Author: Game Infliction

See an Exclusive Excerpt of the Star Wars Outlaws Prequel Novel Low Red Moon

Random House Worlds is gearing up to release its latest Star Wars novel, author Mike Chen’s Star Wars Outlaws: Low Red Moon. You might assume the book showcases an earlier adventure in the life of goldhearted smuggler Kay Vess, but you’d be wrong. Instead, the book focuses on one of the most surprising figures in the game, Jaylen Vrax. The book explores how Jaylen met the fearsome bodyguard droid ND-5 and made his way through the ranks of the criminal underworld.

Ahead of its February 3 release, IGN can exclusively debut a preview of Star Wars Outlaws: Low Red Moon. This excerpt is set early in the book, just after Jaylen is rescued by ND-5 following an attack on his family’s compound. Check it out below:

“You killed them,” Jaylen said, adrenaline surging in him, helping him upward. He staggered to his feet, stiff pain in every muscle. “You killed them,” he repeated.

“I have already acknowledged that.”

Jaylen’s plan had worked. Which meant that it would have worked had Roisem and Nnytyl stopped arguing, stopped causing chaos so he could give the restraining bolt to A1-A1. He could have passed the hardware over, then come up with some distraction for the protocol droid to mount the restraining bolt.

But now, everyone was dead—because they just wouldn’t listen. And that notion burned Jaylen in a different way than when he thought about Sliro.

“No, you don’t understand. You killed them. They didn’t have to die. The Empire took everything from us. And now you’ve taken everything from me. Why? Why would you do this?”

ND-5 looked at Jaylen like he was asking for directions into town. “I executed orders according to my programming.”

“Oh, so that’s it? You’re just an assassin that kills whoever you tar get?” Jaylen threw a pointed finger at the droid, though doing so caused him to wince.

“Yes. That is how droids operate.”

Jaylen wanted to scream. If his body could support it, he probably would have. Some sort of primal release felt necessary at this point. In stead, he swayed on his feet, nausea rolling in his stomach. “What hap pens now?” he asked quietly. “I can barely move.”

“The shock wave struck you. I was able to protect you from only the shrapnel. The noise and pressure have likely given you a concussion. You have soft tissue damage from the impact as well.” ND-5 walked over and put out a long thin arm to support him. “You will need some time to heal. We will use this guest’s shuttle. They do not need it anymore.”

Even as Jaylen moved with ND-5’s help, he couldn’t stifle the laugh ter coming through. “This is madness. How do I know you’re not just going to kill me next?”

“This restraining bolt is telling me to serve you. That has the highest priority in my directive sequence.”

“It’s as simple as that, huh?” Jaylen replied in a dry voice. “You droids. You’re so binary.”

“It does not need to be any more complex than that.” In the distance, sirens clashed with the sound of oncoming thunder. “For now, I await further instructions from you.”

That was exactly what Jaylen meant by binary. “So I could just tell you to leap off a cliff and you would?”

“Yes.”

Jaylen believed the droid. He had no reason not to. He could tell ND-5 to do anything, including shutting himself down—hell, he’d blasted his own chest to follow Jaylen’s directive.

“Well,” Jaylen said slowly, “why shouldn’t I do just that?” He was only musing, but the thought soon rolled into a real, grounded question. He could choose to give the order. Or he could choose to stay quiet. “How would you assess the current situation?” he asked, as if he were chatting with A1-A1 in the garden cottage.

“Emergency vehicles will be here shortly. I can commandeer this shuttle. You will likely need seven to ten days for physical recovery. In addition, they will think you are dead.”

Jaylen paused, feeling the ground beneath his feet. In the distance, he saw that ND-5 was right: The lights of emergency shuttles finally hov ered above the compound. “Who is ‘they’?” he asked with a laugh.

ND-5 stood silent, though his head tilted ever so slightly. From the exposed innards of the droid’s upper body, Jaylen heard mechanisms and electronics struggling to work. “I do not know. That information must have resided in the part of my memory core that is now damaged.”

Part of Jaylen wanted ND-5 to dismantle himself in the most violent way possible. But he let that impulse pass for one simple reason:

A BX commando droid was valuable as a protector. And a servant.

Jaylen needed both right now. Someday, he might scrap him. But not now. Because everything about Jaylen’s personal galaxy had just reset. This thing, this droid, had taken everything from Jaylen. And now ND-5 would help give him a new life.

Reprinted from Star Wars Outlaws: Low Red Moon by Mike Chen. © 2026 by Lucasfilm Ltd. Published by Random House Worlds, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC.

For more on the future of the Star Wars franchise, find out what to expect from Star Wars in 2026 and see the one thing we need from Lucasfilm’s new Presidents.

Jesse is a mild-mannered staff writer for IGN. Allow him to lend a machete to your intellectual thicket by following @jschedeen on BlueSky.

As it approaches its second early access anniversary, Enshrouded gets a 1.0 release window for later this year

More and more as time goes on I feel that if I blink a whole two years will pass, and suddenly a game like Enshrouded, which is coming up to its second early access anniversary, will be gearing up for its proper 1.0 launch. While an exact date for the survival game’s full release hasn’t been locked in just yet, a new Road to Release video was shared by developer Keen Games detailing what you can expect leading up to said launch.

Read more

Fortnite Gets a New Roguelike Map and a Visit From Jason Statham

The British are coming. Specifically, IGN can exclusively reveal that action man Jason Statham – star of Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, Hobbs and Shaw and The Meg – is coming to Fortnite today. He lent his chiselled jawline and voice to the game to promote his new movie Shelter as part of a new in-game experience.

The Stath appears as his character from Shelter, Michael Mason. In the movie Mason is a former assassin who is forced to dust off his guns (aren’t they always?) to protect himself and a girl – Jessie – that he rescued from the sea surrounding the remote Scottish island he calls home. Players can fight alongside him on a new custom map inspired by the movie, taking on waves of enemies in order to protect Jessie. If that wasn’t enough, a huge storm is on the way, which is actually pretty accurate for the Scottish highlands.

The custom map comes with some additional game features to heighten the roguelike experience the creators are going for, with a combination of permanent upgrades, random weapon loadouts and a ‘Rebirth system’ that will give you permanent buffs for resetting your progress. It’s vital to mention that the weaponry is given out by a dog.

There’ll also be a community tournament featuring top streamers that will let viewers vote on the specific conditions for the matches, like weapon restrictions or inverted controls.

The experience was created by Sawhorse and Chartis Interactive, with contributions to the design of the map from Fortnite creators like Jayth, the guy behind Fortnite’s Zombie Escape Tag.

“It’s been exciting to combine the roguelike genre—one of Fortnite’s most popular modes—with a unique film like Shelter, especially with Jason Statham involved,” he said.

The Shelter experience is available in Fortnite now – Island Code 2883-8391-6703 – and the movie, also starring Bill Nighy, will be in theaters on January 30.

Pirates director Gore Verbinski is iffy on Unreal Engine in movies: “I think it doesn’t work from a strictly photo-real standpoint”

We interrupt our regular schedule of weaponising hamsters and grizzling about GTA 6 with a word from the world of film – a film being a curious subspecies of video game that plays itself, consists partly of human souls preserved in gelatin and silver halide, and can only be ‘failed’ by skipping the post-credits scene. Whatever will the mad labcoats dream up next?

More specifically, it’s time for an insight from Gore Verbinski, director of the Pirates of the Caribbean films. He thinks the much-gobflapped adoption of Epic’s Unreal Engine by visual effect teams is a blight upon the face of Hollywood. He thinks it’s an insult to the dignity of helicopters. OK, he doesn’t go quite that hard.

Read more

Crimson Desert Locks in March Release Date as Dev Acknowledges ‘Strong Anticipation’

Crimson Desert has gone gold, locking in its global release date of March 19, 2026. That’s across PC via Steam, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X and S, and Mac.

Developer Pearl Abyss described going gold as a “major development milestone” for the open-world action-adventure game. It thanked fans for their continued support, acknowledging what it called “strong anticipation” that has built up over the course of the last year.

Here’s the official blurb on Crimson Desert:

Set in the vast continent of Pywel, Crimson Desert is an open-world action-adventure game that follows the journey of protagonist Kliff and his Greymane companions. The title has been praised for its realistic, high-fidelity graphics, dynamic combat, and the freedom and interactivity of its open world, delivering a heightened sense of immersion and intensity.

Earlier this month, Pearl Abyss called Crimson Desert’s open world “absolutely massive,” bigger even than that of Bethesda’s Skyrim and Rockstar’s Red Dead Redemption 2.

Speaking on the Gaming Interviews YouTube channel, Pearl Abyss’ Will Powers said that describing the size of Crimson Desert’s world in terms of numbers doesn’t do it justice, because doing so fails to capture the scope and scale of the game. But he did go as far as to compare it to two of the biggest open world games around.

“I don’t think numbers really do it justice because, how big is that in terms of scope and scale?” he said. “But what we can say is that the world’s at least twice as big as the open world, the playable area, of Skyrim. It’s larger than the map of Red Dead Redemption 2.”

Powers went on to insist that the size of Crimson Desert’s open world won’t determine its quality. Rather, what you actually do in it is the key factor.

“The continent of Pywel is absolutely massive, but size doesn’t really matter if there’s nothing to do,” he said. “Open-world games are about doing things, having activities, having distractions. So we wanted to create a world that’s not only massive, but is also incredibly interactive.”

Unlike Skyrim and Red Dead Redemption 2, in Crimson Desert you can fly around on a dragon, so despite the size of its world, you’ll be able to get about quickly. And don’t expect RPG elements in terms of decision-making and choice and consequence as it relates to your character, either. The sheer amount of things to do in the world will facilitate the role-playing part of Crimson Desert, which players will form through “head canon.”

“You choose the type of character you want to play as in terms of your progression within the systems in the game,” Powers explained. “And then through head canon you’re having this very different experience than other players because of the scope and scale of the game. You’ll be distracted by something, you’ll go on this quest line, you’ll have an experience that’ll be radically different than someone else, even though they’re playing the same game and the same canonical storyline that you both are going through.”

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.

Anthem private server experimentation’s underway, as the shooter’s subreddit mods rethink retirement plans

Last week, EA followed through on plans outlined in 2025 by shutting down the servers of Bioware’s Anthem. Pretty much since the shooter’s fate was set in stone, there’s been the natural chatter about whether it could potentially be kept online or revived down the road in some fashion. At this early stage, there’s been no huge re-emergence, but that doesn’t mean folks aren’t experimenting to see what such a thing might involve.

Read more

Sonic Mania Dev Laments “Corporate Bureaucracy” Ahead Of Its Next Game

Rubato launches this March.

Developer Headcannon, which perhaps most notably developed Sonic Mania alongside Christian Whitehead and PagodaWest Games, has announced the release date for its new game, Rubato. The experimental 2D title will hit the Switch eShop on 20th March 2026, and there’s a free demo you can check out right now.

It’s not been smooth sailing for Headcannon, however, as the developer recently released a blog post detailing “a rough few years”, stating that all it wants to do is “make some damn games”. It cites “corporate bureaucracy” as one of its headaches, along with personal difficulties and the cost of living.

Read the full article on nintendolife.com

Xbox App Now Available on Arm-based Windows 11 PCs

Xbox App Arm Laptop Hero Image

Xbox App Now Available on Arm-based Windows 11 PCs

The post Xbox App Now Available on Arm-based Windows 11 PCs appeared first on Xbox Wire.

Mechborn – A Fresh Roguelike Deckbuilder from the Heart of Brazil

Hi Pilots, We’re Turtle Juice, a small indie studio based in the interior of Brazil. Being far from the industry hubs has its challenges, but it’s also our advantage; it drives us to innovate, work harder, and prove that great games can come from anywhere. As a tight-knit team of 23 developers we believe we’ve managed to achieve that with our newest game – Mechborn.

Mechborn is a roguelike deckbuilder inspired by classic ’90s mech anime and Greek mythology. Earth and its colonies are under siege by Kaiju, and humanity’s last hope lies with the Mechborn: elite pilots capable of surviving Mech-Synchronization. But there’s more to Mechborn than just the pilots and mech you take into battle. I want to briefly showcase the systems and mechanics that define every run, every decision and every moment of tension you’ll face each run.

Your Mech is your deck

The core idea behind Mechborn is simple: your mech is your deck. Every mech is built from four parts: Head, Torso, Arms, and Legs. With each part adding cards to your starting deck.

This means deckbuilding begins before your first battle. Swapping out a part doesn’t just change stats, it fundamentally changes how your deck plays. On top of that, each mech comes in three distinct models: Original, Spartan, and Olympian – each with its own mechanical identity. Maybe you lean into mobility, heavy offense or focus on equipping a full matching set to gain a powerful HP bonus – the decision is up to you.

A new way to play cards: the conveyor belt

One of the biggest departures from traditional deckbuilders is our Conveyor Belt combat system.

Instead of drawing a hand every turn, you start combat with seven cards laid out in your belt. When you play a card, a new one enters from the left, pushing the rest along. This transforms combat into a game of positioning and timing, not just card value.

Many cards care about where they sit on your belt. Some activate stronger effects when adjacent to specific card types. Others gain power the longer they remain unplayed. Support cards can “charge” upcoming attacks, while defensive tools may need to be positioned several turns in advance to be effective.

The result is a combat system where planning ahead matters just as much as reacting in the moment.

Pilots change everything

Pilots add a second strategic layer on top of your deck. Each pilot comes with four unique skills that charge as you play cards. These aren’t passive bonuses, but rather powerful, active abilities that can completely alter a fight when used at the right moment.

Some pilots specialize in repositioning cards on the Conveyor Belt. Others manipulate costs, freeze enemies in their tracks or turn defensive setups into offensive opportunities. Certain Mech – Pilot combinations unlock playstyles that simply aren’t possible otherwise.

Choosing a pilot isn’t just flavor, it’s a commitment to how you want your run to unfold.

Adaptive exploration: no fixed routes

Outside of combat, we wanted exploration to feel just as flexible and reactive. That’s where Adaptive Exploration comes in.

There are no fixed paths in Mechborn. You can move freely in any direction across each continent, choosing how aggressively you push forward or when to retreat and regroup. Encounters, events, vendors and factions all shift between runs, meaning the same route can play out very differently depending on your decisions.

You might rush to a vendor to upgrade key cards, hunt down an ancient research lab to unlock powerful Infusers or side with a faction to influence how future encounters evolve. Clearing territories zone by zone helps push back the Kaiju advance, but every move costs fuel. Run out and you could find yourself stranded in hostile territory.

Exploration is a constant balance of risk, reward and long-term planning.

Designed for replayability

Every system in Mechborn feeds into replayability. Dynamic maps. Multiple mechs and pilots. Hundreds of cards. Ever-changing encounters. No two runs are meant to feel the same and mastery comes from experimentation, not memorization.

The path ahead

With Mechborn, we want players to experience the thrill of commanding god-forged mechs, experimenting with pilot abilities, and carving their own path through a Kaiju-ravaged world. From deckbuilding to combat, exploration to boss encounters, every run is a new challenge – one that rewards creativity, adaptability and strategic thinking.

Mechborn is coming to PlayStation 5 late 2026. We can’t wait for you to step into the cockpit, craft your ultimate mech-deck and see how far your skills can take you.

Exclusive: Frozen’s Anna – Soothing Sister and Do You Want to Build a Snowman? From Disney Lorcana’s Winterspell Set Revealed

IGN can exclusively reveal two new Frozen-themed Disney Lorcana cards from the upcoming Winterspell expansion that have exciting implications for both the lore and gameplay of the TCG, and they are Anna – Soothing Sister and the Do You Want to Build a Snowman? song card.

Disney Lorcana’s Winterspell expansion will be released at local game stores and Disney Stores on February 13 and everywhere else on February 20, and one of the Legendary cards players will be searching for is Frozen’s Anna – Soothing Sister.

To learn more about these cool (we had to do it!) cards, we spoke with members of the Disney Lorcana team.

“Anna – Soothing Sister is the first Disney Lorcana card with a 0 ink shift cost,” Lukas Litzsinger, Winterspell Game Design Lead, said. “This means that you can put together some truly impressive turns where you play another card, or two, from your hand in addition to shifting Anna. She can truly swing the momentum of the game in your favor. But that sort of power does come with a condition: a card has to have left a player’s discard this turn. Thankfully, there are several good options included in Winterspell for this to occur, including on her shift base.

“Her second ability, Warm Heart, likewise has synergy with cards in your discard. This gives players a strong direction when building the deck: not only do you want to have a card leave your discard for her shift ability, but you also want to get characters in your discard with high lore value.”

From a lore perspective, this card pairs very fittingly with Elsa – Ice Artisan, who herself is one of the leading figures of Winterspell.

“In Winterspell, we tell the story of a vine that’s growing out of control and sucking up flood ink,” Jenna Giuffrida, co-lead on narrative design for Winterspell, shared with us. “In an effort to quell its growth, the Illumineers of the realm summon powerful glimmers to help deal with it. One of them, an Elsa glimmer, accidentally freezes the whole realm in her attempt to stop the vine.

“Just as Elsa’s costume demonstrates her role as the powerful force of nature that caused the storm and froze the vine, Anna’s costume reflects the ways she balances her sister. When Elsa is in need of comfort (and thawing out, so to speak), she turns to Anna for empathy and hope, so you can see some of that in the spring theming of her character card.”

As for Do You Want to Build a Snowman?, this song brings together the sisters in a really wonderful way, but it was tough for the team as they really wanted to get it right.

“We get to see both these glimmers come together in Do You Want To Build a Snowman? and really feel the tension in the moment–Anna isn’t as upset with Elsa as perhaps she fears,” Giuffrida said. “We also knew it would be a missed opportunity in this gloriously snowy set not to provide fans with such an iconic and recognizable song card.”

“This was a difficult card for us to get right,” Litzsinger added. “We went through many iterations of what it meant to build a snowman in our game, but the breakthrough came when we took a step back and realized that it wasn’t actually about building a snowman. It was about asking someone else if they wanted to help you build a snowman. This led to a card effect where you ask that question, and also gave us a new template: you get to ask your opponent YES! or NO! and the card does something different depending on their response. We worked closely with Darla Kennerud and our editing team to make this new template happen, and the card is all the more charming for it.”

These cards are only two of the many that fans will soon be able to chase that will continue to build the Lorcana universe even larger, and the Lorcana team has been busy teasing exciting new details about Winterspell and beyond. Alongside these Frozen characters, Winterspell will also feature fan-favorite characters from Pocahontas, Angel from Lilo & Stitch: The Series, and Darkwing Duck.

Furthermore, the two Iconic cards of this set will be Moana – Curious Explorer and Pocahontas – Peacekeeper, and they will both sport a “Papercut Style” that evokes paper snowflake decorations.

Following Winterspell, Glimmers from Toy Story, The Incredibles, and Brave will join the roster in Wilds Unknown when it is released in game stores on the Ravensburger Play Hub on May 8 and everywhere else on May 15.

Lastly, Summer will bring the Attack of the Vine! set, and that will feature glimmers of Monsters, Inc.’s Mike Wazowski and James P. Sullivan.

Adam Bankhurst is a writer for IGN. You can follow him on X/Twitter @AdamBankhurst, Instagram, and TikTok, and listen to his show, Talking Disney Magic.