said to me was that all the sacrifices I had made, going against my parents’ advice, pursuing my dreams, all the heartbreaks I’d had along the way, all the close calls, all the rejections, they finally had added up to something,” Ayaz added, discussing the personal toll the cancelation had taken.
Ayaz said she’d turned down other job oppurtunities during the process and worked on the job while recovering from an injury as she had been passionate about not missing out. “It was the best performance of my career, and now no one will ever see it.”
A Canadian citizen, Ayaz said she had planned to apply for a U.S. work visa based on having the game on her CV, something she can no longer do as she is unable to officially acknowledge her work on it. And as someone with Pakistani heritage, Ayaz said the cancelation had been yet another setback after working “twice as hard as non-marginalized actors to find space in the industry.” She added: “It’s an upward battle and it’s going to continue to be that way. It’s like you think you had your foot on a ledge, and it’s crumbled. And you have to start again, and it’s just as steep.”
For its part, Ubisoft told Prince of Persia fans that despite six years of work, the game was still too far away from being ready to fund any further. “We weren’t able to reach the level of quality you deserve,” the company said in a statement, “and continuing would have required more time and investment than we could responsibly commit.”
“Sadly the entertainment industry isn’t just about entertainment,” Ayaz concluded, “it’s about guaranteeing a cash flow. And that means making decisions that treat people’s lives as collateral damage, and art as disposable content… This project existed, even if the world never got to see it. So many talented artists devoted countless hours to make this happen. And that doesn’t just disappear, it’ll be in our hearts forever, as fricking corny as that sounds… The only way these stories survive is if the audience demands them.”
Tom Phillips is IGN’s News Editor. You can reach Tom at tom_phillips@ign.com or find him on Bluesky @tomphillipseg.bsky.social
Back in 2022, Winnie The Pooh entered the public domain in the USA, meaning that any denizen of that nation can publish work featuring the OG incarnation of A.A. Milne’s honey-supping woodland bear (the UK copyright expires in 2027). At some point in the future, once the newly founded Poohlike genre has matured, we can surely expect a renaissance of Winnie derivatives, ranging from erasure Pooh-ems through josei anime interpretations to Kaufman-ass Hundred Acre existentialism. Right now, though, it’s mostly about horror, because the logical thing to do when the lawyers finally abandon a beloved children’s character is break out the chainsaws.
The movie folk have already given us Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey and its sequel, both apparently dreadful in a bad way. Now here comes Steven H. Videogames with Winnie’s Hole, out in early access today. In this roguelite from Twice Different, the nectar-chugging teddy has become a rambling cosmic abomination, and your job is to mutate his insides using tetrominoes. Oh botherlyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn.
In certain parts of the world.
Yesterday, Nintendo finally gave us our first look at Yoshi in The Super Mario Galaxy Movie, thanks to a Nintendo Direct and a brand new trailer. And while Yoshi — and some other Mario series cameos — stole the spotlight, there’s one piece of additional news that fans in certain countries can get excited about.
The Super Mario Bros. Movie is coming out on 1st April 2026, two days earlier in the US “and many additional markets globally”. The new date was shown at the end of the trailer yesterday, with Nintendo confirming the news online.
Read the full article on nintendolife.com
The long-running Resident Evil series contains multitudes. At times it’s been about quiet menace, carefully weighing when to use each of the handful of bullets in your pocket as you try to explore and solve puzzles while avoiding terrifying and often unkillable monsters. At other times it’s been about kicking ass, tearing through hordes of zombies with grenades and shotguns. Resident Evil Requiem, the ninth mainline entry, dares to ask: why not both?
Requiem pulls off this feat of being two games in one with dual protagonists: series newcomer FBI analyst Grace Ashcroft for the classic survival horror and recurring lead and one-man army Leon Kennedy for the action. I recently played a demo that gave me a taste of both — three hours from the beginning of the game, with a lengthy Grace section bookended by bursts of Leon-fueled frenzy.
By default, you play in a first-person perspective with Grace and third-person with Leon. This nicely reflects the different levels of situational awareness between a timid desk analyst and a battle-hardened field operative, and helps Grace’s sections feel appropriately scarier, but you are free to toggle the perspective for either character at any time from the menu, which is a nice accessibility touch (and, again, a way for Resident Evil’s developers to play with the series’ history of switching between the two).
Both characters show up in Raccoon City’s creepy old hospital on their respective investigations and briefly meet before being separated in different parts of the building to continue alone.
Suffice it to say: Grace Ashcroft is having a really bad time.
Amid all the horrors on show, the thing that stood out to me the most about my time as Grace was her ragged breathing. More a proxy for the player than a power fantasy, Grace is terrified to be in the hospital, and not qualified for this. Even in her default first-person, Grace’s timid character is present at all times through her panicked breathing and muttering.
In classic Resident Evil fashion, my time with Grace was spent searching through different wings of the hospital to solve puzzles and collect sun, moon, and star keys in order to unlock the main door out. Healing herbs, bullets, and limited-use melee weapons (as well as inventory slots) were all scarce, so I had to be mindful of when I used them, lest I end up in a bind with no options. She eventually unlocked crafting, allowing me to be even more strategic with my finite resources.
The zombies shambling the halls weren’t fully mindless, with their locations and actions showing that they still retained some imprint of their former lives, performing a hollow pantomime of their duties as doctors, nurses, janitors, etc. Some of them seemed sensitive to light, creating an opportunity for me to turn on a nearby light switch to draw one out of a narrow hallway he’d been blocking to turn it off, allowing me to sneak by.
There was also a hulking chef lumbering through the kitchen and surrounding hallways, looking for meat. At worst, bullets seemed to just annoy him, so the only real thing to do was stay out of his way. Unlike previous games with unkillable threats like Mr. X or Nemesis being more omnipresent throughout the game, Requiem seems to have a variety of more localized horrors. I first encountered — and had to sneak past — the chef in his own kitchen, and once I’d advanced further and opened a nearby shortcut, he was roaming a wider radius, but I never found him outside the general vicinity of where he started.
My colleague Joe described a different, nurse-like monster in Summer Game Fest demo of another section that I never saw, and then across the lobby in the medical wing I encountered yet another unkillable threat: a monstrously fat zombie with the proportions of a giant baby that jump-scared me by obliterating a door frame right next to me as I picked up a key item before crawling after me, smashing through the building around it and cussing up a storm about how hungry it is. It fully took up whatever hallway it was in, forcing me to reroute around it as I continued to navigate that wing.
In my time with Grace, the point was made very clear: approach all of this with caution, because brains will trump your limited brawn. The instances when I tried to brute force my way through a problem in this section — just shooting or shoving my way past everyone — were when my efforts were most frustrated. It rewarded observation and punished impatience.
Leon, on the other hand, is here to chew bubble gum and kick ass, etc.
Resident Evil’s resident himbo is back, and where Grace spends her time in frightened lurking, he’s all roundhouse kicks and quips. “I think I want a second opinion,” he says dryly after slaughtering a room full of zombie medical staff that swarm him at the start of my session. As if to emphasize the over-the-top tone, the doctor had a chainsaw for some reason, which I naturally took and turned on them.
Leon’s sections feature way more enemies, because he’s way more capable of handling them. In addition to more plentiful guns, bullets and powerful kicks, Leon has a hatchet that, unlike Grace’s breakable knives, only dulls with use, and he can resharpen it at any time. When exploring areas that I’d already been through as Grace, I could use that hatchet to pry open cabinets, which typically seemed to be stuffed with ammo.
Beyond just reframing previous areas by returning as Leon, what’s unkillable by Grace isn’t necessarily beyond Leon’s capabilities. “Sorry, but I’m not on the menu,” he smugly told one previously impervious hungry monster, after blasting it to death with a shotgun. It’s a common trope to encounter a boss earlier on in a game and be unable to defeat them, but here it’s nicely used to contrast the characters’ capabilities, giving a sense of cathartic revenge to Leon bullying something that had seemed so impossibly dangerous to Grace.
Leon’s sections were charmingly big, loud, and dumb, and a relieving change of pace from my tense exploration as Grace. The balance between two distinct tones and modes of play worked well in the limited context of the demo, each enhancing the other by contrast, and I’m excited to see how it pans out over the whole game. The Resident Evil series has ranged widely over the last 30 years, and Requiem’s developers have managed the impressive feat of a sequel that embraces all of it.
Resident Evil Requiem shambles onto Xbox Series X|S and Xbox on PC on February 27.
CAPCOM CO., LTD.
– This content may be made available at a later date.
– This costume will change Grace’s appearance only.
Resident Evil Requiem Deluxe Edition. Includes the full game and the Deluxe Kit. A must have for true survivors.
The Deluxe Kit contains the following content:
– Grace’s Costume: Dimitrescu
– Grace’s Costume: Film Noir
– Leon’s Costume: RE4
– Leon’s Costume: Apocalypse
– Leon’s Costume: Film Noir
– Screen Filter: Apocalypse
– Screen Filter: Film Noir
– Four weapon skins including S&S M232 Weapon Skin: Apocalypse
– Mr. Raccoon Charm
– DSO Emblem Charm
– Audio Pack: Raccoon City Classic
– Files: Letters from 1998
A new era of survival horror arrives with Resident Evil Requiem, the latest and most immersive entry yet in the iconic Resident Evil series. Experience terrifying survival horror with FBI analyst Grace Ashcroft, and dive into pulse-pounding action with legendary agent Leon S. Kennedy. Both of their journeys and unique gameplay styles intertwine into a heart-stopping, emotional experience that will chill you to your core.
*The items in this set can be purchased individually. Please be careful not to purchase the same item twice.
CAPCOM CO., LTD.
– This content may be made available at a later date.
– This costume will change Grace’s appearance only.
A new era of survival horror arrives with Resident Evil Requiem, the latest and most immersive entry yet in the iconic Resident Evil series. Experience terrifying survival horror with FBI analyst Grace Ashcroft, and dive into pulse-pounding action with legendary agent Leon S. Kennedy. Both of their journeys and unique gameplay styles intertwine into a heart-stopping, emotional experience that will chill you to your core.
*There are other bundles that include this product. Please be careful of duplicate purchases.
The post Resident Evil Requiem is Two Games in One (and a Lot of Fun) appeared first on Xbox Wire.
Another Nintendo Direct is coming this Thursday, January 29, dedicated to the company’s upcoming social sim game Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream.
Coming just days after a Nintendo Direct focused on The Super Mario Galaxy Movie which debuted our first look at Yoshi, Birdo and more, the next scheduled broadcast from the company will instead return to its games.
You’ll be able to tune in for more details on the Nintendo Switch and Switch 2 life sim game this Thursday at 6am Pacific, 9am Eastern or 2pm UK time. The stream is set to run around 20 minutes.
Living the Dream will be the third game in Nintendo’s Tomodachi Life franchise, which lets you oversee a community of Mii characters. While a relatively niche series in the West compared to its bigger brands, Tomodachi Life enjoys a strong following among its fans, and particularly so in Japan.
Now, the franchise will be getting its first dedicated Nintendo Direct, similar to how Kirby Air Riders was treated to its own presentation (and then a second!) last year.
The series’ first game, Tomodachi Collection, launched in 2009 for Nintendo DS (albeit only in Japan). Its 3DS sequel, Tomodachi Life, was then released worldwide and went on to sell a very respectable 6.72 million units.
Memorably, Tomodachi Life experienced a backlash over its lack of same-sex relationships, something that Nintendo found itself having to comment on after rumors spread online that they were something that had been originally programmed into the game that was later removed. Nintendo denied this, though not before the controversy blew up to the point that it was parodied on late night TV by John Oliver, via a skit which featured crudely animated versions of Mario and Link snogging. Notably, Nintendo then promised that if it did make another Tomodachi Life game, it would make it “more inclusive, and [something that] better represents all players.”
While the status of same-sex relationships is yet to be confirmed (though may be this week), Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream is already notable for finally allowing Mii characters to have ears. It only took 20 years.
Tom Phillips is IGN’s News Editor. You can reach Tom at tom_phillips@ign.com or find him on Bluesky @tomphillipseg.bsky.social
Surprise! It looks like a 30th Anniversary Edition of Rayman is on the way.
Though not formally confirmed by Ubisoft, the unannounced game has popped up on the Australian Classification website, and it’s apparently coming to both Nintendo Switch and PlayStation 5.
While the franchise is owned by Ubisoft, both the developer and publisher are listed as Atari, which has previously distributed physical editions of games and remakes. Sadly, the listing gives us very little detail on what to expect aside from confirmation that it has “very mild” violence (thanks, Gematsu).
We already knew that Ubisoft was set to celebrate all things Rayman as it got ready to mark the series’ 30th anniversary, promising last September that it was working on the “future” of the series. Though the official Rayman X/Twitter account had long been dormant, only resurfacing a handful of times in 2020, then once in 2021, in September it was resurrected to bring us up to speed on what’s happening in Rayman’s world.
“Rayman turns 30! Join us on our official channels to celebrate an incredible legacy,” the account exclaimed at the time, attaching a brief video. In the video, brand producer Loic Gounon — who has been working on the Rayman franchise since 2006 — revealed that “a very talented team at Ubisoft Montpellier and Ubisoft Milan are currently working together on the future of Rayman.”
We haven’t had a mainline Rayman game since 2013’s Rayman Legends. “Don’t expect news from us too soon,” Ubisoft said, “but rest assured, Rayman is in good hands.” Despite all the recent changes and cancellations at IP holder Ubisoft, including that Prince of Persia: Sands of Time Remake, Rayman appears to have survived the cull.
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.
Debuting at The Game Awards 2025 with an end-of-show reveal trailer, Highguard is a new free-to-play PvP raid shooter hailing from some of the creators of Respawn’s Apex Legends and Titanfall.
Though we’ve heard very little since, Highguard reemerged last week with the promise of a launch showcase that confirmed the January 26, 2026 release date. The showcase will offer a “full gameplay deep dive, year one plans, and much more.”
In Highguard, players will “ride, fight, and raid as Wardens, arcane gunslingers sent to fight for control of a mythic continent,” although it has suffered from a degree of negativity online since that The Game Awards reveal.
Highguard is set to launch across PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X and S. Confirmation of its release time comes from SteamDB, which of course relates only to the global Steam launch, but it is likely Highguard will go live simultaneously across all platforms.
Depending on where you are in the world, Highguard is set to go live on:
PST (San Francisco):
CST (Austin, Mexico City):
EST (New York):
GMT (London):
CET (Paris):
JST (Tokyo):
CST (Beijing):
AEST (Sydney):
NZST (Wellington):
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.
Baldur’s Gate 3‘s shift from early access to full release came with heap of tweaks and changes as Larian finalised their huge RPG. Naturally, this meant certain bits or plans not making it into the final cut, and if you’ve come to long for any of those after playing them initially or hearing about them, then odds are a new mod is right up your alley. It’s also really cool if you, you know, just want more BG3.
Not bad!
Koei Tecmo has confirmed that Hyrule Warriors: Age of Imprisonment has now surpassed 1 million copies sold.
This comes via key financial data (thanks, RPG Site) in which Age of Imprisonment is listed with a note stating ‘Over 1 million copies sold worldwide’ when translated. Seems pretty clear to us!
Read the full article on nintendolife.com
