On reddit, a lengthy thread lists a series of plot reveals beat by beat, with links to off-screen images and even lengthy clips of footage that leave no doubt that the spoilers are real. There’s mention of unrevealed characters, various lore connections, and yes — the mechanics and details of game’s ending.
On the main r/ResidentEvilRequiem reddit, spoilers have completely taken over — with 17 of the top 20 posts discussing the leaks and already turning under-wraps plot details into memes.
That said, considering the huge anticipation for Resident Evil Requiem’s release, none of this really comes as a surprise. As noted Resident Evil leaker Dusk Golem wrote on X/Twitter yesterday:
“RE9 starting to leak 10 days away from release is actually super good for the series. RE:4 & RE8 leaked 14 days away, RE:3 was 16 days away, & f***ing RE7 was almost a whole month before release. I see people asking, ‘How could it leak a whole 10 days before release’, and over here I’m all like, ‘Huh, Capcom did better than usual this time. Good for them.
Resident Evil Requiem’s February 27 release date is now just a week 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
There’s now a mod for Yakuza Kiwami 3 & Dark Ties which swaps out the likeness of actor Teruyuki Kagawa. Kagawa’s casting in the remake, which saw him lend both his voice and likeness to secondary villain Goh Hamazaki, caused fan backlash due to a 2022 report from Shukan Shincho detailing sexual assault allegations against the actor.
Kagawa apologised at the time, but didn’t specify what he was apologising for or confirm the events reported in the article. Kiwami 3 & Dark Ties director Ryosuke Horii recently said Kagawa’s casting was the result of developers RGG Studio having “tried to think of someone who makes you go, ‘This guy’s a creep'”.
Finnish dev Tensori’s POOLS (sorry, POOLS) is a self-proclaimed walking sim with uncanny vibes. It launched back in 2024 on Steam and has racked up nearly 3000 user reviews in the time since, leaving it in the rarified “Overwhelmingly Positive” range on Valve’s platform, and it’s coming to Switch on 26th February.
As you can see from the trailer above — running native Switch footage, we’re told — it looks pleasingly minimal and rather lovely, but don’t go in expecting pure cosy vibes, or much else, for that matter, because the list of things this “liminal fever dream” doesn’t feature is sizeable.
Hello again, PlayStation VR2 players! We’re bringing Rager to PS VR2 on March 5, and we can’t wait for you to feel what rhythm-driven combat really means.
Rager is a music-driven VR brawler where the rhythm is never background noise. Every strike, block, and dodge is tied directly to the soundtrack. Enemies attack in sync with pounding basslines and war drums, and your survival depends on whether you can match that timing with precision.
This is combat built on control and awareness. You step into a shifting digital arena as robotic adversaries close in from every direction. The world forms around you as the music builds, then collapses back into the void when the fight is over. The next track begins, and the pressure starts again.
No room for hesitation
At launch on PS VR2, Rager includes a full campaign of 12 hand-built levels and three boss fights that escalate the pressure with every track. Each level locks you into a specific weapon and forces you to commit. There is no switching mid-fight. You adapt or you fail.
The weapon in your hands changes the fight completely. Sword and Mace demand precision, striking independently with clean, deliberate timing. Axe and Hammer require both hands and full-body movement, rewarding committed swings with crushing impact. Claws and Fists pull you into close range, where attacks come faster and hesitation disappears. Every weapon shifts your stance, your reach, and your rhythm. You are reading the beat while reading the enemy, adjusting your timing in real time as attacks come from every direction.
Freestyle mode opens another 12 levels from the start, giving you the freedom to choose your weapon and push your limits. Online leaderboards track every run. When a fight ends, you know exactly where you lost time. If your timing slips, you feel it. If you land clean, you feel that too. Rager rewards discipline. The tighter your movement, the harder it hits.
The PS VR2 experience
Rager is built around clarity, feedback, and physical commitment. On PS VR2, those elements come through at full strength.
The game runs at a native 90Hz, keeping movement smooth and responsive during the fastest exchanges. When attacks come from multiple directions and the beat accelerates, you need stability. Native 90Hz ensures that what you see and what you feel stay locked together, frame by frame.
HDR support deepens the contrast of the arena, sharpening silhouettes and impact flashes against the darkness. Dynamic foveated rendering powered by eye tracking keeps your focus crisp exactly where you’re looking, so telegraphed strikes stay readable even in chaotic moments.
Then there’s the feedback.
Advanced haptics in the PS VR2 Sense controllers reinforce timing in your hands. A clean strike lands with weight. A blocked attack sends resistance through your grip. Headset rumble adds force to heavy blows and boss slams, grounding you in the center of the arena. The result is combat that feels anchored. When you commit to a swing, you feel the consequence.
For players who chase mastery, Rager includes a full trophy list, culminating in a Platinum trophy that rewards precision, discipline, and complete control of the rhythm.
On PS VR2, every strike carries weight, every block carries resistance, and every mistake carries consequence.
The arena opens March 5
Rager rewards players who stay sharp under pressure. When the tempo rises and attacks close in from every direction, hesitation costs you. Clean timing wins fights. Control keeps you standing.
We’re proud to bring Rager to PlayStation VR2, and we’re excited to see how this community rises to the challenge. If you’re ready to test your timing, your stamina, and your control, we’ll see you in the arena on March 5.
The legendary voice behind God of War’s recent iteration of Kratos, Christopher Judge, has teased that we’ll likely get more news about the franchise in “late summer.”
According to a recording from streamer and YouTuber Fuzhpuzy at Canada’s Fan Expo, Judge, who may not have known he was being recorded at the time, confirmed that while he would not be “playing in the remake” — that role is for Kratos’ original voice actor, TC Carson — “you’ll be hearing about what we’re doing probably late summer.”
The suggestion here is that Judge is back working with Sony Santa Monica on a separate God of War project unrelated to the studio’s early work beginning to remake the franchise’s original trilogy (and the new side-scrolling spin-off Sons of Sparta, which was largely made elsewhere).
Interestingly, Judge also explained that the recently announcement remake starring TC Carson will boast “all the new technology in it, add more stuff, a new fighting system.”
It’s our biggest clue yet that an all-new Sony Santa Monica God of War game is on the way. It’s been pretty quiet ever since 2022’s God of War: Ragnarök in which Kratos and Atreus set out on a mythic journey for answers before Ragnarök arrives, visiting each of the Nine Realms in the brutal and epic sequel.
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.
For months, I’ve been keeping an eye out for Denshattack!, an enticingly loud stunt-action game that’s somewhere between an autorunner and Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater, if Tony Hawk was an electric locomotive and not a man of mortal flesh. I played it last year and was instantly smitten with its speedy, tricksy rail riding, and now that there’s a newly released Steam demo, perhaps you will be too.
Hershel Wilk awakes in a small, dirty apartment in the city of Portofiro. Why she’s here, she does not know. Her mission objectives were supposed to be provided by her partner, codename “Pseudopod”, but he’s unresponsive – he just sits there in his underwear, staring at nothing, his senses on lockdown. In his pockets are an invoice for socks and a lipstick-printed business card that simply reads “All you need is miracle.”
It’s not just Hershel who needs a miracle. Developer ZA/UM needs one, too. Zero Parades: For Dead Spies is an espionage RPG that follows the playbook of the studio’s previous game, Disco Elysium, incredibly closely, right down to opening on a confused protagonist in a run-down room. It’s another high-concept, combatless, dialogue-driven game about following threads and investigating leads. But capturing lightning twice is no easy feat, and simply repeating Disco Elysium’s triumphs is no guaranteed road to success. Thankfully, there are fresh ideas here that expand and evolve ZA/UM’s formula, making for what appears to be, on the surface, a more traditionally accomplished video game, but potentially at the cost of crafting a less interesting artistic creation.
I recently spent around six hours with Zero Parades, playing through the entire upcoming Steam Next Fest demo, plus a significant amount beyond it. That meant exploring a wide section of Portofiro, a vibrant hub of criss-crossing cultures, painted in shades of Central America and Southern Europe. It’s made up of six districts, stretching from docklands, through a central marketplace and winding back alleys, and up to a hillside housing project. While perhaps small by traditional RPG standards, this is a much larger playspace than we saw in Disco Elysium, and that’s not just reflected in your step count.
The city is alive. Rather than a decaying echo of times gone by like Revachol was, Portofiro is active. Every street is home to an oddball with their own strange perspective and, often, their own weird problem in need of solving. In the “Bootleg Bazaar” you’ll find two children transfixed by Sixty-Six Wolves, a cartoon that seems suspiciously like foreign propaganda. A few stalls down there’s Petre, a “Format Fetishist” obsessed with a type of vinyl record that wipes itself clean after a single play. Further up the road, you’ll bump into Kurt, a man so consumed by the need to follow imported fashion trends that he’s landed himself in crippling debt. Each is a window into a place where personal obsessions are the tools through which sinister powers manipulate the world.
I will, of course, need to play Zero Parades to completion to judge if its writing around this and other topics can match the unbelievably lofty heights of its celebrated predecessor. And I understand if you’re skeptical – ZA/UM’s controversial firing of key Disco Elysium creatives in 2022 has left many fans wary of both the studio’s management and the current team’s ability to craft something as meaningful. Based on my experience of this demo, though, I feel positive about the writing’s quality, with the odd caveat.
The skills, for instance, which once again form the pieces of your fractured psyche and comment on your choices and the world around you, lack defined voices and feel largely interchangeable (with the exception of Statehood, which bellows your home country’s party line in all-caps). But when it comes to the city’s collection of strangers, it appears the current writing team has successfully penned a cast possessed of a similar blend of literary prose, otherworldly Lynchian vibes, and off-kilter political humour. And, as I cross-referenced their tales with those of others, I began to paint a picture of this deeply troubled world, where techno-fascist superpowers, communist republics, and investment banks battle for power, using secret police forces as knives and pop culture as rifles.
Portofiro begins to feel like a Venn diagram of multiple overlapping quests, much like the cities of Baldur’s Gate and Athkatla.
Finding my place among all that initially felt overwhelming. As a spy, it’s my job to be a disruptor, to exploit those tensions for the gain of my home state. But, as previously mentioned, Hershel has no idea what her mission is. You simply need to talk and talk and talk until you find the threads relevant to your objectives, and there is no shortage of people to pull them from. But soon I began to see the connections. A representative of EMTERR, the world’s super bank, could be the starting point for solving Kurt the fashionista’s financial woes. A group of grizzled veterans impatiently waiting for their turn to dial into the “Miracle” sex line suddenly makes that business card I discovered make sense. And the suicidal Dr. Gonza’s medical know-how could diagnose Pseudopod’s condition… but first I’ll have to bring him the teeth of a medical board “narc” to halt his hanging attempt. As you collect these leads, Portofiro begins to feel like a Venn diagram of multiple overlapping quests, much like the cities of Baldur’s Gate and Athkatla did in BioWare’s seminal Infinity Engine RPGs.
While Disco Elysium certainly shared some DNA with the classics, it held many traditional RPG ideas at arm’s length. Zero Parades is less shy about being a video game. That feeling starts with the increased size and scope of its city, but is cemented in its more wholehearted embrace of regular skill checks and, importantly, building a gameplay system around failing them. You have a trio of pseudo health bars – Fatigue, Anxiety, and Delirium – which fill when you stumble through conversations and interactions in their respective field. For example, elongating an early phone call by asking all of the wrong questions will cause your anxiety levels to soar. Fail too often, or keep digging down into a dark memory hole that you shouldn’t, and you’ll take a permanent penalty to one of your stats.
There are interesting mechanical wrinkles to this system. Skill checks typically involve rolling two dice, but you can choose to “exert” yourself, adding an extra die to increase your chances at the cost of damaging one of those pressure bars. It’s vital to learn how to manage your stressors, then, to keep the bars balanced. Smoking, for instance, will reduce your anxiety, which in turn gives you another opportunity to exert yourself.
Another example of this more crunchy, systemic approach can be found in “Dramatic Encounters”, which turn moments of peril into a series of turn-based decisions, creating a sense of life-or-death drama in a game devoid of combat. It’s essentially Disco Elysium’s late-game tribunal sequence transformed into a defined mechanic. The example in my demo saw me attempt to evade an enemy agent through a busy marketplace, and the branching decisions offered classic spy fiction options: Do I pause to analyse, or act on gut feeling? Try to flee, or hide in plain sight? A skill check on my “Nerve” stat – a test of how cool I can stay under pressure – succeeds, and I walk straight past my hunter, confidently blending into the crowd.
While this example is fairly low stakes, at every junction I nonetheless held my breath as I picked my next move, anxiously waiting to see if my choice paid off. I’m very interested to see how this approach will be applied to other spycraft staples – perhaps tailing, deploying bugs, or even straight-up assassination – as success here will likely be the thing that helps Zero Parades feel distinct from its predecessor and truly cement it as an espionage RPG, rather than Disco Elysium with a 00 license in its wallet.
This project more recognisably a video game than the parameter-defying art experiment that was Disco Elysium.
Zero Parade’s most interesting push into more traditional video game territory, though, is how it uses the city’s physical space to structure its branching quests. My final few hours were spent completing tasks that await beyond the Steam Next Fest demo, and the majority of that time saw me searching for a hidden jail, inside of which awaited a prisoner with vital information. The way you find this jail is determined by a number of different factors; there’s your personal method of investigation, of course, but your character’s stat build and your own ability to interpret the world’s clues also come into play. From what I can tell, this results in at least two completely different routes to the jail: breaking into a subterranean tunnel, or via poetry. Yes, poetry.
It was that second, more artistic path that I took. After quizzing a reluctant boatman who clearly knew about the jail but refused to talk, I was able to use my “Blueprints” skill to track his involuntary eye movements and approximate the prison’s location. Poking around the region he kept gazing at led me to the offices of a poetry magazine, the Noscorrentes Review, which featured a suspicious locked gate that only contributing writers were permitted to pass through. So, how do you convince a pretentious editor that you’re a genuine, publish-worthy poet? Well, dumpster diving through the publication’s trash will secure you a poem, but it’s in the garbage for a reason. And so the only option is to literally write a verse yourself, digging deep into your own soul to increase the chance modifiers on your “Poetics” skill check. The task provides an insight into Hershel’s painful past, but also – most importantly – creates a composition worthy of the magazine’s pages. The editor lets me past the locked gate, and there, in the basement of the Noscorrentes Review, is the secret jail. It’s real. And it’s a path to even more trouble… but I won’t spoil that here.
This branching path, effectively creating two entirely separate questlines that take place in entirely separate locations, reminds me more of RPGs like The Witcher and Baldur’s Gate than it does the almost immersive theatre approach of Disco Elysium. That’s not to say that Zero Parades is a traditional role-playing game. Far from it. But it’s clear that ZA/UM’s attempt to build on its established formula has taken it down a path that makes this project more recognisably a video game than the parameter-defying art experiment that was Disco Elysium. It’s a feeling only reinforced by the espionage genre and the more global approach to its story. There are factions, and one of them is an evil empire! That’s video game stuff.
Although on the surface they run the risk of appearing as less experimental design decisions, I don’t think these are poor choices. In fact, they are what I think make Zero Parades interesting. I left the studio feeling as if I’d just played a fascinating RPG with a strongly defined, richly realised setting, spearheaded by a protagonist who could navigate that world’s obstacles in a myriad of compelling ways. And yet, despite this, Zero Parades still feels beholden to Disco Elysium, as if its ambitions are caged by the reluctance, or refusal, to stray too far from the safety of beloved ideas. Elements like the sentient skills feel like they are template, rather than tradition. In many ways, it feels willing to risk being an imitation in the hope of capturing lightning twice. I doubt that was a risk worth taking, and yet I still think the odd chimera of old and new that ZA/UM has produced may prove to have merit in its own right.
Matt Purslow is IGN’s Executive Editor of Features.
The next big update to Destiny 2, Shadow and Order, has been delayed as it undergoes a substantial round of tweakage and expansion. Such a substantial round of tweakage and expansion, in fact, that it’ll no longer be called Shadow and Order when it returns.
The next major Destiny 2 update, Shadow and Order, has been delayed by three months, until June 2026.
In a series of messages posted to Bluesky, developer Bungie admitted the expansion was “undergoing large revisions,” and “will be delayed” from its original March release.
“This update is being changed and expanded to include sizable quality-of-life updates and as a result, will also be renamed. This update will now launch on June 9, 2026,” the studio said. “We will provide exact details closer to release covering previously announced Weapon Tier Upgrading, but also additions like expanding Tiered Gear to all Raid and Dungeon activities, Pantheon 2.0, Tier 5 stats for Exotic Armors, and more.”
The studio is, of course, preoccupied getting Marathon out of the door after last week’s State of Play reaffirmed its March 5 release date. Nonetheless, the delay intimates the studio may be struggling to juggle everything on its plate, particularly as it alludes to “sizeable quality-of-life updates.”
“Through June, we will continue to have routine bug fixes and stability improvements, continued portal modifiers, Guardian Games (March), and the return of a more frequent Iron Banner cadence (April),” Bungie added. “In terms of communications, we will be focusing on providing you with updates about our live game content, community activations, and general upkeep through the TWID and our Destiny social channels.”
The statement closed on thanking players for their “continued patience and support,” and said there’ll be more information on the next major update and future plans for Destiny 2 “closer to launch.”
“Raids and dungeons getting tiers and pantheon 2.0 is great, but will there even be anyone left playing by then?” asked one player on the Destiny 2 subreddit. “I still log on every week and play a little bit, but nobody can deny that renegades was not meant to last six months.”
“Not to be a total downer, but that really gives me age of triumph ‘final update’ style vibes of making all the endgame viable,” added another fan. “Not to mention this is just a major update in the end. It isn’t gonna have expansion level content, but its now releasing right around when the next expansion was supposed to, which I assume is also delayed at least three months. Even with way more content in this update, renegades being the expansion for nine months at least now is very bad.”
“Until June is rough. The population is going to be absolutely dire by then…,” one player commented, to which someone replied: “Dire[?] It’s dire right now. Falling off a cliff.”
At the time of writing (when, admittedly, much of the U.S. is asleep), there are 10,463 players online right now on Steam. Once Human, eFootball, and single-player Hollow Knight: Silksong all have higher concurrent counts.
It’s undoubtedly a tough time for Bungie and Destiny 2, with parent company Sony recently saying the studio has failed to meet its sales and user engagement expectations. In its latest financial report, Sony said it had recorded a 31.5 billion yen (approx. $204.2 million) impairment charge as a result of Destiny 2’s underperformance. That was significant enough to drag down profits at Sony’s Game & Network Services Segment, which includes Sony Interactive Entertainment.
Following the launch of The Edge of Fate expansion in July, Destiny 2 saw a slump in player activity, and Bungie’s team is feeling the pressure. “For years now, Destiny has been on this steady hardening of the core [audience],” game director Tyson Green told IGN back in November. “More and more core players are staying and playing the game, but relatively few [new] people come into the game. There’s a tightening and contraction, and this presents problems for a game that you’re trying to maintain as a live service, especially when you want to keep serving those core players with great, compelling expansions.”
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.
In the aftermath of reports claiming that the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE) deepened their reliance on Microsoft’s cloud technology last year, No Azure for Apartheid have issued a statement demanding the company cut ties with the agency.
