Author: Game Infliction

Despite Nintendo’s warning to Switch owners not to breathe a word about its mystery online playtest, players have posted screenshots, gameplay videos, and even streamed it online now it’s live.

Earlier this month, Nintendo asked those who successfully signed up for its then mysterious Switch Online Playtest not to reveal what it was once it went live. Documentation includes a request “that you do not discuss or disclose content from either the Nintendo Switch Online: Playtest Program test software or website with others.”

Users leaked details from the playtest’s website as soon as they had access earlier this week, and now the playtest has gone live the curtains have well and truly been pulled back.

Nintendo has worked to take down various streams and videos this morning, October 24, but it faces an uphill battle, with footage doing the rounds across social media and Discords. Remarkably, it appears Nintendo failed to disable screenshots and recording for the playtest, further fueling the “leaks.”

One Twitch channel that streamed the playtest now contains the boilerplate “Content from this channel has been removed at the request of the copyright holder” message. The owner of the channel took to reddit to say their channel is now “super dead.”

“Yeah I got fully DMCA’d, so channel super dead,” redditor BrettWils_ said, before threatening to share the footage. “I recorded everything locally, but not sure I want to take further risk and share it through other means. Open to it if anyone has a safe-ish way to do it tho.”

Spoilers for Nintendo Switch Online: Playtest Program test follow.

Gameplay shows a somewhat bizarre third-person MMO in which players move blocks about on a planet’s surface. The odd-looking avatars can use a rope to swing like Spider-Man and attach to surfaces in the world. It’s been likened to Minecraft and Dragon Quest Builders, with the focus on carrying blocks around and placing them to create ever higher staircases.

There is a player progression system, with avatars able to level up in the hub area. There’s a shop, too, and players can unlock new tools to help with the building part of the game. Footage shows the hub area packed with player avatars, and out on the planet multiple players stacking blocks within and without their Beacons.

The playtest looks a little barebones to be considered a standalone game in its own right, although players are reporting having plenty of fun with it. Nintendo may be using the playtest with future games in mind, or perhaps it plans to flesh the test out over time with new features. Nintendo’s secrecy over its playtest is almost as bizarre as the playtest itself.

The playtest is a Switch experience for now, but the big question is whether it will also be available on the upcoming Switch 2, which Nintendo has yet to formally announce.

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.

Under any other circumstance, The Lake House would sound like a nice spot for a serene summer getaway. In this case, though, it’s the setting for the second and final installment of Alan Wake II DLC, so it is naturally anything but. There’s no rest and relaxation to be found here, only another double-fisted dose of flashlights and firepower in this tightly paced two-hour tour inside the cold, concrete walls of a remote Federal Bureau of Control facility. In raw gameplay terms, The Lake House is not as eccentric a departure as Night Springs was a few months’ back, but as far as closing the book on Alan Wake II’s story and providing a bridge to the upcoming Control 2 goes, it’s yet another meta-storytelling slam dunk for the team at Remedy Entertainment.

You might remember The Lake House from the main Alan Wake II campaign, or at the very least the exterior of its grounds since it’s found behind a locked gate in Cauldron Lake near where the murder victim is found at the start of Saga Anderson’s story. This FBC research facility was strictly off-limits to Saga, but in this new chapter we’re able to fully explore it as returning FBC Agent Kiran Estevez. I liked Estevez in the main campaign and was happy to spend some time in her shoes, but the real show-stealing performances here come from the husband and wife scientist team of Jules and Diana Marmont. Initially I was laughing out loud at the petty bickering between them that occurs in the facility’s welcome video, but their relationship evidently took a much darker turn as evidenced by the many memos and emails I pored over as I continued my engrossing investigation inside the sinister shapeshifting structure.

The facility itself is only five floors, but thanks to its proximity to the Altered World Event in Cauldron Lake and the disturbing research experiments conducted by the Marmonts, The Lake House is as consistently unsettling a space as anything from the main Alan Wake II campaign. One floor finds Estevez caught in a disorientating loop, another has shifting canvases splashed in abstract Jackson Pollock-style sprays, while another still is just a near-never-ending room of ominously clattering typewriters, like a manifestation of the infinite monkey theorem minus the tiny simian scribes. It’s a superbly constructed bit of otherworldly office space that I delighted in exploring, whether I was thumbing through the chilling pages of another Alan Wake manuscript or having conversations with a possessed painting so angry it made Vigo the Carpathian from Ghostbusters II seem like a portrait of a puppy dog.

The Lake House is absolutely blanketed in an unnerving atmosphere, but it’s perhaps a little lacking as far as puzzles go. Aside from carrying battery cubes to electrical sockets, which stimulates the eye with its orange glow but isn’t particularly taxing on the brain, there are otherwise only a handful of computer passwords to figure out using calendar dates mentioned in memos and the like. These hackneyed hacking jobs are pretty easy to deduce, and it was a little disappointing that there was nothing new here to match the mind-bending magic tricks provided by Alan’s world-altering Angel Lamp in the main campaign.

Shadow Complex

Combat against the shadow-cloaked staff of The Lake House is equally as straightforward for the most part, but it’s still extremely tense thanks to its typically claustrophobic close-quarters encounters. Estevez might be an FBC agent, but sadly she doesn’t possess the shapeshifting gun or superpowers that Jesse Faden wielded in 2019’s Control. Instead, a pistol, shotgun, and a combination of flashlight, flares, and flashbangs are at her disposal, and I burned through every last round and spare battery as I desperately tried to illuminate and exterminate each sickle-slinging flanker and sledgehammer-swinging heavy that ambushed me along the way.

Outside of its main boss fight, there’s only one new enemy type to be found in The Lake House, but it’s a doozy. The long-limbed freaks that slither out of painted canvases seem like Remedy’s towering, tie-dyed take on the Slender Man, and since they seem immune to Estevez’s attacks I was going hard on the dodge button early on to frantically try and evade their outstretched clutches. Eventually Estevez gets her hands on a grenade launcher powerful enough to turn the tables on these paint-streaked Stretch Armstrongs, but that didn’t mean that dealing with them ever became too easy – grenade ammo is scarce, the painted shadows are slim enough that they’re somewhat easy to miss, and the fact you need to charge up each shot before you fire puts some added pressure into the timing of each takedown.

The Lake House’s challenge jumped up even further in its final boss fight – whose identity was a fun surprise from a story perspective – and it brought my brief return trip to the world of Alan Wake II to a dazzling and demanding denouement. My short stay in The Lake House was brutalist in its architecture and brutalising in its action, and although it’s bittersweet that my time with Alan Wake II has officially come to an end, the tantalising story teases of what comes next in the Remedy Connected Universe has me locked and loaded for Control 2.

The connections within Remedy’s shared universe continue to grow strong amid the release of Alan Wake 2’s new DLC, titled the Lake House. Included in the DLC is what looks like a pretty substantial teaser for Control 2, the upcoming sequel to the cult favorite supernatural horror game. You can watch the full scene in the video below.

Spoiler warning: This video contains spoilers for both the Lake House DLC and possibly Control 2.

The optional scene near the end of The Lake House DLC features FBC Investigations Agent Kiran Estevez being transported first to the Oceanview Motel and then to Panaopticon in The Oldest House — the setting for the original Control. There she has an extended conversation with Control protagonist Jesse Faden’ brother — Dylan Faden — who offers a glimpse into what lies in store for the future of the Remedy-verse.

Remedy hasn’t been shy about the connections between Alan Wake and Control as it continues to build its shared universe. Earlier this year, the studio teamed up with Annapurna to fund movies set within its universe, and it has continued to talk up the connections between the two series. Control 2, for its part, was first announced back in 2022, with director Mikael Kasurinen saying it will be an “unexpected journey.” Remedy is also working on the recently-announced FBC Firebreak, a three-player co-op game set to release in 2025.

In the meantime, Remedy is busy wrapping up Alan Wake 2, which was one of the best-reviewed games of 2023. The Lake House DLC is the second set of Alan Wake 2 downloadable content, pitting FBC agent Estevez (Janina Gavankar) against a series of supernatural horror. It’s out now on PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X|S.

For more, check out our newly-updated list of the 25 best horror games ever made.

Kat Bailey is IGN’s News Director as well as co-host of Nintendo Voice Chat. Have a tip? Send her a DM at @the_katbot.

The long-delayed sequel Beyond Good & Evil 2 officially has a new creative director, with veteran designer Fawzi Mesmar announcing that he is taking the reins in the wake of the sudden death of Emile Morel in 2023.

“Today I’m glad to share that I joined Beyond Good & Evil 2 as Creative Director. I have been working with those peeps for years now on this ambitious game and witnessed their talent firsthand,” Mesmar wrote on Linkedin. “I am standing on the shoulders of creative giants that have supported the team before me, and I look forward to continuing to craft a game that is truly unique for players to enjoy.”