Category: IGN

Death Stranding 2: On the Beach is widely regarded as another masterpiece from Kojima Productions, with all the sweeping scope, drama, and weirdness fans have come to expect. Now those fans can delve even deeper into this unique world with the release of Titan Books’ The Art of Death Stranding 2: On the Beach.

IGN can exclusively reveal a new preview of The Art of Death Stranding 2 ahead of the book’s release. Check it out in the slideshow gallery below:

The Art of Death Stranding 2: On the Beach is a 240-page hardcover book featuring concept art from the game. The book offers a closer look at character designs, equipment, locations, and creatures from the game, with plenty of pieces from acclaimed artist Yoji Shinkawa.

Here’s the official summary for the book:

The official art book for the action video game DEATH STRANDING 2: ON THE BEACH, from legendary game creator Hideo Kojima, including artwork by acclaimed artist Yoji Shinkawa.

With DEATH STRANDING 2: ON THE BEACH, step by step, legendary game creator Hideo Kojima changes the world once again. Embark on an inspiring mission of human connection beyond the UCA. Sam—with companions by his side—sets out on a new journey to save humanity from extinction. Join them as they traverse a world beset by otherworldly enemies and obstacles.

The Art of Death Stranding 2: On the Beach is packed with hundreds of pieces of concept art for the characters, equipment, locations and creatures featured in the game, as well as early and unused concepts, including artwork by character and mechanical design director, acclaimed artist Yoji Shinkawa.

The Art of Death Stranding 2: On the Beach is priced at $50 and will be released on February 17, 2026. You can preorder a copy on Amazon.

In other Death Stranding 2, we learned at Sony’s State of Play event that the game will be hitting the PC in March 2026. Check out everything announced at State of Play.

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

God of War creator David Jaffe has slammed the series’ new side-scrolling spinoff Sons of Sparta for being “boring” and “an insult” both to fans of the series and its original creative team.

God of War Sons of Sparta was announced and then shadow-dropped on PlayStation 5 last week at the end of Sony’s big State of Play broadcast. A Metroidvania-inspired action platformer from indie retro developer Mega Cat Studios, Sons of Sparta is designed as a prequel to the original God of War trilogy, featuring a young version of Kratos and his brother as they train together.

In an initial YouTube video posted after playing an hour of the game, Jaffe made his frustrations with the project’s concept clear: essentially, that it was too different in tone from the original trilogy, despite his initial excitment to see a side-scrolling take on the series.

“This is the kind of game I’ve always wanted in terms of 2.5D God of War, super into it — but this, to me, is not what I was talking about. I bought this game, it’s a $30 game, I don’t like it, I don’t recommend it,” Jaffe began, before turning his attention to the executives at Sony who decided to greenlight the project.

“I wanted to make a video more about what are they thinking, like what the f*** were they thinking? It’s not a bad game by any means, it’s fine, it controls decently… but to me the more fascinating part of this is, why is this in existence? I don’t understand.”

After an hour’s worth of play, Jaffe said he couldn’t continue with the game as its characters kept “stopping over and over [to] talk and talk.” He added: “This is not God of War.”

“Let’s just make him some generic f***ing kid, like we’re watching a Kids WB TV show or something,” Jaffe continued on. “It’s probably some bulls*** writer going, ‘Oh people want to know why, how did people become this way?’ No one cares. It’s a dumb idea… [Fans] wanted something like Blasphemous, in terms of it’s violent, it’s bloody, it’s serious, it has the tone of the early God of the War games.

“If you pulled God of War out of it, and you just said, ‘hey, we’re making a game about this kid,’ most people would say ‘that doesn’t sound like a very compelling idea for a video game character,’ because it’s not.”

Final Fantasy Remake Part 3 director Naoki Hamaguchi has discussed the impact of expanding the platforms on which the Final Fantasy 7 Remake series is available, insisting that going multiplatform “will not in any way lower the quality of the third instalment.”

In an interview with Automaton, via Eurogamer, Hamaguchi said both the Nintendo Switch 2 and Xbox versions of the game’s prior instalments “have been incredibly well received and generated a lot of buzz online,” but did note some community concerns.

“Both the Nintendo Switch 2 and Xbox versions have been incredibly well received and generated a lot of buzz online,” Hamaguchi said. “That attention has also made me realize how many people are worried about this issue. However, our decision to go multiplatform with the FF7 Remake series will not in any way lower the quality of the third installment.

“Our development structure simply doesn’t work that way to begin with… I suppose I’ll just have to keep saying it,” he said, laughing. He also stressed that because of the growing popularity of gaming on PC both in Japan and beyond, the game has been built with PC “as the foundation.”

“While PC gaming is gradually expanding in Japan, overseas growth has been even more rapid,” Hamaguchi added. “The market has broadened tremendously across both consoles and PC. The FF7 Remake series has sold very well on platforms like Steam and the Epic Games Store, so we develop assets with the broad PC market in mind. In fact, our 3D assets are created at the highest quality level based on PC as the foundation.

“When FFVII Rebirth launched, there was talk about how the PC version looked better than the PS5 version, and our philosophy will not change for the third instalment,” he concluded. “As our fundamental principle, we do not design assets to meet the lowest baseline. Instead, we create them for high-end environments first.”

Last month, Hamaguchi teased that the “core game experience is almost complete,” and while he “really want[s] everyone to play it as soon as possible,” the team has now moved on to “refining and polishing.”

Meanwhile, Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth‘s Queen’s Blood card game is making a “powered-up” comeback for the final chapter in Square Enix’s remake trilogy. Hamaguchi said he plans to double down on the card game when its next installment finally launches, promising to “expand” what was seen with its Rebirth launch.

We also recently learned that the Final Fantasy 7 Remake team actually considered resizing Cloud’s iconic Buster Sword to make it more realistic before deciding to stick with the original design, admitting “it was just too iconic” to change.

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.

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Xenoblade Chronicles X: Definitive Edition for $39.88

Rainbow Six Siege is getting Snake from Metal Gear Solid as a new Operator next month — but the game also nearly had a cardboard box item to hide in, too.

Speaking to IGN, Rainbow Six Siege creative director Josh Mills confirmed that the idea had been discussed internally, but ultimately was dismissed pretty quick — and for good reason. Simply put, Siege fans know the game’s maps too well.

While hiding from enemies in a cardboard box might work against NPCs, Siege fans simply remember the game’s levels too intricately to be tricked by a random package lying around.

“Our players already know every inch of every map, and among the team we have a saying, Operator’s eyes don’t lie,” Mills told IGN. “So, if there were suddenly a box in the corner of a room on any given map our players would promptly shoot that box.”

It’s a fair point, though sadly one which does mean we won’t be crouching inside any cardboard in Rainbow Six Siege anytime soon.

Ubisoft first teased its Rainbow Six Siege and Metal Gear Solid crossover last month, when it showed Splinter Cell’s Sam Fisher taking a Codec Call. Full details on Snake — and a look at us playing as him — lie in the video above. And yes, that is indeed David Hayter providing his voice once again.

Snake officially arrives in Siege as part of Season One: Operation Silent Hunt on March 3, which will also see the launch of a Gray Fox skin for Jackal, and a Meryl skin for Ash.

“We’re excited to bring the world of Metal Gear Solid series into Rainbow Six Siege with Season 1’s new Redacted event, a limited-time 4v4 infiltration mode where Snake and Zero lead a team of elite Operators to recover stolen data,” Mills said. “The team also went a step further with ‘Last Assignment’, a new mission for Dual Front designed as a special nod to long-time Metal Gear Solid fans.”

Metal Gear Solid may be one of the wildest crossovers for Rainbow Six Siege so far, but it’s far from the first. Other recent collaborations have brought the Attack on Titan and The Boys universes into the fold with various cosmetics for existing Operators. Splinter Cell didn’t launch with the game when it first launched back in 2015, but Sam Fisher did go on to get his own Operator in the form of Specialist Zero in 2020.

Tom Phillips is IGN’s News Editor. You can reach Tom at tom_phillips@ign.com or find him on Bluesky @tomphillipseg.bsky.social

Bloober Team has revealed the video game it teased last month as Layers of Fear 3.

In a video presentation celebrating the 10th anniversary of the Layers of Fear franchise, CEO Piotr Babieno thanked fans for keeping the series “close to your hearts for all these years,” before setting up the final reveal: Layers of Fear 3.

Layers of Fear is a psychological horror series that has seen three main releases so far: 2016’s Layers of Fear; 2021’s Layers of Fear 2; and a remake released in 2023.

Layers of Fear 3 doesn’t have a launch window or confirmed platforms, but Bloober Team did release a creepy live action teaser, which features a man reading William Blake’s The Sick Rose in a grand room. We see a painting of a woman, presumably the “sick rose,” and another painting of what looks like a humanoid figure, potentially the same woman, amid a sickness with their mouth sewn shut. A ghostly figure moves past this painting before the painting of the woman falls to the ground. The man waves this away as being the responsibility of his “little friend” who “tries to help” but hasn’t quite got the hang of the afterlife. The teaser ends with the man issuing a Valentine’s Day warning to the audience before turning over a sand timer. The Layers of Fear 3 tagline reads: “Some Things Never Leave The Walls. They Only Learn To Wait.”

That’s pretty much all we have for now on Layers of Fear 3, which sits alongside the Silent Hill remake Bloober Team also has in the works. There’s also a number of smaller games from its subsidiary, Broken Mirror Games, which include a mysterious Switch exclusive codenamed Project M. This all follows what has been a high-profile period for the Polish studio, which has enjoyed success with the Silent Hill 2 remake for Konami, as well as self-published releases including Cronos: The New Dawn and The Medium.

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.

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“Hell is not other people. Hell is yourself.” – Ludwig Wittgenstein

It begins with a group of children looking down a hole. A boy in a hood, the remains of a hangman’s noose around his neck, pilots a boat adrift at sea. I do not know where he has come from or where he is going or if he was one of the ones staring into that well’s abyss. I only know the way forward. Red lights peak through the dark and fog. They are my compass, and I follow them. Buoys. Where they guide me, I do not know, but there is no other path. The ocean is so vast, and my boat is so small. For a time, I am alone. At the fourth buoy, the boy stops the boat and pulls aboard a girl. When he reaches for the hare mask covering her face, she pins him to the small outboard’s wooden bottom, her hands ripping at his mask until he kicks her away. They stare at each other from opposite ends of the boat. It might as well be a chasm. “I thought you were dead,” the boy offers. “Where are the others?” the girl asks. The boy doesn’t know. She takes a lantern and stands at our boat’s bow. The buoys are still our guide, but the girl lights the way forward.

By the time I reach the end of Reanimal, the latest horror puzzle platformer from Little Nightmares developer Tarsier, I have forgotten all of this, and lost track of what parts of this opening are most important. I am too busy trying to make meaning from what I have seen, too focused on trying to connect the pieces of Reanimal’s puzzle, to understand how we got here. But stories, at least the good ones, the ones that know what they’re doing, tell you what they’re about from the beginning. And Reanimal is a very good story. Remember this, it tells you. Remember all of this.

Together – I play the boy, my co-op partner plays the girl. There is no way to select who plays who; it simply works out this way – we sail through jagged cliffs, past mines larger than our boat, bisect a forest of jagged, barren trees. Then the banks of the river we have followed fade, and a large industrial building looms out of the fog ahead of us. It is a remarkable image in a game of remarkable images. Reanimal certainly knows how to set a scene.

There is very little overt explanation.The boy and the girl are brother and sister, but this fact is never told to you. You learn it through the way they help each other up, comfort each other when things go wrong. Their relationship is something you experience, the questions largely left for you to answer. Why does she attack him after he fishes her out of the sea? What happened to them before they were in the boat? Reanimal unspools its story slowly, and asks you to fill in the gaps yourself. To remember what you’ve seen, to put together the imagery, the symbols, notice patterns in the shapes throughout its world. I’m unsure of what they’re after until we find another child separated from us by steel bars blocking a drain pipe. “You came back,” he whispers. “I knew you would. You should leave… while you still can.” But we don’t. The girl’s earlier question is the answer to mine. We are here to save the others. Our friends.

We navigate broken buildings, push through dark forests, leap across gaps, crouch into places only a child can fit. Often, we need to work together. The world is so big, and we are so small. It takes two of us to lift a metal trapdoor. I hold a lever to still a rotating metal shaft so my partner can pilot the girl across. On the other side, she knocks down a piece of wood so I can cross a gap. Reanimal is simple, elegant. You walk, run, jump, interact with and carry objects, boost one another to ledges neither of you can reach alone, and occasionally fight off foes in the clumsy way a child might. Little distinguishes the boy from the girl, save that she can attach her lantern to her hip while carrying something else. The boy’s lighter, on the other hand, is only usable if his hands are free. It’s a subtle distinction, but an important one, and my partner and I often made significant choices about who would do what based on how much light it would cost us, and whether we felt we could sacrifice it.

Reanimal can be played alone, but I found it more meaningful to take the journey with someone else, to coordinate and work together, to congratulate ourselves on our success and discuss our failures before trying again. Like the boy and the girl on screen, we are experiencing this together. Like them, we are not alone. That subtle distinction – of working with a living, breathing person – made it much better than it would have been had I spent the whole experience with a computer-controlled girl who always did exactly what she was supposed to. That’s not what this story is about, and I am deeply grateful that, in an era which has largely abandoned local co-op, Reanimal offers it.

Both Reanimal’s gameplay and the choices it offers are satisfying, but simple. It is less a game you play and more a world you move through and experience without the obvious artifice of a video game. There is no HUD, no meters, no minimap. The camera is often fixed to show you exactly what Tasier wants you to see, and the sense of visual composition here is remarkable. Even horror can be beautiful when framed the right way. Often, the answers to the gameplay questions Reanimal presents are obvious – though not less satisfying for it – and the only way forward, though occasionally we get lost. What carries us ahead are not the puzzles themselves, but the desire to see what’s next. If you are expecting great leaps from the studio’s work on the first two Little Nightmares, you will not find it here, and I’m not bothered by that. You don’t return to your favorite restaurant angry the menu hasn’t changed, and here the chef is a master of his craft.

The environment is not our only obstacle. We start to notice the horrors as we search for the missing wheels to a handcar. A body leans against a wall, its belly a gaping hole left by something that forced its way out – or in. A plunger applied to a clogged toilet reveals a key and the deformed, deflated skin of what was once, perhaps, a man; his features are off, deformed, his face caught between that of a person and a pig.

What we’re up against isn’t obvious until we come across the second of the wheels we need for the handcart, and the man/animal skins around us come to life, slithering after us like snakes. We do the only thing we can do: we run. It gets worse from there; the first living human we encounter is impossibly tall, his face a Halloween mask of sagging skin, empty eye sockets, a maw that is always open. He skitters after us like a spider, biting our heads off if he catches us. He is not the worst of it; not even close. We spend most of Reanimal running from something. I don’t want to say more. These are terrors you really should see for yourself.

But I can say this: the place the boy and girl have returned to is wrong. There is a theory that hell is the worst moments of your life, replayed over and over again, without ceasing, simultaneously something you recognize and fresh at the same time. What does it say that the boy and girl have seemingly returned here by choice after having escaped? “I told you to leave,” the boy we encountered tells us later. Or are they all trapped here, together, in a hell we can’t leave? Only one thing is certain: we are off the edge of the map. Here be dragons.

As we continue, the world opens up to us. We navigate dark forests, the flooded ruins of cities, active warzones, and until the end, whatever shattered this place is only partially clear. Our journey is only partially linear. Returning to the boat allows us to explore, to explore this flooded place and find what lies off the beaten path. It is here that Reanimal is most obviously a video game, rewarding the curious with new masks, collectible concept art, and so on, but it never feels out of place or forced, and doesn’t detract from the atmosphere. Nor does the occasional replay of a chase sequence because you don’t initially know what to do or where to go, which is enough to spell your end. Reanimal’s atmosphere, its art, its sense of place and character and mystery carry the day at every turn, through the odd confusion, annoyance, or visual bug. It compelled us to see it through to the end, to understand the tale it was trying to tell in its roughly six-hour journey through hell. I think I understand. But I know there is much we missed, and I want to return to see it through, and see what, if anything, changes as a result.

Metal Gear Solid: Master Collection Vol. 2 will not include the version of Metal Gear Online featured with the original release of Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots.

Konami confirmed the omission, as well as many other details about its recently announced collection of ports, on its official website. Buried beneath information about both MGS4 and Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker is a single line confirming the multiplayer offering will not return when the former finally sneaks onto more platforms this August.