“Greebling” is George Lucas’s term for the decoration of spacecraft models with showy, superfluous details – clumps of antennae, bulky rivets, bulging pipes, anything that whiffs of function. Speaking as the human grown from the ashes of a child who once built the Death Star out of LEGO, I do enjoy a good greeble now and then, but it very easily becomes a parody of itself – like turning a machine inside out, but none of the exposed parts are meaningfully connected. Liliana, founder of Eridanus Industries and lead developer of space tactics sim Nebulous: Fleet Command, has more practical objections to greebling, based on her eight years in the US Navy: excess surface details are an absolute dust trap for radar waves.
Looks like Death Stranding isn’t only heading to live-action, but anime as well. In a new article ahead of June’s Death Stranding 2: On the Beach, director Hideo Kojima has seemingly confirmed an anime adaptation of Death Stranding is on the way.
Speaking to Vogue Japan (via VGC), Kojima mentioned his current collaboration with A24 on the live-action Death Stranding film adaptation, but closed off with a little extra note about an anime in the works. Here’s the quote, via machine translation:
“I am also currently working with A24 on a live-action film adaptation of ‘DEATH STRANDING”. When it comes to film adaptations of games, there have been recent films like ‘The Last of Us’ that keep the plot of the original intact, and films like ‘The Super Mario Bros. Movie’ that are more like a service to game fans. Each of these works has its own merits, but as a film lover, I want to pursue expression as a film. I am aiming to make ‘DEATH STRANDING’ in a way that can only be done as a film, and that will win awards at the Cannes Film Festival and the Venice Film Festival. In fact, we are also currently working on an anime adaptation.”
While no production studio was confirmed, it does certainly sound like Death Stranding has another adaptation on the way, in anime form.
In 2023, A24 officially confirmed it was collaborating with Kojima Productions and its director on a live-action Death Stranding movie. At the time, Kojima said the adaptation was not just a “direct translation” of the game. “The intention is that our audience will not only be fans of the games, but our film will be for anyone who loves cinema,” said Kojima. “We are creating a Death Stranding universe that has never been seen before, achievable only through the medium of film, it will be born.”
With another adaptation on the way, I’m admittedly curious to see what could be done with Death Stranding in the anime space. Depending on which studio picks it up, we could get some different and interesting versions of the Death Stranding universe. It’s pretty fun to imagine a Studio Trigger-made Death Stranding, for example.
Meanwhile, in the video game world, Death Stranding 2: On the Beach is due out on June 26, 2025 for the PlayStation 5. If you’re curious about how the next entry in Death Stranding is coming together, check out our hands-on impressions of Death Stranding 2: On the Beach after a whopping 30 hours with the game.
Elden Ring had a starting class named the Wretch that gets a club and some ratty underwear filled with dreams and nothing else, and there’s something special about the first few hours in Limgrave playing them, scavenging your first pieces of mismatched armour and build-defining treasures. The first time you hit a site of grace, that initial stat boost feels like a deific power surge. Insomuch as Elden Ring’s most memorable stories run tangential and emergent to its static lore, this early fraught scramble is the player’s self-woven tale at its most captivating. Soon enough, though, the feeling is gone. You’re as powerful as god, desiring nothing but more bulbous Albinauric skulls to toss on the pile.
Elden Ring: Nightreign feels unique among FromSoft’s modern catalogue for its flippant attitude toward a convincing sense of place, and so regrettably sacrifices much of its studio’s identity as committed worldbuilders, even while amplifying some of their more peculiar and interesting beats. It’s tempting, then, to ask why it exists in the first place. On a generous day, I’d say that Nightreign exists to recreate – over and over – that same, wretchedly gratifying early-game feeling. Where every scrap of progress feels like a milestone, dull smithing stones shimmer like silver, and each incremental bonk stat increase is a hero’s journey in miniature.
Alternative history PS4 exclusive The Order: 1886 was originally meant to be the first game in a trilogy, one of its developers has revealed.
Two other games — The Order 1891 and The Order 1899 — were also planned (thanks, VGC). As Ru Weerasuriya, creative director of The Order: 1886, explained in an French-language interview with Julien Chieze, the sequel was in the early stages of development before it was cancelled.
In The Order: 1886, a game that re-writes history by introducing a unique vision of Victorian-Era London, you discover history’s darkest secret. From its 10-page pitch, Weerasuriya said the first sequel would have boasted bigger combat sequences, as well as an additional multiplayer mode. The third game didn’t even make it to early production, but Weerasuriya and the team at Ready at Dawn had planned where the story would’ve taken them, as well as other instalments which could’ve taken the franchise into the 20th century.
Ready at Dawn was a venerable, 20-year-old game studio that worked on God of War and Daxter among other projects. Following the mixed reception of The Order: 1886, Ready at Dawn began to move into VR, releasing Lone Echo for the Oculus Rift in 2017. It was acquired by Meta in 2020, but closed down entirely in August 2024.
Weerasuriya suggested that it was the mixed critical reception to the original game that saw the series cancelled. Like a lot of players at the time, here at IGN we thought the 2015 game was okay, awarding it a 6.5, writing: “Though a stylish adventure, The Order: 1886 emphasizes its cinematic polish at the crippling cost of gameplay freedom.”
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.
There exists in this world much which, if stripped of even one of its components, would be rendered naught but a frail illusion. Roast pork without applesauce? An insult to god and man alike. A sword without a hilt? Merely sharpened iron, stripped of use or dignity. As our band of eight rode into Heuwiller – Thillmann at the head as befitted his command, Slackbladder at the back as befitted our nostrils – a dark cloud fell upon us. For what is a village without a single poxy alehouse in sight? Nary a trough full of fermented carrot juice. It was going to be a long day.
It’s not a particularly exciting update — the patch notes only tell us that May 27’s update “improved the compatibility for multiplayer sessions between Nintendo Switch 2 and Nintendo Switch” — but it marks the first time the relaxing sim game has had an any kind of backend refresh since November 2022.
What “improved compatibility” means, we’re not completely sure, but it’s likely a small tweak to make sure players jumping onto Animal Crossing: New Horizons on Switch 2 can still visit the islands of their friends without incident and vice-versa.
Animal Crossing: New Horizons lets you escape to a deserted island and create your own paradise as you explore, create, and customize your own private island and community. We loved our time with it, and it’s still listed on our Top 25 Best Nintendo Switch Games in 2025 list. In our review, we awarded it a 9, writing: “Animal Crossing: New Horizons is an expanded, polished, next-generation reboot of a classic Nintendo game that’s full of surprises.”
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.
Ho, Lethal Companions! Put down your airhorns, let fall your precious armfuls of plastic fish, and prick up your freakin’ ears. Something is coming to 2023’s breakout horror multiplayer game. Something that will make the music boxes and springhead marionettes look like child’s playthings! I mean, like the child’s playthings they already look like, but without the parts that make them horrifying. That something is… to be announced, but I considered the below teaser text pithy enough to be worth a shout regardless.
I am falling asleep at the wheel of a big bulldozer. RoadCraft is not necessarily a boring game, but it is so meditatively slow, lumbering, and bit-by-bit that I find myself dozing when I’m supposed to be, um, dozing. Some of this is down to simple tiredness, but there’s also a dreamy sensation while playing this engine-purring infrastructure ’em up. I don’t mean dreamy in the sense that it fulfills the promise of nostalgic fantasy put forward by the game’s trailer (the one that suggests you’ll feel like a child playing with toy diggers again). I just mean that flattening sand makes me sleepy.
We are a little under two months away from Donkey Kong Bananza arriving on Switch 2 now, and it’s fair to say we are excited. The first 3D DK platformer in decades is enough to get the hype train running, but let’s not pretend that it doesn’t come with a hefty dose of trepidation, too. There’s a lot riding on this one, and we want Nintendo to get it right.
Of course, we trust the Big N to do exactly that (and from everything we’ve seen and played so far, Bananza is shaping up to be a good ‘un), but that won’t stop us from compiling some hopes and dreams in the run-up to the game’s release.
